I just want to remind people that it’s 2024 and we didn’t “go thru a pandemic” we are “going thru a pandemic” present tense. It is still happening. People are still get sick, still becoming disabled, and still dying. Covid hasn’t gone away and I beg people to not normalize getting sick with it.

a new vaccine is available right now- covid hasn't gone anywhere. my case worker caught it last week. please keep masking, washing your hands, and social distancing. stay masked especially when in large crowds. i have permanent damage to my lungs from when i caught covid last year. it hasn't gone away. please keep looking out for yourself and other people.

"University of Houston researchers make nasal vaccine that prevents COVID from spreading"

For reasons I don't understand, I'm having trouble linking directly to this Houston Chronicle post. But here's most of the text. (The URL's at the bottom if you want to try it.)

The article URL:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/health/article/university-of-houston-covid-nasal-vaccine-19628489.php

There are actually many efforts going on along these lines! (Nasal COVID vaccines, and pancoronavirus vaccines. Not all the labs are working at both at once.)

Here is Washington University’s nasal COVID vaccine with the same kind of result in hamsters as the U Houston vaccine candidate above!

Mt. Sinai’s vaccine completed its phase 1 human trials in 2023, and showed (by administering as a shot to some and nasally to others) that “intranasal delivery resulted in a robust S-specific, secretory IgA response in saliva relative to pre-booster levels, which is important for conferring mucosal immunity and has the potential to prevent infection and/or transmission of COVID-19.” No solid number on the prevention of spread as there is with the hamsters. I assume it’s harder to get hard numbers with humans than hamsters, because they can’t ethically try using them as vectors after vaccination to test it out! In March this effort got one of the Project NextGen funding awards toward Phase 2b clinical trials. This is also known as ‘Castlevax’.

The other, slightly larger Project NextGen award from HHS went to Codagenix, which is out of Stony Brook University, for an intranasal vaccine that’s also had a round of human trials.

There are other nasal vaccine projects too — over 20 as of last fall, per Dr. Eric Topol! The first one I ever heard of was out of Yale, from Dr. Akiko Iwasaki’s lab, but I haven’t found much news about that one lately.

When people ask me, “Are you planning to mask forever?” I tell them about the possibilities of nasal vaccines!

In addition to the fabulous possibility of mucosal vaccines stopping us from spreading the virus, I hope there’ll be less broad resistance to a nasal vaccine than there is to injected ones (based on stuff I’ve heard about the nasal flu vaccine.) But mostly I daydream about the possibility of stopping the spread, and of being able to know a family dinner or an RPG session is almost certainly safe for everyone.

Things to read besides my random links:

I am not a science writer and I don’t keep an organized roster of the vaccine efforts. But I do try to keep up on the blog of a science writer who does! Hilda Bastian, PhD blogs at PLOS and regularly posts roundups of all the current vaccine news. Here’s the most recent one (July 31). She tracks both pancoronavirus and nasal vaccines, and provides tables of current statuses as well as little write-ups on progress. Highly recommend her blog if you’re interested in staying up to date on this! Or just skimming to remind yourself that people are trying to break the current stalemate. I find her round-ups very focused on the science and therefore oddly relaxing to read.

Another source I sometimes dip into is Dr. Eric Topol’s newsletter (he also has a podcast and YouTube channel). He’s more broadly pushing for more research and better communication around COVID. He pushed early for funding to go to the nasal vaccines (seriously, Yale’s promising findings are from February 2022 and the HHS didn’t throw anyone any money until July 2023, and then only the two awards mentioned above.) and is still agitating for more funding. So his newsletter can be good for overviews of the current info on COVID spread and the virus’s evolution, but also vaccine info and the politics of funding. Less relaxing reading.

I hope this helps anybody eager for more news! Chin up, mask on 😉

Now immune to all disease, folks I'm amazing

My kingdom for something like this that works for elementary school colds.

Why? WHY??

U.S. CDC taking comments on potentially limiting COVID vaccine availbility by age or health status. Never mind that the vaccine is crucial to limiting long-term effects that could lead to immunocomprimisation. 🤬🤬🤬

You can comment here.

Comment Period Ends in 3 Days!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(noted on 6/14/2024 0425 EST)

Talk about how you want yourself and your loved ones to be safe. HOw restricting the vaccine will just disable &/ kill more people than if it wasn't restricted. The neurological/cognitive effects of covid affecting your community, children, etc. The thousands and thousands of people with long covid that maybe couldve been saved with masking and boosters. Whatever you want I just made all that up just now.

Lol

you’re just gonna leave this in the tags?

Gravestone from a local cemetery. Five children, aged 2 to 15, died from diphtheria in five days.

Diphtheria has a ~10% mortality rate, higher in younger children.

The vaccine against diphtheria is part of the WHO's recommended childhood vaccination program and resulted in a more than 90% decrease in number of cases globally between 1980 and 2000.

Remembering 4th grade, when we got to the story in our social studies book about vaccines. Both my teacher and the teacher next door were probably in the late fifties or early sixties. Mrs. E. next door had survived polio but had long-term muscle weakness in her right hand that made her have to hold up her wrist with her other hand while writing on the board. She talked about people she'd grown up with who'd ended up in iron lungs or otherwise permanently disabled in major ways.

Mrs. P., my teacher, gave a terrifying account of her brother surviving whooping cough by pulling the mucus out of his throat with his fingers.

I was in 4th grade in the early 1990s. Vaccines as a life-saving option are that fucking new. People who survived before they existed were able to tell me first-hand stories. It is beyond shameful that there are so many people willing to put their health and their fucking children's health at severe risk because they want to feel morally superior.

Cat in the Hat:

"The German Health Minister gave an important update on the Covid situation yesterday.

I’ve written up the section of his speech from the video below for easy reading.

It’s immensely refreshing to see a government minister warning of the harms of Covid in such a transparent way."

https://x.com/_catinthehat/status/1732092683508678954

Prof. Karl Lauterbach

Health Minister, Germany

4 December 2023

"This second (long Covid) round table was very interesting, lasting three and a half hours. It serves as a unique forum for dialogue among scientists, researchers and those affected by long Covid, facilitating the exchange of ideas.

There are many new findings about long Covid. Not all of them are good news. One piece of not-so-good news concerns the fact that long Covid is actually still a problem for those who are newly infected. One estimate that has been put forward is that the risk of contracting long Covid now, even after vaccination, is around 3%. Now you may say, "that's not such a big risk" , but there are tens of thousands of people who are repeatedly affected in a short period of time. And so, the long Covid problem has not yet been solved.

We have also established that there really are many subgroups of long Covid and that we do not yet have a cure. And it was clearly pointed out that we are also dealing with problems here that will challenge society as a whole, because vascular diseases often occur after long Covid. Throughout Europe, we are currently seeing an increased incidence of cardiovascular disease in the middle-age group - from 25 to 50. This is associated with the consequences of Covid infections.

We also very often find cognitive impairment in older people. And one participant pointed out that it may well be like the Spanish flu, where 20 years after the Spanish flu there was a significant increase in Parkinson's disease and probably also dementia.

This is something we must pay attention to, as the past infection afiects how the immune system in the brain functions, as well as the brain's blood vessels, potentially increasing the long-term risk of these major neurodegenerative diseases. This is why we need to conduct very intensive research. This research has played a major role.

What is the overall assessment of the situation now?

We have to be careful. Long Covid is not curable at the moment. We also know that over 40% of those who have several manifestations of long Covid, for example, five or more, still have symptoms after 2 years, so it doesn't seem to heal spontaneously. We also know that those whose symptoms are more pronounced at the beginning are less likely to heal.

So some of what we know from the demographics of long Covid has been confirmed, and we now know more precisely which mechanisms in the brain, but also in the blood vessels and the immune system, are responsible for this. Professor Scheibenbogan will explain this briefly later.

At this point, I can only say the following - this is particularly important to me:

First of all, long Covid is a disease that stays with us and that we cannot yet cure. And we are seeing an increasing number of cases as the waves of infection continue to affect us.

Secondly, Covid is not a cold - with a cold, you don't usually see any long-term effects. You don't see any changes in the blood vessels. You don't usually see an autoimmune disease developing. You also don't usually see neurological inflammation - these are all things that we see with long Covid. Therefore, one should not assume that Covid infection is just a common cold. It can affect brain tissue and the vascular system, and we still lack an effective treatment, making these studies crucial.

Significantly, we know that the risk of long Covid decreases when you're infected but have been vaccinated. That's why it's concerning that only 3 million people have been vaccinated with the new, adapted vaccine. That is a very bad result.

Please protect yourself from severe infections.

Please protect yourself from long Covid.

Currently, the danger posed by Covid is indeed being underestimated. Nothing is worse than infecting someone at Christmas who then becomes seriously ill and may not fully recover."

Alt text is included in all images of this post.

Great news for uninsured adults in the USA who want a COVID-19 booster! It now appears that ALL CVS locations are now active participants in the Bridge Access Program. The Bridge Access Program gives out free Covid-19 vaccinations to 18+ adults who otherwise can't afford one, so if you have a CVS near you, please go get one! For others who don't have a CVS near them, please go to vaccines.gov, click on "Find Covid-19 vaccines", fill out which vaccines you prefer (you can mix different vaccines if you have to so i reccomend just marking all of them for the age groups you need), and when the next page loads mark the "Bridge Access Program Participant" option to see only locations that are Bridge Access Program participants. Hopefully, other places that aren't CVS will start participating soon, so just check back every so often to see if there are any updates. The CDC Bridge Access Program website also has more details on what locations will be participating, but only CVS is appearing as an active participant on the vaccines.gov location finder at the moment.

For anyone who doesn't know: there is currently a NEW BOOSTER available, designed to counter the XBB variant (which is circulating big time currently). So this is not only topping up your existing immunity but adapting it, much like the bivalents did for Omicron and the flu shot does every year.

And if you need another reason: