This is a big loss for virology and infectious disease community. Helen Branswell was a brilliant, ethical, evidence-based science journalist and was so reliable during the COVID pandemic. She never fell for the ridiculous conspiracies or raised false equivalencies just to get more clicks and readers, Helen was very special, I will miss her

My comments with @CBC @CBCNews on Helen Branswell the great science journalist who left us this week cbc.ca/news/health/helen-bra…

Yes and while you are at it @nytimes please do a story on American scientists who receive violent threats and legal thuggery on a daily basis, and your @nytopinion columns encouraging attacks on scientists with your fake opinion pieces on gain of function, lab leak Covid conspiracies, shameless

Many thanks @BloombergTV @business for hosting me this Sat AM as I detail the story of Yersinia pestis and two forms of plague, why the steppes of Central Asia is a plague hotspot and even the origin of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, why there’s a long established Russian institute located in Irkutsk and what we know and don’t know about the recent pneumonia death

I don’t think it would be complicated to develop a plague vaccine, both the Y. pestis F1 and V proteins look like solid targets and now that our Baylor-Texas Children’s Hospital scientists have advanced mRNA technology, I don’t see a lot of technical roadblocks. Right now there’s no plague vaccine available in the U.S., the Russians use an older live attenuated vaccine that has problems, but they’re still at an advantage. I doubt anyone but the U.S. Govt would support mRNA plague vaccine development, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon…

Many thanks @JohnBerman for hosting me this evening on @AC360 as I explain why it makes sense for a Russian institute on the northern edge of the Central Asian steppes where plague circulates in wild animal populations to study the plague bacillus but the puzzling disconnect between Russian Government communications and the actions around quarantine and hospital control

Ann is doing a deep dive and careful reading of @MollyJongFast book #HowToLoseYourMother @PenguinBooks the cat has been helping her through it, it’s quite intense I hear bits and pieces, quite the journey

Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USSR maintained an extensive bioweapons capability. Ken Alibek (aka Alibekov) defected to the U.S., debriefed the CIA and wrote a book about it called Biohazard. But it was never clear what was dismantled with Russia under Putin. I don’t have any inside baseball on this, but it was a reason I became concerned when DHHS under RFK Jr dismantled our pandemic preparedness and cut off vaccine development. It was tone deaf to the bioweapons from our enemies. People forget that it was both flu and the threat of bioterrorism that led DA Henderson and PK Russell to build BARDA for new countermeasures. Guessing this will be contained but it’s a wake up call that our national biosecurity is being dismantled and we’re vulnerable

I’ve said it before but glad @IntegralAnswers has spelled it out @doritmi is a hero, whenever I’m faced with a thorny legal or ethical issue about vaccines I text or call her, unfortunately of late this is now almost weekly. She’s also helped me with the recent surge of smear campaigns my family I’ve endured this summer. Dr. Reiss always takes my calls. She’s a brilliant legal scholar and intellect, a very special person