Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

"The organization that has led the global effort to bring Covid vaccines to poor and middle-income countries will decide this week whether to shut down that project, ending a historic attempt to achieve global health equity with a tacit acknowledgment that the effort fell far short of its goal.

The deliberations reflect the reality that demand for Covid vaccines is waning quickly throughout the world and is near nonexistent in countries that have some of the lowest rates of coverage."

#GAVI #COVID #vaccines #PublicHealth #COVID19

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/health/covid-vaccines-covax-gavi.html

"Using the CD4+ T cell-mediated disease experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), we show here that this process is markedly suppressed when TLR9 signaling is increased, without noticeably affecting the transcriptome of primed T cells, indicating a purely quantitative effect on CD4+ T cell expansion."

#Immunology #TLR #eae

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/eji.202250059

“With the scale of the problems that exist in the world today, this is something that no one philanthropist or organisation – even the Gates Foundation – can tackle on its own.”

It was back in 2018 that the Gates Foundation began to examine how much more impactful philanthropic groups are when their workings are more collaborative, not just among donors but among the group’s various partners.'

https://www.ft.com/content/a8fe8268-0660-43ab-bda4-0759b9ea7057

Great (and brief, 12m) video at @aeon_co on Hopper and movies

https://aeon.co/videos/edward-hopper-came-of-age-with-cinema-as-an-artist-he-left-a-lasting-mark-on-it

"Whatever their evolutionary origin, our work demonstrates that energetically similar, nonfunctional conformations constrain the evolution of protein sequences. Proteins exist as ensembles of structures, with some highly populated and others rarely seen (54–57). The same mutation can have different effects on different structures within this energetic ensemble, redistributing their relative populations (54, 55, 58). This means that proteins must not only avoid mutations that destabilize native structures but also avoid mutations that stabilize nonnative structures."

#Evolution #InnateImmunity #pnas

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208029119#sec-2

Cheerful holiday reads:

"For a writer who spurns the conventions of punctuation, Stella Maris feels a lot like a full stop, a parting pronouncement on the whole sordid human experiment. It’s the second McCarthy novel to be published this year – a companion volume to The Passenger, released in late October. After 16 years of literary silence, McCarthy has produced a drought-busting, brain-vexing double act: first, a nihilistic vaudeville; now, its austere twin."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/07/stella-maris-by-cormac-mccarthy-review-a-slow-motion-study-of-obliteration

'US District Judge Robin Rosenberg in West Palm Beach, Florida, said in an order on Tuesday that the almost 2,500 lawsuits filed in federal court by plaintiffs were based on flawed science, and that the only reliable testing of the blockbuster drug undertaken showed an “unprovable risk of cancer”.

https://www.ft.com/content/c52440c6-8309-4d60-810f-512b67cec89c

"The Chinese government announced on Wednesday a broad easing of its exceptionally stringent Covid restrictions, an implicit concession to public discontent after mass street protests in more than a dozen cities a week ago challenged Beijing’s authority."

#COVID #COVID19

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/world/asia/china-zero-covid-protests.html