Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Novartis announced last week that it had signed an initial agreement to help produce the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19. This followed an announcement from pharmaceutical firm Sanofi that it too had reached an agreement to help the German biotech BioNTech manufacture the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. The great news is that these guys […]
According to a study of 100 people with COVID-19 that was published in the journal Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids, those people with the highest omega-3 blood levels had about a 75 % lower risk of dying from COVID than people with lower omega-3 blood levels. Or looking at it from the other end, […]
A disturbing study in the Journal of the American Society of Geriatrics concludes that “In 2018, 7.3 billion doses of potentially inappropriate medications were dispensed” to seniors. And that estimate, I think, is very likely on the low, low side. Now it’s probably true that Canadian doctors are significantly less likely to give out “inappropriate” […]
Johnson & Johnson reported on Friday that its one-shot vaccine was “overall” 66% effective in preventing moderate to severe Covid disease. But the devil, as you know, is in the details. So, while the vaccine was 72 % effective in the US and A, it was only 57 % effective in South Africa, where a […]
Next week, Moderna will ship only about three-quarters of the supply of vaccine that had been expected for that week, cutting Canada’s shipment by more than 50,000 doses. But just the week before, Trudeau had said he’d spoken to Moderna’s CEO and that he had been assured that Moderna shipments to Canada would not be […]
This week, Dr. Bonnie Henry urged British Columbians that “For the next two weeks, I’m asking you to do more”. But everyone agrees that the great majority of British Columbians are already doing all they can – these are the people who are smart enough to know that they don’t want to get sick with […]
So I told you all a couple of days ago why vitamin D might be helpful during this pandemic, and please note that the operative word here is “might”. But that said, it’s important also to point out that vitamin D is very likely not the panacea for the many other conditions that so many […]
Subjectively, as a fervent soccer fan, I can tell you that these days with the mostly empty soccer stands, without a crowd to witness the hit, most soccer players don’t roll over and pretend to be hurt much worse than they really are nearly as much as they used to do when 75,000 ardent supporters […]
The usual great reporting in Stat: A Covid-19 vaccine from Novavax proved nearly 90% effective in preliminary results on 15,000-volunteers in a clinical trial in the UK, including those cases from the virus variant circulating widely in the UK. That’s the good news. The bad news? In a 4,400-volunteer study in South Africa, the vaccine […]
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters yesterday that Canada’s vaccine doses are still “very much on track,” despite warnings from the European Union that it might impose controls on European-made vaccine doses. “I spoke to the CEO of Moderna about an hour and a half ago, so the topic of the recent musings by Europe certainly came […]