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: vaccines

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • The Intelligence of Artificial Intelligence And Blogging

    Have you tried dabbling with artificial intelligence? I specifically refer to the type referred to as chatbots that use powerful generative artificial intelligence that you can really chat with to generate ideas. It is like the computer, Hal, in the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey. Remember? Remember too that Hal malfunctioned big-time? I’ve been dabbling…

  • 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.”

  • US Life Expectancy Finally Bounces Back Up

    The graph below shows the dramatic drop in life expectancy beginning in 2019 and reversing about 2021. If vaccines were killing rather than saving people, you would think the curve would continue downward.

  • 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.

  • BioX Wins The Nobel!

    The breathtaking speed with which a new biology discovered the SARS-CoV-2 virus then developed a safe and effective vaccine against it ushered in a new post-molecular biology world I dubbed ‘BioX’.

  • Politics: A Risk Factor For Death From COVID?

    The bottom line was that after the vaccines rolled out, Trump voting counties saw 40% higher fatality rates per million residents. Before the vaccines, the COVID death rates were the same for all counties.

  • 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?

  • Is Intentional COVID Vax Disinformation Criminal?

    The Kaiser Family Foundation found that between June 2021 and March 2022, 234,000 deaths could have been prevented with COVID vaccinations. Vaccine disinformation that convinces people to avoid being immunized against the virus that causes COVID, undoubtedly caused many of these deaths.