Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★ (An ECTRIMS red Wednesday #e52330) I am getting endless questions about when is it the best time to have the 3rd and/or booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in relation to ocrelizumab infusions, which is why I did an MS-Selfie Case Study on this topic on the weekend. Unfortunately, until we have good evidence that shows people on ocrelizumab who seroconvert do...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★ (a red-eyed Tuesday #FF0000) I was doing a Q&A webinar with some US clinicians last night and they were asking whether or not pwMS should have a booster COVID-19 vaccine or not. The answer is simple, YES. The study below in 60+-year-old Israelis shows that people who had a booster or third dose of the Pfizer-BionTech RNA vaccine were 11.3x less likely to be...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★ If anyone who has any doubts on the debate of getting or not getting COVID-19 and taking your chances without being vaccinated needs to read the paper below in this week’s BMJ on long-COVID. Long-COVID is a serious problem and should not be dismissed as something minor. Long-COVID is not simply post-viral fatigue. So if you are one of those people who is nervous...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★ In response to a comment from one of our readers. We have not directly addressed the thrombosis AstraZeneca vaccine issue as we are not vaccinologists or haematologists. But as there seems to a lot of anxiety around this issue a short blog post about the potential risks may allay your fears. I received the following email, from Professor Marcel Levy (Consultant...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★ How do you distinguish transverse myelitis that is not MS-related from spinal cord involvement in MS? Yesterday after reporting the possible and likely link between the Oxford-AstraZenca vaccine and transverse myelitis (TM) and possibly MS you asked how do neurologists differentiate TM from CIS or MS. Idiopathic or post-infectious/vaccine-related TM...
Will Prof G have to eat his proverbial hat? I have been telling people that an effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is a long way away and that we shouldn’t expect a commercially available vaccine for another 12-18 months. Maybe I am wrong. The Moderna phase 1 results were published by the NEJM yesterday and are more impressive than I expected. These results are so important because the vaccine is...
This is not about coronavirus. Epstein-Barr Virus is an(other) extremely common virus which has infected the vast majority of people (~95%) by their late 20s. Unlike coronavirus, EBV has co-evolved with humans and the observation that it is so ubiquitous suggests that it actually may confer some kind of evolutionary benefit, e.g. by enhancing the host’s ability to respond to novel...