John Purdy

So very proud of my friend @jimalwine.bsky.social for providing accurate information among a sea of misinformation.

🚨ATTENTION EARLY CAREER VIROLOGISTS🚨 We have a webinar on how to get a faculty position! Hear from Jean Lim,
@drsprggs.bsky.social and @tylernstarr.bsky.social. Check your email for registration link and form to submit questions in advance.

Interested in shaping ASV decisions? Do you know someone who is? Nominations for ASV President-Elect and a number of Virology Councilors are due on November 21. Look for the nomination form in your ASV member email!

Medicine Nobel goes to three researchers who identified immune system’s security guards Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi discovered regulatory T cells that prevent autoimmune disease

This year’s #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists for discovering how the immune system distinguishes friend from foe. https://scim.ag/3Wt5rdi

NIH froze funding for clinical trials at a major university. By fall, they’ll run out of funding | CNN Northwestern University hasn’t received any funding from the NIH since the end of March. Not only could patients potentially stop receiving treatments that trials provided, the research itself could b...

New CNN story about clinical trials damaged by the funding freeze at Northwestern.

www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/h...

1/n

Convergent evolution in nucleocapsid facilitated SARS-CoV-2 adaptation for human infection | Journal of Virology After its emergence, SARS-CoV-2 rapidly adapted to human infection, acquiring numerous mutations across its genome. Many of these mutations remain uncharacterized. This study examines a mutational hot...

2 in a row in the Journal of Virology.

A new paper from our group & the new Johnson lab at UTMB.

Here, we find multiple variant mutations in the SR rich domain of N facilitate improved infection with #SARS2.

A brief thread since this didn't get preprinted

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

A call for the United States to continue investing in science | mBio The U.S. life science research mission is critical not only to human health and understanding the natural world but also to agriculture and food production, technological innovations, socioeconomic pr...

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

"If NIH and HHS leadership comply with these orders, as a cisgender bisexual man I am forced to ask myself what support, if any, I should expect to receive when this administration decides to unfairly and irrationally target other populations within the LGBTQ..."

- Me January 29 to Acting NIH Dir.

Graph showing that prior to 1963 when the measles vaccine was introduced, there were around 300,000-700,000 measles cases per year. Within a few years of the vaccine, the number of cases fell below 20,000/year. There were a blips where cases rose, but shortly after the second vaccine dose was recommended in 1989, annual cases have generally been well below 1,000 cases. In 2000, measles elimination was declared in the US. Now we have sporadic outbreaks that typically spread among unvaccinated people. Chart is from Center for American Progress and is based on CDC data on measles cases.

Vaccines work! As measles cases have recently been reported in Alaska, Georgia, New York, Rhode Island and Texas, it's important to remember that prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, measles killed 400-500 people and resulted in ~48,000 hospitalizations per year.

Congratulations to @rmokry.bsky.social on her first pub from the lab.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...