🦠 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.

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.🧪

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...

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 🧪

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

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....

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 🧪

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.🙂

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🧪

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.

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

#ECV 🧪 Olivier Schwartz, the former director of the Pasteur Institute, showed that HKU1, one of the 4 endemic #coronavirus, present among people since centuries, uses #TMPRSS2 as the receptor for entry into cells. TMPRSS2 is a protease critical for processing viral proteins, like spike or HA... 1/2

#ECV 🧪 A. Marzi showed us that an rVSV vaccine against Ebola Sudan that was until very recently spreading among peoplein Uganda protects experimentally infected monkeys from this virus. Yet importantly, the vaccine against Ebola-Zaire was not only inefficient, but accelerated disease and death. 1/2

#ECV 🧪T. Pietschmann talking about efforts to develop a vaccine against HCV (hepatitis C virus). Just like with HIV, we now have efficient drugs against HCV, but there is no vaccine. This is due to the enormous diversity of circulating HCV strains. To develop a vaccine, we would need antigens... 1/n

#ECV The presentation by S. Pöhlmann was a tour de force covering lots of their work on SA-CoV-2 spike, and its role in entering cells. They assessed in detail the alternative receptor TMEM106b for entry, which was shown to mediate entry instead of ACE-2. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Yet..

The European Congress of #Virology, ECV, starts soon in Cavtat, Croatia. eusv-congress.eu I look forward to meeting so many old colleagues and friends and hearing about the their new research. I wish to thank the organizers for this fantastic lineup of speakers and the choice of this gorgeous venue.

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

There have been many lab leak articles in the media recently, but none had actual new data In a new preprint, @zachhensel.bsky.social and I analyze early COVID-19 cases sequence data that have been overlooked so far. These new data continue to point to a natural origin ▫️1/7 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Es ist ein Meinungs-Artikel, aber diese "Meinung" beruft sich sehr wenig auf Fakten. Wir würden daher gerne ein paar Dinge aufklären: 1) „In den Vereinigten Staaten registrierten Regierungsbehörden" in vier Jahren "mehr als 1100 Laborvorfälle mit Bakterien, Viren und Toxinen“ 1/8

Recently, a lot of media gave attention to a report of BND, the main German intelligence agency, about a supposed COVID lab-leak origin. The report is from 2020, & claims that the lab leak is likely to a level of 80-95%. A balanced statement on the matter: www.helmholtz-hzi.de/en/media-cen... 1/3🧪

Many thanks to M. Jakobsen who led the team that identified a robust antigen-presenting function of plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDC). www.cell.com/cell-reports... pDC have been known for interferon responses to infections. The new study shows that they also support adaptive T cell responses. 🧪

A measles epidemic that cannot be contained is absolutely unacceptable for a developed country in the 21st century. Words fail me. 😡

Both Luka Modric and Luka Cicin-Sain can play football.

The 34th annual meeting of the @gesvirologie.bsky.social is coming to an end. It was instructive and fun. We learned a lot about #viruses from colleagues across Germany and the world. We look forward to the next meeting, taking place in Heidelberg next March. I'll be there, hope to see you too.

Let me just point here that transGENIC mice are not the same as tranGENDER mice. Transgenic mice are those where we introduce a gene into one of their chromosomes to study mechanisms of disease and find cures. Transgender mice, as described by D. Trump in his recent congress speech, do not exist.🧪

Elisabeth Puchhammer-Stöckl opens the first plenary session of the day with her talk about Herpesviruses as a potential key to neurological diseases. (CR)

@gesvirologie.bsky.social 2025: The Löffler-Frosch Medal, a symbol of lifetime achievements in the field of virology, has gone to Thomas Mettenleiter from the Friedrich Löffler Institute. Highly deserved! Thank you Thomas for your decade long comittment to advancing science.

@gesvirologie.bsky.social Jahrestagung 2025: E. Neugebauer from the Full lab showed a crucial role for a host cell factor named Dux4 in herpesviral replication. DUX4 is expressed at earliest stages of embryonic developemnt. Or after herpes infection. Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪

We start the 34th Annual meeting of the Virological Society @gesvirologie.bsky.social, this year in Hamburg. Many colleagues from the Swedish Virological Society are joining us. The first plenary is on Zoonoses with Sandra Ciesek (Frankfurt), Eva Haris (UC Berkeley) and Ake Lundqvist (Uppsala).

How can medical virology quickly adapt scientifically and diagnostically to a pandemic caused by a new pathogen? Examples from Covid-19 – Sandra Ciesek recapitulates the work of her institute in the first months of the pandemic.

RNA xkcd.com/3056