Comment and Link Roundup: July 12, 2021

[brin_bellway]

Comments on my own posts:

[fairly mild cw: corporate bullshit] The awkward transitional period of history we are currently living through

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) Dragonfruit reviews.

[Reddit; Wayback] (OP by /u/purakau) How to access the ArchiveTeam scrape of Tumblr.

[arguably cw: discourse, depression] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by transgenderer; partly in response to sigmaleph and maryellencarter) Do subtitles interfere with grasping the visual elements of a show? It's complicated. [two comments]

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Links:

[cw: heights] [CTV News] Whee!



There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.


Comments on my own posts:

[cw: food] Friday Five: June 25, 2021 [two comments]

[cw: (mild) food, (arguably) discourse] Horseshoe theory

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Blogspot; Wayback] (OP by Michael Mock) Have you heard the good news of our Lord and Savior, pollen masks? [three comments]

[cw: unsanitary] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari) Pain responses.

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Links:

Today in diseaseblogging, we have several pieces of good news regarding vaccines:

[Stat; Wayback] (by Helen Branswell) I figured something like this would happen, but this is the first news article I've seen suspecting that the Year Without Colds drove some flu strains extinct. The current, extremely tentative estimates are likely too good to be true (there have been no recorded sightings of *any* Yamagata-lineage virus since March of 2020: if this reflects reality, quadrivalent flu vaccines can safely go back to trivalent because *every member* of the-group-the-fourth-strain-is-selected-from is extinct), but it's a fairly safe bet that we've reduced influenza's diversity to *some* extent.

[United States National Institutes of Health; Wayback] Then again, why worry about quadrivalent vs trivalent when you can have *pan*-valent? (Maybe. We hope. It's early days.)

[Verywell Health; Wayback] (by Claire Wolters) It'll be very interesting to see what else the mRNA platforms come in handy for.

[University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy; Wayback] (by Stephanie Soucheray) A new (well, 2019) smallpox vaccine that does *not* require you to go through an outright vaccinia infection. It is, unfortunately, still restricted to emergency government stockpiles and people deemed to be currently at elevated risk of orthopox exposure: you are not allowed to decide for yourself whether the risks are worth the benefits.

[Valneva; Wayback] Chikungunya vaccine development is coming along very well.


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