CorDx has submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application for its CorDx TyFast Flu A/B & COVID-19 Multiplex Rapid Test to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The multiplex lateral flow immunoassay is designed to distinguish between COVID-19, influenza A, and influenza B from samples collected using nasal swabs from individuals suspected of having a viral respiratory infection. It delivers results in 10 minutes, CorDx said in a statement.
The test was designed for use in point-of-care settings and for home use; it can be administered by either healthcare professionals or individuals.
CorDx received an EUA for its COVID-19 Ag Test in late 2022.
"The introduction of this multiplex rapid test is a critical step forward in our fight against respiratory viral infections. Weve received a high volume of calls from across the country expressing interest in us developing this type of multiplex rapid test solution, and we will urgently expand our production lines in Georgia and California to meet this surging demand immediately after FDAs EUA confirmation, said Jeff Aiiso Yufeng Li, founder and chief scientific officer of CorDx.
Astudy of US veterans finds that healthcare visits rose significantly in the month after COVID-19 infection and then leveled off but remained higher than those of their uninfected peers through 1 year.
The Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care Systemled study, published today in JAMA Network Open, matched 202,803 COVID-infected veterans with the same number of uninfected veterans to track primary care, specialty care, surgery, mental health, emergency, and diagnostic and/or other visits from January 2019 to December 2022.
The average veteran age was 60.5 years, and 88.1% were men. The team obtained data from the VA Corporate Data Warehouse and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Fee-for-Service Carrier/Physician Supplier file for the year before and after COVID-19 infection.
In the year before infection, rates of outpatient healthcare visits were similar in the two groups (0.70 and 0.65 visits per week in the infected and uninfected groups, respectively). The week of infection, healthcare visits increased (4.02 vs 0.65 visits the previous week), with attenuation after the first month post-infection (from 0.83 to 0.66 visits).
Outpatient healthcare visits of all types except for surgery were higher among infected veterans than among their uninfected counterparts, with an increase of 5.12 per 30 days, mainly due to primary care visits (increase of 1.86 visits per 30 days). The difference fell to 0.58 visits per 30 days but remained significantly higher during 184 to 365 days post-infection (increase of 0.25 visits per 30 days).
Visit increases for infected veterans were seen for in-person specialty care (0.74 more visits; 0.59 in person) and emergency care (0.73; 0.72 in person), but not for telehealth, the month following infection. But visit increases did occur in telehealth for primary, mental health, and other care the month after infection, an increase that persisted.
A total of 1.86 more primary care visits occurred the month after infection, with 1.32 of these visits through telehealth. Overall 0.19 more mental health visits were observed 1 month post-infection, 0.11 of them via telehealth.
Over the full year post-COVID, infected veterans had 9.59 more visits than those who were still uninfected during that time. Half of the increased visits took place via telehealth. The increase was highest for veterans aged 85 years and older (6.1 visits), compared with those aged 20 to 44 (4.8 visits), and unvaccinated participants (4.5 visits), compared with their vaccinated peers (3.2 visits).
The adverse health outcomes of COVID-19 infection translated into increased use of outpatient services for up to 12 months after infection, suggesting persistent effects of postCOVID-19 conditions.
The greatest effects of infection on visits occurred in the first pandemic wave (March to May 2020; 5.8 visits) and were still evident during the second wave (June to October 2020; 4.7 visits) and third wave (November 2020 to May 2021; 3.6 visits).
"The adverse health outcomes of COVID-19 infection translated into increased use of outpatient services for up to 12 months after infection, suggesting persistent effects of postCOVID-19 conditions," the study authors wrote. "The increased telehealth use for primary care and mental health care has been sustained since 2022, suggesting that the pandemic induced a modality switch for certain care types that may be more patient centered and clinically appropriate for patients with an infectious disease."
They called for future research into the degree to which the persistent increase in telehealth visits reflects patient preferences, healthcare provider or health-system change in the delivery of care, or other factors. "These results reinforce the value in determining which types of care may be equally effective when delivered by telehealth and which types of care are best delivered in person," they wrote.
A real estate developer from Vancouver was sentenced Friday to nearly two years in federal prison for fraudulently obtaining COVID-19 relief funds and laundering the money.
Michael James DeFrees, 62, pleaded guilty in October in U.S. District Court in Oregon to bank fraud, money laundering and two counts of wire fraud. In addition to his prison sentence, a judge also ordered him to forfeit $1.2 million and pay $1.3 million in restitution to the U.S. Small Business Administration, according to a U.S. Attorneys Office news release.
Between April 2020 and April 2022, DeFrees claimed Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Paycheck Protection Program loans for two businesses under false pretenses, the news release states.
Prosecutors said that on applications for the loans, DeFrees claimed he was the sole owner of two businesses construction company Gateway National Corporation in Washington and real estate development company Yacht Harbor in Oregon and that he had never been convicted of a crime or placed on parole or probation. But investigators say that when he submitted the applications, he was serving a term of probation for a 2017 Washington conviction for falsifying records in a bankruptcy proceeding.
Once he received the loan payments, DeFrees then laundered some of the money through a third business, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.
Michael DeFrees crimes demonstrated his indifference to both the many businesses suffering the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and American taxpayers who funded the relief programs created to alleviate these impacts, Ethan Knight, chief of the U.S. Attorneys Offices Economic Crimes Unit, said in the news release. Prosecuting COVID-19 fraud remains a top priority for the Department of Justice and our partners.
Researchers in Nantes, France, working on a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. The use of preprints to disseminate research findings saw a major uptick during the pandemic.Credit: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty
The COVID-19 pandemic saw an explosion in publication of preprint articles, many by authors who had never produced one before. Now it seems a high proportion of these scientists are likely to continue the practice.
A survey published in PeerJ1 questioned researchers who had posted preprints relating to COVID-19 or the virus SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, across four preprint servers: arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv and ChemRxiv. Of the 673 people who completed the survey, just under 58% had posted their preprints on the biomedical server medRxiv; around 18% on arXiv, which focuses on mathematics and physical sciences; 14% on the life-sciences server bioRxiv; and 7% on ChemRxiv, a chemistry repository.
For two-thirds of respondents, this was the first time they had published a preprint. Almost 80% of these said they intended to post preprints of at least some of their papers going forward.
AI writes summaries of preprints in bioRxiv trial
One of the most intriguing findings is the number of respondents who received feedback on their preprints, says study co-author Narmin Rzayeva, a scientometrics researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Fifty-three per cent received comments from peers, more than half of which were delivered privately through closed channels such as by e-mail or during meetings. Around 20% of respondents received comments on the preprint platforms, which are publicly accessible.
We expected much lower numbers, Rzayeva says, because preprint papers dont typically receive much feedback.
Previous work2 found that by the end of December 2021, just 8% of preprints posted on medRxiv since it launched in mid-2019 had received comments online. But that study considered only publicly posted comments.
Preprint feedback is having an effect, albeit unevenly. Of all survey respondents, just 1.9% reported making major changes to the results section of their preprints as a result of feedback. By contrast, 10.1% received such changes in response to peer review conducted as part of conventional journal publication. Rzayeva suspects that this is partly because authors feel obliged to make changes after receiving feedback from journal peer reviewers.
Of the survey respondents who reported receiving feedback on their preprints, 21.2% said they had made substantial changes to their discussion and conclusions sections. I find it pretty exciting and encouraging that authors are making the amount of changes to their preprints that they do in response to preprint commentary, says Jessica Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, a non-profit organization in San Francisco, California, that promotes innovation in the life sciences.
Polka notes that preprint feedback tends not to be as thorough as a review commissioned by a journal. An analysis of comments left on bioRxiv preprints posted between May 2015 and September 2019 found that only around 12% of non-author comments resembled those from conventional peer review3.
Australian funder backflips on controversial preprint ban
Polka encourages researchers to strike up discussions over preprints. By conducting peer review in the open, you integrate many more perspectives than you would by doing it behind closed doors, she says.
The preprint experience seems to have been positive for the survey respondents, 87% of whom said they had later submitted their paper to a peer-reviewed journal. Preprints shouldnt replace journal articles, Rzayeva says, but should complement them and become an integral part of the publishing system.
Rzayeva acknowledges that the survey covered only 4 servers, which accounted for around 55% of all COVID-19 preprints published in 2020. As with most surveys, there was also a self-selection bias, meaning that the proportion of individuals with certain views could be overestimated.
Anita Bandrowski, an information scientist at the University of California, San Diego, says the survey is important, but notes that it did not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools that are giving automated feedback on preprints. Bandrowski was part of a group of biologists and software specialists who developed a set of automated tools that measure the rigour and reproducibility of COVID-19 preprints and post the results on the social-media platform X.
Similar tools could become common as researchers consider ways to assess the rapidly growing number of preprints, and it will be important to find ways to track the results, says Bandrowski. She predicts that there will be much more adoption of preprints in the future among biologists as a result of researchers dipping their toes in during the pandemic.
Polka agrees. The pandemic gave us a window into what is possible with preprints. Its just a matter of tweaking policies in order to make use of that potential.
Dr Alessandro Siani
School of Biological Sciences at the University of Portsmouth in the UK.
As climate change causes more extreme weather events, increased rainfall and rising temperatures, itsincreasing the spreadof infectious diseases.
While this claim might sound like scaremongering, it is not a prediction its already happening now in our cities, as exemplified by news reportsof the streets of Paris being fumigatedto limit the spread of tiger mosquitoes known to carry Zika and dengue.
Vaccines are a key tool in the fight against these diseases. They can protect against some tropical and mosquito-borne illnesses, such as Japanese encephalitis, dengue or yellow fever, as well as many diseases that can thrive when drought and flooding reduce access to clean water, such as cholera and hepatitis A.
With newglobal pandemics also predicted to emergewith climate change, vaccines will likely play a key role in mitigating their most devastating impacts.
But troublingly, vaccine hesitancy appears to have increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, and its not just COVID vaccines that are subject to this hesitancy, but vaccines more broadly even those that have been successfully used for decades and led to the near-eradication of some infectious diseases.
TheUK Health Security Agency warned that urgent action should be takento curb the re-emergence of measles outbreaks caused by the decline in MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine coverage in some communities.
The increase in vaccine scepticism presents a real challenge for healthcare organisations and national governments as they attempt to incorporate a climate resilience lens into their public health plans.
The decline in vaccine confidence was a key finding ofa study I carried out with my student Amy Trantercomparing survey data collected before and after the onset of the pandemic.
We ran two anonymous online surveys of more than 1000 adults in November 2019 and January 2022 respectively, with the aim of investigating public perspectives on the practice of vaccination and the factors that might underpin hesitancy and refusal.
Both surveys asked respondents to indicate their attitudes towards statements including vaccines are safe and I think vaccines should be a compulsory practice.
Because the second survey was carried out after COVID-19 emerged, it contained two additional questions specifically focused on that pandemic.
The results were troubling: They showed that confidence in vaccinations was considerably lower in 2022 compared to 2019 across all demographic groups.
Almost one quarter (23.8 percent) of participants in 2022 reported their confidence in vaccines had declined since the onset of the pandemic.
A decrease in vaccine confidence was found across participants ages, genders, religious beliefs, education levels and ethnicities.
We found that, among our participants, some demographic groups were more vaccine-hesitant than others. In both 2019 and 2022, participants who held religious beliefs were more vaccine-hesitant than agnostic or atheist individuals. Respondents of Black and Asian ethnic backgrounds were also less vaccine-confident than White respondents in both surveys (although for the Asian participants this difference was only statistically significant in the post-pandemic survey.)
There was also a key age-related difference between the 2019 and 2022 groups: while middle-aged (46 to 60-year-old) respondents were more vaccine-hesitant than any other age group in the 2019 cohort, this was no longer the case in 2022, when middle-age participants appeared more confident than those between 18 and 30 years old.
This finding gels withprevious findingsof a separate survey carried out during the Delta wave of COVID, which indicated that younger populations had less willingness to receive vaccinations.
The trend might also reflect the disproportionate severity of COVID in older patients, which may have prompted a higher perception of the infection risk in elderly participants, spurring a greater willingness to get vaccinated.
While the practice of vaccination has been met withcontroversy and oppositionever since its inception, the COVID vaccines were met with particularly heated scepticism and hostility.
The decline in vaccine confidence post-COVID has significant public health implications especially given that vaccine hesitancy was already a key threat to global health even before the pandemic hit.
Today,millions of children remainunvaccinated and therefore vulnerable to numerous vaccine-preventable diseases. We know that climate change disproportionatelyimpacts the most disadvantagedand marginalised groups: in addition to the direct effects of climate change (e.g. floods and droughts), it is the poorest populations in developing countries who will likely suffer the most if vaccine hesitancy drives down vaccination rates.
Thus, rebuilding vaccine confidence must be a priority for all governments and health agencies seeking to build climate-resilient health systems. Ideally, authorities should consider specifically tackling vaccine hesitancy in their plans for climate adaptation.
Health authorities seeking to address vaccine misinformation should be non-judgemental in their approach, and mindful ofcultural and religious factors that might underpin the hesitancy.
Vaccine communication works best when it is culturally appropriate and tailored to the individuals position on the vaccine hesitancy continuum: By engaging with specific groups based on their concerns, discussions can be focused and are more likely to be productive and less confrontational, as researchersfromThe University of Melbournehave found.
Emphasising support for vaccinations, rather than focusing on detractors and conspiracy theories, may also be a wise approach in attempts to overcome vaccine hesitancy,since research showsthat making vaccine uptake visible will encourage vaccine acceptance as a social norm.
Public health campaigns should also emphasise the many success stories linked to vaccination campaigns throughout history, for example the drastic reduction intyphus,cholera, plague, tuberculosis,diphtheriaandpertussisin the early 1900s, the elimination ofpolio,measles, mumps andrubellaacross several regions over the following decades, and the global eradication ofsmallpoxin the 1980s.
Ultimately, it is essential to acknowledge that climate change and vaccine hesitancy are not onlyexistential threats to our species,but also extremely polarising and controversial topics. Considering the enormous political and financial interests at stake think of thebillions spent by fossil fuel lobbiesto spread false narratives denying human impact on climate change dispelling misinformation on these topics is one of the most challenging collective endeavours of our times.
To succeed, it is crucial that governments and health authorities work together with scientists, educators and community leaders to coordinate a response that is global in scale but tailored to individual local communities.
Dr Alessandro Siani is the Associate Head (Students) of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. With a research background on cellular and molecular bases of human pathology and a keen focus on science communication, education and pedagogy, he authoredseveral peer-reviewed papersin both biomedical and educational journals.
Originally published underCreative Commonsby360info.
Brazzaville Nearly 10 000 children in Burkina Faso and Cameroon have now received the RTS,S malaria vaccine since being introduced this year. A wider malaria vaccine rollout is underway this year in several African countries, with Cameroon being the first outside the malaria vaccine pilot programme to do so.
Cameroon launched the vaccine on 22 January 2024. It is being integrated into its national routine immunization programme in more than 500 public and private health facilities across 42 health districts in the countrys 10 regions.
Burkina Faso introduced the vaccine on 5 February, becoming the latest country in the region to kick off the immunization. The game-changing vaccine complements the existing range of malaria control measures to prevent the disease and lower its burden.
Malaria is one of the major health challenges our region faces. The wider rollout of the malaria vaccine marks a significant milestone in advancing the fight against this deadly disease, said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Africa. Were committed to supporting countries to ensure that all eligible children are protected from the devastating impacts of this preventable illness.
The vaccine rollout in the two countries mark the start of a major initiative by the WHO Regional Office for Africas Accelerated Malaria Vaccines Introduction and Rollout in Africa (AMVIRA).
AMVIRA was developed as a response to the planned introduction of the two malaria vaccines (RTS,S and R21) into the routine immunization schedules of 19 countries[1] the Africa region in 2024. Through AMVIRA, WHO in Africa will strengthen the provision of state-of-the-art support to countries in their efforts to effectively and efficiently introduce and rollout malaria vaccines. The initiative also enhances coordination with partners, UNICEF, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and other partners.
In support of countries to ensure smooth introduction, community understanding and acceptance, and strengthened logistics, WHO has deployed 69 experts in immunization, data science and communication, across all 10 regions in Cameroon, as well as in Burkina Faso.
WHO is working with countries to set up comprehensive preparations such as national vaccination policy and guidelines, integrating the new vaccine into the delivery schedule of other vaccines and health interventions, developing an operational roll out plan, training of healthcare workers, investing in infrastructure, technical capacity, vaccine storage, community engagement and demand generation, and ensuring formative supervision, monitoring and evaluation of the process to ensure quality vaccine delivery.
As the malaria vaccine rollout extends to all eligible countries, WHO will continue to ensure that experts are deployed where needed, implement robust monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to track progress, identify challenges and facilitate timely interventions where required. The effective strategies that were witnessed in Cameroon and Burkina Faso are being documented and will be shared with other countries as they prepare for and launch the vaccines.
Malaria burden is the highest on the African continent, which accounted for approximately 94% of global malaria cases and 95% of related deaths in 2022. There were 249 million malaria cases globally in 2022, leading to 608 000 deaths. Of these deaths, 77% were children under 5 years of age, mostly in Africa.
[1] Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, DRC, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Niger, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Central African Republic, Chad, Cote dIvoire, Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria and South Sudan
All Oregon students must be current on their childhood vaccines by Feb. 21 or risk being sent home from school until they get up to date on their recommended shots.
Exclusion Day falls on the third Wednesday of every February and applies to all children in public and private schools, as well as those who attend preschools, Head Start and certified child care facilities, unless they have a medical or personal exemption. That doesnt include COVID-19 vaccinations, which are not required to attend school, but does include shots that protect against other common childhood illnesses, including measles, polio and whooping cough.
School exclusion warnings letters were sent to about 5,600 families in Multnomah County earlier this week, according to county officials.
A series of catch-up vaccination clinics for students ages 5 to 19 is happening in Portland. Shots will be free to students and their families, regardless of whether they have insurance. Families are encouraged to call 503-988-8939 to make an appointment, but appointments are not required.
The first of the four clinics is happening 10 a.m.-2 p.m. today at the Blazers Boys & Girls Club at 5250 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The other clinics are happening:
The Oregonian/OregonLive
The global anti-vaccine movement and vaccine hesitancy that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic show no signs of abating.
According to a survey of US adults, Americans in October 2023 were less likely to view approved vaccines as safe than they were in April 2021. As vaccine confidence falls, health misinformation continues to spread like wildfire on social media and in real life.
I am a public health expert in health misinformation, science communication, and health behavior change. In my view, we cannot underestimate the dangers of health misinformation and the need to understand why it spreads and what we can do about it. Health misinformation is defined as any health-related claim that is false based on current scientific consensus.
Vaccines are the number one topic of misleading health claims. Some common myths about vaccines include:
Beliefs in such myths have come at the highest cost.
An estimated 319,000 COVID-19 deaths that occurred between January 2021 and April 2022 in the United States could have been prevented if those individuals had been vaccinated, according to a data dashboard from the Brown University School of Public Health. Misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines alone have cost the US economy an estimated US$50 million to $300 million per day in direct costs from hospitalizations, long-term illness, lives lost, and economic losses from missed work.
Though vaccine myths and misunderstandings tend to dominate conversations about health, there is an abundance of misinformation on social media surrounding diets and eating disorders, smoking or substance use, chronic diseases, and medical treatments.
My teams research and that of others shows that social media platforms have become go-to sources for health information, especially among adolescents and young adults. However, many people are not equipped to maneuver the maze of health misinformation.
For example, an analysis of Instagram and TikTok posts from 2022 to 2023 by the Washington Post and the nonprofit news site The Examination found that the food, beverage, and dietary supplement industries paid dozens of registered dietitian influencers to post content promoting diet soda, sugar, and supplements, reaching millions of viewers. The dietitians relationships with the food industry were not always made clear to viewers.
Studies show that health misinformation spread on social media results in fewer people getting vaccinated and can also increase the risk of other health dangers such as disordered eating and unsafe sex practices and sexually transmitted infections. Health misinformation has even bled over into animal health, with a 2023 study finding that 53 percent of dog owners surveyed in a nationally representative sample report being skeptical of pet vaccines.
One major reason behind the spread of health misinformation is declining trust in science and government. Rising political polarization, coupled with historical medical mistrust among communities that have experienced and continue to experience unequal health care treatment, exacerbates preexisting divides.
The lack of trust is both fueled and reinforced by the way misinformation can spread today. Social media platforms allow people to form information silos with ease; you can curate your networks and your feed by unfollowing or muting contradictory views from your own and liking and sharing content that aligns with your existing beliefs and value systems.
By tailoring content based on past interactions, social media algorithms can unintentionally limit your exposure to diverse perspectives and generate a fragmented and incomplete understanding of information. Even more concerning, a study of misinformation spread on Twitter analyzing data from 2006 to 2017 found that falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be shared than the truth and spread further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth across all categories of information.
The average kindergarten student sees about 70 media messages every day. By the time theyre in high school, teens spend more than a third of their day using media.
The lack of robust and standardized regulation of misinformation content on social media places the difficult task of discerning what is true or false information on individual users. We scientists and research entities can also do better in communicating our science and rebuilding trust, as my colleague and I have previously written. I also provide peer-reviewed recommendations for the important roles that parents/caregivers, policymakers, and social media companies can play.
Below are some steps that consumers can take to identify and prevent health misinformation spread:
All of us can play a part in responsibly consuming and sharing information so that the spread of the truth outpaces the false.
Monica Wang is an associate professor of community health sciences at the School of Public Health; she can be reached at mlwang@bu.edu.
This column originally appeared on The Conversation.POV is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John ORourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.
Sometimes it's the simplest solutions that get lost in the kerfuffle of scientific progress.
Since the advent of vaccines more than two centuries ago, researchers have studied all sorts of ways in which inoculation with a weakened pathogen (or parts thereof) can prepare the immune system for a full attack exploring different dosages, vaccine agents, and forms of administration.
In all that time, very few experts have investigated the question: Does it matter which arm gets vaccinated?
Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) suspect that it just might.
It all started in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare workers participating in studies on immune response to the new COVID-19 vaccines were asking experts at OHSU whether they should switch arms between the first and second jab.
The team wasn't sure what advice to give. Until that time, most scientists had just assumed that it didn't matter.
"This question hasn't really been extensively studied, so we decided to check it out," says infectious disease specialist Marcel Curlin.
When Curlin and his colleagues combed through the scientific literature, they could only find four papers on the topic. And the results were mixed.
One randomized controlled trial among infants found that influenza vaccinations given at 2, 3, and 4 months of age in different arms resulted in higher antibody levels than they did when given in the same arm.
A more recent study in 2023, however, found higher immune responses after giving COVID-19 vaccinations in the same arm as opposed to different arms.
To get a clearer picture, researchers at OHSU tested the antibody levels of 947 participants who received a two-dose COVID-19 vaccination.
Half of the cohort were randomized to get the second dose in the same arm as the first one, while the other half received the staggered jabs in different arms. Four weeks after their second dose, SARS-CoV-2-specific serum antibodies were 1.4 fold higher in those who received the vaccine in different arms.
A subset of 108 people in 54 pairs were matched based on their gender, age, and time of vaccinations, and their blood work was compared.
Serum samples collected in the weeks and months after vaccination showed clear differences between the groups. Four weeks after the second jab, those who received shots in both arms had up to a four-fold increase in SARS-CoV-2-specific serum antibodies compared to those who got shots in just one arm.
What's more, this improved immune response lasted more than a year after the booster was administered.
"It turned out to be one of the more significant things we've found, and it's probably not limited to just COVID vaccines," Curlin hypothesizes.
"We may be seeing an important immunologic function."
Curlin and his colleagues are not yet sure what that special function is, or how it works, but they have an idea.
When a vaccine is given in muscle, the antigens in the medicine are recognized by immune cells, which 'handcuff' the invaders and take them to the lymph nodes for further questioning. This then primes the immune system against this particular antigen by sort of sending out wanted signs of the invader.
The thing is, different sides of the body drain to different lymph nodes, so by triggering an immune response on both sides, the body may be more on guard.
"By switching arms, you basically have memory formation in two locations instead of one," explains Curlin.
That's the opposite to what the 2023 study found. It suggested that same-arm vaccinations better prepared the immune system for COVID-19. The reason for the differing results could be due to the timing of serum blood tests.
The 2023 study tested blood serum just two weeks after the vaccinations were given.
The immune cells that memorize the characteristics of an antigen, however, continue to ramp up and mature for many months after vaccination.
Only at three weeks did researchers at OHSU notice that injections in both arms began to show better results than the same arm, and these benefits improved incrementally, hitting a peak at week 4 and lasting for many months after.
While more research needs to be done to understand the pros and cons of vaccinating different arms, Curlin says he won't hesitate to switch it up for his next booster.
The study was published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield whose fake anti-vax data has been blamed for the current measles epidemic has set his sights on discrediting the mumps vaccine.
The 67-year-old, who fled to the US after being struck off in the UK for fraudulently connecting the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, is seeking Hollywood fame with his first feature film Protocol-7, which claims the mumps jab causes serious long-term health issues.
The film's extended trailer debuted at the Autism Health Summit in San Antonio, Texas last weekend, with Wakefield telling the conference's 500 guests that the vaccine, which has been used for decades, is 'dangerous'.
Attendees who paid 310 each for the two-day event gasped as scenes showed a child convulsing after receiving a mumps shot.
Wakefield, who divorced his wife of 35 years and later dated supermodel Elle Macpherson, told the crowd: 'It's not just a matter of this vaccine doesn't work the disease [mumps] has become more dangerous precisely because of the vaccine.'
The movie, which will be released on May 31 and is based on a 'true story', stars Julia Roberts's brother Eric as an executive at Merck who goes up against two whistleblowers who claim the pharmaceutical company's mumps vaccine is faulty.
British actor Matthew Marsden, who has appeared in Coronation Street and Rambo, plays Wakefield.
The trailer comes as cases of measles in the UK last week hit a ten-year high amid concerns that attempts to contain the outbreak particularly in the West Midlands are not working because of poor vaccination rates.
Wakefield's now-disgraced paper, published in the medical journal The Lancet in 1998, claimed the MMR jab caused autism and bowel disease in a study of just 12 children. The General Medical Council struck him off after ruling he behaved unethically by using children who showed signs of autism as 'guinea pigs' and subjected them to needless invasive procedures, including colonoscopies.
Since then, Wakefield has reinvented himself in the US as a podcast host and by doing lucrative speaking gigs at anti-vax conferences.
In promotional material for the conference, Wakefield was referred to as 'doctor', while a table bearing merchandise, including 15 'Wakefield was Right' T-shirts, did brisk trade.
Wakefield told the audience: 'Mumps in children is a trivial disease. We do not need a mumps vaccine.'
It is not known if Wakefield was paid for last Saturday's appearance, which was made over Zoom rather than in person because he was sick.
A woman answering the door at an address linked to Wakefield in Austin, Texas, said the disgraced doctor was not giving interviews.
Dr Martin Scurr, a GP and the Mail's Good Health columnist, said Wakefield was exploiting post-Covid fears about vaccines, adding: 'Sadly he has a lot of followers on social media who believe these conspiracy theories.'
