What the latest large-scale surveillance study says — In biology, it’s always about the dose, even at the nanoscale level. Too much of anything is hardly ever a good thing, and too little of anything is hardly ever helpful. That’s why pinpointing the threshold — the tipping point —where an effect is effectuated is vital yet tricky because…

What the most comprehensive autopsy study from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) shows — An autopsy, the dissection of a dead body, ‘the act of seeing for oneself’ in Greek, is the gold-standard method of determining the cause of death and understanding what a disease does to the human body. Numerous autopsy studies on Covid-19 patients have been published. But researchers at the National…

An update on the basics after two years — It seems odd to ask this question at this point. But maybe it’s about time to ask again, given that it has been over two years since we discovered Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. …

A newsletter providing a short note of each of the articles published in the past month — Hello all, it has been another month, and I have here another update on what has been going on in Microbial Instincts, an independent publication about infectious diseases (including vaccines). As usual, articles are friend-linked, which I hope will keep you more scientifically informed. Covid-19 Omicron Reveals Multiple Pandemic Infectious Disease…

And why it’s important to know them (and their limitations) — Biomedical devices have their limits in understanding the body from the outside. That’s why autopsy— meaning ‘the act of seeing for oneself’ in Greek — remains useful to this day. To know what really happened, we have to understand the body from the inside. …

Scientific studies support vaccine safety, but certain individual reports don’t. Which side to trust? — A randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the gold-standard method for testing the safety and efficacy of a drug or biologic in humans. Because of RCTs, we know that the Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective compared to the control group. Beyond the clinical trial’s control group in the general population…

A newsletter providing a brief account of articles published in the last month — Hi everyone! I have here another monthly update from Microbial Instincts, an independent publication about microbes and vaccines. But first, as most have already heard, the World Health Organization (WHO) has named the B.1.1.529 variant as Omicron last week, which was first detected in South Africa in a sample dated…

I went through at least 300 papers for this. — The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) of the U.K. has recorded 32,036 individual cases of post-vaccine menstrual disorders — out of 49.4 million Covid-19 vaccine doses — as of 27 October 2021. But the MHRA did not accept that the Covid-19 vaccines are linked to menstrual disorders: These…

This article should cover everything we know at present that’s important concisely. — One of the primary drivers of hesitancy about the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna is that it’s a new technology with no long-term safety data. Whereas traditional vaccine technology — such as inactivated, protein-based, and live-attenuated vaccines — has been used to combat infectious diseases for decades.