The Guardians of the TWiV-o-verse discuss the process of codon deoptimization for the production of experimental infectious attenuated viral vaccines, and how a respiratory syncytial virus with 619 base changes was rescued by genomes with very large internal deletions.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Rich Condit, Kathy Spindler, and Brianne Barker
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Download TWiV 740 (58 MB .mp3, 97 min)
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Links for this episode
- NIDO 2021 Symposium 2:04
- ASV hosts free COVID-19 Vaccine Education Town Halls (register here) 2:33
- Research position in Spindler laboratory 3:43
- Attenuation of poliovirus by codon deoptimization (Science) 8:00
- Rescue of codon-deoptimized RSV by large deletions (PNAS) 6:12
- Letters read on TWiV 740 57:08
- Timestamps by Jolene. Thanks!
Weekly Picks 1:20:38
Dickson – Let us now praise tiny ants
Brianne – Small-school science
Rich – Smallpox ‘virus squads’ and the mandatory vaccinations upheld by the Supreme Court
Kathy – The Transcontinental Burrito Tunnel
Vincent – Glass music by Robert Tiso
Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees
Send your virology questions and comments to twiv@microbe.tv
Hi,
nice podcast! Did you know what’s going on beside, the handling of Covid-19? For example in Germany, where Drosten was artifically made a big player? Where his Test creates huge false positve results, where death certificats (accident, cancer, heart attact…) are rewritten to Corona? Where influenca cases are relabeld to Corona?
It is the same Business Project like 2009 with the Swine Flu.
Greetings out of the Lockdown-Area,
where no one in quantity is sick as written,
Dr. Walker
It is an experiment, just really badly planned.
The paper from the Norwegians, including cases:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104882
On VIPIT/VITT
The references 9,10 would seem to point to a loss of tolerance triggered by the immune stimulation (very effective by vaccine- after all somuch work went into guaranteeing this). Candidate antibodies widely present but regulated as norm.
Obviously continuing to gather data through continued vaccination of the more susceptible will clarify true risk/benefit eventually- so UK data, not EU, Phillipines, South Korea etc. Data on effectiveness of diagnostic/treatment protocol need to be published too. Also making the experiment official by recruiting people actively for pre- and post- vaccination blood sampling would be a good idea?
I guess this is a sort of vaccine nationalism/heroism.
A vaccine is not like a drug, which you can stop taking and the effects are better known, idem remedies for these effects. Less flippancy please, the extent of the pathology, beyond these acute presentations, is also as yet undefined. Probably not a worry to you in the US, where from the vantage-point of the Pfizer/Moderna vaccinee, generic prevention of vaccine hesitancy is seen as more of a priority.