Vincent Racaniello and the hard-working team at MicrobeTV stepped up to provide an extraordinary form of leadership during the CoViD-19 pandemic. Their professionalism was, of course, well established before CoViD but their weekly review of CoViD literature, their tireless organization of information, and their principled scrutiny of the science during the pandemic has helped scientists and physicians around the world learn faster and deeper when it has mattered to all of us.
Worldwide appreciation for MicrobeTV and This Week In Virology (TWIV) is apparent in many forms. We were thrilled to channel a small fraction of that goodwill into a fundraising project that supports them. In the last two weeks of September, MicrobeTV fans from 10 countries and 44 US states rallied to buy hundreds of spike protein shirts and mugs, and declare their support of that organization by using the coupon code “MicrobeTV” (or various recognizable variants). At the close of the month we sent MicrobeTV a check for $2500, which reflected profits from all those sales, and a little rounding up that we were honored to contribute. This fundraising partnership continues through October.
The Vaccinated.US project was originally launched to raise funds for an urgently needed informatics solution to chronic analytical bottlenecks in metabolomics, proteomics, lipidomics, and related realms of analytical chemistry. Our team of artists and scientists sells high-resolution molecular art to fuel our R&D. In this case we hoped to weave in an artistic strand of gratitude for the 5.3 billion people who came together around the world to invent, test, distribute, and embrace CoViD-19 vaccines on a heroic timeline — right in the middle of the century’s most deadly pandemic. The odds are good that you are one of those 5.3 billion, so thank you for contributing to a monumental collective action achievement. Sometimes we really can pull together constructively.
You can support this confluence of projects by buying high-resolution molecular art in the shop, here. In case you are starting to think about holiday shopping, you get free shipping at $75 USD.
Some say CoViD vaccines were the scientific achievements of the century.
When was the last time you heard anyone say thank you?
Just thank you. To the
vaccine scientists who made them possible. | overworked doctors who held it together. | overworked nurses who carried us through.| clinical trial volunteers. | 270 million Americans who vaxxed. | 5.3 BILLION around the world who vaxxed. | people who vaccinated to protect others. | people who vaxxed to protect themselves. | people who vaccinated in round 1. | people who vaxxed in round 501. |public health scientists still tracking CoViD.
Vaccines were never supposed to be about making a statement but these 3D molecular structures of the SARS-CoV2 spike protein just seem to do that… Could a statement be forgiven in the form of exquisite molecular art? How about when the primary message is ‘thank you’?
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