by Paul Bieniasz Dr. Bieniasz is Professor and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Rockefeller University. As viruses go, SARS-CoV-2, is quite easy to neutralize with antibodies and, it turns out, straightforward to generate effective vaccines based on the spike protein. Perhaps, even probably, those two properties are causally related. Moreover, it appears …
Daniel Griffin provides a clinical report on COVID-19, then we discuss Bill Foege’s letter to CDC director Robert Redfield, the false promise of herd immunity for COVID-19, secret blueprints for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine trials released, and neuropilin-1 as a possible entry protein for the virus. Click arrow to playDownload TWiV 675 (105 MB .mp3, 174 min)Subscribe (free): iTunes, Google …
TWiV 675: Forget what you’ve herd about immunity Read More »
Not only the popular press but even some of my distinguished science colleagues are claiming that the recent report of reinfection of a COVID-19 patient is the end of the world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. First, the facts. The patient is a healthy Hong Kong male who was diagnosed by PCR with …
What does the future hold for SARS-CoV-2? Will it remain in its current configuration, with 20% of infections causing serious damage? Will everyone on Earth need to be vaccinated regularly to prevent infection? Allow me to indulge in some speculation and suggest that SARS-CoV-2 will eventually become the fifth common cold coronavirus (CoV). There are …
Among the mountains of false information being peddled during the current pandemic, one of the most offensive is being used to drive opening of schools in the fall: that children do not transmit SARS-CoV-2. The results of multiple studies have shown that this assertion is incorrect. I’ll review two of them here. One study examined …
Don’t believe the headlines that SARS-CoV-2 is becoming more transmissible! Virologists are making conclusions that are not justified by the data. SARS-CoV-2 virus isolates from many parts of the world have a single amino acid change in the spike protein, D614G. This observation in itself doesn’t mean very much. It could be that the change …
No evidence for increased human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Read More »
