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: immunity

  • 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.

  • Are mRNA Vaccines Gene Therapy?

    It is biologically impossible for an mRNA vaccine to affect your cell DNA in any way. Think about it—it if could, then all of your cellular mRNA from normal genes being expressed, and the mRNA you eat, breath get from other vaccines, wounds, etc. could do the same. But it does not.

  • 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…

  • Still Digging Into Long COVID

    …some progress is being made; probably not fast enough if you are a long COVID sufferer, but medical science often moves at a glacial pace. Here, I describe some of our recent advances in learning about the problem.

  • NIH Launches First Trial Of Nasal COVID Vaccine

    Wouldn’t it be nice if a vaccine could be developed to nip the infection in the bud at the site of entry so it could not set up shop at all? That is an idea behind a mucosal vaccine that I described earlier. This summer, NIH launched the initial Phase 1 trial to begin testing…

  • Coronaviruses, Colds And COVID: And Cool Immunology

    ….if you were infected with CoV-2, you likely had a much milder cold, if you caught one at all. And vice versa! But the funny thing is that vaccination against COVID did not also protect you against a cold like an infection would.

  • 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.

  • Paxlovid: Just Follow The Settled Science

    Thus, the makers of the drug now have two studies with diametrically opposite results on the effects of Paxlovid on COVID patients. The first showed “eye popping” effects sufficient to get NIH to move all other drug investigations to a lower priority. The second showed that Paxlovid was no better than a placebo. Both results…

  • While SARS-CoV-2 And Our Immune Systems Do A Dance, We Get Re-Infected

    The natural immune response, like the vaccine immune response, is robust and effective, yet both are only directed against a very small portion of a big pathogen, and both are very leaky in that one can still get infected again! What gives?

  • Why Don’t The COVID Vaccines Last Longer?

    Are the vaccines not very good? After all, we get small pox or measles shots that last a lifetime. Others like the vax for tetanus lasts for ~10 years. Why can’t we get a more durable coronavirus vaccine?