#VaccinesWork. #VaccinesSaveLives. There is nothing to debate. graphics.wsj.com/infectious-dis… 🧵 1/ 2/ graphics.wsj.com/infectious-dis…

Too early to say what this means for @Moderna's #CMV (cytomegalovirus) mRNA vaccine candidate, which is already in Phase III trials. However, this preprint suggests CMV's pentameric gH/gL complex is not important for transplacental infection. #StopCMV 🤰 🧵biorxiv.org/content/10.110… CMV is notoriously difficult to vaccinate against. When he was still @pfizer, Phil Domitzer & colleagues "threw the book" at rhesus CMV --trying all leading vaccine strategies. The virus still infected, shed and transmitted horizontally just fine. 2/ academic.oup.com/jid/article/22…

1/ Every person who rapidly shares viral genome sequence data should be celebrated & I'm proud to have helped @GISAID grow. I believe in the platform & its cause is noble. Most of all, I believe in the global community that is the true fabric of GISAID. But there's a problem.. 🧵

https://twitter.com/RickABright/status/1493765874586640384

2/ The person who is in effect, CEO of GISAID, Peter Bogner, acts as judge, jury & executioner of all decisions at GISAID, has made big mistakes, including acts of overt dishonestly. His mistakes now threaten the platform's credibility all over the world. science.org/content/articl…

1/ My Israeli friend once told me a Bedouin proverb that his father told him: “Lies don’t have legs…” they don’t walk on their own.. you have to remember them and there’s a weight to keeping your story straight. 🦵🏽🦵🏽

https://twitter.com/edwardcholmes/status/1641156250418434048

2/ GISAID is a fantastic platform built by a visionary. Hugely important for global health. Tragically, the visionary in charge doesn’t care about truth & the lies are getting too heavy to bear. I hope GISAID survives. But it’s in desperate need of reform. science.org/content/articl…

When an organization doesn’t have sufficient internal oversight to prevent bad decisions, you’ll see good feedback coming from outside. Either way, @GISAID should not be changing the terms of use in a hasty & non-transparent manner.

https://twitter.com/Alexander_Tin/status/1641061030020227074

In this case, it looks like Peter Bogner (he alone is in charge) is going out of his way to accommodate the needs & wishes of a single data submitter: The Chinese CDC. WHY DOES HE INVENT TOTALLY NEW POLICIES FOR THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT?

1/ GISAID can’t unilaterally release these data. That’d severely hurt the platform. But Peter Bogner —the “data diplomat”— is M.I.A. Why wasn’t he working the phones to broker a solution here? In 2006, he came to the rescue after Indonesia refused to share bird flu samples. 🧵

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1639997298389450753

Indonesia was rightfully upset that weathy ‘Western’ countries in the “Global North” were the only ones benefitting from the influenza vaccines that pharma companies would develop. Together with Nancy Cox of
@CDCgov, Bogner launched GISAID to help resolve the impasse.. 🧵 2/

The mainstream media —e.g., @CNN @NBCNews— is basically just repeating a lab leak friendly narrative of ambiguity, when there is in fact very little ambiguity here at all. China is working hard (yet clumsily) to cover up that COVID-19 came from their illegal wildlife trade .@NBCNightlyNews dishonestly used an out-of-context clip from my interview w @stephgosk to make it seem I’m skeptical of the Raccoon dog 🧬 findings as unreliable to indicate wet market animal trade origin of COVID. This was just a caveat, not the takeaway nbcnews.com/nightly-news/v…

What really happened? Atlantic reporter got scoop about WHO’s SAGO briefing where researchers who were NOT ready for this to go public shared findings on 🦝 🧬 🦠 . China’s govt caught *everyone* off guard by demanding their scientists remove the data from GISAID. 360° shit show

https://twitter.com/evanifitkillsme/status/1636996019673071618

2/ Per @GISAID rules (data access agreement) users are not allowed to publish findings based on GISAID data unless they make a good faith attempt to forge a collaboration (include authorship for) the submitting lab that generated the data.

WHOA.. Sad to hear that the data already got DELETED from @GISAID. Maybe the China's govt is not happy about the revelation that COVID-19 started from illegally traded Raccoon dogs at the Huanan market? 🦝🦠

https://twitter.com/PhilippMarkolin/status/1636492381984882690

Yup..

Excellent thread on the Origin of the first Lab Leak Conspiracy Theories. Whether COVID-19 is a natural virus that “leaked” from a lab is largely unfalsifiable. But, if we ask ourselves, has this topic been politically weaponized? Well, that’s verifiably true. 🧵 👇

https://twitter.com/_everythingism/status/1634131862741188611

https://twitter.com/_everythingism/status/1634132831185293312?s=20

On Thursdays it’d be a brisk 90 mile jog, followed by two fat lines of bone marrow aspirates, and maybe a margarita on the rocks to unwind. I hadn’t gotten so much as a runny nose in 7,000 years. But now the woke mob wants to take it all away. Brought to you by this magnificent thread 🧵

https://twitter.com/MarkELindsay/status/1621339446363754496?s=20

Respectfully, @fayeflam you’re not following the latest data. The entire point of the bivalent boosters is that they’ll induce more DURABLE protection than ancestral vaccines. @EricTopol’s feed incudes excellent summaries. He was skeptical, too. But the data are convincing.

https://twitter.com/fayeflam/status/1621222515145146369

We already knew several months ago (AS EXPECTED h/t @victora_lab @jbloom_lab Ellebedy lab & many others) that Omicron specific B cells can eventually "spring forth" despite imprinting/ "original antigenic sin" .. for example, science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

First things first, there’s no such thing as a “Covid epidemiologist,” but there are Infectious Disease epidemiologists. Secondly, Tracy Beth Høeg is not prominent. Her views on #vaccines are “Flat earther” fringe. Thirdly,.. 1/ 🧵

https://twitter.com/ID_Denmark/status/1620849024558592001

"Why should I get vaccinated for a disease that is not a risk to me?”Examples: (1) Whooping cough can kill infants, who are too young to get the vaccine, yet many of us carry the bacteria that cause it. Vaccinating everyone in the home protects the 👶🏼 cdc.gov/pertussis/preg…

Ok.. this one merits a tear down 🧵 https://twitter(dot)com/TRyanGregory/status/1619423229537550336?s=20 This exposes: (1) T Ryan Gregory’s very poor knowledge of immunology, and (2) his thirst for followers via alarmist rhetoric. Let’s discuss what he’s getting wrong here …

“LINES, SINES, & SARS—will COVID become an endogenous virus? asks his eminence, T “#Kraken” Gregory. (AFAIK, no Nidovirus has ever become part of a metazoan genome & coronaviruses rely on an entirely cytoplasmic replication cycle.. so this is **exceedingly** unlikely) The convo itself should be linked & saved for comic value (I’m blocked by all of the major participants—someone sent me screenshots..). It’s entertainingly revealing.. Ed covers some of the logical issues here

https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1619513345685753856?s=20

Fantastic preprint from Dr. Cao's group in Peking-- huge amount of data in the preprint. I do, however, think it's worth questioning the somewhat frightening conclusions about imprinting, aka "original antigenic sin".. 🧵

https://twitter.com/yunlong_cao/status/1570922875590414336

As the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has evolved, our bodies have come to rely on a subset of antibodies, called "broadly neutralizing" for their ability to contain a wide range of different variants. 2/

Yo! Please don’t amplify armchair variant doom predictors. “A new variant is coming…” Yes, there will be new ones. But we usually don’t know which will actually sweep, if they’ll cause a wave 🌊 while doing so or just displace each other as case numbers remain steady 🧵. 1/ Please chill.. this isn’t a zombie movie.. so many on Twitter waiting with bated breath for the next Delta or Omicron. 2/

People say: “Spike is mutating so fast it is escaping vaccines.” But in fact the gene that encodes Spike, S, is not mutating any faster than the rest of the viral genome. 🧵 On a related note, people also say, “why should we immunize only against Spike, it’s a terrible vaccine target because it evolves so quickly”.. this is also mostly an incorrect statement. Why?

There’s been some back & forth of late between Worobey & Bloom about early SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from China, focusing on the meaning of deleted SRA files. Anyone else notice that none of this debate concerns what the existing data say about the #OriginOfCovid ? 🧵 Jesse’s main argument is “because the early viral genome data from China is incomplete, we can’t make strong conclusions about the #OriginOfCovid.” This assertion has some serious flaws..

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1534406872337350657

💥 T’was long predicted that colorectal cancers would respond well to immunotherapy since like melanoma, these tumors carry heavy mutational loads & hence produce “neoantigens” that can be targeted as non-self when inhibition is removed. This was correct. nytimes.com/2022/06/05/hea… I’m no cancer biologist but from what I understand both melanomas and colorectal cancers end up losing a key set of DNA repair pathways called “mismatch repair,”.. melanomas lose it & get even more mutated from UV exposure, colon cancers from mutagens in our diet..

A 23-year-old S. African man presented to emergency department w/ 2-day history of fever, mild dyspnea, headache, nausea & myalgias. Symptoms began 5 days after he had traveled to Colorado to ski with friends. TL;DR: he died of herpes simplex in🧠. 🧵
nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

https://twitter.com/farid__jalali/status/1518782797573353472

It's important that people be aware of the risk of #LongCovid, but context matters. If folks who work in hospital emergency departments want to freak everyone out, it's easy to do. There are dozens of protozoa, viruses, fungi & bacteria that can cause awfully frightening outcomes