I would recommend Kamil Galeev threads to anyone interested in the history of Russia and Ukraine, he has written a ton of threads about a lot of different aspects to the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, which all look very well researched to me. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions though.
It looks like the proposed Covid-19 antibody find for Italy from 2019 is not uncontested among the science community, here is a comment from virologist Marion Koopmans [1], who was trying to validate the study's results:
"Yrs, we tried. Sofar have not been able to confirm. Serology in low prevalence situations is challenging so our criteria are stringent ( triple antigen positive and neutralisation). With that no positives pre march 2020 in our country and sofar not in panel from italy"
Do you have source for that claim?
I tried to find that recommendation, but all I came up with, was this fact check [1]. According to the fact check the CDC did NOT change cycle threshold, and the thresholds used to decide if test result is positive, are not different for vaccinated and unvaccinated.
The quoted 28 cycle threshold is apparently only used for deciding if a sample can be submitted for sequencing.
Also, PCR is not one test, one method, one process. There are hundreds of distinct PCR-type molecular nucleic amplification tests. CDC guidance would only apply to the one process they provide/support. For a survey of the ecosystem and the difficulties in standardizing Ct values, see e.g.
Well apparently it is possible, and it has been done, probably more than once.
In his German language podcast Dr. Drosten, a Coronavirus specialist from Charite Berlin, is addressing this exact issue.
In case you have never heard of him, his lab was the first to publish a working PCR test protocol for SARS-CoV-2 back in January 2020 [1]
Here is an DeepL translated excerpt from the transcript for his latest podcast [2]
"The whole thing has a certain complication. The Ct values that we have here are not easily comparable between the individual test manufacturers. Basically, you can say that a high Ct value always indicates a low viral load. And if the Ct value then becomes lower, then that also becomes a higher viral load. But we can only compare them numerically as long as we are in the same test system. The differences there are sometimes considerable. There are test manufacturers where a value of, let's say, 25 is nothing at all worrying, while the same value of 25 in another manufacturer's test shows that this is already a seriously infectious concentration. This is simply because these test manufacturers do not standardize on the Ct value. That would not make sense either. Instead, it makes sense to simply determine what lies behind the Ct values, namely the actual viral load. You can do that, you have to calibrate that."
and further
"We did that in the fall. All the laboratory work that is necessary for this was done in September and October. I had already explained that to the public in the summer, how that works. We worked in the lab to make this possible. We have also come so far that viral load standards... You really have to imagine it as a small plastic vial with a test solution in it. It contains killed virus of a known, defined concentration. You can order it in two or three defined concentrations from a company that sells such a thing. The purpose of this company is to provide quality assurance for laboratories and to offer the necessary calibration standards. And these calibration standards are produced here in our laboratory, this killed and exactly quantified virus. So we have produced this calibration standard. We have also developed instructions, which are then recommended by the Robert Koch Institute, on how the laboratories can use this calibration standard to convert their Ct values into viral load ranges, which either actually lead to an exact viral load or which - and this is our recommendation - lead to assessment ranges. And that is to an assessment of highly infectious, low infectious, and borderline. So roughly speaking, that is expressed a little bit more genteel and precise. There's even a recommendation on how to express that on the medical findings then. Medical laboratories can do all that. This is also done in practice in the hospital sector.
routinely used for discharge decisions. For example, a patient is in the intensive care unit. He is getting better. He should be transferred to a normal ward. Now the question is: Can we do that? Is he still highly infectious? Then a quantitative PCR test is carried out with these findings."
This WHO statement has been widely misinterpreted, is is not the case that PCR tests were resulting in inflated numbers of false positives, see Reuters fact check [1] from February 4, 2021, and [2] from April 8, 2021.
According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.
Quoting him:
> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.
> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:
> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.
> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA
> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?
> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.
> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.
I'm only a former bioinformaticist (not a clinical practitioner), but people tend to anthropomorphize the blind idiot god of evolution a bit too much. "Selection" is just the end result of survivorship bias.
CGG-CGG is the most potent furin cleavage site because it works on the outer cell membranes and on the interior. Viruses that have it will outcompete all others -- but all this means is that SARS-Cov-2 with the CGG-CGG FCS has been well adapted to humans since the beginning of the pandemic and less potent mutations haven't been able to keep up. There's no "natural/unnatural" axis to consider. The most infectious virus "prefers" to be the most infectious, indeed. It's tautological. Evidence of efficacy doesn't disprove laboratory alteration.
This is good summary of the intellectual property situation for mRNA vaccine. The link was posted 2 weeks ago on the Twitter stream of Katalin Kariko, pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology and VP at BioNTech.
I had the exact same question. What I could find was
this Reuters article [0] which lists nucleotides and special plastic containers as two of the items in short supply.
Relevant twitter thread by Kai Kupferschmidt, a science journalist, whose top-notch coverage of COVID-19 related topics, I have come to appreciate during this pandemic.
Key points:
- This paper tells little about the AstraZeneca vaccine, which seems to have a much higher risk of CVST than the mRNA vaccines.
Actual quote from press conference: "I think our data say actually nothing about the AZ vaccine."
- The number of CVSTs for mRNA vaccines are surprising and very different from the ones presented by ACIP yesterday.
I would recommend Kamil Galeev threads to anyone interested in the history of Russia and Ukraine, he has written a ton of threads about a lot of different aspects to the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, which all look very well researched to me. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions though.
Here is the meta thread for all the sub threads: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498377757536968711
Unrolled twitter threads:
1. Why Russia will lose this war? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497993363076915204.html
2. Information Warfare https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498313116312080384.html
3. Kadyrov's kingdom https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497612331953577991.html
4. "Ukrainian Nazism" - Putin's take https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497306746330697738.html
5. How Putin came to power https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1496711906412933121.html
6. FSB: State Security as the core of Putin's regime https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1496506490202513413.html
7. Valentina Matvienko: a sociological portrait of Putin's elite https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495790874235744258.html
8. Isn't Ukraine just a separatist Russian province? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495469553136066572.html
9. Ukrainian Geography https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495200579919958021.html
10. A crash introduction into ethnopolitical situation in Ukraine https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1494334415446577153.html
11. Russian demography https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1493602653586264076.html
12. Russian army https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1493968165717561346.html
13. Why Putin is afraid of Ukraine so much https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492960693737463813.html
14. Russian assabiyahs https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492549093771694082.html
15. The Horde and Russian Imperiogenesis https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492164056962195457.html
16. Why honour matters - The War in Ukraine in American context https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498692916511924232.html
17. Russian parliamentarism https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1499048492358111235.html
18. VDV: Why Russia lost this war https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1499377671855292423.html
19. Russian exports https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1499855858456567809.html
20. Dynamics of nuclear deterrence https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1500168838356381703.html