Do as I say…

Georgia state health employees have been reluctant to get vaccinated for Covid-19, and DPH commissioner Kathleen Toomey is not happy.

“Only about 30% of our own staff in our own health departments wanted to be vaccinated — which means 70% did not,” Toomey said. “The same was true in hospitals.”

The state had such a “disappointing” response to the vaccine by medical workers that officials decided to move forward with opening eligibility for all Georgians 65 and older.

DPH will answer pharmacists’ vaccine questions

Do you have questions for Georgia DPH on Pharmacists and COVID-19 vaccines? You should plan to join GPhA and a panel of professionals from the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) for this rapid-paced Q & A session just for pharmacists and pharmacy staff.

Pharmacists & COVID-19 Vaccinations: A Q&A Session with Georgia DPH.

Tuesday, January 26, 2021; 8:00 – 8:30am

CLICK HERE to register, or CLICK HERE to submit your questions in advance.

Statins vs Covid

It seems that the SARS-CoV-2 virus needs cholesterol to get into cells (report Princeton scientists), which explains why people taking statins might do better if they get infected.

The work may also shed light on a strange feature of the disease: the formation of giant, compound cells found in the lungs of COVID-19 patients.

Merck quits Covid vaccine game…

It found its trial vaccines just weren’t good enough.

In these studies, both V590 and V591 were generally well tolerated, but the immune responses were inferior to those seen following natural infection and those reported for other SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 vaccines.

It’s going to publish its research, though, and “continue to evaluate the potential of the measles-virus vector and vesicular stomatitis virus vector-based platforms” for possible use during the next pandemic.

…while Moderna works on an update

Concerned that its existing vaccine might not work as well on the South African variant of the virus, Moderna is working on a tweak that will protect against that as well. “I don’t know if we need it, and I hope we don’t.”

Diet war: Fat vs. sugar

If calories and protein are equal, which is better — a low-fat diet or a low-carb diet?

Since the 1960s, when the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to say that ‘sugar good, fat bad,’ the concept of low-fat foods are healthier has spread … and we just ignored the sugar. Recently we’ve shifted the blame back to carbs.

So the National Institutes of Health decided to test which is healthier, cutting fats or cutting sugars. The answer might surprise you. Cutting fats seems to be better than cutting carbs … if you’re willing to put up with “pronounced swings in blood glucose and insulin”:

[P]eople eating the plant-based, low-fat diet showed a significant reduction in calorie intake and loss of body fat, which challenges the idea that high-carb diets per se lead people to overeat. On the other hand, the animal-based, low-carb diet did not result in weight gain despite being high in fat.” (Emphasis ours.)

20/20 hindsight

“Covid-19 warnings were on Twitter well before the outbreak of the pandemic” found Italian researchers. When they looked back at tweets at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 — they decided on the keyword “pneumonia” — it’s clear something was up:

[The study] has identified tracks of increasing concern about pneumonia cases on posts published on Twitter in seven countries, between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. The analysis of the posts shows that the “whistleblowing” came precisely from the geographical regions where the primary outbreaks later developed.

At your local greasy spoon

Eating fish can cut your diabetes risk (according to researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine), but only oily fish. Why is that? Heck, they don’t know — they confirmed a connection, but not yet a cause.

And what, you may wonder, constitutes an “oily fish”? Think anchovies, herring, and sardines, as well as mackerel, salmon, swordfish, trout and tuna. The opposite (“whitefish”) like cod, flatfish, and haddock. At least according to Wikipedia.

Eat less, smell bad, live forever

It’s been known for a while that eating a lot less (“carefully balanced but restricted diets”) can increase your lifespan considerably. But why?

Harvard scientists found that one step toward the answer is sulphur amino acids: Cutting out foods that contain a lot of them — like red meat, dairy, eggs*, and even soy — “can reduce the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, and promote healthy aging.” Doing so causes the body to produce more hydrogen sulfide, “a gas that’s poisonous if inhaled and smells like rotten eggs, but promotes health inside the body.”

* Do you really want to argue whether eggs count as “dairy”?

This Bud’s for your vaccine

For the first time in 37 years, Budweiser won’t be advertising during the Super Bowl. Not because no one cares about Tampa or Kansas City, but because it’s giving the money to “Covid-19 vaccine awareness efforts.”

Captain Obvious’s quick take

Being lonely because of a pandemic lockdown leads to depression, say British researchers.