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Last month I wrote about a Chinese study of the coronavirus which found antibodies to the virus only last a few months in the body. That seemed to indicated that people who’d survived the virus would not have a long term immunity to it. Over the weekend a pre-print (meaning it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet) study from King’s College in the UK found something similar. People who have recovered from Covid-19 may lose their immunity to the disease within months, according to research suggesting the virus could reinfect people year after year, like common colds.In the first longitudinal study...

Immunity to Covid-19 might be lost within months, according to research. The findings suggest that, like the common cold and flu, the virus could infect people on an annual basis. This undermines ideas that herd immunity could be a way of defeating the virus.

The coronavirus has mutated to become more infectious. Does that mean it will become more or less lethal? And what implication does it have for a vaccine and herd immunity?

Scientists at the University of Oxford who are leading the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, believe it could give people protection for "several years." Professor Sarah Gilbert, who is leading the University of Oxford trial told MPs on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that she was hoping the vaccine would provide "a good duration of immunity" from the novel coronavirus. The vaccine, developed in partnership with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, has been described as a "leading candidate" by the World Health Organisation's chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan. Some had feared that any potential COVID-19 vaccine, which is not expected...

The number of people who have coronavirus immunity could be higher than antibody tests suggest, a new study indicates. Research from Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital shows that many people with mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 demonstrate so-called T-cell immunity to the disease. This is even if they have not tested positive for antibodies to the virus. Marcus Buggert, assistant professor at the Centre for Infectious Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and one of the paper’s main authors, said: “T-cells are a type of white blood cells that are specialised in recognising virus-infected cells, and are an essential part of the immune...

A new wave of mandates is here, supposedly in the interest of our health? But if this is true, why are they ignoring the tools that can save our lives?

“We made them mandatory in public settings, public transportation etc., but when we’re talking about reopening stores and places of business, we’re giving the store owners the right to say, ‘If you’re not wearing a mask, you can't come in,'” Cuomo said during his daily press briefing. “The masks work, they work,” he said. “And we have to culturalize the masks, we have to customize the masks for New York, to get New Yorkers to wear them.”

Wednesday, May 27, 2020 Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey questioning why Twitter should continue to receive special immunity from the federal government after choosing to editorialize on President Trump’s tweets. Twitter currently receives special immunity under the law in what’s known as Section 230, which states that companies that merely distribute user content should not be treated like a publisher, such as the New York Times or the Washington Post. But, with Twitter’s decision to editorialize on President Trump’s tweets, the company appears to be acting like shifting to a publisher,...

U.S. Senator Rand Paul - Facts matter May 27, 2020 US Sen. Rand Paul (KY-R) was attacked in an opinion piece from KPR. The author was literally lecturing one of the few elected officials who actually has the scientific background and medical training to comment on the COVID studies. The following op-ed is Sen. Paul's response: I don’t think any medical professional would enjoy receiving a lecture from someone who is clearly scientifically illiterate. Ryland Barton’s charged, leftwing diatribe scolding me for making “claims [not] backed up by science” is itself ignorant of and misrepresentative of abundant scientific evidence. Take...

new study from scientists in the United States suggests that a significant majority of the population may already have some level of immunity to the coronavirus, a possible explanation for why so many individuals seem to experience few to no symptoms from the disease. The study, written by researchers in California, New York and North Carolina and soon to be published in the journal Cell, discovered that certain types of cells in blood samples taken from donors in 2015-2018—well before COVID-19 arose—were reactive against the COVID-19 virus. In other words, those blood samples were at least partially immune from the...

Conclusion: as the epidemic whirls on, the effective HIT drops dynamically, down-- at the end-- to only 10%. And-- for everyone worried about whether or not effective first wave suppression has just left everyone vulnerable, and implies a nearly-as-big second wave once distancing is reduced: the model nicely predicts that removing the "highly susceptibles" from the population in the first wave makes the second wave likely rather muted.

Faced with 20,000 coronavirus deaths and counting, the nation’s nursing homes are pushing back against a potential flood of lawsuits with a sweeping lobbying effort to get states to grant them emergency protection from claims of inadequate care. At least 15 states have enacted laws or governors’ orders that explicitly or apparently provide nursing homes and long-term care facilities some protection from lawsuits arising from the crisis. And in the case of New York, which leads the nation in deaths in such facilities, a lobbying group wrote the first draft of a measure that apparently makes it the only state...

This video is called, “Customers In Packed Colorado Coffee Shop Ignore Mask And Distancing Advice.” They all look under the age of 60. I support their actions. I hope they help create herd immunity. This video is called, “Customers In Packed Colorado Coffee Shop Ignore Mask And Distancing Advice.”Everyone in the video looks under the age of 60.I support their actions.I hope they help create herd immunity.Please be sure to check out this other blog post that I wrote: Here are 44 reasons why I’m against the COVID-19 lockdownshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulTS0IDpg_M

In addition to the GOP demand for corporate liability protection, Democrats have demanded more assistance for cities and states, which McConnell says he won’t agree to without liability protections included...Multiple lawsuits have already been filed against businesses including Wal-Mart, nursing homes, insurers and others...Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who is a member of the White House council...“Here’s how I got the idea: I kept getting calls from employers, small business owners and people who run factories, who were saying, ‘It’s going to be really difficult even when we reopen to hire back workers if we have to worry about these...

In the past two weeks, researchers across America have begun announcing results from studies showing that there have been many more coronavirus infections in their communities than were previously recorded. Findings have come in from Santa Clara County, California, as well as Los Angeles, New York, Chelsea, Massachusetts, and Miami-Dade County, Florida. The debates began immediately. What did the study results actually mean? If more people were infected than previously known, did that mean the death rate is actually lower than previously thought? Is the coronavirus actually more like the flu, after all? And are we close to “herd immunity,”...

There is no evidence that people who contracted COVID-19 and recovered are immune to a second infection, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). On today’s Daily Dose, Dr. Michael Wilkes, a professor of medicine and global health at UC Davis, says the announcement could be a game changer during the pandemic. Before the WHO announcement, many health care workers were operating under the assumption that once someone became infected, they developed antibodies that would protect them in the future, Wilkes says. However, WHO didn’t explicitly say these antibodies don’t exist, Wilkes points out. How California has faredA new...

Many hold out hope for a vaccine to bring our present COVID-19 pandemic to an end. But development of a vaccine is not a certainty and could take months or years to develop, while millions suffer job losses and economic devastation. The second-best hope to escape our nightmare in a timely way is herd immunity. A month ago, Dr. David L. Katz, wrote a significant piece in the New York Times, “Is our fight against Coronavirus worse than the disease?” He advocated a pivot from our current health policy to a “surgical approach” in fighting the disease. On April 19th,...

Some Scientists fear that it may prove impossible to produce a working coronavirus vaccine and believe the world may have to simply learn to adapt to the permanent threat of COVID-19. The UK's Chief Medical Officer, Christopher Whitty, told a Parliamentary committee on Friday that there was "concerning" evidence suggesting that it may not be possible to stimulate immunity to the virus. "The first question we do not know is 'do you get natural immunity to this disease if you have had it, for a prolonged period of time?'" Whitty said. "Now if we don't then it doesn't make a...

There is simply no other way to state this. Nearly everything we’ve been told about models, rates of infection, deaths, and recoveries was inaccurate. I’m not here to argue that it was malfeasance or ignorance — both are unacceptable. But the one thing that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s stunning announcement made clear on Thursday is that there are some pretty shocking — and what should be — reassuring truths. Cuomo announced that antibody testing in New York state, which only began four days previous, was already demonstrating that at minimum 13.9% of New Yorkers, had COVID-19 late stage antibodies. The implication...

<p>The COVID-19 crash comes suddenly. In early March, the 37-year-old writer F. T. Kola began to feel mildly ill, with a fever and body aches. To be safe, she isolated herself at home in San Francisco. Life continued apace for a week, until one day she tried to load her dishwasher and felt strangely exhausted.</p>