John writes:
Vincent & Alan,
I think particularly both of you were discussing claimed religious objections to vaccination in either 1107 or 9. That brought to mind this one that crossed my window recently:
Willpower dissolves in alcohol
Integrity dissolves in money
Reality dissolves in ideology
That might have relevance to the current campus protests that you commented on in 1109, too.
I also liked your discussion about the mutability of viruses in the context of sloppy polymerases. It should probably be mentioned more often that the nucleotide called at any position in the genome in a sequencing effort is the one that gives the strongest signal, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some strands in the mixture with one of the other three nucleotides at that position.
Otherwise, unseasonalby warm here in Greater Braddock today at nearly 30C, as I imagine it was in NY/J as well.
Cheers,
John
Hunter writes:
TWiV Personalities:
I was pleasantly shocked when I read this article about animal sampling in the USA. Someone must have been listening to TWiV to come up with such a bold plan :). It might seem foreign to many of the “lab leakers” but it is refreshing to see that scientists are doing what scientists should do – try to answer questions. Hopefully, the project will give us some idea about the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in other animals besides humans.
Favorite quote from the article: “She and Bowman ‘feel really quite stupid’ at meetings when colleagues ask why the virus persists in deer, she says.” REAL SCIENTISTS say things like this because it is true and they know when to say “We don’t know”.
Take care and thanks for all you do.
Hunter Lang, DVM
Retired Food Animal Veterinarian
Volker writes:
Dear Vincent and Alan,
Thank you for reading my email regarding the worldwide usage of IPV vs. (N)OPV on epitope 1107. The two of you agreed to disagree, yet I kindly ask if you could reconsider.
There are questions of taste (cheesecake vs strawberry cake) and of moral (what is more important, equality or freedom), where there is no clear right or wrong and differing opinions are acceptable. (Warning: rabbit hole alert!)
Then there are questions with definitive answers (laws of physics, Paxlovid vs. Ivermectin for Covid). These are amenable to the scientific method, and here, disagreements should be resolvable. Here there are facts, maybe uncertainties, but (after a thorough analysis) there is no room for opinions or “alternative facts”.
Although we cannot perform large-scale repeated experiments on the IPV vs. OPV question, I believe, e.g. based on simulations, it falls into the second category. How about bringing a public health expert on the show to delve into the details? What would it take to use only IPV? What would this mean if we had to operate within the same financial resources?
Please make sure both of you are available for this session 😉
Thanks and best regards,
Volker
P. S.: The price of Paxlovid in Germany is 60 € rather than 600 USD and even this small price is almost always covered by your insurance… It is tough to live in a country where the interest of big pharma is so little protected 😉
Robert writes:
Thank you for your informative podcasts that are great continuing education in virology and immunology.
Interesting history of H5N1 in our milk supply at least since February
Robert MD Sitka, Alaska P&S 1972
Daniel writes:
Dear TWiV team,
The discussion on TWiV 1105 about the future of SARS-CoV-2 and whether it will end up like HCoV-OC43 from the 1889 pandemic (allegedly), reminded me of a study I discovered earlier in the pandemic originally from 2006 about an OC43 outbreak in 2003.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095096/
An Outbreak of Human Coronavirus OC43 Infection and Serological Cross-reactivity with SARS Coronavirus
In summer 2003, a respiratory outbreak was investigated in British Columbia, during which nucleic acid tests and serology unexpectedly indicated reactivity for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Cases at a care facility were epidemiologically …
The study claims OC43 can have a case fatality rate of 8% in a long-term care setting.
Is it possible that OC43 never fully lost its virulence, and just faded into the background of ILIs especially compared to Influenza and RSV, especially without explicit testing?
Would adapting the mRNA vaccines for OC43 spike make sense that could be given as a yearly booster for the elderly-elderly?
Would Paxlovid work?
Thanks,
Daniel
Alan writes:
Hi, Racaniello et al.,
Greetings from the editorial offices of the Journal of Clinical Ambivalence!
Here’s an NPR story and interactive quiz on pandemic respiratory disease transmission, based on the new WHO guidelines. The staff here got 100%, mostly thanks to careful TWiV listening.
All the best,
Alan
Az writes:
A short video by Dr. Rob Swanda explains why H5N1 bird flu has infected other mammals more readily? Humans lack one type of cell receptor in the upper respiratory tract that H5N1 viruses can use to establish an infection.
– https://youtu.be/msEsgGHRHNM?si=_nx3RtW-XxgYtdEl
– Az
