It won’t be Woodcock

Apparently acting FDA commish Janet Woodcock is not on the list to be the permanent head of the agency. Was it because of the whole Aduhelm approval bruhaha? The slow approvals of the Covid vaccines? Or back-room politics? Does it matter?

So, about those third doses….

Apparently (says an expert in these things), one of the reasons people will need a third dose of an mRNA vaccine is because we got the first two doses so close together — three or four weeks. That was done to get as many people “fully” vaccinated as possible … but sacrificing the longer-lasting protection.

In a multi-dose vaccine regimen, a longer interval between doses gives the immune system time to mature. During this time period, a process called affinity maturation takes place, which causes antibodies to improve in quality while dwindling in number.

And that means that a third dose, coming eight or nine months after the first ones, could be it. Emphasis, of course, on “could.”

Stay safe this weekend

The last place you want to go is a hospital — in Georgia or any of the other five states that are just about out of ICU beds.

The tsunami of Delta variant cases […] has begun to put a strain on an already incredibly busy emergency department, with patients waiting longer than usual for assistance.

Yet more Covid killers

At some point, one of these treatments is actually going to work outside the lab. Until then, though, it’s just one press release after another. The latest is from the University of Michigan, where researchers pitted more then 1,400 drugs and compounds against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The good news is they got 17 “potential hits,” — seven already known (e.g., remdesivir) but 10 that were new. One of them: lactoferrin, which is available over the counter as a dietary supplement.

“We found lactoferrin had remarkable efficacy for preventing infection, working better than anything else we observed,” […] Early data suggest this efficacy extends even to newer variants of SARS-CoV2, including the highly transmissible Delta variant.

They’re starting clinical trials shortly.

Captain Obvious offers a toast

“Study Shows Uptick in U.S. Alcohol Beverage Sales During COVID-19 Pandemic” with a peak in the third quarter of 2020. Data from 2021 to come….

There’s no good way to stop

Obviously opioid users can’t just go cold turkey, but there’s bad news: A UC Davis study found that, for “long-term, higher-dose users,” even tapering off them is bad.

After tapering their usage, overdoses went up by 69 percent and mental health crises more than doubled versus those who didn’t try to taper.

Granted that the definition of “tapering” was reducing daily dose by more than 15 percent over two months, it’s possible that what’s needed is more-gradual reduction.