Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Here is a case report on someone in Germany who was vaccinated against covid 217 times. At some point after the public prosecutor decided not to file fraud charges, a team of researchers asked to study him, and he agreed.

Tests of blood and saliva samples found that his adaptive immune responses were larger than in a control group of people who had three doses of the covid vaccine. He reported no side effects from the vaccines, and there's no evidence of breakthrough covid infections. The paper says that they don't know whether the many extra vaccine doses are why he didn't get sick, and "Importantly, we do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity."

If the man in question told anyone why he wanted to be vaccinated so many times, it's not in this paper.

Vaccination against shingles turns out to also protect people against dementia.

The authors explain how they concluded that the vaccine is protective, rather than being correlated with something else that affects the likelihood of a dementia diagnosis.

The study took advantage of the way the shingles vaccine was introduced in Wales: the vaccine was initially offered to everyone who was 79 years old (born between September 2, 1933 and September 1, 1934). It was then offered each year to people who had reached their 79th birthdays. (The vaccine was never offered to anyone born on or before September 1, 1933.) This let the researchers compare people of very close to the same age. They checked, and found no other health intervention with the same cut-off date.

The vaccine did protect against shingles (as expected). It didn't protect against any common medical problems

Wen they broke the data down by gender, the vaccine was definitely protective for women, and enough smaller for men that it may not be statistically significant.

The authors' suggestions for future research include whether protective effect wears off over time, in which case booster vaccines might be useful; whether the vaccine can be useful in treating as well as preventing cognitive impairment; and the broader question of causes of dementia.

Also, these results are for the older shingles vaccine (Zostavax), not the current vaccine, Shingrix.

I just made an appointment for a bivalent covid booster, Friday afternoon in Central Square.

If you get a covid vaccine booster in the US now, it will be bivalent: the older ones have lost their emergency use authorization and should no longer be available. This fact has not been well-publicized, and in fact I had trouble finding anything official about this after seeing it mentioned on a Discord server. Places it wasn't mentioned included the CVS and Walgreen's vaccine appointment websites, and the official Massachusetts vaccine finder website.

I'll be getting another Pfizer booster; while I have a vague preference for Moderna, I have a stronger preference for getting the vaccine in two days rather than two or three weeks. I'll be getting a flu vaccine at the same time; it may not do any good, but I'll be there anyway. (When I saw my neurologist last week, he said I should get a covid booster, despite the effects of the MS medication, but that he doubts the flu vaccine will do anything for MS patients who are taking Ocrevus.)

Since my last booster, CVS has added two new questions to the vaccine appointment process: have I had monoclonal antibodies against covid in the last 90 days (no, it's been more than 90 days since March) and have I had a monkeypox vaccine in the last four weeks.

Before I forget: yes, the Ocrevus interferes with other vaccines. What this means in practice is that if I ever have the sort of injury where they ask when you last had a tetanus vaccine, my answer will be "I'd better have one now."

Also, after talking to my neurologist this afternoon, I decided I do want the Evushield preventive monoclonal antibodies, so he has placed that order and the hospital will call me when I can come in. (That will be in the area the hospital calls the walk-in clinic, even though I need an appointment for this.) They're supposed to be good for six months. He thinks that whether a second dose will be approved depends on whether the FDA thinks this is a reasonable thing for the government to be spending money on, and that depends on vaccination rates and whether there's another variant like delta or omicron driving up case rates.

The Evushield is two intramuscular injections, one in each buttock; having been on Avonex for several years, my reaction was "that's easy" because I won't have to self-inject.

I just heard from my doctor, via MyChart. She said she reached out to Tufts asking what the next step should be, and they told her that they might contact me directly, so I may be hearing from Tufts infectious disease, immunology, or rheumatology. (I think the rheumatology connection is that MS is an auto-immune thing as well as a neurological thing, and the MS drug that seems to be the problem here is an immune-suppressant.)

This is good to know, even though I generally answer unknown-number calls from the local area codes, because so many of them turn out to be from medical offices I want to talk to.

I went to my doctor's office yesterday and had blood drawn for the semi-quantitative covid antibody test. The results came back this morning: no antibodies detected.

That's after three full doses of the Modern vaccine, the most recent one carefully timed relative to my MS medication and the time of day (and a Pfizer booster in November, poorly timed relative to the MS drug).

I will need to continue to be more careful than most people, even though it seems like that those vaccines left me with useful T cells.

(Also, our household's free rapid Covid tests arrived yesterday.)

Yesterday afternoon, I went to my doctor's office for a hepatitis B vaccine booster, and the annual flu shot. Hep B doesn't normally need a booster, but one of my medications required hepatitis tests, and Carmen noted that while I don't have hepatitis, I wasn't immune, despite having told her I'd been vaccinated. I made that appointment last week, then the doctor's office sent out a general message about flu vaccine clinics, so I decided to ask if I could get that vaccine at the same time, and they said yes.

I went over to adrian_turtle's after that, and stayed over; she made a half-recipe apple crisp, which was a pleasant surprise to go with the pasta and salad I was expecting for dinner.

On my way home today, I went to the library to pick up a book they had on hold, and browsed a little while I was there. Then to Cambridge to buy socks at Cambridge Clogs--three pairs of smartwool socks, two navy blue and one red, plus a non-wool pair of socks, which seemed like a good idea because rysmiel is allergic to wool.

I noticed that Bagelsaurus was open and didn't have a line, so I bought a bialy and a "deli rye" bagel. When I ordered the bialy, the cashier told me that they had onion-and-poppy seed bialys, was that all right? I said yes, though I'm used to bialys with onions and no other toppings. cattitude and I enjoyed the bialy: it's not Kossar's*, but it's a good bialy, unlike the things the otherwise-excellent bagel shop in Bellevue was calling bialys.

*Kossar's, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is so much the canonical bialy that most New York bagel shops get their bialys from Kossar's, and when I was living in New York, they had the one kind of bialy. I just looked at their website, and they have added a half-dozen other flavors to go with the onion/original bialy. Nothing I'd consider weird, it's plausible savory things like garlic, sesame, and olive, though some people might think sun-dried tomato and basil is a weird thing to put on a bialy.

I just got the first dose of the Moderna vaccine.

My doctor's office called an hour and a half ago; they said they were squeezing out a few extra vaccine doses, and asked if I could come in right away. I said "give me time to grab clothes and call a car," did that, waking cattitude in the process, and headed over to Somerville.

I have been vaccinated, and then Carmen (my nurse practitioner) came into the office to tell me what comes next, and answer any questions--in my case, is it okay to take naproxen for my hip pain today?--and she offered me a hug, unexpected but welcome. That makes her the third person I've hugged this year.

I will be going back in four weeks for the second dose, and should check with them on what time to go in, since it looked as though they were timing things to have room in the waiting room for people to sit for 15 minutes after receiving the vaccine. Also to do, notify neurologist and ask about postponing the upcoming Ocrevus infusion.

I have pre-ordered tomato and cucumber plants for next spring, from GrowJoy, the company I got my cucumbers from this year. I will be getting Paul Robeson and Yellow Brandywine tomatoes, plus one cherry tomato plant and some cucumber plants that they recommend for container gardening. I jumped on this as soon as they opened for pre-orders, not just because I had trouble finding plants last spring, but because Paul Robeson and Yellow Brandywine are heirloom varieties that I learned about in Washington, which I haven't seen in Boston-area farmers markets.

I have been vaccinated against the flu. I made an appointment after breakfast, for 1:30 this afternoon, and everything went smoothly. They had appointments available throughout the day; I got to CVS a little early, checked in, and at 1:30 a man called my name, told me that the injection site might be a little sore for a day or two, and vaccinated me. I'd filled out the relevant forms online, when I made the appointment, so he didn't have to ask much besides confirming that he had the right person.

We now have a topographic map of the immediate area on our study wall. I ordered it from the US Geological Survey a few weeks ago, it arrived last week, and this afternoon cattitude got out the blue-tack and a level and put it up.

After some annoying back-and-forth, I have confirmed with the Registry of Motor Vehicles that if I renew my "REALID" state ID card between now and the end of the state of emergency, it will cost $25 instead of $50. I don't know if they'll make me go to an RMV office at some point in the future when that's safe again. (The flyer they sent me was unclear, and the website didn't help, so I sent an email rather than spending $25 now and possibly being charged another $50 later. And then I sent another email, quoting chunks of their flyer to be very clear about what I wanted to know, because the first reply hadn't answered my question.) I will fill out the forms, and give them the $25, tomorrow.

After looking at the latest color-coded state COVID map, with the red blotch at the north end of Middlesex County, I made another donation to Bread and Roses Lawrence. I first donated to them a couple of years ago, after the gas explosion up there, and yes, that's partly because of the name.

I did a bit more text-banking today, mostly following up on conversations started by other people hours or days earlier. It's more congenial work: still at least 85% variations on "STOP" and "take me off your list," but also the chance to answer a few more interesting questions, like the dates for Ohio early voting and (on Slack) what "I'm PEV all the way" meant: that's the Arizona Permanent Early Voting List, which I knew about from phone-banking in August urging people to get on that list. Now they're sending out texts asking people whether they are planning to vote by mail, in person early, or in person on Election Day.

I've been wondering whether I was properly vaccinated against measles, so after picking up my new glasses today, I went the the bank that has our safe deposit box and looked for the records I remembered putting in there. I found a list of vaccines, with a note advising my parents to save it because it's important, in an envelope labeled "Vicki's birth certificates*. I copied everything into my notebook, and have now added it to my list of relatively recent vaccines.

I had one dose of measles vaccine in 1965 (before there was a vaccine for mumps or rubella), and I remember a dose of either measles vaccine or the MMR when I was in college. (There was at least one case of measles in one of the dorms, and we were told to either provide proof of immunization or go to the dining hall and get vaccinated; getting the shot seemed quicker and easier than asking my parents to find the paperwork and mail me a copy.) Someone posted a few days ago that they'd had their blood tested and were immune to measles but not mumps or rubella; if you're as old as I am you probably got the measles vaccine early and then nobody went back to give you the others. So, I'm not going to go to the pharmacy and ask for a(nother) dose of the MMR, but am going to ask my doctor what if anything she thinks I should do, when I see her next.

I am also very thoroughly vaccinated against polio: four doses of [I assume injected] polio vaccine in 1964 and '66, followed by doses of "oral polio" vaccine in 1967 and 1968. The paperwork also confirms that I was vaccinated against smallpox (I don't have a scar from that) but doesn't list the BCG anti-tuberculosis vaccine I remember my parents telling me about at some point.

When I asked Mom about my vaccines recently, she didn't remember specifics, just that they got me all the recommended childhood vaccines, and that I had chicken pox when I was five.

*yes, plural. There's one from the hospital and one from the City of New York.