In his weekly clinical update, Dr. Griffin discusses how vaccination and vaccine hesitancy affects public health and disease spread in terms of mpox, the first human death from H5N1 in US, why one should not feed their pets raw pet food and the metapneumonia outbreak in China before reviewing the recent statistics on RSV, influenza and SARS-CoV-2 infections, the WasterwaterScan dashboard, where to find PEMGARDA, how nirmatrelvir-ritonavir/Paxlovid reduces adverse outcomes of COVID in patients with kidney disease, provides information for Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s long COVID treatment center, SARS-CoV-2 infection affects skin conditions including shingles and if long antiviral treatment affects long COVID.
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 1182 (19 MB .mp3, 31 min)
Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, RSS, email
Become a patron of TWiV!
Links for this episode
- Mpox vaccination hesitancy, previous immunisation coverage, and vaccination readiness in the African region (eClincial Medicine)
- Global prevalence and correlates of mpox vaccine acceptance and uptake (Communications Medicine)
- First case of new mpox variant in France (Reuters)
- First “Bird flu” death in US (NY Times)
- Emerging threat of H5N1 to human health (NEJM)
- Don’t feed your pets raw food (County of Los Angeles Public Health)
- Oregon, nationwide raw pet food recall (CIRAP)
- Raw cat food avian flu, is this like raw milk? (CIDRAP)
- Human metapneumovirus surging in China (The Guardian)
- Viral video of viral chaos: human metapneumovirus in Chinese hospital (The Economic Times)
- Human metapneumovirus in China (NY Times)
- Acute respiratory infections including human metapneumovirus in northern hemisphere (WHO)
- Waste water scan for 11 pathogens (WastewaterSCan)
- US respiratory virus activity (CDC Respiratory Illnesses)
- Weekly surveillance report: clift notes (CDC FluView)
- RSV: Waste water scan for 11 pathogens (WastewaterSCan)
- RSV-Network (CDC Respiratory Syncytial virus Infection)
- US respiratory virus activity (CDC Respiratory Illnesses)
- Waste water scan for 11 pathogens (WastewaterSCan)
- COVID-19 deaths (CDC)
- COVID-19 national and regional trends (CDC)
- COVID-19 variant tracker (CDC)
- SARS-CoV-2 genomes galore (Nextstrain)
- Where to get pemgarda (Pemgarda)
- EUA for the pre-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 (INVIYD)
- Fusion center near you….if in NY (Prime Fusions)
- CDC Quarantine guidelines (CDC)
- NIH COVID-19 treatment guidelines (NIH)
- Infectious Disease Society guidelines for treatment and management (ID Society)
- Drug interaction checker (University of Liverpool)
- The effect of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir on short- and long-term adverse outcomes from COVID-19 among patients with kidney disease (OFID)
- Paxlovid tied to lower risk of hospital stay, heart problems, death in adults with kidney disease and COVID (CIDRAP)
- Molnupiravir safety and efficacy (JMV)
- Convalescent plasma recommendation for immunocompromised (ID Society)
- What to do when sick with a respiratory virus (CDC)
- When your healthcare provider is infected/exposed with SARS-CoV-2 (CDC)
- Managing healthcare staffing shortages (CDC)
- Steroids, dexamethasone at the right time (OFID)
- Anticoagulation guidelines (hematology.org)
- Daniel Griffin’s evidence based medical practices for long COVID (OFID)
- Long COVID hotline (Columbia : Columbia University Irving Medical Center)
- Chronic urticaria, vitiligo, alopecia areata, and herpes zoster following COVID-19 infection (Journal of Dermatology)
- Impact of extended-course oral nirmatrelvir/ritonavir in established Long COVID:
- (Communications Medicine)
- Letters read on TWiV 1182
- Dr. Griffin’s COVID treatment summary (pdf)
- Timestamps by Jolene. Thanks!
Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees
Send your questions for Dr. Griffin to daniel@microbe.tv
The post TWiV 1182: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin first appeared on This Week in Virology.
amazing! Thanks you!
My hat is off to Vincent and friends for being able to talk about gain-of-function research in an honest and engaging manner. I personally would have no problem with halting this research if someone could truly make an honest and thorough case for it, but I see very little of this coming from the anti-GoF crowd. Try making it all the way through that Scientific American article without grinding your teeth. I am embarrassed that a magazine I love published this without any rebuttal whatsoever, and I wonder if their editors even realize how few professional virologists share Lipsitch’s conclusions.
If history is any guide, you may have already lost on the GOF issue and the future of biology in the US. First a legitimate scientific question is raised, then some scientist starts taking a radical position and comes up with an arbitrary set of assumptions that risks catastrophic impacts. The bench scientists respond with science, reason and better sets of assumptions in the risk calculation that show insignificant risk. The high risk assumption makes the press and feed the ego of the scientist who make the assumptions (giving him a huge state in backing his foolish assumptions along with normal confirmation bias issues: he can’t and won’t back down and evolves into a “true believer” like the Wakefiels and anti-evolutionists and Climate change denial activist who actually believe their own delusions and assumptions) and the politicians and political scientists (including scientists who turned politician) sense a tactical advantage and join the fray with moratoriums, delays, and restructuring of regulatory organizations to favor more arbitrary political decision making. It is game over for rational science, where most of the funds get shifted to bureaucrats and record keeping.
The only action left is to put the decision making in the hands of lawyers and political appointees to make the decision making “independent” of the “proponents” resulting in no one at the funding level knowing any details about the actual science in question. A bunch of scientist with actual skin in the game and bench level knowledge can’t be trusted to make these high risk decisions.
If you want an example of this history, look at nuclear power. Back in the 60’s it was poised to put coal out of business (and prevent much of the global warming issue as a byproduct), but you had a couple of real scientists who really understood health physics make some assumptions about various reactor designs “blowing up” and spreading death and destruction everywhere. However, those scientists in reactor physics and dispersion showed that these assumption were insanely high, but the original estimates made the headlines. At that time the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) was accused of being too close to the evolving industry and the NRC (nuclear regulatory commission) was created to oversea this evolving industry. The NRC, whose present members consists of four lawyers (one empty slot) only 2 of which even have relevant undergraduate degrees and all are political connected.
The NRC managed to triple the cost of reactors and double the construction time while freezing the technology to 70’s levels that we are still dealing with. This stopped the downward cost curve for nuclear power and made it more expensive than coal in the US. Most of the best scientists and engineers left the field and the existing systems are being managed by lawyers and bureaucrats, which is far more scary. This also killed the research in fast breeders and most research reactors in most Universities.
The worst possible accident in the worst possible reactor design (a positive thermal coefficient design: not like the western designs) did occur in Chernobyl with a total of 2000 direct and delayed fatalities with Japan at zero from radiation (18,000 from the tsunami) and TMI with zero. These numbers are trivial relative to the death and destruction from the coal alternative, let alone the climate change impacts of the coal. These numbers from half a century of hard data indicate that the assumptions by the serious scientists of a more reasonable risk was clearly scientifically correct and justified and the chicken little’s were full on FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).
Imagine grant oversight board for microbiology consisting of 5 commissioners who are all lawyers and appointed by politicians with only 2 of the 5 having even a BS degree level of knowledge about biology and none of whom had actually done any real research. That is what may come based upon history.
I could have used many other evolving technologies, such as offshore aquaculture, etc. where a few activists have killed the future and jobs in the US, but the world impact of not replacing coal fired electricity with nuclear is the largest impact on humanity and the environment. Most of the TWIVERS probably believe the narrative that nuclear power is too risky without looking at the data or alternatives.
Hopefully the future citizens won’t believe than biological research is too risky to safely conduct while nature runs billions of experiments per second trying to take advantage of one of the largest protein sources on this planet — human biomass. The alternative is facing nature without knowledge, and that doesn’t work out very well for the dominant biomass (nature kills of the winners while increasing diversity).