Making Sense of Medical Science (MSMS)

A medical scientist explains medical news for lay people

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Steve Clark, PhD is a retired university professor with a PhD in immunology and a past Special Fellow of the Leukemia Society of America. Clark has published dozens of papers based on his research and holds two drug patents. He taught medical and graduate students about cancer biology and genetics, and about research ethics. He also directed an NIH-funded PhD Graduate Program and chaired several executive-level faculty committees. Clark served on the University Chancellor’s Speaker’s Bureau. While retired, Clark has been blogging on the COVID pandemic, which is the subject of his next book.

Category: CDC

  • COVID And Kids

    • About 1 in 5 children hospitalized with COVID were admitted to the intensive care unit. • Significantly, >90 percent of these children who were hospitalized or died from COVID weren’t vaccinated.

  • Vaccinating Pregnant Women And Kids Against COVID: Suspicion vs Science

    The announcement in May on X by Health Secretary RFK, Jr. that the CDC will no longer recommend COVID vaccinations for children over 6 months and pregnant women took the entire CDC by surprise. Kennedy’s decree represents a profound policy shift as well as a major assault on science-based medicine. It completely abandons established procedures…

  • Deadly Vaccine Disinformation

    The insidiousness and even silliness of anti-vaccine charlatans like RFK, Jr and the others is that while they claim to be saving peoples’ lives, they actually are causing deaths. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that in the nine months between June 2021 and March 2022, 234,000 deaths could have been prevented with COVID vaccinations that…

  • Another Jab’ll Do Ya…

    What the boosters do is prevent you from getting serious disease that these new variants can visit on you! Realize that the vast majority of people across all age groups who were hospitalized with serious disease last fall did not get the updated booster for the current virus that was circulating.

  • Vaccine Disinformation Moves To Congress

    This was not a meeting called by a regular committee but an ad hoc gathering of some anti-vaccine rogues. It was held in a tiny back room in the Capitol and was poorly attended, poorly staffed, and poorly equipped. It was described as a meeting of the “shadow Congress;” accurately named as it dabbled in…

  • ‘Tis The Season To…..Mask Up Again??

    A family doc wrote about a week ago that all the hospitals in his health system are at capacity. He was unable to send a patient to the preferred ER because its hospital was full due COVID, flu and RSV cases. And the patients with these flu-like respiratory infections who were filling the beds were…

  • Vaccines: When the Experts Lie But Claim They Are Right

    Therefore, the goal of COVID vaccines is to prevent severe disease—to keep people out of the hospital, out of the intensive care unit, and out of the morgue. The Qatar study showed that the booster does exactly that. Protective efficacy against severe disease was about 75 percent.

  • The Latest On Long COVID (So Far)

    some 16 million working age Americans now suffer from long COVID, which creates a huge burden on our health system. Up to 4 million of these are unable to work, which is a major drain on a labor market already short of workers. The annual cost in lost wages is up to $230 billion! The…

  • Pandemic History: Long COVID

    Who are those people susceptible to long COVID? It also seems that vaccination protects a bit against long COVID, but not as much as previously thought. But, this observation complicates things. The vaccine is designed to stimulate an immune response without the risk attendant to an infection. Why doesn’t this immune response cause long COVID…

  • The Next Pandemic Is Here

    Clearly, not all pandemics are created equal. Some smolder like AIDS, others fulminate like COVID. What will our next pandemic be like?