🦠 Abstract submission for the 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for Virology is open! Share your research with the virology community and help shape the scientific dialogue next year in Heidelberg. 🕐 Deadline: Jan 4, 2026 🔗 virology-meeting.de/programme-ab... #GfV2026 #virology #virologymeeting

This is important and needs to be shared everywhere. American Scientific Associations working in the field of Infection and Immunity have said that enough is enough and are calling for RFK Jr. Resignation: www.idsociety.org/news--public... This is an act of civil courage that I strongly support.🧪

Governor Jared Polis says on a reddit AMA that Colorado will fix it so that people can access COVID vaccines without a prescription within the next few days.

Source:

This is so sad, because avoidable. We know much more now than 45 years ago. Vaccine technologies and infection tracing are drastically improved. Yet, fight against infections has become a partisan and ideological issue, slowing real-world deployment of medical knowledge. Politics is failing us.

Isabella Eckerle@eckerleisabella.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Would never ever be possible today and I am quite pessimistic that we will eradicate another human disease in the years (decades?) to come.

I've been elected as speaker of the Working Group on #Vaccines of the German #Immunological Society (@dgfi-org.bsky.social). I thank all members who voted & look forward to the upcoming mandate. Jan 14-16 '26, is our next #Vaccine #Workshop at @helmholtzhzi.bsky.social in Braunschweig. Stay tuned! 🧪

Interesting take. It rings a bell with me. Antivaxers refusing vaccines is not the fault of imperfect communication by scientists. Antivaxer groups have agency and thus responsibility for the growth in vaccine hesitancy. This is not just scientists that fail to reach impossible standards of proof.🧪

David Roberts@volts.wtf · 12mo ago

I really enjoyed this @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social pod about Covid & MAHA, but one thing it repeatedly revealed is a habit of liberals that drives me crazy. A short 🧵.

I was asked by the international office of Deutsche Welle for a comment of the funding cuts for mRNA vaccine development (linke below). My lab is developing a vaccine technology that competes with the mRNA one, and I have no personal incentives to advocate for it. 1/2 🧪 www.dw.com/en/why-us-bu...

Why US budget cuts could derail future mRNA vaccine progress – DW – 08/14/2025

US Government cuts to mRNA vaccine research could set back technological advances and reduce access to therapies, while raising their costs.

dw.com

I am at the International #Herpesvirus Workshop (IHW) in Berlin, where the cream of the #herpes science crop gathers this year to share data and ideas (hopefully, not herpes #viruses). I look forward to the talks and may post under #IHW some thoughts on the most interesting talks by my colleagues.🧪

Paul Offit has a detailed takedown on the new misguided #vaccine policies of RFK Jr. pauloffit.substack.com/p/rfk-jrs-cr... In brief, it is a combination of arrogance with willful ignorance of scientific #evidence. An entire change in policies is justified by a single outlier paper from 1980. 1/2 🧪

RFK Jr.’s Cruelest Cut of All

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just eliminated U.S. vaccine funding for the world’s children. Why?

pauloffit.substack.com

Filter the microplastic from your blood through a plastic filter! What could possibly go wrong?

Heather Shearer@heather-sea55.bsky.social · last yr.

🧪 “no published scientific evidence that microplastics can be effectively filtered from human blood…claims that dialysis or other treatments can remove them should be viewed with scepticism, especially when the filtration systems themselves are made of plastic.” theconversation.com/orlando-bloo...

This is important - there is vaccine derived polio in German sewage water. Please share in your networks these information for MDs and parents (only in German, sorry). bsky.app/profile/rki....

Robert Koch-Institut@rki.de · last yr.

In den vergangenen Wochen wurden in Abwasserproben erneut #Polioviren nachgewiesen, die vom Schluckimpfstoff abgeleitet sind. ☑️ Wo Viren nachgewiesen wurden ☑️ Wer erkranken kann ☑️ Warum #Impfschutz wichtig ist ☑️ Was Ärztinnen, Ärzte und Eltern wissen sollten Details im #EpidBull 🔗 rki.de/epidbull

We started the Cres conference with a great talk by Tony Hunter, spanning his work over 5+ decades, from early identification of protein kinases as drivers of cell transformation and cancer to his recent work on PIN1 and cholesterol biosynthesis in bladder cancer pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39808064/

I am attending the Frontiers in Drug Discovery workshop on the beautiful island of Cres, Croatia in the next few days. Even more beautiful is the lineup of speakers, with big names in cell and molecular biology, immunology and biochemistry. Kudos to @idikic.bsky.social, I. Stagljar and T. Lenac 1/2

While LLM are useful and make us much more efficient, thez also make us complacent and kinda lazy. Now there is more evidence on that. time.com/7295195/ai-c... h/t @mjkellner.bsky.social 🧪

ChatGPT's Impact On Our Brains According to an MIT Study

The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.

time.com

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years. NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

"You're laughing? Big Balls lost his government job and you're laughing?"

Like every other Friday, today my lab has a journal club. We will discuss a new paper by the @virusesimmunity.bsky.social Iwasaki lab on Ig responses to endogenous retroviruses. I write this to highlight an AI tool for rapid analysis of PDF manuscripts notebooklm.google.com. We tried it and... 1/2🧪

This is a very nice report on the local TV network (German only) on our efforts to develop a #biotech platform that allows modular development of #vaccines eliciting non-waning immunity against an array of potential targets. Our first aims is a vaccine against #RSV. Others will follow. Stay tuned.🙂

Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung (HZI)@helmholtzhzi.bsky.social · last yr.

Die HZI-Forscher @cicin-sainlab.bsky.social & Henning Jacobsen entwickeln eine Technologie, die Auffrischungsimpfungen überflüssig machen soll. Mithilfe eines #Herpesvirus aus Mäusen soll zunächst langanhaltender Schutz gegen #RSV erreicht werden. Sat1 berichtet. www.sat1regional.de/auffrischung...

Very proud of my former student Zeeshan, who has identified a genetic determinant of T-cell memory formation. www.nature.com/articles/s41... He & the team of G. Belz show that GFI1 is critical for the establishment & maintenance of antigen specific T-cell populations. Why does this matter? 1/3🧪

GFI1-driven transcriptional and epigenetic programs maintain CD8+ T cell stemness and persistence - Nature Immunology

Belz and colleagues show that GFI1, a transcriptional repressor that recruits histone-modifying enzymes, is necessary for the generation and maintenance of stem cell memory CD8+ T cells.

nature.com

The @gesvirologie.bsky.social has now published g-f-v.org/en/fuenf-jah... addressing among others the merits of Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for ending COVID-19 lockdowns, focused protection of vulnerable, while allowing low-risk groups to live normally & build natural immunity. 1/5

I gave a talk on COVID vaccines yesterday. I combined in my introduction slide two key meta-analyses, with the good and the bad news about COVID vaccines. While mRNA and some protein vaccines outperform infection in terms of antibody responses and protectivity, this does not last that long. 1/2🧪

The Virological Society (Gesellschaft für Virologie - GfV), along with the German Society for Infectiology has issued a statement on lessons learned from the last pandemic. While it was originally issued in German, it is now also available in English. You can find it here:🧪 g-f-v.org/en/fuenf-jah...

Second day of the @www.helmholtz.de #COVIPA Symposium on Pandemic Preparedness. Really excited now to listen to Leif Sander @sanderlab.bsky.social on the role of innate immunity in respiratory viral infections 🤩

Really grateful to my host Milena for her hospitality at the Pasteur Institute. Amazing research environment and facilities, and awesome faculty. I look forward to more opportunities for future joint projects.

Great success for our team! This provides us another million in funding to develop our vaccine concept in pre-clinical models. The idea is based on a modular CMV vaccine vector that forms a slow-releasing antigenic depot, and thus obviates the need for vaccine boosters. Stay tuned for more.

Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung (HZI)@helmholtzhzi.bsky.social · last yr.

Das IBT Lower Saxony hat gestern knapp 3 Mio. Euro an drei innovative biomedizinische Startup-Ideen vergeben. Die Impfstoffprojekte #ENDURIVAC @cicin-sainlab.bsky.social & #V3ECTORY @twincore.bsky.social konnten die Jury überzeugen. Glückwunsch an alle Gewinner! www.helmholtz-hzi.de/media-center...

Dr. Anthony Fauci urges Americans not to accept "Normalization of Untruths".

The #ECV in BEautiful Croatia has come to an end. My highlight was the acceptance speech of Stipan Jonjić, my PhD mentor and friend, who was awarded the Yearly Award of the European Virology Association. Stipan made tremendous advances to our understanding of NK and T cells in virus control, &...1/2

🧪 #ECV Another herpesvirus doing a lot of severe & severely unappreciated damage to the brain is the Epstein Barr virus (EBV). E. Puchamer-Stockl from Vienna told us at the virology conference of EBV's effect on multiple sclerosis (MS), where people with many antibodies against EBV developed MS. 1/2

🧪 #ECV Ilija Brizic was telling us today about the impact of latent #CMV #infection on #brain function. Congenital CMV infection is the most common infectious cause of malformations and disabilities. 1:1000 newborns will be hindered for life due to such infections, where no vaccine is available. 1/n