Do neutralising antibodies really protect you from infection, or are they just a correlate? Our collaboration with SIREN @UKHSA is out – a case control study of people who were infected during the UK's first wave and re-infected during the second. 1/n sciencedirect.com/science/articl… We found very low or absent neutralising antibodies in these rare re-infected individuals. They all mounted excellent nAb responses after re-infection. Very striking!

Three doses of vaccine protects healthy people reasonably well against Omicron. The critical question is: how well will vaccines protect the most vulnerable? Here we look at a correlate of vaccine efficacy in a vulnerable group. @TheLancet with @EdjCarr. thelancet.com/journals/lance… 2/n We report authentic live virus neutralisation (best correlate of vaccine efficacy) of Omicron & Delta by haemodialysis (HD) patients after 3rd doses of BNT162b2.
Funding @Kidney_Research @NKF_UK @PKDCharity @KidneyWales
Thanks to patients taking part & @ukkidney colleagues.

Delighted to share this in @TheLancet, with @EdjCarr. Neutralisation of live SARS-CoV-2 (+variants) in haemodialysis patients after BNT162b2 or ChAdOx-1.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Funding @Kidney_Research @NKF_UK @PKDCharity @KidneyWales
Thanks to patients taking part. 1/n 2/n Context-1: Haemodialysis [HD] patients respond poorly to traditional vaccines.
Hepatitis B vaccine is reformulated
Pneumococcal boosters are recommended
Influenza vaccine responses are attenuated
Context-2: HD patients either excluded from Phase III trials, or not reported.

Can regular testing help with reducing the spread of Covid? Yes it definitely can, in the right context. It's not a panacea, but with education and other sectors of the economy opening up before we are fully vaccinated it's vital we try to make this work. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-566320… First, the basics. You will never detect infection in the first day or two after exposure. Then the viral load goes up massively, then – after that – symptoms start. The idea behind these programmes is to detect cases before symptoms start, and to detect asymptomatic cases.

Right Twitter, it's been a dreadful 2020 and the first half of 2021 isn't looking too clever either. For no other reason than hubris, I wish to bestow my own awards for best Pandemic tweeting of 2020. These are of course entirely worthless, being based purely on my own bias. First category is hotly contested: best ITU tweeter of the pandemic. Nominations @rupert_pearse (reality), @WelshGasDoc (humour) and @kennethbaillie (science). But the winner is... @charlot_summers.

A thread as promised on this biorxiv.org/content/10.110… from George Kassiotis’ lab including @kevinWng and others @thecrick, the result of incredible teamwork with @uclh. This is a paper born of adversity, and contains two really important and unexpected findings. When the pandemic hit London hard – very hard – we had minimal diagnostic capacity. Our main focus was the critically important qPCR pipeline for diagnosing active infection,