COVID
COVID vaccines are on the horizon! And sadly, vaccine misinformation is on the rise as well. One claim that has been circulating for a while now is the idea that mRNA vaccines will somehow mess with people’s DNA and turn them into genetically modified organisms. Is this true? Lol
COVID
Yesterday someone sent me an article about an alleged side effect of the COVID vaccine: female sterilization. The argument goes like this: there is a protein expressed in the placenta (syncytin-1) that is similar to the coronavirus spike protein encoded by the vaccines. Because these proteins are allegedly so similar,
COVID
How do we know that vaccines are safe? Has any action been taken from side effects reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)? Have vaccine recommendations ever changed in response to reports of adverse events to this system? To answer that question, I’m going to tell you
COVID
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been confusion over the numbers: are cases being undercounted or overcounted? Are deaths being correctly attributed to COVID, or is the COVID death count grossly overestimating the true death toll? People hear stories of men dying from heart attacks being listed as
COVID
Hello! It’s been a little while since I’ve written a COVID-related post, as I have officially graduated with my PhD and am now back in medical school! (And thus am……. rather busy.) I am a third-year medical student now (if that’s confusing to you, check out this
COVID
As the current pandemic continues to unfold, people have compared COVID to other diseases to help them evaluate the risks of the disease and to understand why the world’s top experts reacted the way they did to COVID-19. One theme that frequently arises among proponents of a more lax
COVID
After writing about Dr. Stella Immanuel’s viral video, the most common request I got was to assess this Newsweek Opinion piece circulating by Dr. Harvey Risch, a Professor of Epidemiology at Yale, claiming that we already have the key to defeating COVID (hydroxychloroquine), and we need to start using
COVID
This morning I got a request to address one of the latest viral videos going around from a doctor claiming that we already have a cure for COVID-19: hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc. While the video has been taken down on many platforms (and for the record, I have very mixed
COVID
Ooooooooook. Deep breaths. Let’s begin. I started this blog because I saw a lot of misinformation flying around, and well-meaning people are getting legitimately confused. And a lot of that misinformation is half truths or just quotes taken out of context (check out this post for examples of that)
COVID
I saw this post on the interwebs citing a bunch of studies, suggesting that masks are ineffective at preventing infection and/or are unsafe. (And also suggesting there is some sort of cover-up of this science). Since there is still controversy around mask-wearing (and the post gave me PubMed ID’
COVID
I started this blog because I saw a lot of people getting confused about science topics surrounding the COVID pandemic, and I wanted to help clarify things where I could. So the majority of my focus has been science. But one of the biggest side effects of this pandemic has
COVID
Guest post from virologist Dr. Alex Chang-Graham! For those of you whose last biology class was decades ago, the differences between bacteria, viruses, and other microbes is probably a bit hazy. I asked my friend Dr. Alex Chang-Graham, who studied viruses for her PhD thesis, to give a refresher on