#Voroshilova

[balletthebestphotographs]

Elena Lyskova, Anita Voroshilova and Maria Sheleva

Elena Lyskova Елена Лыскова, Anita Voroshilova Анита Ворошилова and Maria Shevela Мария Шевела, “Pas de trois of the Bees” (“Pas de trois des Abeilles”), “Confiturenburg” scene from Act II of the “Nutcracker Щелкунчик”; libretto and stage by Marius Petipa adapted by Mikhail Chemiakin Михаил Шемякин based on the fairy tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (1816) by Ernst Hoffmann; choreo by Kirill Simonov Кирилл Симонов; music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky Пётр Чайковский; set, costume and production design by Mikhail Chemiakin Михаил Шемякин; Mariinsky Ballet Мариинский театр, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

The “Confiturenburg” scene, in other “Nutcracker” productions, is also known as the “Land of the Sweets” or “Le Royaume des Délices“.

Source and more info at: Mariinsky Ballet Website Mariinsky Ballet on Flickr Mariinsky Ballet on TikTok Mariinsky Ballet on Twitter Mariinsky Ballet on Pinterest Mariinsky Ballet on Telegram Mariinsky Ballet on You Tube Mariinsky Ballet on Facebook Mariinsky Ballet on Instagram Mariinsky Ballet on Instagram (videos) Mariinsky Ballet on VKontakte Mariinsky Ballet on Mariinsky TV

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Note II: Original quality of photographs might be affected by compression algorithm of the website where they are hosted.

[balletomaneblog]

The Top Female Vaganova Graduates of the Past Ten Years: Then and Now (Part I)

2015 - Renata Shakirova (Mariinsky Principal)

This was actually a tough one since 2015 was such an amazing year for graduates, especially considering that both the ninth year and eighth years graduated together. But in the end, Shakirova just seemed to me the most professional and technically strong in 2015! A star then and now!

Role I'd love to see her début: The Sylph

Special Mentions: Anastasia Lukina, Nika Tsvikhtaria, Elena Solomyanko

2015 (Laurencia at Graduation):

2024 (Dulcinea Variation in Don Quixote) :

2016 - Alyona Kovalyova (Bolshoi Principal)

This one was a no-brainer. While Maria Ilyushkina is a rising star now, her technique and strength in her Vaganova days were still developing while Kovalyova was the clear featured star graduate. After being rejected from Mariinsky for being too tall, she was offered a contract with the Bolshoi and quickly rose through the ranks, including spending only one year in the corps de ballet!

Role I'd love to see her début: Anna Karenina

Special Mentions: Maria Ilyushkina, Laura Fernandez-Gromova

2016 (Raymonda in Grand Pas shortly after graduating):

2024 (Nikiya in La Bayadère):

2017 - Eleonora Sevenard (Bolshoi Principal):

Another obvious choice, Sevenard was the clear stand-out. She was accepted into both the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi, before choosing the Bolshoi! She spent two years in the corps but was given soloist and principal opportunities right off the bat, including debuting as Masha in the Nutcracker in her first season. She was promoted to principal in 2023!

Role I'd love to see her début: Aurora

Special Mentions: Vlada Borodulina

2017 (Fairy Doll during graduate year):

2024 (Kitri in Don Quixote):

2018 - Maria Khoreva (Mariinsky First Soloist)

2018 was another year like 2015 with tons of amazing graduates. However, the graduate who garnered the most attention before and after graduation and who finished at the top of the class is Maria Khoreva. At only eighteen her technique was shockingly close to flawless and only two months into her first season she was promoted to first soloist! Khoreva has not be dancing for most of the past two seasons due to injury, but she is finally returning to the Mariinsky stage at the start of this season!

Role I'd love to see her début: Parasha (Bronze Horseman)

Special mentions: Maria Bulanova, Anastasia Nuikina, Daria Ionova, Anastasia Petushkova, Biborka Lendvai, Anita Voroshilova

2018 (Paquita shortly after her graduation):

2023 (Odile in Swan Lake last year):

2019 - Alexandra Khiteyeva (Mariinsky First Soloist)

Alexandra Khiteyeva was by far the strongest graduate of 2019. She had been featured in Vaganova graduation performances since her sixth year. After joining the Mariinsky, her initial progress was slowed due to COVID, but after four years in the Corps she was promoted, first to Second Soloist and just recently to First Soloist!

Role I'd love to see her début: Juliet

Special mentions: Svetlana Savelieva, Yulia Spiridonova

2019 (Paquita at graduation):

2023 (Cristina in Paquita):

[thecutiecollective]

Indiana

IG: Indi_Rebel

Represented by Jem Models

📷 Evelina Voroshilova

[love-for-carnation]

Blooming gardens. Sweet William, 2022 Natalia Novikova (b. 1976, Russian)

Natalia is a member of the Union of Artists of Russia, member of the International Art Foundation. She implements her projects under the pseudonym Natalia Voroshilova. Graduated from the Faculty of Art and Graphics of the Moscow Pedagogical State University. The thesis was devoted to jewelry art. She takes part in exhibitions in Russia and abroad. She is a participant and winner of various Russian and international painting competitions. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Moscow, the Lipetsk Art Museum, the Kolomna Kremlin Museum, the Toy Museum of Sergiev Posad, the Kargopol Historical, Architectural and Art Museum, the Kenozersky National Park Museum, the Museum of the Moscow Pedagogical State University, as well as in many private and corporate collections in Russia, Europe and Asia.

Other painter's works https://art-most.com/all_pictures/?swoof=1&pa_artists=novikova

[mennyfox55]

Voroshilova ..

[thomasthetankieengine]

You're right. The only Jews among Stalin's associates after 1926 were Lazar Kaganovich and Lev Mekhilis. Perhaps if you wanted stretch the definition of "inner circle", you could include the women, Maria Kaganovich, Polina Zhemchuzhina, Dora Khazan, Ekaterina Voroshilova, Maria Korona, and Bronislava Poskrebysheva, the Jewish wives of Kaganovich, Molotov, Andreyev, Voroshilov, Alexander Svandize (Stalin's former brother in law), and Poskrebyshev.

But since Korona and Poskrebysheva were both arrested and shot during the Purges and Zhemchuzhinza and Khazan were both arrested and sent to the Gulag in the late 1940s during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, it doesn't really make Stalin look like someone who loved Jews.

Admittedly, the arrests and deaths of Korona and Poskrebysheva didn't have much to do with their Jewishness, but the arrests of Zhemchuzhinza and Khazan absolutely did.

Sudensk-the-stallionist perhaps genuinely doesn't know what happened to Korona, Poskrebysheva, Zhemchuzhinza, and Khazan as he seems to exclusively read Stalin apologia produced by avid Stalinists like Ludo Martens and Grover Furr.

"Mildly insensitive culturally"?

Yeah, that's definitely one way to describe what happened to Solomon Mikhoels, Benjamin Zuskin, Solomon Lozovsky, Polina Zhemchuzhina, Dora Khazan, Peretz Markish, Dovid Hofshteyn, Itzik Feffer, Leib Kvitko, David Bergelson, Boris Shimeliovich, Solomon Bregman, Lina Shtern….

And WTF @ the idea that being less of an antisemite than the fucking Romanovs, Whites, Nazis, and Stepan Bandera is some kind of great achievement.

[melmothblog]

Vaganova Ballet Academy graduates Alexandra Khiteeva, Anita Voroshilova, Daria Ustyuzhanina and Yulia Spiridonova at the Mariinsky. September 2019.

[miss-mollys-ballet-blog]

Anita Voroshilova photographed by Marianne Sorokina

[paolo-streito-1264]

Varvara Voroshilova  #photography.

[ballet-symphonie]

Do you know what happened to Maria Petukhova? I think I'll never get over what happened to her. She was the best at her year, a rising star. To think of how great she could have been... and there is also the ~rumor~ of why she didn't fit in the Mariinsky :/ I went to her Instagram but haven't found anything either. Don't even know if she's still dancing...

Ah yes I do know a bit. She was not accepted to the MT or BT, there is a widespread rumor that it was due to her weight. MT in particular has always been excessively strict about body types and it cost them a beautiful dancer yet again. Although I think it is important to note that she did not receive an honours diploma (all the ‘prominent’ students from her class did). So regardless of her perception as a ‘top’ student by the public and relatively good place at the barre/center, her dancing was not awarded top marks by the faculty. Of course, you don’t need an honors diploma to work at MT and I remember there were a few girls taken from that year who didn’t have one (Anita Voroshilova, Sofia Voronova) but it does say something about how she was regarded compared to her peers.

But regardless after graduating VBA, She spent a season dancing in Talin, at Estonian National Ballet. She got some soloist roles, but eventually decided to return to Russia. She was dancing at the Rostov State Musical Theater in 2020 but now she is teaching at a school in SPB called “Palace Ballet.”

[balletroyale]

Whenever I see Mariinsky cast a corps/soloist that's not Khoreva/Ionova/Nuykina/Anzai/Bulanova/Voroshilova at this point all I can think of is the one Lady Gaga meme where she's like "Awesome, amazing, fabulous, wonderful, phenomenal"

Hahaha I share your sentiments. 

[balletomaneblog]

About your recent ask, I'm so rooting for Daria Ionova too! Since she graduated, I never understood why she got behind from the girls her year. She is so musical, has great acting, beautiful lines and amazing port de bras! I don't know if I'm overly reacting to this, but in my opinion, she would be a great Giselle, Aurora, Masha, Juliet, Nikiya, Maria from The Fountain of Bakhchsarai, and even Odette. It's crazy that she never performed Masha in The Nutcracker! And I can only imagine how great she would be in the Kingdom of Shades. I just wished the theater would invest more in her and other dancers who are good and can improve with the right opportunities.

Right now, the MT divides itself in four types of dancers: the favorites who get all the opportunities, even when not deserved; the principals that have the least performances; the reliable ones they don't promote, but they work like crazy; and those who rarely get an opportunity and when they do, they get stuck in dancing the same role over and over, or being in the corps. Anyways, sorry about the rant lol.

Never apologize for ranting to me lol !!! Especially about Daria Ionova, as I adore her!

We know Daria got unlucky with the group that she graduated with. 2018 was an insane year for female Vaganova graduates (Khoreva, Bulanova, Nuikina, Ionova, Lendvai, Voroshilova, etc). But Daria can more than hold her own so I don't think this is entirely the problem. She debuted some of her larger roles like Gulnare right before COVID, which meant she was slowed down just as she was getting momentum, and then an injury had her out for much of last season as well.

Thankfully she's been back for awhile and she's had some debuts this season as Shyrin's Friends in Legend of Love and in the Almeh pas de trois and the Pas d'Action trio in La Fille du Pharaon. However, it frustrates me to no end that these are all smaller debuts. Out of the roles you listed I would especially love to see her as Maria in Bakhchisarai and as Giselle! And I've said before she would be a perfect Sylphide and I'd also love to see her as Le Papillon in Carnaval. Not to mention that she's always cast as First Odalisque even with Gulnare in her rep. I wish she'd get another shot at that role too.

I'm always wishing for more roles for Daria and am hoping that she finishes this season with some more debuts!

To your other points, I completely agree with you. I love following the Mariinsky and at the same time the management sometimes makes me want to hit my head against the wall. There's so many talented dancers and so few who get a real shot. I especially resonated with what you said about the "reliable ones they don't promote, but they work like crazy" and will take this as my opportunity to rant about Osmolkina who more than fits this description. In any other company she would have been promoted to principal ages ago! She dances almost everything, has amazing technique, beautiful acting skills, and brings a unique presence to the theatre. And while she dances exclusively principal roles and has a larger workload than most of the principal dancers, she was never promoted and almost definitely won't be now that she's at the very end of her career. And of course there are plenty of lower ranking dancers who have it even worse.

Anyways . . . feel free to rant on my blog anytime! And it's always good to know that there's someone else out there wishing for more opportunities for Dasha!

[thecutiecollective]

Indiana

IG: Indi_Rebel

Represented by Jem Models

📷 Evelina Voroshilova

[xtruss]

Beyond the Booster Shot! Could a “Broad Spectrum” Booster Increase Our Immunity to Many Pathogens Simultaneously?

— By Matthew Hutson | February 8, 2022 | The New Yorker

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

The first tuberculosis vaccine was developed in 1921, by two French scientists, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin. It was called Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or B.C.G., and has long been one of the world’s most widely administered shots. From the beginning, its power was surprising. B.C.G. contains a bacterium similar to the one that causes TB, and engenders an immune defense specific to that disease. But, as Calmette noted in a paper in 1931, those vaccinated with B.C.G. at birth were around seventy-five per cent less likely to die in their early years of any cause. The effect seemed out of scale with the incidence of TB. There were, Calmette thought, two possibilities. TB might be more widespread than was commonly supposed. Alternatively, the vaccine might somehow confer a broader benefit—“a special aptitude to resist those other infections which are so frequent in young children.”

No one knew how to explain the phenomenon. But researchers observed a similar effect when polio vaccines were introduced, in the nineteen-fifties. Two married virologists, Marina Voroshilova and Mikhail Chumakov, conducted the Soviet Union’s clinical trials for Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine, known as O.P.V.; they noticed that it reduced not just the incidence of polio but of many other viral infections. Voroshilova started giving O.P.V. to her children every flu season, as a kind of prophylactic. Meanwhile, she looked at the medical records of more than three hundred thousand people, most of whom had received vaccines for polio and related viruses, across three winters. She found that those who’d received the vaccines were about seventy per cent less likely to have suffered acute flu or respiratory infections. Certain vaccines, she wrote, seemed to offer “a potential means of overcoming the diversity of pathogenic viruses.” (Her son Konstantin Chumakov is now the associate director for research at the F.D.A.’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review. “Knock on wood, but I don’t remember ever having flu,” he told me.)

In 1978, a Swedish organization sent Peter Aaby, an anthropologist with a doctoral degree in medical research, to Guinea-Bissau, in West Africa, to study the country’s high rate of child mortality. The next year, a measles outbreak hit a district in the capital city of Bissau, and Aaby began vaccinating children there. He, too, found that the vaccine reduced child mortality over all—by around half, according to his measurements, which was higher than what one would expect if the vaccine were preventing deaths from measles alone. “That was a very stunning experience,” he told me, on a video call from Bissau. “I guess that is what has kept me here, to try to understand what actually happened.”

Aaby published his initial findings in 1984, then followed up with a fuller report in 1995, describing similar results across ten studies in Bangladesh, Benin, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Senegal, and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Since then, he and others have reported that B.C.G., O.P.V., and a measles vaccine called M.V. have significantly reduced mortality from non-targeted diseases in low-income countries. Aaby has run randomized trials on infants in Guinea-Bissau and found that, according to some measures, B.C.G., O.P.V., and M.V.—all of which contain “live” bacteria or viruses, rather than chopped-up bits of pathogens—have reduced child mortality by at least thirty per cent. For this work, he won the Novo Nordisk Prize, Denmark’s most prestigious medical-research award. Surveying data collected by Aaby and others, researchers convened by the World Health Organization concluded that B.C.G. and measles vaccines reduce all-cause child mortality more than would be expected from specific protection. In a report published in the British Medical Journal, in 2016, they wrote that they “strongly recommend further studies.”

There’s a story we typically tell when we explain how vaccines work. We say that they prepare our immune systems to target specific intruders by programming antibodies and T cells. But for decades we’ve also had evidence of another phenomenon. Some vaccines appear to build a degree of defenses against nearly anything that comes our way. In this second mode of action, they work as a general immune-system booster. It’s like taking a cross-training class—for some period afterward, your whole body is extra fit.

The extent of these effects isn’t fully understood, in part because they’re understudied. “It’s almost counterintuitive to use one live vaccine to help protect against diseases caused by one or more other infectious organisms,” the medical researcher David Naylor, the co-chair of Canada’s covid-19 Immunity Task Force and a former president of the University of Toronto, told me. In general, he said, “the scientific compass for many years has been swinging toward precision medicine.” Still, if we knew more about how some vaccines manage to provide a degree of broad protection, we could use that benefit to our advantage. In theory, we could use a preëxisting vaccine to protect against a new virus while more specific vaccines are still being developed. This is the strategy that Naylor adopted for himself during the pandemic. In the fall of 2020, he got a shingles shot.

Mihai Netea, a fifty-three-year-old immunologist at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, coördinates a research group of about twenty scientists, studying how organisms respond to severe infections. In 2010, his team was running an experiment to assess the impact of B.C.G. vaccination on Toll-like receptors—proteins that our cells use to respond to a broad class of microbial structures. The idea was simple. An initial encounter with B.C.G. should increase the production of immune-system molecules called cytokines in response to mycobacteria, the genus of bacteria that causes TB, and it should have no effect on the body’s response to a control stimulus—in this case, a fungus. But the cells showed increased reactivity to fungi, too. Netea thought that one of his students had made a mistake.

After they repeated the experiment and arrived at the same result, Netea searched the literature to see whether anyone else had documented the effects of B.C.G. on diseases besides TB. He discovered epidemiological studies, including Aaby’s, and also lab work done in mice. In those animals, “in the sixties and seventies, people were showing that B.C.G. protects against influenza, Listeria, malaria—everything,” Netea said. “And I thought, Oh, my God.” He developed a hunch about the mechanism at work, and, in a 2011 paper, gave it a name: trained immunity.

Most vaccines target what’s called the adaptive immune system: they work by aiming antibodies and T cells at specific pathogens. But we also have an innate immune system, a more indiscriminate first line of defense, which includes our skin, mucous membranes, and generalist proteins throughout the body that inhibit viral replication. Scavenger cells in this system attack foreign intruders—even ones the body has never seen before—and killer cells destroy any infected cell. All this happens no matter which pathogen is attacking us. Inflammation and fever, mediated in part by cytokines, are tools of innate immunity. Netea compared the adaptive and innate immune systems with specialists and hard laborers: one takes weeks to prepare, while the other goes to work in hours or less.

One proposed explanation for B.C.G.’s broad effectiveness was focussed on the adaptive immune system. Perhaps B.C.G. and the control fungus looked so much alike that adaptive immune cells aimed at the former also reacted against the latter—a phenomenon called cross-reactivity. But Netea suspected something else. Even in the absence of an adaptive immune system, one infection can bolster responses against future infections. In 1933, a similar effect, now called systemic acquired resistance, was identified in plants. Adaptive immunity evolved just half a billion years ago, roughly three billion years after life first appeared on Earth; many living things, including plants and all invertebrates, have only innate immune systems. And yet immunity in those organisms has a kind of memory, too—it can be sharpened by experience.

What could be the mechanism behind such effects? Netea thought that infections might be altering innate-immune cells through a process called epigenetic reprogramming. When cells make proteins—including the ones involved in innate immunity—they do so using instructions that are hard-coded into our DNA. But experience can affect which instructions a cell executes, and how often. In 2012, Netea confirmed that epigenetic changes were behind his lab’s earlier B.C.G. results. Increased production of certain signalling proteins had insured that cells launched an innate-immune response to the TB-causing bacterium while also doing the same for both a very different bacterium and a fungus. In a commentary published alongside the paper, Aaby and his longtime collaborator Christine Stabell Benn wrote, “It is rare that epidemiological and immunological data support each other to such an extent, telling a completely coherent and plausible story.” And yet the story was unfinished: the cells Netea had studied survive for only a few days, but epidemiological evidence showed that trained immunity could last for months or even years. Netea suspected that epigenetic changes took place elsewhere, too—possibly in the cells in our bone marrow that divide and differentiate into innate-immunity cells. Such changes would persist through time even as innate-immunity cells died and reproduced.

In 2020, a multinational team led by Sandrine Sarrazin and Michael H. Sieweke, of the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy, deepened the story, suggesting how the reprogramming might take place. If you were to stretch out all the DNA strands in your body and place them end to end, they would encircle Earth’s equator roughly two million times; they fit inside cellular nuclei by wrapping around proteins called histones, forming a tightly coiled complex called chromatin. A chromatin fibre, Netea explained, is like a book telling the body how to operate. Normally, most of it is closed—but its pages must open so that cells can read the instructions and make proteins. Inflammation, he explained, can alter the chemical structure of histones, essentially placing bookmarks. “You close the book, but the bookmark says, ‘This is where the chapter on fighting infection is,’ ” he said. “So, the next time you fight an infection, you can open it much easier.” Training makes innate-immunity cells faster and better at finding the plans for proteins that kill infected cells, produce signalling molecules, and trigger adaptive immunity.

It’s not just vaccines that train our immune systems. We get sick all the time, experiencing colds, flus, or fatigue; when such illnesses aren’t severe, they usually leave us stronger, better prepared to battle the next infection. Netea recalled how, in his children’s first years of schooling, they continually got sick, with fevers and runny noses. Slowly, illness became less frequent. “Well, part of it is producing antibodies, and so on,” he said. “But also the innate immune system matures. You put in these bookmarks. You catalogue the information.” Some vaccines, it turns out, can help us build those capacities while avoiding sickness.

In 1984, Robert Gallo co-discovered H.I.V. as the cause of aids; in 2011, he co-founded the Global Virus Network, an international coalition of virologists aiming to prevent and control viral epidemics. Early in 2020, when Chinese researchers published the genetic sequence of sars-CoV-2, Gallo grew interested in the possibility of using trained immunity to slow the spread of the virus. A few years earlier, he’d attended a lecture given by Konstantin Chumakov about protecting against the flu with O.P.V. He’d also read about bats, which harbor several coronaviruses simultaneously without growing ill, and without antibodies. “How do they do fine?” Gallo said. “It’s not the classical adaptive-immune response. It’s on all the time. They keep a balance, so that the coronavirus is there but not harmful. This really caused me to become deeply interested in innate immunity.” In 2020 and 2021, Gallo co-authored two high-profile articles—with Chumakov, Aaby, Benn, and Netea on one or both—advocating an attempt to fight the coronavirus by eliciting trained immunity through the use of existing vaccines.

To some extent, the idea had already been put into practice by accident, through ordinary vaccination. Researchers at Virginia Tech and the National Institutes of Health have found that, among twenty-two socially similar countries, those with greater B.C.G. coverage had lower covid-19 mortality rates. (This finding is remarkable considering that the last common ancestor between the bacterium that causes TB and the virus that causes covid-19 existed more than three billion years ago.) Studying O.P.V.’s capacity for covid-19 protection is more difficult, because supply is reserved for polio eradication, but an analysis by Chumakov, Gallo, and others found that Iranian mothers who’d been indirectly exposed to O.P.V. through their children’s vaccinations—the vaccine is transmissible—were better protected against the coronavirus. A study in Brazil, conducted by Swiss and Brazilian researchers, found that a flu shot reduced the odds of death from covid-19 by sixteen per cent.

Other studies seem to tell similar stories. Netea and his collaborators conducted a small study at a Dutch hospital and found that those who’d been immunized against the flu were roughly forty per cent less likely to contract covid-19, thanks, it appears, to changes in their innate immune systems. In a GlaxoSmithKline study of nearly half a million adults in California aged fifty and above, those who’d received G.S.K.’s shingles vaccine were sixteen per cent less likely to contract the coronavirus, and thirty-two per cent less likely to be hospitalized because of it. And, among more than a hundred and thirty-seven thousand Mayo Clinic patients, those who’d received any of several vaccines within the past one to five years—including shots for chicken pox, flu, hepatitis, measles, pneumonia, and polio—had lower chances of covid-19 infection. Polio vaccines reduced the probability of infection by forty-three per cent—even when controlling for comorbidities, other vaccinations, demographics (age, gender, race, ethnicity, county of residence), and regional covid-19 incidence and testing rates. Numerous studies by researchers around the world have presented harmonious findings.

There is a problem, however, with all of these studies. They are “observational”—that is, based on after-the-fact data analysis. Observational studies are suggestive but not conclusive, because it’s impossible to completely rule out biassing variables, such as differences in who gets a vaccine. Researchers are now conducting placebo-controlled trials, in which they randomly administer vaccines to one group and placebos to another, then measure the outcomes. Preliminary results from an ongoing study in Brazil indicate that adults who have received the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine are not protected against covid-19 infection but do have half the rate of covid-19 symptoms, suggesting that the vaccine might reduce the severity of the disease. In preliminary results from a study recently completed by Netea and others in Greece, elderly adults given B.C.G. were sixty-eight per cent less likely to become infected with covid-19. And, in a trial among two hundred elderly people that Netea and others completed just before the pandemic, B.C.G. reduced respiratory infections over the following year by seventy-nine per cent.

The question is whether the takeaways from the observational studies will hold up as more randomized trials roll in. “Mihai does some really interesting science, and I think that’s exactly what we need,” Andrew Pollard, who directs the Oxford Vaccine Group, which co-developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine, told me. But Pollard is unsure whether innate-immune-system boosting will be very powerful beyond young childhood. “As an adult—where we’ve had gazillions of viral infections, we’ve had our vaccines, we’ve been in this soup of exposures to our immune system for decades—whether the additional impact of an intervention will allow protection against other diseases, I just don’t know,” he said. Such existing protection, he added, could help explain why there’s been relatively little interest—until this pandemic—in research on vaccine repurposing for adults. Referring to randomized controlled trials, he told me, “We urgently need the R.C.T. data. The problem with observational studies is this is an area absolutely fraught with biases.”

If trial data point toward clear and long-lasting benefits, Pollard went on, “that really changes thinking going forward.” But the trials may fail to back up the observational studies. If that’s the case, then the immune-boosting effects may be insufficiently large. Or the results could point to “a design question,” Pollard said. “Was it the right population? And were the studies big enough?” The choice of booster vaccine also matters. Most vaccines come in one of two forms: seasonal flu shots, for example, are “inactivated” vaccines, comprising pieces of destroyed viruses, while B.C.G., O.P.V., and M.M.R. are “live attenuated” vaccines, comprising whole bacteria or viruses that have been bred to be weaker than the forms against which they’re meant to inoculate us. In general, live vaccines seem to train the innate immune system more effectively, and so have the greatest potential for repurposing. This is why live non-flu vaccines can sometimes protect against the flu even better than flu-specific vaccines, which, in the worst cases, provide only ten-per-cent protection.

Repurposing old, targeted vaccines to boost our innate immune systems would be a kind of hack. Could a vaccine designed specifically for that purpose elicit larger, more dependable effects? In 2016, Jaykumar Menon, a human-rights lawyer based in New York, founded the Open Source Pharma Foundation to address market failures in drug development. (It received its first funding, in 2018, from Tata Trusts, in India.) One of its goals is to create new vaccines that leverage trained immunity for what it calls “ultra-broad spectrum” coverage. “B.C.G., for example, is not ideal,” Netea told me. “It’s inducing a good trained immunity only in approximately half of the people.” He’d like to have four or five vaccines on the shelf, each proven to prepare different elements of innate immunity—including inflammation and the cellular digestion of invaders—ready for the next pandemic.

Menon believes that such vaccines could be profoundly important in the developing world. A vaccine could offer a degree of protection against a new pathogen, “and it already exists in some vaccines that are very cheap, that people in Asia and Africa and Latin America have access to,” he said. “Some of the vaccine-hesitant might be more kindly disposed to it, because you’ve probably taken an M.M.R. in your life.” The ultimate goal, he went on, was to “address pandemics far earlier for all people.”

If the research pans out, and such shots become widely available, we may need to revise our pandemic playbook. At the beginning of a pandemic, before we develop specific vaccines, governments could distribute broad-spectrum boosters, providing some level of temporary protection. It wouldn’t halt a virus’s progression, but it might slow it, and perhaps spare the most vulnerable some of the worst effects. Earlier this year, researchers at Cornell and Oxford published a paper in the scientific journal PNAS describing epidemiological models of such a scenario. According to their calculations, if even a minimally effective immune booster, reducing covid-19 transmission and severity by only five per cent, had been given to one in ten American adults in December of 2020, it would have reduced national mortality by more than fifteen per cent over the following months, saving eighty thousand lives. Even as targeted vaccines roll out, such shots could still have a role to play, by protecting people in poor countries and boosting immunity further in rich ones.

Gallo told me that he’d arranged to receive an M.M.R. shot before the covid-specific vaccines were available. He continues to get the shots. “If my antibodies are going down—it’s month four or month five—I say, ‘Shit, I’m not waiting for somebody to approve being boosted. I’m going to get M.M.R.’ ” He said that “many G.V.N.-center directors” were doing the same, referring to the Global Virus Network. Could general-immunity boosters become part of our regular medical routines? In theory, some of us might want to receive a live vaccine every winter, as a kind of innate-immune-system pick-me-up. If we were to take this approach, we’d be following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, which distributed O.P.V. shots before the flu season in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Each winter in Romania, where Netea was born, some people took Polidin, a mixture of thirteen dead bacteria.

Such a scenario may come to pass, or not, depending on how the science turns out. In November, I got a flu shot, seeing it not just as a flu vaccine but as a potential general-immunity booster—albeit one with a weaker effect than a live vaccine like O.P.V. As I tugged up my sleeve, I mentioned to the pharmacist that there was some evidence suggesting that flu vaccines offer a degree of protection against covid-19. She looked alarmed, and asked me whether I’d received a covid-19 vaccination. I must have sounded like a strange variety of vaccine truther. People have lots of ideas about vaccines’ hidden effects. Many of them are negative and unsubstantiated—autism, infertility, microchips. But, while trained immunity is a hidden effect, it’s also a good one. It’s a way in which our vaccines are even better than we thought.

[mennyfox55]

Voroshilova ...

[osvaldo-bertolino]

Os estudos soviéticos de décadas anteriores sugerem a estratégia dos coronavírus

Os estudos soviéticos de décadas anteriores sugerem a estratégia dos coronavírus

Especialistas russos em poliomielite, incluindo Marina Voroshilova e Mikhail Chumakov, saíram, assistindo um terapeuta exercitar as pernas de um menino de 3 anos no Instituto Kenny em Minneapolis.Crédito…Arquivo Bettmann

Andrew E. Kramer – The New York Times

Para os meninos, foi apenas um doce. Para os pais, proeminentes pesquisadores médicos, o que aconteceu em seu apartamento em Moscou…