The biology of coronavirus COVID-19 - including research and treatments

Besides the obvious immediate harm from doing something this foolish, this will also be a massive boon to the anti-vaccine movement. It's impossible to overstate how damaging to public perception of vaccines releasing a likely invalid, for lack of proper testing, vaccine will be.

This is very likely to be a done deal. If not this one it may be another one, politics are driving the issue and no one is willing and able to stop this, the personal risk is too high.

Thanks, Richard Horton, for having released this genie out into the wild. That he is still the editor of the Lancet is one of the most catastrophic errors of judgment I have seen from a supposedly serious institution.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1300120040549879810

 

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.20.259937v1
SARS-CoV-2 infects brain choroid plexus and disrupts the blood-CSF-barrier

 

I'm becoming very concerned by reports coming out of the USA that there is pressure to get a vaccine out by the beginning of November (remind me what the election date is, please, someone?) Here's an example:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/us/cd...tion-running-by-nov-1/ar-BB18E2QN?ocid=ASUDHP

If the situation is as politicised as it appears to be becoming, then I find that absolutely appalling - public bodies shouldn't be partisan in such a case, in particular when lives are at stake. I hope no corners will be cut.

 

Things are getting a bit confused. Lots of talk about heart damage, but from autopsies many have commented that although this looks like myocarditis at a distance, a closer look reveals a different picture, that this is not typical myocarditis, though clearly heart damage.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1301602057967689728


Topol is referring to this:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1301604281364037633

 

Post copied from the Possibility of ME or PVFS after COVID-19 thread

Last night on CNN Chris Como interviewed Dr. William Li who says it appears that COVID is a 'blood vessel disease' causing severe damage to the vascular system, which would explain why the virus seems to be affecting all organs.

Dr Li is an internal medicine physician and a research scientist—specifically a vascular biologist. He’s been actively involved in angiogenesis research and clinical analysis for more than two decades. Angiogenesis is the development of new blood vessels and Dr. Li is one of the world’s leading experts in this field.

 

Twitter thread which gives the gist of this
https://twitter.com/user/status/1297068650604769280

 

Broad and strong memory CD4+ and CD8+ T cells induced by SARS-CoV-2 in UK convalescent individuals following COVID-19

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-020-0782-6

Notably:

This contradicts the suggestion by Mateus et al. and Grifoni, A. et al. who suggested there was partial T-cell immunity acquired from prior coronavirus infections. I previously wondered whether this was merely naive T-Cell cross reactivity, or low-affinity reactivity and would not provide a robust immune response.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/04/science.abd3871
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3

Note that this was in a "brain organoid" (in-vitro) model. Thus, it is only suggestive of what could happen to real people and says nothing about how common this may be.

 

The best part is that the cost of the steroid drug is cheap.

 

Yes, affordable and widely available for the rest of the world (Asia, South America)! Compared to Remdesivir which costs over $5000 and doesn't save lives...

 

COVID-19 patients suffer long-term lung and heart damage but it can improve with time

Coronavirus patients recover faster if they undergo rehabilitation as soon as possible after coming off ventilators or leaving intensive care

 

That looks suspiciously like a self-fulfilling study.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54082192

Amazing isn't it, one patient has a suspected adverse reaction of unknown cause and they pause the whole trial.
Yet people dropped out of the PACE study and they just carried on as if nothing had happened.

 

The adverse reaction has to be in the "serious" category for them to call a halt. It could be a coincidence, e.g. someone suffering from a stroke, or it could be a reaction that is probably associated with the vaccine (Guillain Barre Syndrome).

I'm not sure how many people they have enrolled so far, but if 10,000+, a coincidence might not be unheard of.

The Phase 2 trial had a high proportion of people suffering from headache, fever, so I still wonder about (rare) serious immunological reactions.

edit - I should have read the article, as it had a new report about the underlying condition that wasn't a part of previous news reports.
edit 2 - Is this a second case of transverse myelitis or is the earlier (July) case being cited incorrectly?

 

Transverse myelitis is an inflammation of both sides of one section of the spinal cord. This neurological disorder often damages the insulating material covering nerve cell fibers (myelin). Transverse myelitis interrupts the messages that the spinal cord nerves send throughout the body.

 

Ah, the news reports earlier today did not report the actual condition.

Transverse myelitis is similar to Guillain Barre Syndrome and sometimes GBS is misdiagnosed as Transverse myelitis or vice versa.

https://www.bioscience.org/2004/v9/af/1351/fulltext.php?bframe=tables.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/cmi2017142

And sometimes they occur at the same time...

https://www.cureus.com/articles/370...myelitis-of-unknown-etiology-in-an-adolescent
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5177703/
https://adc.bmj.com/content/102/Suppl_1/A152.1.info

 

Dysautonomia Intl. reaching out to Chris Como (CNN) to bring awareness to Post-Covid POTS.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1303515509586096128

 

Discovery of four COVID-19 risk groups helps guide treatment

https://www.ukri.org/news/discovery-of-four-covid-19-risk-groups-helps-guide-treatment/

Discussion thread for study, Risk stratification of patients admitted to hospital with covid-19 using the ISARIC WHO Clinical Characterisation Protocol, 2020, Knight et al

 

Medscape: Unexpected Results in New COVID-19 'Cytokine Storm' Data

 

Except it wasn't unexpected and other research groups have already debunked the hypothesis. I knew it was nonsense from the start and pointed this out to quite a few people...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2767939 (June)

Cytokine storm syndromes are rare and have quite a different pattern to severe COVID19.