Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever, or CCHF, traces back to World War Two when around 200 Soviet soldiers were infected in Crimea. Today, over 3 billion people worldwide are at risk of infection from the virus that causes it.

The CCHF Virus is one of the Nairovirus family. Check out @KKelland’s latest instalment of The Viral Most Wanted to learn more about this viral family’s prime suspect and other menacing members ➡️ bit.ly/3tFnGln The Nairovirus family includes Nairobi Sheep Disease Virus, Dugbe Virus and Hazara Virus, but CCHF Virus is the top suspect because it’s the only established member known to cause widespread and frequent outbreaks of severe & deadly disease in people.

infogram.com/1ppl7pem7p25j9…

In a new letter, published today in @Nature, our Head of Vaccine R&D, Melanie Saville, explains why comparator #COVID19 vaccines – those already approved – are now needed to support the next generation of vaccine candidates undergoing clinical trials (1/6) nature.com/articles/d4158… To date, COVID-19 vaccines have received approval based on data from studies known as ‘placebo-controlled vaccine efficacy trials’, where unvaccinated participants take part (2/6)

In 2018, CEPI partnered w/ @Inovio to advance the development of a vaccine against Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (#MERS) coronavirus.

MERS is part of the same family of viruses that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) & #Covid19

bit.ly/3A9Fna9 (1/7) 🧵 MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-1, in particular, pose a significant recurrent pandemic threat.

The fatality rates of these viruses are 10-35%, making them 5-16 times worse than SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19; 2/7)

2020...what a year it's been!

Here's a quick recap of our efforts🧵

Thanks to the vital work by scientists, healthcare workers, global health experts and many others, we have reached an extraordinary moment in the history of vaccinology but also medicine more generally 🔬 At the start of the year, we turned our attention to a novel and fast-spreading mystery virus 🌍

We responded quickly and in collaboration with our partners, announcing our first 3 vaccine programmes on 23 Jan 📅

We've partnered with @biological_e to advance the development and manufacture of their #COVID19 vaccine candidate 🔬

This is the 1⃣1⃣th COVID-19 vaccine programme CEPI has supported (1/5 🧵) ⏬
cepi.net/news_cepi/cepi… We will initially contribute up to $5m to support scaling up the process for manufacturing the vaccine 🏭

We will also explore providing additional funding to potentially enabling the production of 100 million doses in 2021 🩺 (2/5)

Today we announced our new partnership with @IVIHeadquarters and @BharatBiotech to advance development of a #Chikungunya vaccine 🔬🌏

👉bit.ly/2MsO4FO

What is Chikungunya? What are its symptoms? Where does it occur? And how do we currently prevent infections?🤔 (1/5) What is Chikungunya? 🦠
A mosquito-borne disease spread by infected female Aedes mosquitoes🦟

The term is derived from Makonde, a language spoken in Tanzania, meaning “disease that bends up the joints”.

@WHO's highlighted Chikungunya as a major public health risk (2/5)