06/2022 Issue: What’s New This Month About Monkeypox and Omicron
A newsletter providing a short note of each of the articles published in the past month
Published in
3 min readJul 1, 2022
Hello all! It’s time for me to send another monthly update of published articles in Microbial Instincts, an independent publication on infectious diseases (including vaccines). As usual, here is the list (friend-linked):
Monkeypox
- Why Monkeypox Hasn’t Killed Anybody in Non-African Countries With Its Case Fatality Rate of 1–10%: Although monkeypox is known to kill 1–10 for every 100 individuals infected, we’ve seen no monkeypox deaths in non-African countries so far, not even during the current international outbreak. Why? The reason is simple yet tragic — Africa doesn’t have the necessary medical resources to treat monkeypox properly.
- The Heart of Problems of Zoonoses like Monkeypox: Agustín Muñoz-Sanz, MD, informs on the basics of spillovers — i.e., jumping and establishment of disease from animals to humans — such as the concepts of reservoirs and R-naught. And how back in 2003, scientists warned that monkeypox resurgence among the human population could happen.
- Effectiveness of Monkeypox Vaccine Is Questionable, Especially When the Virus Has Mutated: Some countries have started vaccinating infected and exposed individuals against monkeypox with our current smallpox vaccines, which are thought to be effective against monkeypox as well. But little did many know that such vaccine effectiveness data came from non-randomized, observational studies from the late 1900s.
- Monkeypox Vaccine: Unless For Occupational Exposures, Only Vaccinate If You Are Infected Or A Close Contact: Stephanie Jyet Quan Loo provides an overview of the currently available vaccines against monkeypox and their usage guidelines — i.e., for who and how should the vaccines be given. For instance, even if infection already occurs, the vaccine can still be given during monkeypox’s incubation period of 0–4 and up to 14 days.
Omicron
- Omicron Hospitalized More People Than Delta, and Americans Shrugged: Joe Duncan describes how Omicron, despite being known as mild, has put more people in the hospital than Delta. Yet many assume that the pandemic is no longer as bad and that we should live on as usual. But it’s the complete opposite in reality, especially more so as Omicron has evolved its immune evasion capacity even further.
- Evidence of Covid-related Original Antigenic Sin Has Finally Surfaced: Original antigenic sin or immune imprinting occurs when prior immunity interferes with the formation of newer immunity. And recent evidence in lab settings suggests that immune imprinting may be a concern, where our pre-existing non-Omicron immunity may weaken the formation of Omicron-specific immunity.
- The Debatable Lightness of Omicron: Agustín Muñoz-Sanz, MD, has written a comprehensive account of Omicron‘s key developments — starting from its evolutionary trajectory, immune evasion capacity, risk of causing long-Covid and re-infection, and its associated excess deaths. For example, the risk of long-Covid from Omicron seems lesser than that of Delta. But the number of excess deaths associated with Omicron outnumbered Delta's by as much as 3-fold.
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