SmartMEDInfo Blog
SmartMEDInfo Blog by Moira Dolan, MD
Covid Vaccines Part 5: Hospital Burden and Death Counts
This is 5th in the series of sharing information that will assist your assessment of personal risk of covid. Given that it is impossible to count covid cases by using unvalidated tests, what about assessing the hospital burden of serious covid dis...
Covid Vaccines Part 4: Covid Case Count
Any medical intervention requires an analysis of risk versus benefit. If you’ve been paying attention, you have perceived some potential downsides with the covid vaccine, the primary one being it is still experimental in that it has not been ade...
Covid Vaccines Part 3: The History of Rushing Vaccines to Market
In the hurry to squelch covid there is tremendous enthusiasm for widespread inoculation. This bears a review of the not-too-distant history of the hazards of rushing vaccines to market. These range from distributing completely ineffective vaccines to...
Covid Vaccines Part 2: What Are The Covid Vaccines?
There are currently no covid vaccines approved for use in the US. Instead, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized emergency use of two unapproved vaccines by invoking Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority. ...
Covid Vaccines Part 1: What Are We Talking About?
Covid Vaccine Considerations In evaluating a vaccine, the key questions are: Does it work? Is it safe? Are potential benefits worth the known and unknown risks? This blog addresses these questions in a 5-part series. Covid Vaccines, p...
False positive CoVID tests
The annual announcement of the Nobel Prize in medicine this week was dwarfed by the ongoing news of the worldwide CoVID pandemic. Despite the apparent CoVID media saturation, there is CoVID news that is not getting enough attention, and in some ca...
What Is In Your Disinfectant?
The pandemic response has included widespread, frequent use of disinfectants. Although the SARS-CoV2 virus is easily killed by soap, electrolyzed water, citric acid or thymol, there has been a trend to use strong chemicals for routine cleaning. An...
Update: Boosting viral resistance naturally
As the pandemic wears on, concerns have shifted from ‘hiding out’ to ‘how to thrive’ in a world of viral transmission. Indeed, the natural history of viruses new to the human population is to hit hard at first, then taper rapidly. From the...
To Mask Or Not To Mask?
In a study of 100 confirmed CoVID cases in Taiwan, 2,761 close contacts were traced, in which 22 secondary cases were found. That makes for an overall secondary case rate of 0.7%. (Journal of the American Medical Association, May 2020) When a clos...
Healthy Skepticism
What if you accepted every ‘diagnosis’ made by an auto mechanic? What if you never read a food label, or totally ignored ratings and reviews on amazon? Surely you’d be paying for some repairs you don’t need, eating stuff you should avoid, ...