Why Women Experience COVID and the Vaccines Differently Than Men

[EmbarrassingAdmissions]

Podcast with a full transcript. Although it's US-centric, it covers a lot of relevant material from immune responses to job losses with an excursion into the history of the exclusion of women from clinical trials.

www.medpagetoday.com/podcasts/trackthevax/91659?

I thought that the approach of only testing stuff on standard humans (men) was so criticised it had changed?

Well I hoped. Not surprised.

SAGER - Sex and Gender Equity in Research guidelines are a good read:

researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-016-0007-6

Heidari S, Babor T, De Castro P, Tort S, Curno M. Sex and Gender Equity in Research: rationale for the SAGER guidelines and recommended use. Research Integrity and Peer Review. 2016;1:2.

SAGER guidelines are useful to persuade authors:
*to acknowledge the number of male/female trial participants;
*to provide sex disaggregated data analysis of the results.

At an early enough stage, they can improve the design of trial protocols. However, as in the thread below, they've existed for some time and there is still disappointingly little implementation.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a4104564-Sex-and-gender-analyses-in-the-design-of-research-studies?msgid=102566915#102566915

This feels all the worse that women and lifestages were excluded in a pandemic emergency.