Thursday, August 12, 2021

August 12

When we thought COVID-19 was over, as more individuals were vaccinated against the deadly virus, the fourth wave of the pandemic struck, fueling a rise in breakthrough infections. 

We have documented several cases of fatal breakthrough infections. Publishing it is not easy because of many biases. 

Science has been always linked to the politics of society. Current political polarization hinders not only effective COVID-19 pandemic mitigation measures but also impedes research on side effects of vaccines and fatal breakthrough infections in healthy individuals. Social media fuels the divide encouraging toxic discussion, favoring rude and disrespectful comments. 

Publishing bias is another issue since scientific journals prefer to publish positive results discriminating against negative or null results. 

But we have many documented cases from the COVID-back-to-normal study and information about other COVID victims from genealogy and other sources. Let the truth be told. 


REFERENCES

Berkessel J, Ebert T, Gebauer J, Jonsson T, Oishi S. Pandemics Initially Spread Among People of High (not Low) Social Status: Evidence from COVID-19 and the Spanish Flu. PsyArXiv, 12 Jan. 2021. [example of using genealogy sites for medical research]

Gabashvili IS. Community-Based Phenotypic Study of Safety, Tolerability, Reactogenicity and Immunogenicity of Emergency-Use-Authorized Vaccines Against COVID-19 and Viral Shedding Potential of Post-Vaccination Infections: Protocol for an Ambispective study. medRxiv. 2021 Jun 1. medRxiv 2021.06.28.21256779; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.28.21256779

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