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Yuri Deigin Profile picture
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29 May, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Another rabbit hole on the topic of SARS2 as a potential pan-coronavirus vaccine candidate. This time it was prompted by @gdemaneuf pointing out several papers that say SARS2 spike might bind not just to ACE2 but also to the MERS receptor, DPP4.

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There have been several papers just after the outbreak of SARS2 that hypothesized that it could also invade immune system cells via DPP4 receptor, mostly based on in silico modeling. Then a couple papers reported that in actual experiments it doesn’t and this topic died down

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But even if it doesn’t bind to the MERS receptor, the presence of those residues in its spike is intriguing, as they could come from someone trying to make it bind and/or trying to generate neutralizing antibodies against those key residues with a goal of neutralizing MERS.

3/4
Curious to hear informed opinions on this from experts.

Here is one of the papers on the topic:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

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More from @ydeigin

Yuri Deigin Profile picture
28 May
Sure let’s do this math exercise.

Say, you have 10000 “trees”. The COVID fire is approaching and will get 50% of them if you do nothing. 

If you vaccinate them, that 50% is reduced by 95% to 2.5%, so only 250 trees will catch fire instead of 5000.

1/6
The trees that do catch fire will have, say, a 2% mortality if you don’t use IVM or if IVM can reduce mortality by 83%, a 0.34% mortality. 

Of course, nothing is preventing you to use IVM on the vaccinated trees if you believe in its power to reduce mortality.

2/6
But for the sake of the argument, let’s say we don’t. What is the difference in deaths under the exclusive scenarios of vaccinated vs. IVMed?

So 250 trees caught fire, and 2% or 5 trees will die. 245 will survive but might be scarred by Covid. 

3/6
Read 6 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
27 May
Hey @WSJ, ever heard of Huang Yanling? Please don’t say that’s a crazy conspiracy theory, cause so was the lab leak until about 10 minutes ago.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/globa…
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Read 4 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
25 May
Just so that we’re clear — I am not saying we should dismiss any COVID vaccine concerns. Absolutely not! We should debate any potential issues and closely monitor any actual ones. So far there do seem some rare minor issues and ultra-rare major ones (deaths, clots).

1/5
Not all vaccines are equal. Some are better than others. I am a huge fan of mRNA ones, I fully admit. I’ve been a fan of mRNA technology for many years (back when it was just invented/considered for use in Yamanaka factors delivery which are my main passion).

2/5
Vaccines seem like a perfect fit for the mRNA technology, especially in a pandemic where you need very quickly adapt to novel strains. I actually hope we can squeak by without new boosters, but for that we need a coordinated world-wide effort to eradicate SARS2 ASAP.

3/5
Read 5 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
24 May
Waaaait a minute 😁

So some COVID vaccine alarmist have been quoting the study by @manorlaboratory out of Salk that SARS2 spike alone can cause cell damage. But that’s not what the study has shown!

1/4
Those were not lone spike proteins, those were HIV-like virions encoding SARS2 spike. I.e. entered the cells expressing ACE2 and once inside expressed their proteins and maybe even integrated into cell genome (not sure if they used integrase-deficient retroviruses or not).

2/4
Maybe the confusion is due to the lax wording by the popular science article describing the study:

3/4
Read 4 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
23 May
AAA SNAKES ON A PLANE, I mean
SPIKES IN MY BRAIN AAA!!!

The latest Covid vaccine fear is that spike proteins produced by the vaccine will get out of the cells, get into the bloodstream, and travel to the brain causing prion-like pathology.

1/4
While there are some data that free-floating spike proteins (or just their fragments) seem to be detected in the blood the first couple of days after vaccination, the amounts detected are minuscule, around 70 pg/mL. A picogram is 1e-12 gram.

2/4
Moreover, free-floating spikes cannot get inside cells on their own, and even if they could, any potential prion-like effects of spikes are pure conjecture at this point: nothing of sort has yet been observed — neither in vitro or in vivo.

3/4
Read 4 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
18 May
1/7
Ok let’s try to estimate our annual risk of contracting COVID. We have these nice CDC data from when there were just 15M cases in the US (after about 6 months of the pandemic). Now it’s 33M, icymi.
2/7
Let’s look at the 40-64 age group. We have 5M cases out of ~100M ppl, i.e. a 5% incidence in 6 mo/15M cases, which I think we can extrapolate to 10M cases out of 30M/12mo. => annual risk of 10% for people aged 40-64.

Quick sanity check: 33M cases out of 330M is also 10%.
3/7
Now, what is the risk of death for people aged 40-64 who got COVID? Well, we got about 0.1M dead out of about 10M infected, which means a nice round CFR of 1%.
Read 7 tweets

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