What to expect with Covid-19 vaccines for kids ages 5 to 11...

‘Here’s what the science reveals about the safety of the Pfizer shot for this age group, the doses involved, and the role it will play in protecting everyone from the disease...

‘A recent Swedish study confirmed the value of this ring of protection: Families where one member is immunized have up to a 61 percent lower risk that others in the home will get COVID-19, while three or four immunized members gives more than a 90 percent reduction.

‘Inoculating children in an effort to protect others already happens in the U.S., Levy says. “Some say it’s not ethical to vaccinate kids for a disease that doesn’t affect them as much,” he says, but children are currently immunized against rubella when the main risk is to pregnant mothers, he points out.’

Read here (National Geographic, Oct 30, 2021)

Skin patch coated in Covid-19 vaccine may work better than injections

‘Covid-19 vaccines in use today have to be stored at cold temperatures, but a patch covered in tiny plastic spikes coated in a vaccine could provide an alternative...

‘A skin patch for administering covid-19 vaccines gives greater immune protection than traditional injections, according to a study in mice. The patch can be stored at room temperature and be self-administered, making it suitable for use in places that lack cold storage facilities and medical staff.

‘Although covid-19 vaccines are now widely available in many countries, they have to be transported and stored at cold temperatures. “We wanted to come up with an alternative that would be stable long enough to go that last mile, especially in resource-limited settings,” says David Muller at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.’

Read here (New Scientist, Oct 29, 2021)

Effect of early treatment with fluvoxamine on risk of emergency care and hospitalisation among patients with COVID-19: the TOGETHER randomised, platform clinical trial

‘This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first large, randomised controlled trial to test the efficacy of fluvoxamine for acute treatment of COVID-19. We found a clinically important absolute risk reduction of 5·0%, and 32% RR reduction, on the primary outcome of hospitalisation defined as either retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to tertiary hospital due to COVID-19, consequent on the administration of fluvoxamine for 10 days. This study is only the second study to show an important treatment benefit for a repurposed drug in the early treatment population.13 Our findings represent the complete analysis of the trial after the DSMC recommended stopping the active fluvoxamine group and all 28-day follow-up of randomly assigned patients. Given fluvoxamine's safety, tolerability, ease of use, low cost, and widespread availability, these findings might influence national and international guidelines on the clinical management of COVID-19.’

Read here (The Lancet, Oct 27, 2021)

Covid: Virus may have killed 80k-180k health workers, WHO says

‘Covid has severely affected healthcare staff and may have killed between 80,000 and 180,000, the World Health Organization (WHO) says. Healthcare workers must be prioritised for vaccines, WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, and he criticised unfairness in the distribution of jabs. The deaths occurred between January 2020 and May of this year.’

Read here (BBC, Oct 19, 2021)

Follow a natural health philosophy? Vaccination may have more in common with it than you think

‘One thing people often overlook is the adaptive immune response caused by vaccination is natural. Vaccination prepares the body’s immune system in the same way “natural” exposure to infection does. It just does it in a safer, controlled way with a much lower dose.

‘Given there’s no underlying reason why natural health and vaccination cannot coexist, why does this perception exist, and why does it persist?’

Read here (The Conversation, Oct 19, 2021)

‘Maybe the coronavirus was lower-hanging fruit’

‘Emerging mRNA technology proved excellent for COVID vaccines. BioNTech’s founders preview what that could mean for cancer and other mysteries...

‘The fact that mRNA technology had never delivered an authorized therapy before the coronavirus pandemic could tell us one of two things. Perhaps synthetic mRNA is like a miraculous key that humankind pulled out of our pockets in this pandemic, but it was so perfectly shaped for the coronavirus that we shouldn’t expect it to unlock other scientific mysteries any time soon.

‘Or perhaps mRNA is merely in the first chapter of a more extraordinary story. This month, BioNTech announced that it had initiated Phase 2 trials of personalized cancer vaccines for patients with colorectal cancer. It is working on other personalized cancer vaccines and exploring possible therapies for malaria using a version of the mRNA technology that had its breakout moment in 2020.’

Read here (The Atlantic, Oct 18, 2021)

All about Molnupiravir, the anti-Covid pill

‘A new pill with the promise to treat Covid-19 is creating waves across the world and even at US$700 for a five-day course of treatment, it might just be a game changer. It is too early to tell if it will be available to Malaysians, although health minister Khairy Jamaluddin has revealed that he has started negotiations for Malaysia to procure the drug Molnupiravir, which is reputed to have shown a 50% reduction in the risk of hospitalisation and death.

‘Developed by US pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co, the pill has yet to get emergency authorisation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It would be the first Covid-19 oral antiviral medicine, if approved.

‘How does the pill work? The pill has been designed to introduce errors into the genetic code of the virus, thereby stopping effective replication. It is designed to be taken once someone displays Covid-19 symptoms. One course of the treatment lasts five days, with four capsules taken twice a day for a total of 40 pills.

‘How effective is it? Merck says the drug cuts the risk of hospitalisation or death in half according to trials conducted among 775 Covid-19 adults with mild-to-moderate Covid-19 symptoms. After 29 days, 7% of those who received the drug were hospitalised compared to 14% of those who received the placebo. No deaths were reported in patients who received Molnupiravir while there were eight deaths in patients who took the placebo, the company said.’

Read here (Free Malaysia Today, Oct 3, 2021)

What even counts as science writing anymore? Ed Yong

‘The pandemic made it clear that science touches everything, and everything touches science...

‘To the extent that the pandemic has been a science story, it’s also been a story about the limitations of what science has become. Perverse academic incentives that reward researchers primarily for publishing papers in high-impact journals have long pushed entire fields toward sloppy, irreproducible work; during the pandemic, scientists have flooded the literature with similarly half-baked and misleading research. Pundits have urged people to “listen to the science,” as if “the science” is a tome of facts and not an amorphous, dynamic entity, born from the collective minds of thousands of individual people who argue and disagree about data that can be interpreted in a range of ways. The long-standing disregard for chronic illnesses such as dysautonomia and myalgic encephalomyelitis meant that when thousands of COVID-19 “long-haulers” kept experiencing symptoms for months, science had almost nothing to offer them. The naive desire for science to remain above politics meant that many researchers were unprepared to cope with a global crisis that was both scientific and political to its core. “There’s an ongoing conversation about whether we should do advocacy work or ‘stick to the science,’” Whitney Robinson, a social epidemiologist, told me. “We always talk about how these magic people will take our findings and implement them. We send those findings out, and knowledge has increased! But with Covid, that’s a lie!”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/how-pandemic-changed-science-writing/620271/

Read here (The Atlantic, Oct 2, 2021)

Re-learning the importance and possibility of natural air ventilation during Covid

‘The Penang Hospital began life as a double-storey, colonnaded brick-and-timbre building. As was the norm for most bungalows in Penang at the time, the building would have been raised on a brick plinth, allowing for air to flow underneath. The floors were probably hardy and washable, and tiled with terra cotta. The veranda on the first-floor was 5ft wide and protected by a roof jack, a feature developed by builder designers of the day in observance of tropical architecture.

“A roof jack,” explains conservation architect Laurence Loh, “is a secondary roof located at the ridge that is literally jacked up for the hot air within the space to rise up and escape through the open gaps between the two roofs, based on the principle that air, once warmed, becomes more buoyant, with a tendency to rise.” This process employs what is known as stack effect or ventilation. The surrounding cool air is pulled into the building from openings like doors and windows at the lower level, with the heated air being pushed up and out.’

But how has it evolved?

Read here (Penang Monthly, October, 2021)