📍NOTA BENE—a “mild but faster” virus will often kill & harm more people than a virus that is slower & more severe. Even if just 2x more transmissible & 1/10 less deadly! ➡️Folks who call #Omicron “nature’s vaccine” need to stop the public endangerment. Figure by Malgorzata (Gosia) Gasperowicz

If you think Prior Covid protects against Omicron (B.1.1.529), think again medrxiv.org/content/10.110… and "Neutralizing antibody titers against Omicron were low, even below the limit of detection in a significant fraction of convalescent individuals drive.google.com/file/d/1zjJWsy…

The country with the highest cases/capita in the world now is Denmark, with 77% of its population fully vaccinated, 23% boosted, soon to be Omicron dominant. (The US is 61% vaccinated, 15% boosted, avg ~120,000 cases per day, w/ >66,000 hospitalizations)

Balanced piece on the severity of Omicron., Too early to call. nature.com/articles/d4158…

A new, outstanding review of diagnostic tests for Covid The Lancet: PCR/molecular tests, rapid antigen and antibody assessment, and how they should be used thelancet.com/journals/lance…

You know it's a good day in the pandemic when: —The 1st anti-Covid pill is cleared —More indications that Omicron is associated with less severe illness and tends to come down from its big surge as quickly as it ascends —The 1st pan-coronavirus vaccine is ready for Phase 2 trials

Our T cells appear to be ready, willing and able to defend vs Omicron medrxiv.org/content/10.110… CD4+ and CD8+ cells hold up well in people vaccinated or prior Covid

We are in Bangladesh, thanks to our friends and colleagues here Nurul Islam. We deploy a field-laboratory to investigate viruses with public health relevance. We will try to understand and cut off outbreaks before they get serious. #nipah #dengue #chikungunya #knowledgetransfer

🦇🦇 First target is #nipahvirus Although #flyingfox population habitat is heavily disturbed and bat population is declining, the human/animal interference is strong and still growing. Good for #spillover events, so there is an urgent need for rapid response capabilities

#outbreaks occur in nature, not just in humans. Here is a recent preprint from our lab, where we investigated an epizootic event of Canine Distemper virus in foxes. We developed a novel #sequencing method to better understand the genetic background of this outbreak. 1/3 🦠🦊🧑‍🔬🧬

Here is a recent preprint from our lab, where we investigated an epizootic event of #CDV in foxes. 🦊🦠🧬 Research Square researchsquare.com/article/rs-111… Universal, amplicon-based sequencing method for Canine Canine Distemper Virus Oxford Nanopore protocols.io protocols.io/view/universal…

Food for #flyingfox is limited during the winter. Here is a cute #pic of a chewed seed dropped by one of them.Due to limited food sources they visit #rawpalmsap coll.points to drink.They can occasionally contaminate it with #nipah,that makes winter as the #nipah outbreak season.

Q: Do vaccines help protect vs #LongCovid? thelancet.com/journals/lanre… The Lancet Respiratory Medicine A: Yes medrxiv.org/content/10.110… by Michael Edelstein and colleagues

I'm happy to say that our paper is now in Cell! Our data show that T cell responses to #SARSCoV2 are largely preserved with variants (including #omicron) in COVID-19 vaccinees. The result of hard work and great collaboration between Alessandro Sette and Prof. Shane Crotty labs

Interested in network medicine and bioinformatics? Here is your intro: youtube.com/watch?v=vXeA7g… produced by our students. Join the band at: barabasilab.com/jobs Thanks, Ayan Chatterjee, Samuel Westby, Ula Widocki,

Our paper is finally out in Nature Communications We describe the isolation of infectious Lloviu #filovirus from a bat. It puts this virus among the few isolates from bats and the first isolate outside of Ebola or Marburg virus genera. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Isolation of infectious Lloviu virus from bats in Hungary The researchers show that this virus can infect human cells in vitro, suggesting spillover potential Gabor Kemenesi Tóth Gábor Endre @jakab_ferenc University of Pécs (UP) go.nature.com/3NbkDFj