Making Sense of Medical Science (MSMS)

A medical scientist explains medical news for lay people

about

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: morbidity

Vaccinating Pregnant Women And Kids Against COVID: Suspicion vs Science

June 8, 2025

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…
New Data On COVID Vaccine Deaths

May 29, 2025

Two years ago, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed that 34% of Americans believe that the COVID vaccines have caused thousands of sudden deaths. As a result, some health departments have been forbidden from promoting the shots or have had to even ban them.
Still Digging Into Long COVID

October 7, 2024

…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.
Vaccine Disinformation Moves To Congress

January 16, 2024

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…
What We Learned From Sweden’s Response To COVID

December 13, 2023

The real lesson from Sweden is that if you keep things open and people get sick, the economy still suffers in a pandemic. As far as the economy goes, it is a case of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
The Latest On Long COVID (So Far)

December 23, 2022

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…
The Long Haul, Part 4: The Cost of Long COVID In Terms Of Individual Health And Quality Of Life

January 25, 2022

Surviving COVID-19 is one thing, recovering is another.
Has Omicron Rendered Vaccines Ineffective?

January 17, 2022

Many vaccinated people are indeed getting infected with omicron, yet the vaccines are still quite effective, and much better than no vaccine.
The Long Haul, Part 2: What Is Long COVID?

October 19, 2021

About the only thing we can say with any certitude at this time is that long COVID exists but is not easy to describe. The only constant between different long COVID patients with different symptoms is that the conditions is a collection of varied symptoms that persist long after the acute disease subsides
The Long Haul, Part 1: What Long COVID Is Like

October 1, 2021

This is the first part of a multi-part blog series on long term morbidity associated with COVID-19 infection (how many parts there will be in the series remains to be determined). In this post, Part 1 in the series, I will discuss what long-term COVID is like and the general impact of it on the…

recent posts

about

Category: morbidity