Making Sense of Medical Science (MSMS)

A medical scientist explains medical news for lay people

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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: public health

  • 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.

  • Over 400 Studies Show Face Masks Protect Against Respiratory Infection

    Now a new meta-analysis by University of Oxford researchers, or an analysis of some 400 published studies on facemasks, further confirms that if they are correctly and consistently worn they effectively protect against respiratory infections, including COVID.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • What We Learned From Sweden’s Response To COVID

    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.”

  • Masks Redux

    The effectiveness of masks in schools is supported by many different studies and analyses that show similar results. There are more than a dozen studies beyond those cited here, that all point to the same conclusion: Masks work.

  • What Happened To The Flu And Other Respiratory Diseases?

    In this post, I present further data on how the mandates significantly reduced the incidence of other infectious respiratory diseases around the world. If the measures can reduce flu, then you can bet that they also reduced COVID-19.

  • Lingering Post-COVID Vascular Risks

    We have known for some time that patients with COVID-19 are at risk for dangerous blood clots (also called deep vein thrombosis, or DVT), pulmonary embolism, and bleeding. Findings reported this month in the British Medical Journal reveal that this risk continues several months after COVID recovery.

  • “Mater Artium Necessitas”

    These PDMS-based passive samplers may serve as a useful exposure assessment tool for airborne viral exposure in real-world high-risk settings and allow early detection of potential cases and guidance on infection control.

  • Still More Evidence For An Animal Origin Of The Virus

    This new data comes from an international team of scientists which concluded that the coronavirus jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.