Day 528: Alphabet Soup and Guillain-Barré

A 90-year-old Belgian woman died in the spring of both the Alpha (British) and Beta (South African) variants. Researchers claim this apparently unique event is merely going undetected most of the time.

Johnson & Johnson's vaccine is about to suffer another blow with the FDA's plans to warn recipients about its association with Guillain–Barré syndrome:

In a statement released Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the cases have largely been reported about two weeks after vaccination and mostly in males, many aged 50 years and older.

No similar link has been found for the mRNA vaccines.

On the things we already knew front, the Wall Street Journal reports that children remain practically immune to COVID-19:

Some 99.995% of the 469,982 children in England who were infected during the year examined by researchers survived, one study found.

In fact, there were fewer deaths among children due to the virus than initially suspected. Among the 61 child deaths linked to a positive Covid-19 test in England, 25 were actually caused by the illness, the study found.

Cases are up about a sixty-sixth of a percentage point in Massachusetts today, pretty much on par for the past month (though it's hard to be precise now that the MDPH is taking the weekends off). I guess we're truly post-COVID now.