🚨 BRAND NEW MPOX DATA ALERT🚨

As mpox cases mount in the Congo, and following a beautiful genetics paper on the global outbreak in 2022, I spent a couple of weeks trying to visualize mpox evolution in real time in my city, New York, but ended up looking in 4 cities: LA, NYC... ... Chi, and Seattle.

I'm going to walk through what I learned, starting with a recent cluster here in NYC.

Travelers should be EXTRA aware of mpox during and after travel.

Sometime in mid-2023, an mpox case from Europe arrived in NYC, leading to at least 14 cases here.

Long thread here on mpox in 2022 and how, if activists had been listened to in the US and globally in May, we could have prevented almost all mpox cases.

This new work from @trvrb is a masterpiece in using viral phylogenetics to make essential inferences about epidemiology. The paper can be found here:

I'm going to go through the data figure by figure, starting with the big take aways.cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

It's remarkable to me that virologists and other scientists are under threat of violent attack AT THE SAME TIME as they worked to develop SARS-2 vaccines and drugs in a time frame that still feels impossible.

Short thread on the history of anti-viral drug/vaccine development: HIV emerged in the US in the 1970s and was 'found' in the early 1980s. Some individual drugs were available in the 80s and early 90s (like AZT) but, alone, failed.

Protease inhibitors and combo therapy became available in 1996 (in the US), changing the course of infection.

Been watching a lot of Judith Butler lectures and I am very aware of the transphobic nature of RESPECTING PEOPLE’S FUCKING PRONOUNS being perceived as doing violence to the person speaking.

We tend to view language as something WE DO, not that is done to us. 🧵 If language is something YOU DO, it’s one place you imagine you have 100% agency. And so being asked to use X word or Y pronoun for a person is altering the one place you can alter the world.

Pretty devastating cohort study of severe monkeypox/MPV cases in the US.

Severe infections are most common in people not with HIV but AIDS with really low CD4+ count, which means they've been HIV+ for YEARS without treatment.

cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7… Nearly 70% of these patients were Black.

The HIV crisis IS the MPV crisis and neither is over, particularly for Black people. This is our collective burden, and we know how to fix it: free quality healthcare for all.

Since literally everyone else has a plus one, I will just keep myself as unsocially anxious by live tweeting the event. Why not.

Current standing in the corner around the suits trying hard not to sweat but I finally got a drink THANK GOD.

https://twitter.com/reluctantlyjoe/status/1585038690937876480

I’m def a not-famous here, duh: cut and held in the line for the step and repeat, no plus one, but she’s in the corner people watching.

And frankly this drawing of me is like 10x hotter than I am and it’s gonna be my new grindr photo for sure.

“MATERIALISM!” they shout, ignoring the material realities that many working people are religious, COVID isn’t going to 0 soon, the US electorate isn’t as radical as they want it to be, Bernie Sanders isn’t a god in a frumpy jacket. ALSO Marxism are purely anti-religious is an interpretation of the texts, and not the only one.

It's extremely important to the USSR secularization of cultures in those countries, but Marx didn't necessarily mean what you think by 'opiate of the people'

I’m hearing from so many confused friends. If getting JYNNEOS intradermally, you should look at your injection side after injection but before the bandaid goes on.

If there isn’t a bleb like this, the shot wasn’t properly placed and you likely won’t have protection. Here’s a bit more info and another photo of a bleb. It might not be as large as the one above.

med.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Nu…

I am so tired of these self-aggrandizing sex-phobic pieces that canonize Larry Kramer as Uniquely Perfect and Adult and argue for something THAT IS ALREADY HAPPENING...

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… They argue NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT SEX while talking about SEX in the WaPo and The Atlantic.

Just because Demetre doesn't use exactly the words you want him to FROM THE CDC doesn't mean queer EXPERTS haven't been talking about sex for MONTHS now, and you KNOW we have.

I think what's happening now with this intracommunity fight over shaming people into less sex is because WE JUST HAD THIS FIGHT around PrEP and the sluts won, pissing a lot of people off.

Larry Kramer hated PrEP. He came around...

1/22 ... with effort, with private talks in community. Michael Weinstein, of the horrible AHF, called PrEP a "party drug"

Many questioned how efficacious it would be in practice

Turns out PrEP is VERY effective, and allowed a lot of us traumatized by HIV to explore new types...
2/22

It's not just Monkeypox (MPX) testing.

You want to get treated for MPX? Your provider must enroll you in a clinical trial and become the PI of that trial.

They also must follow a 124-page trial protocol from @HHSGov

THIS IS FOR AN FDA APPROVED DRUG The drug has to be administered on-site.

YES, this means that people with MPX have to... TRAVEL to a site to get a... PILL!

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT PLAN!!!

Your reminder that *no* COVID test is perfectly correlated to viral shedding (e.g. whether you're infectious to others).

Let's briefly go through the thinking on this and why a 5 day isolation without testing out is a *bad idea*.

1/19 PROPER experiments of viral shedding don't just look at Ct value as a proxy; they measure whether you can find LIVE VIRUS in the samples.

These early results from Germany showed that at about 10 days post symptoms, pretty much every patient had cleared CULTURABLE VIRUS.

2/19

*VERY IMPORTANT COVID-19 VACCINATION THREAD*

According to Very Important People™, we've moved, in the last 7 days, from a situation of vaccine scarcity to appointments going unreserved.

Here in NYC, only 44% of residents have had at least one shot.

This is.... bad.

1/n We hear this is happening in pretty much every major US city (except Seattle) and in many rural areas, too.

THIS IS AN ENTIRELY NEW PHASE OF THE COVID-19 VACCINATION PROCESS.

2/n

As the news of SARS-CoV-2 evolution breaks today, I'm INCREDIBLY PROUD to release the @covid19ny's COVID RESEARCH AGENDA, a document highlighting the (many) gaps in the federal research response to this novel virus.

1/6

static1.squarespace.com/static/5e6fd0a… We highlight how much work has been done on vaccines (yay) but how we are still struggling to implement the testing we need to save lives RIGHT NOW (can you literally believe this?).

2/6

Vaccine thread :

I’ve been getting some questions about what a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine would mean for QUARANPOD or social distancing rules.

While these vaccines protect against COVID disease WE DO NOT YET KNOW IF THEY PREVENT TRANSMISSION.

1/8 This means that while the vaccine protects YOU we don’t know if it will protect those unvaccinated folks in your family or pod.

2/8

How gay is Handel's Messiah, yall? when you find a top on grindr:

THREAD:

Among all the horrible sexism, this article also commits epistemological harms, arguing that science PhDs are real and humanities and social science PhDs are not.

1/4

wsj.com/articles/is-th… This scientist with a PhD in Molecular Biophysics values (indeed NEEDS) contributions from humanities scholars and social scientists.

2/4

COVID-19 THREAD on GYMS and RESTAURANTS:

COVID-19 is on the rise in NYC, and just about everywhere. Yet, you can still legally eat indoors or go to the gym.

1/9 Yesterday was World AIDS Day. In the response to HIV, activists and citizens had to act because their government would not.

People think that because things aren't shut down, it's safe to go. Safe to eat out with a few friends. Save to mask up and get on a treadmill.

2/9

It's astonishing to me that people are defending the rights of ANY college professor to sleep with students at their own university.

It isn't homophobic to argue that this often harms students' educational experience. Homos, can we... do better please. "BuT StRaigHT PeoEple dO iT" doesn't mean it's ok. Just because two people are over 18, doesn't mean it's ok.

Who's ready for some molecular virology?*

SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that's causing this pandemic – evolves VERY SLOWLY for an RNA virus. You've probably seen headlines like "There are now 3 strains of the coronavirus" or "8 strains are now circulating the globe."

1/12 All total bullshit.

2/12

THREAD:

Hi everyone. I'm a writer. I'm also a scientist with a training in microbiology and virology.

I've just decided to skip #AWP this year.

1) The risk for me personally is very *very* low. That's not what this is about. 2) There are high risk people in my communities, though, and I don't think we can just imagine that "only X and Y people die of this so it isn't a problem."