06/2023 Issue: What’s New This Month About Vaccines, Covid, and More

A newsletter providing a short account of the articles published in the previous month.

Hello all! It’s time for me to send another monthly update on what has been published in Microbial Instincts, an independent publication about infectious diseases and vaccines, in June 2023. As usual, here is a short list (friend-linked) that I hope will keep you more scientifically informed:

Covid-19 Vaccines

• mRNA Vaccine Caused Multiple Sclerosis in Case Report: Putting Things in Perspective: The claim that a new paper from the WHO showing that mRNA vaccines cause multiple sclerosis went viral earlier. But apparently, the paper is just a case report indexed in the WHO literature database. In this article, I described what the case report means and doesn’t mean for the safety of Covid vaccines.
• New Korean Autopsy Study Reveals Nationwide Rate of Sudden Cardiac Death From mRNA Vaccine at <0.0001%: This is a part III series of my previous work on autopsy findings of individuals vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccine. Herein, I covered a new, meticulous study that fills the loopholes and unanswered questions left in my prior work.
• Shocking Study Finds mRNA Vaccine Linked to Blindness: Blind Panic or Genuine Concern?: I delved into a recent study finding an increased risk of retinal vascular occlusion (RVO) after getting the mRNA vaccine. Although this study is scientifically sound and published in a reputable journal, I raised a few concerns about this study — that the effect size is small, no solid mechanistic basis exists between RVO and mRNA vaccine, and unmeasured confounding can’t be ruled out.
• Stroke and mRNA Vaccine: An Update From The Last CDC’s Announcement: Earlier this year, the FDA and CDC announced a preliminary analysis noting an increased risk of stroke after Covid (bivalent mRNA) and influenza (adjuvanted or high-dose) co-vaccination. But a newly published study of a similar design from the U.K. failed to find such an association (Fig 1), in agreement with unpublished data from Canada.

Figure 1. The relative incidence of stroke, according to subgroups of age, vaccine type, and vaccine combination. BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 are the code names for Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, respectively. The blue annotation is my own. Source: Andrews et al. (2023).

Covid-19

• Ongoing Brain Inflammation Found in Long-COVID Patients With Depression and Cognitive Damage: Shinaa Kurisu described a recent study that found elevated inflammation in the brain of long-Covid patients with lingering symptoms of depression. Kurisu then expounded on how this study contributes to our understanding of long-Covid pathology.
• Brain Fog in Covid Might Be Due to Abnormally Fused Neurons: New Breakthrough: In light of the notorious brain fog plaguing long-Covid patients, Shinaa Kurisu covered a new study that shed light on this issue. Specifically, the study showed that brain neurons fused upon exposure to SARS-CoV-2’s but not the vaccine’s spike protein. Such fused neurons fire haphazardly, wreaking havoc in the brain (Fig 2).
• New Human Challenge Trial Reveals Covid Superspreaders In Action: In another succinct work, Shinaa Kurisu described a new human challenge study that deliberately infected humans with SARS-CoV-2. And the results were insightful, proving a few things about Covid transmission we previously theorized.

Figure 2. Left: Neuronal fusion seen upon exposure to SARS-CoV-2's spike protein, where neurons tagged red and green fused to become yellow. Right: Lack of neuronal fusion, where neurons tagged red and green remains unfused upon exposure to the vaccine’s spike protein with the double proline mutation (that stabilizes the spike in an inactive formation). Source: Martínez-Mármol et al. (2023).

Others

• New report names 3 Wuhan lab employees who got sick from covid: Recent headlines have named three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who fell sick in November 2019 while doing gain-of-function research, with the source being U.S. intelligence. But many people accept this news as the truth without further scrutiny. In this article, The Gift Of Fire pointed out several loopholes in this claim.
• U.S. Braces for Upsurge of Tick-borne Diseases This Summer — How to Stay Safe: Due to the rising rodent population, the wave of tick-borne diseases could worsen this summer in the U.S. As such, Shinaa Kurisu informed us about the science-backed basics of tick-borne diseases, such as the types of diseases, life cycle, and ways to stay safe.
• An Unexpected Ally In Dementia Prevention: Shingles Vaccination: Several observational studies have found vaccines as a protective factor against dementia. However, observational studies are not randomized and, thus, unable to infer cause and effect. But observational studies of naturally randomized settings can circumvent this caveat. To this end, I described a recent natural experiment study that found a causative link between the shingles vaccine and reduced dementia risk (Fig 3).

Figure 3. Effect estimates of being vaccine-eligible on new diagnoses of dementia separated by women (left) and men (right). For women, a statistically significant absolute reduction of 2.9% was seen in the occurrence of dementia. For men, no statistically significant effects were seen. For both men and women, the absolute reduction in dementia occurrence was 1.3% (data not shown here). Source: Eyting et al. (2023).

Thank you for reading! Subscribe to Microbial Instincts here and follow the contributing authors if you’d like. Feel free to reach out to me for any questions or feedback by email or commenting here.