@miamalan A quick summary of which vaccines these are: Pneumococcal (seruminstitute.com/product_ind_pn…), rotavirus (seruminstitute.com/product_viral_…), meningococcal (currently still in trails I think: path.org/media-center/s…) and hexavalent (seruminstitute.com/product_combi_…). And what's their impact? @miamalan Pneumococcus (Streptococcus pneumoniae) caused estimated 5000 deaths / year before vaccine introduction in SA, down to less than 2000 after vaccine: journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… - SII's vaccine is dramatically cheaper than GSK & Pfizer ones: businessinsider.in/science/health… Next 2/..

My neighbourhood "community newspaper" is up in arms about the diversity training at #FishHoekHighSchool & proudly quotes MEC David Maynier saying that the "events happened last week never happen again". The events? Asanda Ngoasheng's diversity training which confronted learners with the need to understand racism as systematic oppression. Seems that some of the learners, no doubt echoing their parents, are happy when racism has two sides (racism as prejudice) but get "worked up" when they are forced to confront racism as systemic. The poem Ngoasheng read

Glad to see this @WHO guidance on Pathogen Genome Data Sharing in the wild after having been part of the consultation process. This establishes some incredibly valuable principles that are not yet "business as usual": a 🧵

https://twitter.com/padstamundo/status/1590493542170124288

1. The call for capacity development is a form of benefit sharing - I hope that this - like our @pha4ge ethics & data sharing WG paper (gh.bmj.com/content/7/2/e0…) - inspires *more* & *deeper* conversations about benefit sharing w.r.t. pathogen data sharing. Good start!

Antivaxxers in SA are proclaiming that the "tide has turned" and "the CCMA" has found that vaccine mandates in SA are now unlawful. That sentiment expressed a wilful misunderstanding of a recent CCMA ruling and the legal status of CCMA awards. So let's dive in: 1/.. the facts here relate to a CCMA ruling by commissioner Richard Byrne on a matter between Kgomotso Tshatshu and Baroque Medical. Byrne found that Tshatshu's dismissal was "substantively unfair". Note this was not "the CCMA", this was an award by a single commissioner 2/..

For all those going on about Gates & vaccines: this is Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, one of the chief architects of the Moderna vaccine. Beating herself up for getting more than 4 hours sleep in a night. Her equivalent on the Oxford/AstraZeneca one is Dr Tess Lambe (@jenneratingVacc)

https://twitter.com/KizzyPhD/status/1348921734481801216

Dr Corbett was working on a vaccine for MERS before 2020. That work involved designing a "prefusion stabilised Spike protein" (pnas.org/content/114/35…) using the same technique used in the NIAID/Moderna vaccine. The MERS stabilised Spike was tested in mice in 2017.

getting reading to introduce @NoraNiLoideain : "A Game Changer for Research? GDPR and Health Data" #DataProtection @SANBI_SA last week we were discussiong @rdpeng 's simplystatistics.org/2018/05/15/ret… #datasharing @SANBI_SA so this talk is very timely!