Francois Balloux

2.8K Followers
113 Following
13 Posts
Director of the UCL Genetics Institute. Interests in pathogen genomics, infectious disease epidemiology and global health.
Eric on Twitter

β€œNew school masking study suggests school districts that removed mask requirements had significantly more COVID spread One huge issue: this is an apples to oranges comparison due to masked contacts being exempt from testing requirements in MA. The "findings" here are useless.”

Twitter
Both rapid expansion of naive T-cell clones and 'cross-immune-primed' T-cells are most likely genuine mechanisms, but the newly described one, if its importance were to be more widely confirmed, may represent quite some scientific paradigm shift.
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The early immune response due to rapid expansion of naive T-cell clones is a distinct, non-mutually exclusive, mechanism from prior cross-immunisation provided by infection with a related viral lineage (eg. SARS-CoV-2 and endemic HCoVs).
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If some of the abundant naive T-cell clones happen by chance to recognise epitopes of an invading virus, they can expand fast enough to control and abort the infection, sometimes possibly even before seroconversion (ie. antibodies kicking in).
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We all have a large repertoire of naive T-cell precursor clones that recognise different bits of pathogens (epitopes). The relative frequency of those populations of clones is highly variable, with some being far more common than others.
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New preprint suggesting that rapid expansion of naive T cells can provide a fast and effective immune response to SARS-CoV-2, and likely other viral infections.
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.08.515436v1
@xtaldave
πŸ™„

Closing date this Friday - come and work with us in Bradford looking at #ArtificialIntelligence in #healthcare - in conjunction with the University of York Assuring Autonomy International Programme.

#MedTwitter #MedMastodon

https://www.improvementacademy.org/clinical-leadership-fellows-2023/

I recognise so many names on Mastodon, including people I fell out during the pandemic sometimes over fairly trivial differences of views.

I often wonder to what extent those conflicts were primarily caused by the toxic nature of twitter.

Anyway, I'm not planning to continue fighting Covid wars on here, and would welcome patching up our pandemic differences with anyone so inclined.

#Covid #twitter #polarization

Hey everyone. Just making sure everyone knows that direct messages on here are not end-to-end encrypted. They work more like a post, with visibility set to the person/people you tag.

This means an admin (like me), can read these by looking at the database/in backups.

I promise never to do this.

If that's not good enough (which is fine, obviously), please use something like signal for DMs

p.s. Twitter DMs are also not encrypted and anyone there can read them too.