(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . COVID-19 updates from a couple of articles [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-11 A couple of encouraging nuggets in the following two articles... The first is from Eric Topol [American cardiologist, scientist, and author. He is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps]. Link: erictopol.substack.com/... Quote from Eric Topol: The bivalent vaccine booster outperforms A review of the cumulative body of evidence You may recall that I was a skeptic about the bivalent BA.5 vaccine when the FDA gave it the OK to roll out in September without any human data. At the very least, I had hoped there would be lab studies to confirm a strong immune response to this variant, and that it was superior to the original (monovalent) booster that was directed to the ancestral (Wuhan) strain. But we now have extensive data that is quite encouraging—better and broader than expected— that I’m going to briefly review here. The second is from Katelyn Jetelina [MPH PhD, epidemiologist and data scientist]. She has several points to make (one is below). Link: yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/... Quote from Katelyn Jetelina: Vaccines and infections (still) reduce transmission Before Omicron we knew that vaccines reduced transmission . Mis/dis-information has sown doubts. What we know: New info: A new study from Nature examined prison systems to assess transmission networks. A COVID-19 vaccine reduced infectiousness by 22% and prior infection reduced infectiousness by 23%. Hybrid immunity reduced infectiousness by 40%. The least infectious cases were those who had been recently vaccinated. --- Why does this matter? On an individual level, vaccines still help in ways other than preventing severe disease. On a policy level, timed vaccination campaigns for a variant of concern may make sense until seasonal patterns arise. There is more interesting information in both articles - should you care to check them out. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/11/2146729/-COVID-19-updates-from-a-couple-of-articles Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/