Africa's dependence on foreign medicines is a big problem. This issue started during colonial times and got worse later on. Many African countries used to make their own medicines, but things changed. The government-run drug factories were closed. Also, rules about patents made it hard for Africa to learn how to make medicines. The COVID-19 pandemic showed just how ...
Health workers are under a lot of stress. This stress can affect their decisions and how they care for patients. One big factor is their beliefs about health and their choices about COVID-19 vaccines. Burnout is a big problem. It can make health workers less effective and even impact public health. So, it's important to understand what makes them more likely to burn...
In a surprising turn of events, the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed an order that would cut federal funding for schools requiring Covid-19 vaccinations for students. This move was seen as a response to the ongoing debate surrounding vaccination mandates in educational institutions. The order, which was first reported by Breitbart News, aim...
COVID-19 vaccines are being used in many countries. People are very careful when it comes to safety. Literally billions of text reports about VAE's are being collected from social media and VAERS. One way to understand what is being said is to use large language models (LLMs) that can understand context but may not perform well in Named Entity Recognition (NER). W...
Near the end of 2020 a wild idea sprung up to gather lots of volunteers to figure out certain long term problems that the new Covid vaccine could be causing. Soon the BiCoVac was ready to go. This was a big venture that took place across the whole of Denmark. This wasn't about how well the shots stopped covid. No, it was all about answering that annoyin...
You might have received a COVID-19 vaccine shot in your arm, but what about your nose? Scientists are exploring a new way to boost your immune system by giving a second vaccine dose through your nose. This two-step process starts with an initial shot in your muscle, like the vaccines you're already familiar with. The second dose, however, is given through your nose. ...
The world is still grappling with COVID, though vaccines and natural infections have provided some protection. The virus isn't as deadly as it once was, but it's always changing. Scientists need to keep a close eye on it. Five years ago, people in Wuhan, China, got sick with a new virus. We don't know exactly where it came from. Some scientists think it jumped from ...
When the COVID-19 vaccines were first announced, they sparked a lot of debate. Most studies focused on misinformation on social media, but not much was said about how mainstream and alternative news sources talked about the vaccines. To fill this gap, researchers used cognitive network science and natural language processing to look at 5745 Italian news articles shar...
Imagine you're cooking up mRNA in a lab, using a common technique called in vitro transcription (IVT). This method is a big deal for making mRNA therapies and understanding RNA biology. Here's an interesting fact: the mRNA you produce can start with either a 5'-pppG or a 5'-pppA. No big deal, right? Wrong! It turns out that mRNAs starting with 5'-pppA can be quite th...
You might be wondering what kind of side effects people experienced after getting the COVID-19 vaccine in Bangladesh. An online survey was conducted between July 11th and 16th, 2021, to find out. Out of 175 people who got the vaccine, about half got one dose and the other half got two doses. Most people got the SinoPharm vaccine, followed by AstraZeneca, and a few go...