WHO launches global megatrial of the four most promising coronavirus treatments/ Science mag

The first legal cases (outside the secret FISA court and post Snowden) questioning the legality of NSA spying come to the forefront next week.  See the US News piece here. The first case seeks a broad preliminary injection against “some NSA surveillance programs” and will be heard Monday, Nov 18.  It is a class action…

From McNeill and Adelstein at The Independent: It is one of the mysteries of Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the 11 March earthquake inflict on the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit? The stakes are high: if the earthquake structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then…

The Lancet’s H1N1 Flu Resource Center includes this interesting article on the provenance of the swine flu virus.  CDC submitted a first set of completed coding sequences (8 gene segments) for the 2009 swine flu virus to GenBank on April 27, 2009. Drs. Hong Zhang and Ling Chen of Zunyi Medical College, China, compared the…

Thanks to CDC for these weekly influenza stats

Here is a collection of CDC staffer Dr. Tom Shimabukuro’s slides from that meeting, and I elaborate on what they mean. The CDC’s Dr. Shimabukuro gave a talk on June 10, 2021 to FDA’s vaccine advisory committee (VRBPAC) discussing preliminary safety data from V-safe, VAERS and VSD. So preliminary it did not agree with what…

From infectious disease MD Judith Stone at Scientific American comes this comprehensive look at what is behind the push to keep buying anthrax vaccine and even give it to children: In my last post, we began to play “Follow the Money” to better understand the history of the anthrax vaccine and the current proposal to…