Our amazing @SciBeh volunteers are launching on TikTok with messages about vaccine hesitancy: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdSt4fEm/ @Sander_vdLinden @roozenbot @adamhfinn @CorneliaBetsch @PhilippMSchmid @philipplenz6 @AnaSKozyreva

What was a worrisome suspicion 4 weeks ago is now widely accepted: The AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine can, in very rare cases, cause a disorder characterized by dangerous blood clots and low platelet counts. In Europe, at least 222 suspected cases have been reported among 34 million people who have received their first dose of the vaccine. More than 30 have died.

Hard choices emerge as link between AstraZeneca vaccine and rare clotting disorder becomes clearer

Her son has an intellectual disability and needed to see, hear and touch his parents. But rigid interpretation of public health measures kept them apart.

One mother's human-rights victory over hardline COVID restrictions

3/ Most people who get Guillain-Barré syndrome RECOVER FULLY.

2/ Baseline rate of Guillain-Barré syndrome (i.e. not due to vaccination) is 3-6K cases/year out of 330M people in the U.S. (~0.001%). Often follows respiratory (e.g. influenza, CMV, EBV, Mycoplasma) or gastrointestinal (e.g. Campylobacter) infection, or HIV.

1/ J&J COVID vaccine linked VERY RARELY to Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). https://washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/12/johnson-and-johnson-warning/… - 100 prelim reports of GBS out of 12.8M doses (0.0008%) - about 2 weeks after vaccination - mostly in men - mostly in 50+ years-old

This resource surveys published papers and preprints for SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. Select a topic / article type from the left, or search above.

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The summer of 2021 is shaping up to be – corona volente – a summer full of exciting sports events, including the European Football Championship, closely followed by the Olympic Games, to name just two. I’m often struck by the parallels between competitive sports and good scientific research. Successful research is the result of hard work by researchers, just as top athletes have to train many hours a week to reach their goals. Research is often just as competitive as the rivalry between athletes. Indeed, researchers also want to be the first to make a discovery or the best in their field, and consequently they too set the bar higher and higher. And like many sports, science is often a team effort, where the score doesn’t depend on one person but on the hard work of several researchers, supported by technicians, lab technicians, students, librarians, assistants or scientific instrument makers.

Science is like competitive sports

It was only a matter of time until Donald Trump converted the debate over covid-19 vaccines into an occasion for his supporters to show their loyalty to him — and even worse, to the “big lie” that his 2020 loss was illegitimate.

Opinion: A vile new Trump-GOP claim about vaccines suggests trouble ahead

The response of the global virus genomics community to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has been unprecedented, with significant advances made towards the ‘real-time’ generation and sharing of SARS-CoV-2 genomic data. The rapid growth in virus genome data production has necessitated the development of new analytical methods that can deal with orders of magnitude of more genomes than previously available. Here, we present and describe Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak Lineages (pangolin), a computational tool that has been developed to assign the most likely lineage to a given SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence according to the Pango dynamic lineage nomenclature scheme. To date, nearly two million virus genomes have been submitted to the web-application implementation of pangolin, which has facilitated the SARS-CoV-2 genomic epidemiology and provided researchers with access to actionable information about the pandemic’s transmission lineages.

10.1093/ve/veab064

Assignment of epidemiological lineages in an emerging pandemic using the pangolin tool

How do I know which COVID-19 vaccine information sources are accurate? Accurate vaccine information is critical and can help stop common myths and rumors. It can be difficult to know which sources of information you can trust. Before considering vaccine information on the Internet, check that the information comes from a credible source and is updated on a regular basis. Learn more about finding credible vaccine information.

Myths and Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines

"If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated," says CDC Director

Debate Is Over: COVID Vax Doubled Protection for the Previously Infected

In some social networks, the opinion forming is based on its own and neighbors' (initial) opinions, whereas the evolution of the individual opinions is also influenced by the individual's past opinions in the real world. Unlike existing social network models, in this paper, a novel model of opinion dynamics is proposed, which describes the evolution of the individuals' opinions not only depends on its own and neighbors' current opinions, but also depends on past opinions. Memory and memoryless communication rules are simultaneously established for the proposed opinion dynamics model. Sufficient and/or necessary conditions for the equal polarization, consensus and neutralizability of the opinions are respectively presented in terms of the network topological structure and the spectral analysis. We apply our model to simulate Kahneman's seminal experiments on choices in risky and riskless contexts, which fits in with the experiment results. Simulation analysis shows that the memory capacity of the individuals is inversely proportional to the speeds of the ultimate opinions formational.

Opinion Dynamics Models with Memory in Coopetitive Social Networks: Analysis, Application and Simulation

The FDA’s top vaccine official vowed to complete the process ‘as rapidly as possible,’ but would not speculate on the timetable. Other officials have suggested it could be a matter of weeks.

Q&A: When might the coronavirus vaccines get full approval?

Background The period from February to June 2021 was one during which initial wild-type SARS-CoV-2 strains were supplanted in Ontario, Canada, first by variants of concern (VOC) with the N501Y mutation (Alpha/B1.1.17, Beta/B.1.351 and Gamma/P.1 variants), and then by the Delta/B.1.617 variant. The increased transmissibility of these VOCs has been documented but data for increased virulence is limited. We used Ontario’s COVID-19 case data to evaluate the virulence of these VOCs compared to non-VOC SARS-CoV-2 infections, as measured by risk of hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and death.

10.1101/2021.07.05.21260050

Progressive Increase in Virulence of Novel SARS-CoV-2 Variants in Ontario, Canada

The John Snow Society Annual Pumphandle Lecture will be given by Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), entitled "COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Remaining Challenges".

Pumphandle Lecture 2021: Dr Anthony Fauci

10.1038/d41586-021-02152-y

Fears of backfire effects are overblown, and advice to listen and interact still stands.

Talking to science deniers and sceptics is not hopeless

US COVID Deaths Fully vaccinated (left) Not fully vaccinated (right)

3.5 billion people in have not had a single Covid Meanwhile, rich nations are: - throwing away expired vaccines - giving booster shots - offering lotteries to people who are hesitant - hoarding doses for next year 𝙃𝙊𝙒 𝙒𝙄𝙇𝙇 𝙏𝙃𝙄𝙎 𝙋𝘼𝙉𝘿𝙀𝙈𝙄𝘾 𝙀𝙑𝙀𝙍 𝙀𝙉𝘿?

Vaccine maker Moderna has reported net income of $2.8bn for the three months to June 30th. Rasmus Bech Hansen is chief executive of the life sciences data analytics company Airfinity, and tells us how the company's coronavirus vaccine has boosted its prospects. Also in the programme, workers at Minera Escondida, which is the world's largest copper mine, in Chile, have voted to go on strike. The BBC's Jane Chambers updates us on the negotiations from Santiago, and Julian Kettle, mining analyst with Wood Mackenzie considers the potential impact on the global copper market. We hear how games console maker Nintendo is faring after a bumper year in 2020 as a result of lockdowns, from Dr Serkan Toto, chief executive of the games industry consultancy Kantan Games in Tokyo. Plus, in the wake of the saga of office sharing company WeWork, the BBC's Ed Butler explores whether technology startup founders have become the latest wave of cult leaders.

Covid vaccine boosts Moderna profits

Moderna said its COVID-19 vaccine remained 93% effective through six months after the second shot, as it reported second-quarter earnings and revenue that beat expectations.

Moderna's COVID-19 Vaccine Still 93% Effective After 6 Months, Company Says

Brooks Fallis is a critical care physician and the former medical director and division head of critical care at the William Osler Health System.

A vaccine-only strategy won’t prevent a fourth wave of COVID-19

The World Health Organization called for a moratorium on Covid-19 booster shots to enable poorer countries to catch up in vaccination rates.

WHO Seeks Halt to Boosters to Let Poorer Nations Catch Up

Florida education officials on Friday agreed to extend private school vouchers to parents who say requiring students to wear masks amounts to a form of harassment, escalating tensions over how to slow the spread of the coronavirus as the school year approaches and cases spike.

Florida to offer vouchers in districts with school mask requirements

10.1038/s41467-021-24732-2

Forecasting the evolution of contagion dynamics is still an open problem to which mechanistic models only offer a partial answer. To remain mathematically or computationally tractable, these models must rely on simplifying assumptions, thereby limiting the quantitative accuracy of their predictions and the complexity of the dynamics they can model. Here, we propose a complementary approach based on deep learning where effective local mechanisms governing a dynamic on a network are learned from time series data. Our graph neural network architecture makes very few assumptions about the dynamics, and we demonstrate its accuracy using different contagion dynamics of increasing complexity. By allowing simulations on arbitrary network structures, our approach makes it possible to explore the properties of the learned dynamics beyond the training data. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of our approach using real data of the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain. Our results demonstrate how deep learning offers a new and complementary perspective to build effective models of contagion dynamics on networks.

Deep learning of contagion dynamics on complex networks

10.31234/osf.io/gbqw3

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health messaging, including guidance regarding protective health behavior (e.g., use of non-medical masks), changed over time. Although many revisions were a result of gains in scientific understanding, we nonetheless hypothesized that making changes in guidance salient would negatively impact evaluations of experts and health-protective intentions. In Study 1 (N = 300), we demonstrate that describing COVID-19 guidance in terms of inconsistency (versus consistency) leads people to perceive scientists and public health authorities less favorably (e.g., as less expert). Among a Canadian subsample, making guidance change salient also reduced intentions to download the COVID Alert contact tracing app. In Study 2 (N = 1399), we show that a brief forewarning intervention mitigates detrimental effects of changes in guidance. In the absence of forewarning, emphasizing inconsistency harmed judgments of public health authorities and reduced health-protective intentions, but forewarning eliminated this effect.

A Brief Forewarning Intervention Overcomes Negative Effects of Salient Changes in COVID-19 Guidance

10.31234/osf.io/67zuk

For some church choristers, whose means of livelihood were attached to church performance, the COVID-19 pandemic became challenging. How did these choristers fare during the COVID-19? 69% of the respondents claimed the church they performed in, used live online music that is being streamed live featuring just two or three members of the choir. In comparison, 14% used recorded music, either those performed by the church choristers themselves prior to the lockdown or other forms of gospel music already recorded. However, about 17% of the choristers claimed no music was used in their various churches during the online church services during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This gave room for concern; this study identified problems associated with the low-performance level of church choristers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through questionnaires purposely distributed to over a hundred and thirty (134) choristers on the researcher's WhatsApp platforms, these respondents were equally asked to send the same to their friends or family who sing in the choir residing predominantly within the Lagos metropolis in Nigeria.Responses were, therefore, collated via the Google forms. Descriptive analyses were made. The chi-square test/cross-tabulation and the Kendal tau were used to find the correlation between online performance and social media use. The study finds that the use of social media does not have a relationship with online performance. The study's implication reveals that, if the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacts the choristers, then other aspects of the economy are not in saved hands from the havoc the pandemic has wrecked. Hence, singers and teachers of music should ensure they are technologically inclined. The teaching of music in school should also include computer music and how to perform online, which may lead to the school reforming her curriculum.

AN EVALUATION OF NIGERIAN CHORISTERS’ LEVERAGE ON TECHNOLOGY IN THE FACE OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC

10.1126/science.abg9857

The highly contagious severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infects the respiratory tract and is transmitted, in part, by respiratory droplets and aerosols. Consequently, unvaccinated people are encouraged to wear masks in public, self-quarantine if symptomatic, and practice social distancing. Despite these precautions, millions are dying. As the pandemic takes its toll, vaccines are once again headline news, notably for the speed of their development and the success of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. Given the respiratory tropism of the virus, however, it seems surprising that only seven of the nearly 100 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines currently in clinical trials are delivered intranasally. Advantages of intranasal vaccines include needle-free administration, delivery of antigen to the site of infection, and the elicitation of mucosal immunity in the respiratory tract.

Scent of a vaccine

Israel says technical issues have scuppered deal to give UK Covid vaccines expiring on 30 July

Million Pfizer jabs face being dumped after Israel-UK swap deal fails

Experts react with dismay to ‘frightening’ attitude of Sajid Javid towards removing protections

UK scientists caution that lifting of Covid rules is like building ‘variant factories’

Health experts agree the COVID-19 vaccines have proved to be extremely effective against the virus, including providing protection from the highly contagious Delta variant.

Vaccines are incredibly effective against Delta variant. So why do we need to wear masks indoors?

DeSantis - who signed a bill outlawing vaccine passports, blames “experts” for public distrust of vaccines, sells “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merch and was hesitant to disclose his own vaccination — wants you to know “vaccines are saving lives.”

Dr. Brytney Cobia said Monday that all but one of her COVID patients in Alabama did not receive the vaccine. The vaccinated patient, she said, just needed a little oxygen and is expected to fully recover. Some of the others are dying.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’: Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients

A number of leaders on the right suddenly urged their audiences to get vaccinated in the past day. Why now?

Suddenly, Conservatives Care About Vaccines

From the start of the worldwide coronavirus vaccination campaign, the anti-vaccine movement and vaccine skeptics picked an unfortunate case study: Israel. The country shot to the lead of the pack with an aggressive vaccination campaign, but its results weren’t as instantaneous as these critics suggested they should have been. Cases in Israel kept rising for a little while! So they pitched Israel as evidence that maybe the vaccines didn’t really work that well.

Vaccine doubters’ strange fixation with Israel

LONDON, July 21 (Reuters) - Two doses of Pfizer (PFE.N) or AstraZeneca's (AZN.L) COVID-19 vaccine are nearly as effective against the highly transmissible Delta coronavirus variant as they are against the previously dominant Alpha variant, a study published on Wednesday showed.

Two doses of Pfizer, AstraZeneca shots effective against Delta variant: study

apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1358525/retrieve… just out from @WHO Guidance on conducting vaccine effectiveness evaluations in the setting of new SARS-CoV-2 variants INTERIM GUIDANCE 22 JULY 2021

Täglich prasselt eine Vielzahl von Informationen zur Coronaimpfung auf die Menschen ein – dabei sind längst nicht alle Fakten wissenschaftlich belegt und damit verlässlich.

„Impfung gegen Falschinformationen“

People may repeatedly encounter the same misinformation when it “goes viral.” The results of four main experiments (two preregistered) and a pilot experiment (total N = 2,587) suggest that repeatedly encountering misinformation makes it seem less unethical to spread—regardless of whether one believes it. Seeing a fake-news headline one or four times reduced how unethical participants thought it was to publish and share that headline when they saw it again—even when it was clearly labeled as false and participants disbelieved it, and even after we statistically accounted for judgments of how likeable and popular it was. In turn, perceiving the headline as less unethical predicted stronger inclinations to express approval of it online. People were also more likely to actually share repeated headlines than to share new headlines in an experimental setting. We speculate that repeating blatant misinformation may reduce the moral condemnation it receives by making it feel intuitively true, and we discuss other potential mechanisms that might explain this effect.

10.1177/0956797619887896

Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share

10.31234/osf.io/7gja2

People rely heavily on information from the social world to inform their real-world beliefs. We ask whether the perceived prevalence of a belief, divorced from any direct evidence, serves as an independent cue in belief updating. Using real-world pseudoscientific and conspiratorial claims, our experiment (N = 403 American adults) shows that increases in people’s estimates of the prevalence of a belief led to increases in their endorsement of said belief. Belief change was most dramatic when initial beliefs were most uncertain and when novel prevalence information was most convincing, suggesting that people weigh social information rationally with other information sources. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of online misinformation.

Social prevalence information is rationally integrated in belief updating

BACK in March, an eventual end to the coronavirus pandemic appeared to be in sight. The number of covid-19 cases were plummeting in the UK and the US as vaccination levels rose. It seemed the same might gradually happen in country after country around the world.

UK conditions are ideal for evolving vaccine-resistant covid variants

10.31234/osf.io/8u5jn

COVID-19 and the 2021 U.S. Capitol attacks have highlighted the potential dangers of pseudoscientific and conspiratorial belief adoption. Approaches to combating misinformed beliefs have tried to “pre-bunk” or “inoculate” people against misinformation adoption and have yielded only modest results. These approaches presume that some citizens may be more gullible than others and thus susceptible to multiple misinformed beliefs. We provide evidence of an alternative account it’s simply too hard for all people to be accurate in all domains of belief, but most individuals are trying. We collected data on a constellation of human beliefs across domains from more than 1,700 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find misinformed beliefs to be broadly, but thinly, spread among the population. Further, we do not find that individuals who adopt one misinformed belief are more likely to engage in pseudo-scientific or conspiratorial thinking across the board, in opposition to “slippery slope” notions of misinformation adoption.

“Fringe” beliefs aren’t fringe