virology blog
About viruses and viral disease
TWiV explains a study of how climate change is predicted to increase cross-species viral transmission risk, and increased memory B cell potency and breadth after a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine boost.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, and Amy Rosenfeld
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 896 (65 MB .mp3, 108 min)
Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email
Become a patron of TWiV!
Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv
In COVID-19 clinical update #112, Dr. Griffin reviews seroprevalence of infection-induced antibodies, Moderna filing for vaccine authorization in young children, public health impact of vaccines in US, FDA approval of first treatment for young children, phase 2 data for Sabizabulin, and post infection inflammation.
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 895 (33 MB .mp3, 54 min)
Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email
Become a patron of TWiV!
Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv
TWiV explains what is known about cases of acute, severe hepatitis of unknown origin in children, and discovery of an inhibitor of TMPRSS2 protease that blocks SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Kathy Spindler, and Brianne Barker
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 894 (60 MB .mp3, 100 min)
Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email
Become a patron of TWiV!
Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv
By David Tuller, DrPH
*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347
And here’s another major trial designed by investigators who think that an exercise program might be the optimal strategy for treating the complex grab-bag of conditions known as long Covid. As with other long Covid research, these investigators seem either unaware of or unconcerned about the core ME/CFS symptom known as post-exertional malaise (PEM)–also called post-exertional symptom exacerbation (PESE) or, in the ME-ICC case definition, post-exertional neuroimmune exhaustion (PENE).
Elke, Adam, and Gabor join TWiV to discuss their work on Lloviu virus, a filovirus, including recovery of infectious virus from a DNA copy of the genome and from Schreiber’s bats in Hungary.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, Kathy Spindler, and Brianne Barker
Guests: Elke Muhlberger, Adam Hume, and Gabor Kemenesi
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 891 (65 MB .mp3, 108 min)
Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email
Become a patron of TWiV!
Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv
By David Tuller, DrPH
*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347
It is clear that long Covid—however that term is defined–is having enormous impacts on employment, social benefits, disability insurance, and other domains. Even the coronavirus pandemic were to end today, those impacts would continue long into the future. The pandemic is also likely to lead to a rise in the numbers of those diagnosed with the disease or cluster of diseases currently being called ME/CFS.
Two publications this month shed some light on the situation in the US. First, the Solve Long Covid Initiative published a “white paper” called “Long Covid Impact on Adult Americans: Early Indicators Estimating Prevalence and Cost.” Second, three authors revisit their own earlier estimates of the economic burden of ME/CFS in relation to levels of government research spending. This time, they have incorporated into their analysis the expected increase in cases stemming from the pandemic. (I’m not a statistician or any kind of math whiz, so I’m not commenting on the models and calculations used in these analyses.)
By David Tuller, DrPH
*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347
Last Friday, I interviewed poet, journalist and editor Meghan O’Rourke about The Invisible Kingdom, her insightful and affecting memoir of living with chronic illness. As the book recounts, O’Rourke initially began experiencing perplexing physical signs and sensations not long after graduating from Yale in the late 1990s–“daily hives, dizziness, chronic pain, and drenching night sweats.” She struggled for years with a range of debilitating symptoms, and finally found some relief after being treated for chronic Lyme disease—itself a controversial diagnosis. In 2013, she wrote an extended piece about the issue for The New Yorker.
This episode of TWiV is focused on COVID-19 vaccines and antibodies: who should get boosters, whether a variant matched mRNA vaccine is superior to a historical vaccine, and how the interval between vaccination and infection influences the quality of the antibody response.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Rich Condit, and Brianne Barker
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 890 (65 MB .mp3, 108 min)
Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email
Become a patron of TWiV!
Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv
In COVID-19 clinical update #110, Dr. Griffin covers hospital admissions during variant outbreaks, viral load in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, predictive capacity of symptoms in children, comparison of antigen tests, incidence of myocarditis after vaccination, steroids during replication phase, Paxlovid efficacy and safety, fluvoxamine, sabizabutin, colchicine, and prevalence of infection in Africa.
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 889 (52 MB .mp3, 53 min)
Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email
Become a patron of TWiV!
Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv
By David Tuller, DrPH
*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347
*Note: To give credit where it’s due, Magical Medicine: How to Make an Illness Disappear, an exhaustive investigation from Malcolm Hooper and Margaret Williams, first mentioned the PACE team’s violations of the Declaration of Helsinki 20+ years ago.
The PACE authors and their allies routinely cite the UK’s Health Research Authority as having given this boondoggle of a trial a clean bill of health. The HRA, which oversees research ethics processes and procedures, conducted a review of PACE and issued its findings in January, 2019. The agency assessed PACE as having been conducted properly, but it noted that its purview was limited to “whether the study was properly approved by the Research Ethics Committee (REC),” and questions about the “quality of the study” were beyond its scope.