09/2022 Issue: What’s New This Month About Covid, Vaccines, and Monkeypox

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

Hi everyone! It’s time for me to send another monthly update on the articles published in Microbial Instincts, an independent publication about infectious diseases and vaccines, last month. As usual, here is the list (friend-linked) that I hope will keep you more scientifically informed:

Covid and Vaccines

• Are covid vaccines causing falling birth rates?: The Gift of Fire has written another in-depth piece on vaccine safety, covering whether Covid vaccines and birth rates are related. The writer first looked at data from randomized clinical trials, followed by birth rate and vaccine uptake statistics from different countries. In the end, the writer offered a few explanations for the declining birth rate seen in a few countries, none of which is vaccine-related. If Covid vaccines are a depopulation tool, it’s a terrible plan. Read on to understand why.

Source: The Gift of Fire. For every Covid vaccine, the pregnancy and miscarriage rates are similar for women who got the vaccine or placebo in their respective clinical trials.

• The Viral Origin of Alzheimer’s Disease Remains Undecoded. But What We’ve Seen So Far Is Worrying: The infectious etiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been around for decades, but it has only received its overdue attention in recent years. It’s getting impossible to deny the increasing evidence that viruses — herpesviruses in particular and perhaps even Covid-19 — can facilitate and even initiate the development of AD.

Source: Zarifkar et al. (2022). Covid-19 patients, regardless of inpatients or outpatients, had an over 3-fold increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease at 12-month follow-up compared to non-Covid controls. Note: Bars that cross the horizontal dotted line are non-significant.

Source: Douaud et al. (2022). Longitudinal analyses showed significantly greater cognitive impairment (requires a longer duration to complete a cognitive task) in Covid-19 vs. control cases, especially among the older age groups.

• Gloves Off: Moderna Sues Pfizer/BioNTech Over COVID-19 Vaccine Patents: Gil Pires, MSc, described what’s going on between Pfizer and Moderna who are fighting for the intellectual rights of mRNA vaccine technology. He explains the rationales behind why Moderna sued Pfizer and whether those rationales are justified, which, apparently, appears not.

Monkeypox

• Monkeypox is different than COVID. Here’s why: Like Covid-19, monkeypox has taken us by surprise, with cases spiking to nearly 68,000 across over 100 countries by the end of September. This article provides an exhaustive explanation of the differences between Covid-19 and monkeypox. As we are all rather familiar with Covid-19, using it as a reference will help us understand monkeypox and make better-informed decisions in our lives.
• Monkeypox’s Biggest Mystery: It Suddenly Appeared In Labs From 1958 Onwards Without Explanation: It’s no secret that monkeypox was first discovered in laboratory monkeys in Denmark in 1958. But the big question is, how did the laboratory monkeys get monkeypox in the first place? In this article, I covered the monkeypox events that happened since then, exploring the possibilities of how monkeypox could have emerged. But in the end, like Covid-19, the origin of monkeypox remains unknown to this day.

Source: Arita and Henderson (1968). List of monkeypox outbreaks occurring in research institutions since its discovery in 1958.

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