Dr. Klotman’s Week 188 COVID update is a Q&A. The highlights are:
- While cat and dog allies can become infected with COVID, their infections are typically mild. I have to editorialize that there have been COVID deaths of big cats in zoos.
- There is no solid data on cats and dogs getting RSV.
- SARS-CoV-2 virus can and does wind up on household surfaces when we get sick, but contact is not a common means of transmission which is mostly due to aerosols.
- COVID infection by the oral route is quite unlikely because saliva & stomach acid kill the virus; the virus typically enters the body by way of the nose and conjunctiva.
- The current, injectable vaccines for respiratory viruses do not prevent infection; they protect us from severe disease. It would take a different kind of vaccine, perhaps an inhaled or aerosolized vaccine to call up an IgA antibody response rather than the IgG response that injected vaccines bring about.
- Vaccine updates do not require large clinical trials in order to obtain approval. Once the pilot vaccine is shown safe and effective, minor tweaks to address new variants are typically tested in animal models (mice) and/or small numbers of volunteers who are tested to assess their immune responses.
- So far, the uptake of the new COVID vaccine is about 2-3% of US adults. Sigh.
Not in Dr. Klotman’s update this week is an announcement from Moderna-BioNTech regarding a combined COVID-Flu vaccine that they are testing. Moderna announced that its most recent tests show a good antibody response to the vaccine. It’s too early to say much about safety at this point – recalling last week’s FDA announcement that there is a small but real increase in stroke risk in people over 85yo who take the COVID and high-dose Influenza vaccines. We will see.