This week President Biden received the report he commissioned on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. As I predicted three months ago, nothing was learned, because to find the origin of the virus it is necessary to conduct extensive wildlife surveys. Consequently this week I would rather write about a new study that identified coronaviruses in rodents. …
The US Centers for Disease Control have concluded that a third dose of COVID-19 vaccine will be needed for protection against disease, but the science says otherwise. A review of the immune responses to infection will help explain why vaccine boosters are not needed. The graph below shows the relative concentrations of antibody and T …
Understanding the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is complicated by the large numbers of presymptomatic, asymptomatic, and mildly symptomatic (PAMS) patients. The reproductive number, R0, is a measure of population-level dynamics, but it cannot provide information on infectiousness of different groups such as PAMS subjects; when peak infectiousness occurs; and the effect of intrinsic properties of the …
From the authors of Paul Has Measles and Paul Stays Home comes Paul and the Mosquitos, an illustrated book for children about mosquito-borne diseases.
In the two previous installments (one, two) of what has now become my praise of T cells, I explained that the SARS-CoV-2 protein sequences recognized by T cells do not change, likely explaining why vaccines prevent serious disease and death caused by any variant. Today I will explain that virus-specific T cells appear a week …
The ancestors of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) moved from land to the sea over 50 million years ago. Many viruses infect cetaceans, but how they evolved during the shift from land to sea is unknown. Fossilized retroviral genomes integrated into cetacean DNA provide insight into this question. The retroviral reproduction cycle involves the conversion …
