Covid

Back last summer, I was writing blog posts about possible side effects of mass vaccination. For readers who’ve shown up more recently and might have me filed as Defender of Vaccines, that might seem surprising, but remember, I’ve been in drug discovery for a long time now. All drugs, all therapies have side effects. It’s

Why we should rethink COVID safety protocols for children — and everyone else.

As emergency provisions end, patients are scrambling — in some cases, driving across state lines — to keep their telehealth appointments.

The big issue right now is the delta variant and increasing infection rates mainly among people who aren't vaccinated.

The guidance generally leaves it to local officials to figure out how to ensure the unvaccinated are using precautions while letting those who are fully protected go mask-free.

The huge success of the mRNA vaccination platform during the pandemic has set a lot of people to thinking about what comes next. Moderna and BioNTech, of course, have been thinking this way for quite some time. But Sanofi now says that they’ll be investing large amounts into the technology, and this previously hadn’t been

Here’s a new paper (open access) from a large multi-center team of authors urging caution on many of the reports of small-molecule repurposing screens against coronavirus activity. The list of drugs that has shown activity in vitro is long, and the list of potential targets is as well. But when you look at those targets,

There have been 175 cases of the variant in Massachusetts.

There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism. The vast majority of brain imaging studies so far have focused on qualitative, gross pathology of moderate to severe cases, often carried out on hospitalised patients. It remains unknown however whether the impact of COVID-19 can be detected in milder cases, in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal a possible mechanism for the spread of the disease. UK Biobank scanned over 40,000 participants before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible to invite back in 2021 hundreds of previously-imaged participants for a second imaging visit. Here, we studied the effects of the disease in the brain using multimodal data from 782 participants from the UK Biobank COVID-19 re-imaging study, with 394 participants having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection between their two scans. We used structural and functional brain scans from before and after infection, to compare longitudinal brain changes between these 394 COVID-19 patients and 388 controls who were matched for age, sex, ethnicity and interval between scans. We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison, with, in addition, a greater loss of grey matter in the cingulate cortex, central nucleus of the amygdala and hippocampal cornu ammonis (all |Z|>3). Our findings thus consistently relate to loss of grey matter in limbic cortical areas directly linked to the primary olfactory and gustatory system. Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid the danger of pre-existing risk factors or clinical conditions being mis-interpreted as disease effects. Since a possible entry point of the virus to the central nervous system might be via the olfactory mucosa and the olfactory bulb, these brain imaging results might be the in vivo hallmark of the spread of the disease (or the virus itself) via olfactory and gustatory pathways. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement This work was primarily supported by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award 215573/Z/19/Z. KLM is supported by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship 202788/Z/16/Z. The Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN FMRIB) is supported by centre funding from the Wellcome Trust (203139/Z/16/Z). This research has been conducted in part using the UK Biobank Resource under Application Number 8107. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: Human subjects: UK Biobank has approval from the North West Multi-centre Research Ethics Committee (MREC) to obtain and disseminate data and samples from the participants (), and these ethical regulations cover the work in this study. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. All necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable. Yes Data can be accessed through the UK Biobank.

1. Novavax Clinical Data Word came yesterday that Novavax had very good safety and efficacy in the trial of their recombinant protein vaccine. This is good news. By this point, the vaccine is much less needed here in the US, but it could be a very important part of getting many other countries vaccinated, due to

Researchers have found more evidence that coronavirus was circulating at low levels across the United States as early as December 2019 -- weeks before the first officially reported cases.

Labs like the one in Wuhan are essential to preparing for future pandemics

The face mask mandate that's been in place for more than a year to protect against the coronavirus expired in Massachusetts on Saturday.

Pandemic summer uncertainty with Julia Marcus

New research backs up the idea that dogs can accurately sniff out COVID-19.

When the governor lifted the state’s mandate, liberals predicted disaster. But it never came. Why?

Critics worry about his tendency, in conversations with politicians, in media interviews, and in tweets, to downplay Covid-19's impact.

The number of people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in Massachusetts is approaching 50%, state officials said.

The infections are not a surprise. They may even be a good thing.

Following SARS-CoV, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 (the cause of COVID-19), researchers have detected yet another novel coronavirus jumping from animals to people. In this case, the source are dogs. Spurred …

I'm going to regret writing about this, but it's not a topic to be ignored. Where did the current coronavirus come from? If you ask that question, you get all sorts of answers from all sorts of people. Let me downgrade some of those right up front. To start at the far end of the fever scale, I do

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Both the Pfizer and Modern COVID-19 vaccines provide effective protection from the novel virus even after the first shot. According to a real world study by the CDC, both vaccines reduced the risk of infection by 80% two weeks after the first dose.

The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is 85 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19 after one dose, according to a new study.

Also, 63% of Americans are now willing to be immunized, up from 50% in September.

In a new report, independent experts detail the ‘toxic cocktail’ of poor choices and systemic failures that created the current pandemic catastrophe.

We have a special edition of the newsletter on a misleading C.D.C. statistic.

Early in 2020 as the pandemic began to surge around the world, Asia and the West were divided on whether people should wear facemasks to try and stop/slow transmission of the new virus. In short, Asian countries went very heavy on masks early on, while most Western countries initially said they wouldn’t help and kept saying so in increasingly forceful ways until suddenly reversing course in April/May 2020. I think most people have forgotten how extreme this divergence in views was, so I’ve tried to summarise it all here.

In some respects, it's easy to make direct comparisons between the three vaccines; in others, it's more complicated.

The decision, based on data from a Phase 3 trial, makes Pfizer's Covid vaccine the first to be available for use in children under age 16.