Gabrielle Knight

A friendly reminder to #SaveStargate

@CovidDataReport I believe I got infected while wearing a P100 at a stand up show. Thought I was doing enough to protect myself but nope. I hypothesize that the qual. fit testing I did with the P100 wasn’t sufficient for the range of face shapes I was making at the show. Expect failures.

Poll for Saturday's video: Did you ever get Covid in a crowded 1 way masking situation? In example you were masked but no one else was. Some comments may get used in the video.

@waysidescribble This is extremely effective communication. Fantastic job.

– You seem awfully obsessed with that branch #longcovid #postcovid #ableism #accessibility #satire

@siriusnoire @DEC0L0NIZE I am also SoCal 🙂

@DEC0L0NIZE Southern California checking in!! 🙋🏻‍♀️

I need more in-person covid safe friends.

I would love it if Amazon Prime would #SaveStargate

Japan: "COVID-19 still kills over 30,000 a year, even 3 years since the infectious disease was downgraded to the level of seasonal influenza" 🔹36,000 COVID deaths in 2024 🔹38,000 COVID deaths in 2023 COVID-19 was 8th cause of death in Japan, 2023-2024 asahi.com/ajw/articles/1…

This is fantastic! Awesome that they are leading in this aspect of accessibility.

📢🍵A long time coming, we finally have a randomized controlled trial evaluating green tea (via 3x daily gargling) for the prevention of COVID-19: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… For the group gargling with green tea, there was a 22.8% reduction in COVID infections. However, the result did not come close reaching significance - the 95% confidence interval spanned all the way from a 58% reduction to a 55% increase. But stay tuned to see just how impressive that result still is…The trial itself was run horribly, and there are also many major problems not related to the protocol that would all be expected to contribute to an underwhelming result. For starters, why would we think that gargling with green tea would be beneficial for COVID prophylaxis? EGCG, or epigallocatechin gallate, the most abundant catechin found in green tea, has long been understood to be implicated in viral binding to ACE2. From 2021: EGCG from green tea effectively blocks infection of SARS-CoV-2 and new variants by inhibiting spike binding to ACE2 receptor: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC84… For the trial, about the only thing I like is that they used a high-quality product - a pre-measured powder mix of green tea & matcha from a reputable manufacturer, where the catechin concentration is readily available and standardized. If someone wanted to use green tea for this purpose, that’s exactly the type of product I would recommend. For anyone interested, this is the specific product (2 packets worth) used in the trial: japanesetaste.com/products/itoen… But there are a LOT of major problems: • As a control group, they used 3x daily gargling with water, which is a horrible decision to make in a study that is incapable of being blinded anyway. It’s possible that the act of gargling itself, even with water, has prophylactic effect, similar to what we see with saline nasal rinses. There is already evidence of this, like this 2023 RCT evaluating viral load and infectivity that compared a saline placebo to various mouthwashes: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10…. Contrary to expectations, it was discovered that gargling with saline alone was almost as effective as the mouthwash. • They only used 1.6g of green tea dissolved in 13oz of water, which is…a very puzzling concentration. Working with pre-measured packets, they had free rein to easily make the concentration as high as they liked, but their stated intention was to only “match the catechin concentration of commercially available green tea bottles.” Uh, what? For context…a typical, much smaller cup of matcha uses 2g of tea. • There were significantly higher rates of mask wearing (84.26% vs. 79.87%) and vaccine uptake within the past 6 monrhs (21.6% vs. 17.4%) in the water gargling group compared to the green tea group. • The study ended up very undersized to attempt to make a conclusion. By their own estimation, they needed about 550 participants in each group, but only ended up with 403 and 386 after removing 214 due to lack of adherence (gargling rate below 80%). • Since blinding is not possible for a trial like this, it’s expected for the green tea group to become more comfortable taking risks, which would increase their COVID incidence. This is what we commonly see with mRNA vaccines, and why they often end up with a “negative effectiveness” after several months, because vaccinated individuals take more risks after overestimating their level of protection. • The trial, being based in Japan, already included high rates of green tea consumption in both groups. 64–67% of participants from both groups had habitual tea drinking behavior, so the water gargling group were also receiving any benefits inherent to EGCG consumption. Despite ALL of those problems…the green tea group still saw a 22.8% reduction in COVID-19 incidence, which doesn’t sound too shabby to me. We obviously need more (and better) trials in this space, but it’s also a zero-risk (and pretty tasty) intervention that you can institute now if you would like.

@singingsox I usually look up the “professional” info about the test for prep instructions because I can’t trust the doctor/phlebotomist to give me correct or any instructions. Don’t have links off the top of my head sorry, but Google led me to iirc a University of CA med site that helped

Do you think this is unchecked box meaning I do not need to fast, or a note that I do need to fast, but they used a box instead of a regular bullet point?? 🙃 It’s for Sjögrens and Lupus blood tests

@kinnkon Love seeing them again! Gorgeous art as always 😍

It’s been so long since I’ve drawn these boys. I miss them so much. Happy Pride Month! <3

📉 Wastewater numbers are currently incredibly low, about *7 times* lower than the spring lulls in years past. We're approaching flu-in-the-summer style prevalence.

@AvadxFeirm @BullTheoryio US’s CIA says leak most likely.

@AvadxFeirm @BullTheoryio People speculate that covid was engineered because there continues to be uncertainty about whether it was. The French National Academy of Medicine thinks there’s uncertainty. The German intelligence agency BND says 80-90% chance lab leak. UK thinks leak possible. 1/

BREAKING: Google is planning to release 32 million mosquitoes across Florida and California. The company has asked the EPA for permission to proceed, with the public given until June 5 to respond. The mosquitoes are infected with Wolbachia bacteria, which stops them from reproducing and slowly collapses the wild population from within. Google's previous Debug Project trial in California's Central Valley nearly eliminated mosquitoes from three test sites entirely. A separate trial in Singapore cut dengue cases by 70% within 12 months. Google has now released over 1 billion mosquitoes across four continents. This new proposal is the largest deployment in US history.

🚨💊HUGE news: @US_FDA has finally granted approval to @ShionogiUS’s Xocova (Ensitrelvir), a 2nd-generation antiviral targeting SARS-CoV-2. The approval is for the indication of “post-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 following contact with an individual who has COVID-19”. However, just like with any drug, it can obviously also be used off-label (e.g. treatment of both acute COVID or Long COVID). In Japan, Xocova received Emergency Use Authorization for the treatment of acute COVID all the way back in November 2022, received full approval in March 2024, and an expansion to include post-exposure prophylaxis in March 2026. The post-exposure prophylaxis indications are based on the SCORPIO-PEP trial (nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…), where Xocova reduced the incidence of COVID-19 after household exposure by 67%, from 9.0% down to 2.9%. Mechanically, Xocova is the same class of drug as Paxlovid - a 3C-like protease inhibitor that inhibits viral replication. From our best understanding, Xocova is probably slightly more potent than Paxlovid, but the more definitive advantage is that it comes with less side effects and less drug interactions (which are caused by the Ritonavir component of Paxlovid, added to boost the concentration of the actual antiviral, Nirmatrelvir). Xocova should be useful for lowering viral load during an acute infection, especially if taken within a couple or days of symptom onset, which may help shorten the duration of acute symptoms. Will it do anything to prevent long-term damage or the development of Long COVID? Almost certainly not, just like Paxlovid, but I’d be more inclined to tell people that it’s worth trying if we’re no longer dealing with the side effect profile of Paxlovid. Where it makes the most sense to use Xocova, just like with Paxlovid, is as a component of polytherapy for Long COVID driven by viral persistence. The big issue there, however, is that you need a longer course of these antivirals than most physicians are willing to prescribe and/or most insurance companies are willing to cover. And they’re generally not very effective as a monotherapy, you need to pair these oral antivirals with other therapies for better coverage and tissue penetration (eg. monoclonal antibodies and Nuvaxovid, and potentially even a 2nd antiviral like Remdesivir). All in all, this is a very important and long overdue approval. It’s not a game-changing silver bullet, and notably, nobody should really be expecting to use or rely on Xocova in a way that they wouldn’t be open to using or relying on Paxlovid in the present. But there are plenty of applications for it, and Xocova should absolutely be seen as another Swiss cheese layer / tool in the toolbox for COVID conscious community members and any allied medical providers.

@vladimirlesbian @YvTsl I’m not sure how to reconcile the fact that it covers new strains responsible for 20% of cancer with the fact that a paper showed that epidemiologically they didn’t see further cancer reductions from the new one

@sparklegemstone @YvTsl The new expanded version covers 5 strains that are responsible for 20% of cervical cancers. That is not ambiguous at all nor does it need reconciliation. It’s actually incredibly important and highly effective!

If you got Gardisil when it first came out, it’s been updated! Request a booster!

@vladimirlesbian @YvTsl But I just said why so I’m confused by your confusion. I haven’t seen experimental results that the new one prevents more cancer cases than the old one. Not saying it doesn’t, that’s just what I’ve seen.

@sparklegemstone @YvTsl Preventing a viral infection is good. Not sure why you find it to be ambiguous or needing reconciliation. We have a sterilizing vaccine for a virus. It’s not ambiguous or harmful. Its beneficial to every individual to reduce their risk of viral infections & their complications

@vladimirlesbian @YvTsl So I'm not sure how to reconcile those. Theoretically the new one should be better, but I'm not sure it's been experimentally shown to give additional benefit. Maybe the new strains it covers are very uncommon?

@vladimirlesbian @YvTsl Whether to get the new one seems ambiguous from what I've seen. My understanding is 1) the new one protects against additional cancer causing strains that the prev. one did not, but also 2) iirc studies show that the new one does not reduce risk of cancer more than the prev. one