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#covid

8 posts7 participants0 posts today

The mRNA technology behind coronavirus vaccines is now being used to create bespoke vaccines for cancer patients.

"Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.

Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

The UK was ready. We had fridges and we had world-class manufacturing and research facilities. During the pandemic, we had proven we could open and deliver clinical trials fast. Also, the UK had established a genomic global lead with Genomics England and the 100,000 Genome Project. All doctors and nurses in this country are trained in genomics.

So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.

For many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.

We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It’s now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That’s completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long.

What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there’s a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn’t. We’re hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive."

- Dr. Lennard Lee, UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford

wired.com/story/wired-health-l

WIRED · Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer VaccinesBy João Medeiros
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"The act of forgetting has always been a tool of oppression. We cannot adequately resist that which has been revised, erased, or forgotten by our community members. But few will acknowledge that this is happening with COVID. Just as one may utter that “slavery was back then, get over it”, when we use verbiage like “post-pandemic” we are rendering oppression as a static past event rather than an ever-evolving present that shapes our shared future. This tactic has always been useful to those who wish to profit off of our suffering and the cycle will continue to repeat if we do not acknowledge and act on the truth of our current reality. If we do not reckon with our failures to each other around COVID and do the work to remedy it, are we better than those who try to ban our people’s histories’ from the schools? We aid in the crusade to forget every day when we do not consider the pandemic as both current and deadly."

~V. Copeland

forgeorganizing.org/article/re

The ForgeReflecting on COVID, Year 5 - The ForgeVee Copeland, a disabled organizer and former policy analyst details their experience facing the lack of care in movement strategy around surviving the current administration It has been a treacherous five years since the COVID pandemic began.  According to the World Health Organization, more than seven million people across the globe have died from COVID-19, […]

Hey did anybody hear anything yesterday to "remember" or "never forget" the day that we entered the global pandemic called #Covid?

It's been 23 years and we still get bombarded with insistence that we never forget 9/11!!

But not one rememberance of Covid.

DEATHS:

7,090,776 - Covid
2,996 - 9/11

ILLNESSES RELATED TO:

65,000,000 - #LongCovid
45,200 - 9/11

If we had a 9/11 every day since March 11, 2020, the total deaths would still not be as many as the deaths from Covid.

I facilitated an online workshop for @freetechproject tonight and it's the first time we tackled technology to fight #Covid (Co2 monitors, air purifiers, #HEPA, #CorsiRosenthal boxes, #NukitTempest, etc) as well as why this is important (what Covid is, how it spreads, etc) and the small (predominantly older) group was very open to the ideas, sincerely inquisitive about the topic, interested in reducing risk, aware of inclusion issues, and sensitive to my own experiences as carer for a partner disabled by Covid. I'm also realising that people genuinely refer to "Covid" in the past tense sometimes because they wrongly associate it with government policy, while at the same time they very clearly understand that #CovidIsNotOver. My point is, keep tackling the topic, and keep giving folks the benefit of the doubt -- humans are of course good at heart and state policies, and obviously the establishment media, may very well indeed not, in fact, reflect people's actual concerns about Covid.

Continued thread

3) Measles infections cause immune amnesia, which means that for about 3 years your body reacts to infectious agents as if you were encountering them for the first time. This is Very Bad.

Mechanism: because the virus infects immune cells including memory T-cells and B-cells, when your body beats the infection it wipes out everything you learned from prior infections.

The potential when combined with #COVID 's impacts on the immune system is really alarming. asm.org/Articles/2019/May/Meas

(3/4)

ASM.orgMeasles and Immune Amnesia | ASM.orgMeasles is much more serious than a rash and fever: it also causes immune amnesia and leaves patients especially vulnerable to secondary infection.
Continued thread

2) Measles is hilariously contagious compared to illnesses I'm more familiar with, like typical flu and #COVID.
The R0 for measles is somewhere around 12-18, compared to 1.3 and 2-8* (*continues to vary! SARS-CoV-2 is still an emerging disease)

These specific numbers are all debated, however, the general scope of "over ten times as contagious as usual flu" holds.
Here, have a wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_re

(2/4)

en.wikipedia.orgBasic reproduction number - Wikipedia

‼️ Cause of post-#COVID inflammatory shock in children identified: Reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus appears to cause the rare condition #MISC. The findings, uncovered by a team from #CharitéBerlin & the DRFZ, have now been published in #Nature.

💡 These insights open the door to new treatment methods, potentially not limited to MIS-C.

👉 charite.de/en/service/press_re

#CharitéPaper #Science #Research #Medicine #EBV #PIMS #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #corona
@nature.portfolio

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How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic Edited by Mara Mills, Harris Kornstein, Faye Ginsburg, and Rayna Rapp
Afterword by Judith Heumann
Foreword by Ed Yong

Open Access PDF + ePub

opensquare.nyupress.org/books/

Open Square: NYU PressHow to Be Disabled in a Pandemic[Open Access] A chronicle of ableism and disability activism in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemicHow to Be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the pivotal experiences of disabled people living in an early epicenter of COVID-19: New York City. Among those hardest hit by the pandemic, disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans for medical rationing and refuted the eugenic logic of mainstream politicians and journalists who “reassure” audiences that only older people and those with disabilities continue to die from COVID-19. At the same time, as exemplified by the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleToldYou, disability expertise has become widely recognized in practices such as accessible remote work and education, quarantine, and distributed networks of support and mutual aid. This edited volume charts the legacies of this “mass disabling event” for uncertain viral futures, exploring the dialectic between disproportionate risk and the creativity of a disability justice response.How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic includes contributions by wide-ranging disability scholars, writers, and activists whose research and lived experiences chronicle the pandemic’s impacts in prisons, migrant detention centers, Chinatown senior centers, hospitals in Queens and the Bronx, subways, schools, housing shelters, social media, and other locations of public and private life. By focusing on New York City over the course of three years, the book reveals key themes of the pandemic, including hierarchies of disability "vulnerability," the deployment of disability as a tool of population management, and innovative crip pandemic cultural production. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic honors those lost, as well as those who survived, by calling for just policies and caring infrastructures, not only in times of crisis but for the long haul.

From the link:
“Question  What is the relative severity of illness caused by SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)?
Findings  In this cohort study of more than 141 000 nonhospitalized US veterans who were concurrently tested for all 3 viruses and diagnosed with a single infection between August 2022 and March 2023 or between August 2023 and March 2024, RSV was associated with lower 30-day risk of hospitalization, and COVID-19 was associated with a higher risk of long-term mortality through 180 days.
Meaning  COVID-19 was associated with more severe disease outcomes, including long-term mortality, compared with influenza or RSV.”
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamai

Wearing a #mask can’t help me if I am an idiot. When I travel on planes and trains and stuff I use an Envo mask with a valve. It’s super comfortable and the soft gel edge has no leaks. No fogging up the glasses.

The valve is a little round flap of silicon and mine fell out right before this trip. As I was hastening out the door, I quickly reassembled it. Well, I installed it BACKWARDS. So it was open when I was breathing in, and closed when I was breathing out.

After like 5 flights and 4 train journeys, across 10 days of travel, I just noticed it today.

Never fear! Captain Facepalm is here!

If I pick up #covid on this trip, I will have done it to myself. 🤦‍♂️

Checking in for my flight back to the US and this bullshit comes up. It’s galling because (a) it’s a #privacy invasion, (b) it’s bullshit in March 2025 because the #CDC hasn’t given a flying fuck about #COVID in years. And (c) the kakistocracy is dismantling the CDC anyways.

But it’s mandatory. And united will send it to some government database for Elon’s #DOGE cronies to hoover up. But nobody will be any safer or healthier as a result. Nobody is “putting my health and safety first”
#uspol #flying #travel

This. I've been thinking about FTD for a long time. #Covid can trigger this. And the burning question I've had from the beginning (that deep down, I really don't want to hear the answer for), is "Is there any hope for even partial recovery?" I want my loved ones back, as the people they were before covid. And I don't think they are coming back.
x.com/JamesThrot/status/189592

X (formerly Twitter)James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath (@JamesThrot) on XWe are currently watching what I can only describe as the early stages of Frontotemporal Dementia on a mass scale playing out in real time. The geopolitical ramifications of this are worrisome. I am in no doubt about what I’m seeing. The cause? Ceaseless SARS-CoV-2 infections
Replied in thread

@ProPublica
During #TheOrangeMenace's first term, I half-joked they didn't care if millions of people died of #Covid b/c The Far Right was exploiting it as a means of #PopulationControl.

But here we are in a second term and two more potential #pandemics. If they WANTED to prevent all those deaths, this would be the perfect "Do Over"... a chance to "learn from their mistakes" and take the #BirdFlu & #Measles outbreaks seriously.

But instead, it appears they are out to kill millions more.