Professor of Immunology at Indiana University. TFH cells, TFR cells, germinal center regulation. Dad jokester. Struggling Pianist. Opinions are personal.
Honestly at beginning of the pandemic, I (naively) thought โhey, Iโm a professional immunologist! I have practical knowledge for once and I can help guide people through this mess and make a difference!โ Instead itโs turned into an endless slog against disinformation and the
The fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci, previously the most respected medical voice in the country, has been absolutely demonized, receives death threats is goddamned fucking insanity. And I'm sorry to curse so much but it's only because I'm so fucking frustrated by this situation!
saddest part for me is no one gives a fuck about my credentials and people just believe what they want to believeโ what they saw from some random person on social media or from an obvious quack promoting bogus facts and treatments.
My chair is quite the writer-- his out-of-office email text:
"Hi,
I'm on vacation. Like real vacation. Like I threatened people that I wasn't taking my laptop vacation. So I'm pretty unlikely to respond before August 1st. Now if you really, really need something, you can try and
It's just not fair
Said the overworked Chair
As he prepared his out of office reply
I give them direction
With a hint of affection
But this week I'm just not their guy
See ya soon.
Thanks"
@JonathanTurley
Yes, it was utterly hilarious that in a heated presidential campaign that will determine the very future of our democracy, that you called a candidate, who is a decent man and has never been credibly accused of a crime, genetically predisposed to being a criminal. Good one!
Jay Bhattacharya was just on CNN still whining about lockdowns when we haven't them here for 20 mos. He didn't have a good answer when asked about hospitals filling up now, without completely returning to normal life as he wants (but somehow protect the vulnerable). Embarrassing.
Since I'm getting slammed with people promoting "natural immunity" for COVID19 over vaccination, I do want to clarify that the issue is not (and never has been) that people *can't* have protective natural immunity for COVID19. The
#1
point is that it is much much more dangerous
(and)
Cassie, my cat, for any emeowgencies
Now I realize there's a chance that you're still reading this and I'm starting to wonder if you don't have something better to do. I mean I know it's the last week of July, but if all you're doing is spending your day reading
find someone from the list below to deal with your requests, problems, and crises. Note that ... is also off during this time, so honestly, the Department is currently completely lacking in leadership. Like when I'm there.
If you need immediate help you can contact (...)
Seeing "Catturd" trending reminds me of how unreal it is that we used to have a president who used to retweet a twitter account called "Catturd".
#TrumpIsStillALaughingStock
"DNC and Clinton for Trump" is a ridiculous trending topic being ridiculously distorted by trumpbots because the ridiculously lame FEC issued a ridiculous fine on the DNC & the HRC campaign & it has nothing to do with the veracity of the Steele dossier or Trump's Russia ties.
out of office replies, and surely not all of them will be as entertaining as this, I feel you need help. But again, try the emails above, I'm not available.
Still, if you are still reading at this point, I feel I need to reward you. So, a little poetry.
Darn! "This stark failure of intranasal vaccination to induce mucosal ... immune responses in humans after clear positive results in mice, hamsters & non-human primates highlights the need to develop more robust preclinical models for mucosal immunology."
@atrupar
@ImageFeeder
๐คฃ๐คฃ๐คฃ๐คฃ
Fox News host Tucker Carlson privately expressed contempt for former President Trump in text messages ... โI hate him passionately, I blew up at Peter Navarro today in frustration. I actually like Peter. But I canโt handle much more of this.โ
I don't see anyone else talking about it, but the case fatality rate (CFR) for the Omicron wave in NY state is ~0.1%. This is a truly remarkable decrease from the ~1.5% CFR for the big COVID wave at the end of 2020 and the general CFR seen during the pandemic.
I get that the CD8 T cell response to COVID19 can be protective and it's good to have vaccines that induce CD8s, but I feel like given how nasty this virus is, that our main goal in vaccination has to be an neutralizing antibody response to block infection before it starts.
to get infected with SARS-CoV-2 than to get vaccinated, because of a much much high rate of severe disease and even death from infection than being vaccinated, even now with all the various treatments we have for the disease. I'm not sure why this isn't super obvious though
@angie_rasmussen
The fact that he went on Tucker Carlson is enough for me to write him off as a dishonest broker and willing to overlook white supremacy for whatever attention he gets
For all the talk about Covid and Long Covid I still see here on Twitter, in my personal real life, people have really moved on and are back to pre-pandemic behavior, even the microbiology and immunology researchers I know.
I know I'm guilty of this, but doesn't it seem like 99% of papers on Tregs completely ignore the specificity of the Treg TCR and just act like they suppress regardless of antigen specificity?
I know there are some people convinced that vaccination is more dangerous than getting the disease. But there's no evidence for that and if you believe that, I don't think there's anything I can say to change your mind. The other part of "natural immunity" is it is more
Keto Kariko: rarely got grants, never got her own lab, never earned more than $60K. For 40 years, she kept working on mRNAโan unpopular topic. Her work is the basis for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
I was hoping "The Day the Delusions Died" was about people finally realizing what an insanely treasonous criminal Trump is and leaving the
#MAGACult
. Instead it's apparently a lame anti-woke screed related to the Oct 7th Hamas terror attacks, which I have no desire to read.
@itspatsworld
Show us the math on that, because I doubt "My Pillows" were such a huge item for that store ... I never saw them in there. Also, My Pillow pillows suck-- they are lumpy foam-filled crap.
Biden's surprise visit to Ukraine today was the first time a U.S. president entered an active war zone not controlled by the U.S. Totally badass.
#DarkBrandon
#SlavaUkraini
The point of this paper wasn't a thorough examination of natural versus vaccine-induced immunity but to point out that natural immunity can produce ineffective antibodies and as a result less neutralizing antibodies.
@JesseKellyDC
believing that climate change is a serious threat to the future of humanity doesnโt make you a communist, it makes you a caring person. I donโt approve of their tactics but at least they arenโt trying to pretend thereโs no problem like you while earth becomes unlivable.
unpredictable than getting vaccinated & doesn't always produce good neutralizing Abs. While the vaccines have taken a hit because of the massive spread of the virus & mutation into evasive variants the vaccine + booster is still very effective against severe disease & death.
There's always a thrill of having a tweet go viral... but then the cringe of the eventual trolling that comes with it... I had to mute the thread. And now they are going after my pinned tweet. Oy.
@What46HasDone
wow, that's a great way to put it. The death of that young man was truly needless and undoubtedly spurred on by online outrage over something most people don't even understand fully.
How we used to make scientific figures for papers ca. late 1980โs โ cutting out flow histograms and gluing them to a typed page then itโs all professionally photographed and printed out. ๐คช
I know there are important differences but still I think SARS-CoV-2 is not unlike HIV-1, where vaccine-induced CD8s really aren't protective and what's needed is high antibody titers to block the virus before it gets going.
Key point from
@VirusesImmunity
's talk on mild vs severe COVID19: mild disease strongly correlates with early IFN and early neutralizing Abs, whereas severe disease correlated with late production of early IFN and early neutralizing Abs.
#AAI2021
Some super interesting new findings on the germinal center response just came out in Cell. These findings make a lot of sense but do change our view of how affinity maturation occurs in the GC.
So as I conclude a week of intro immunology lectures to first year grad students, I'm struck by how outdated some of the concepts are. I've been giving these lectures for over 15 years now (yikes!) and clearly the field has evolved quite a bit in that time. One concept that is
@stepantxt
@tweetforAnna
@nytimes
The NYT's coverage of the Russia wear on Ukraine has really pissed me off, alongside so many other stories they've covered problematically over the years.
I just had a mystical experience. I had the text of my R01 application all done & then spent an hour inserting figures, making sure it matched the text & sized ok. When I was finished, everything was lined up just right & it was exactly 12 pages. That's got to be a sign, right?
The NYTimes is lost in so many ways. Of course they have a bad history on Ukraine in particular. If you've ever seen the film "Mr. Jones", it covers how the NYTimes helped Stalin cover up the holodomor genocide.
I give up trying to understand what the NYTimes is doing these days.
I mean yeah, Ukraine is not telling a FORMER intel official โhow many troops has Ukraine lost, how many pieces of equipment has Ukraine lost.โ
What does this even suppose to mean?
Made me laugh-- "Secretory IgA has long been a divisive molecule. Some immunologists point to the mild phenotype of IgA deficiency to justify ignoring it..."
This idea that Covid vaccinated people can shed the vaccine and kill unvaccinated people who are exposed to the shedded vaccine may well be the most incredibly stupid thing I have ever heard and yet, for God's sake,
At one point I was looking into trying to do a research project on Long Covid, but when I mentioned it to some people at work, there was just no interest. I might as well have said I was interested in studying UFOs.
As we witness the horrors of what Russia has done in Ukraine-- the GENOCIDE and the LIES-- we MUST NOT FORGET the many ties of the GOP to Putin & Russia. It was NOT JUST TRUMP. Ideologically the GOP admires Putin and his brand of white nationalism, authoritarianism & bigotry.
@KatiePhang
I can only hope that she finally wakes up and pursues justice (unlikely) or that she does something so egregiously wrong that Jack Smith has grounds for finally getting her taken off this critically important case.
My lab's paper on allergic priming in the gut & how allergen-specific IgE responses develop is finally out!
Thanks to
@IN_trons
for his super hard work on this project.
This fits with the recent description of extra-follicular B cell responses in COVID patients, which are typically associated with auto reactive B cell responses. Wild, scary story.
New exciting collaboration work with
@Aaronmring
lab reveals diverse and functional autoantibodies in
#COVID
patients.
Our findings provide clues for why COVID affects many organs, induce range of symptoms that are long lasting.
Thread (1/n)
Who else thinks that if we had a H5N1 pandemic in the human population with 50% fatality rate, that all of a sudden, mask wearing and vaccination wouldn't be seen as such ineffective interventions?
@PalmerReport
I loved the bit Maddow played last night where some QAnon freak was saying very seriously how Trump was JFKs cousin and Mike Flynn was descended from Lincoln and Gen Patton and they are all related to Mussolini some how. Totally off the rails crazy train.