Day 106: More Mediocre Measles Research

PlagueBlog readers may recall a paper from Day 71 about the MMR (and especially R) providing protection against coronavirus. It seemed weak at the time, but since then even weaker papers have come on the scene. The somewhat innumerate folks from Day 95 have since gotten their collection of anecdotes onto a preprint server, and another group has actually published a rather bare statement of the thesis in an open access, print-on-demand journal.

One interesting feature of the new paper is that, even more than the second one, they ignore rubella completely in favor of measles vaccination coverage. Their focus (if you can call it that) is on the structural similarities between coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses (both measles and mumps). They hit the high points: Italy has the poorest measles vaccination coverage (84%) in Europe, while China is on the ball at 97%, measles vaccination is associated with a drop in all cause mortality for the vaccinated, and cross-reactivity. But there are few hard numbers and no statistical analysis beyond these points.

The BCG school is much further along with the math, so far so that a group of epidemiology grad students have debunked one of the (many) papers making similar connections between tuberculosis vaccine and coronavirus. Sadly, the debunking is also short on math, only mentioning that perhaps new COVID-19 numbers would lead to different results, rather than actually crunching the latest batch in search of said different results. The debunkers also mistake the argument from cross-reactivity for some sort of "common sense" approach that can be dismissed with their own somehow more common common sense. Actually the protection some vaccines provide against unintended targets is a prior result, not an illicit truism.

In plague ship news, CNN reports that there have been eight relapses aboard Germ Boat #23, the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Like the later disowned South Korean relapses, all eight sailors tested negative twice before they were allowed back aboard and caught out in later testing.

In local news, Massachusetts cases are up 2% today. Although Middlesex County is up only 1% and Camberville have never been hotspots of the county despite their density, the City of Somerville has cancelled all fun through next December—most notably HONK! and the annual Fluff Festival. (Fluff is from Somerville.)