Latest Blog Posts

How well do the COVID vaccines work? (and why has this been so confusing?)
How well do the COVID vaccines work? This question is not as simple to answer as it may seem. The communication during the pandemic has been in many ways very confusing, and vaccine efficacy is no exception. In this series of post, I’m going to tell you the story of the COVID vaccines and dissect where the communication broke down. And along the way, we’ll answer the question: just how well do the vaccines work?

COVID vaccines and fertility: vaccination before pregnancy
Even before COVID vaccines became available to the public, rumors were circulating about hypothetical impacts on fertility. This is the first in a series of articles by my friend Dr. Sana Zekri, MD, a board-certified physician in Family Medicine with Obstetrics, tackling these rumors and discussing the risks and benefits of vaccination for those who are trying to become pregnant as well as those who are pregnant or breastfeeding.

In the US, “milder” omicron is killing more people per day than the worst of delta
While COVID cases are thankfully falling in the US, omicron, despite being “milder,” continues to kill more people per day in the US than the worst day of the delta surge. This post explains why, and dives into the confusion over the word “mild.”

10 logical fallacies used in vaccine arguments
Arguments about vaccines are often rife with logical fallacies. Many logical fallacies, at their root, are oversimplifications. They are appealing because they make something complex, like vaccine safety or the efficacy of vaccines, into something very simplistic that is easy to understand. However, that oversimplification often leaves out important details, which can lead to inaccurate conclusions. Here are 10 logical fallacies commonly used in vaccine arguments, with explanations of why they don’t hold up.

What is luciferase and what does it have to do with vaccines?
One of the latest vaccine rumors centers around luciferase, a (perhaps) unfortunately named protein that is as harmless as a firefly. This post tackles where this rumor came from, tells how luciferase got its name, and explains how you can be sure that the vaccines aren’t using bioluminescence to track people.

Is there really no correlation between vaccination rate and the spread of COVID?
A paper published in a legitimate scientific journal is making the rounds, claiming that there is no association between vaccination rates and increases in COVID cases. Is this true? This post tackles the claims made in the paper, digging into the data and providing a little analysis of my own.
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About

Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist who likes to help people understand science.ย She saw a lot of people getting unnecessarily confused by inaccurate claims flying around, and started this blog to help clarify some of those things.
Data Visualizations
People are looking at the percent of vaccinated hospitalizations and getting alarmed. But by itself, this number can't tell you much about how the vaccines are working, as it's highly dependent on the rate of vaccination in a community. Here's some maths to show what I mean๐๐ฝ pic.twitter.com/MmfiL7H1lw
— Kristen Panthagani, PhD (@kmpanthagani) July 20, 2021
Reviews
Featured In
Though Covid vaccines protect against serious illness, they are not perfect shields against the virus, particularly not the Delta variant. Experts say โbreakthroughโ infections are still relatively uncommon.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 23, 2021
Hereโs why they occur. https://t.co/rEDD2DMj0U
Breakthrough cases arenโt the cause of the US Covid-19 surge https://t.co/j20tM5QBIN
— Vox (@voxdotcom) August 3, 2021
The @nytimes collected breakthrough data from 40 states. At least until recently, severe COVID infections among fully vaccinated people have been relatively rare.
— Danielle Ivory (@danielle_ivory) August 10, 2021
We also learned that a rising share of breakthrough infections is not necessarily scary.https://t.co/q5zFMoFHxo