Edward Nirenberg 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Feb 25, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Also you can tell me what else you’d like me to write about on my blog here:

ngl.link/deplatformdise…

Or you can ask me whatever you want too. That seems like a fun way to deal with insomnia
Yes. They’re being actively worked on all the time. One thing that would really help though is an orally bioavailable form of remdesivir. Also molnupiravir should go away.
Pondering the meaning of life for a few hours, then I’ll probably eat something when I accept that there are no good answers to the question bc blood sugar
Thank you, Internet stranger. You are probably great too
The souls of lesser men. Also eggs. It’s not breakfast without eggs.
I mean at this point it’s probably very hard to improve upon VE for severe outcomes considered in a vacuum for any vaccine because they’re so good at it but this hypothetical vaccine likely wouldn’t be approved. I wouldn’t take it- that’s a ~10-30 fold increase in GBS risk.

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More from @ENirenberg

May 27
I've been yelling for a while about how imprinting is not the problem with our immune responses to Omicron- its intrinsic immunogenicity. This freshly published study provides pretty definitive proof of that 🧵
nature.com/articles/s4159…
The setup here is a bit complex. Using a cohort of individuals from July to December 2021, this group was able to find an unvaccinated and uninfected group of individuals, which allows us to explicitly examine the effects of imprinting because we have people without exposure.
This has previously been done with mice, but not humans. The team looked at antibody responses to the ∆ variant between vaccinated, ∆ infected, and hybrid immune (∆ infection) groups. The gist is: vaccinees draw their response against ∆ mainly from the ancestral variant. Figure 1a- plaque reduction neutralization titers for the ancestral and delta variants. When looking at the ancestral variant, titers are similar between the vaccinated and delta infected, but hybrid immune titers are much higher. For Delta, titers from the vaccinated are lower than those from Delta infected, which are lower than those from hybrid immune individuals.  Figure 1b examines antibody binding to the RBDs of the ancestral and delta variants. The key part is the ratio of titers between the ancestral variant and delta variant. In the vaccinated, the ratio is significantly higher (in...
Read 18 tweets
May 15
I haven't had the time to go through all of it, but I did catch part of the HELP committee meeting where Kennedy alleges that varicella vaccination leads to shingles outbreaks in older adults. This is not true, but it's worth discussing where this idea comes from 🧵
Chickenpox is caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), which is a herpesvirus. This means that it can undergo a process called latency, wherein it remains dormant inside cells and then reactivate. When it reactivates, it can cause herpes zoster- shingles.
This condition has a distinctive rash pattern and causes severe pain, and can even result in a chronic pain syndrome due to scarring of the nerves (postherpetic neuralgia). Depending on where the virus reactivates it can also threaten vision (herpes zoster ophthalmicus)...
Read 19 tweets
May 9
Let's go through all the ways this comment is inherently deceitful.

If you go through the entire recommended childhood vaccination schedule, children receive about 4.4 milligrams of aluminum salts in the first 6 months of life.

What does that mean?🧵
First, we need to consider the form of aluminum. Vaccines use salts of aluminum as adjuvants- things that potentiate the immune response. Without adjuvants, many vaccines will simply fail to give any meaningful immune response and therefore protection...
and adjuvants allow for dose-sparing of the antigen (the component of the vaccine that the immune system is responding to). Aluminum salts have been used in human vaccines as adjuvants since 1926- literally almost 100 years of data on them.
Read 18 tweets
Oct 9, 2024
I didn't think I needed to say anything about this paper but I am frankly baffled by how skewed the explanations of its findings have been:


tl;dr- nothing in this study suggests Novavax is better than mRNA

A brief thread 🧵journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-…
The idea is simple enough: 155 adults aged 50-70 who received 2 priming doses of Oxford/AZ's COVID-19 vaccine (adenovirus vector) and a licensed booster 3 months before enrollment were randomized to receive a dose of Pfizer, Moderna, or Novavax's vaccines. Image
Image
People seem to be taking away from this study that Novavax's vaccine somehow gave an immune response that was better than either mRNA vaccine, which is... an odd take. The paper emphasizes that the antibody titer with Novavax was more sustained. This is true, however...
Read 15 tweets
Oct 8, 2024
New paper in Cell describes an antibody from Vir that seems to have potent activity against a number of coronaviruses, some of which do not even use ACE2:


A thread summarizing the findings
1/10 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…Graphical abstract from the paper summarizing the antibody Vir-7229. The antibody shows high potency in protecting hamsters from challenge with SARS-CoV-2, exquisite resistance to mutation, and is much more difficult to escape via serial passage of pseudoviruses than comparable antibodies.
First though I want to spend a minute talking about where this antibody came from, because this aspect of things tends to be underappreciated. Before there was Vir-7229, there was S2V29, a candidate antibody that covered all SARS-like coronaviruses:

2/10 nature.com/articles/s4158…Image
S2V29 came from a participant who had been vaccinated against and infected with SARS-CoV-2. From there, S2V29 underwent affinity maturation using SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and BQ.1.1 variant RBDs via yeast display. These were then screened and revealed an antibody that had...
3/10 Image
Read 10 tweets
Sep 27, 2024
I see some discussion of this paper going around:


It was preprinted a while ago but since that time I have had an opportunity to talk to some plasma cells researchers and it is apparent that there is a lot of important nuance being missed 🧵nature.com/articles/s4159…
Background: antibodies against the spike protein are protective against infection by SARS-CoV-2. Antibodies are made by antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) which come from B cells and vary widely in their lifespan. The goal of vaccination is generally to elicit durable antibodies.
Long-lived plasma cells (LLPCs) are ASCs that can live for many years (potentially your lifetime). They are canonically found within the bone marrow, but mucosal LLPCs have also been described. The problem: there is no simple way to define look at a cell and say it's an LLPC.
Read 17 tweets

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