What are the prospects for the Covid-19 pandemic in the months and years ahead? Should we be hopeful?
The new coronavirus, 1000 times more infectious than the flu and with far greater potential health complications, has now spread worldwide and caused the largest human pandemic since the emergence and spread of HIV in the early-1980s.
This presentation will discuss what makes this novel virus so dangerous, debilitating and deadly, how we can best confront and contain it, and the impact of the pandemic on those with compromised immune systems, such as the elderly and persons living with HIV. Looking ahead, the talk will also assess current progress toward a vaccine—the most likely pathway for getting back to a “new normal.”
About the speaker
Sarah Palmer is the Co-Director of the Centre for Virus Research at The Westmead Institute for Medical Research and a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney School of Medicine. She is a world-renowned HIV researcher who received her PhD at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden focussing on medical virology. She conducted her post-doctoral studies at Stanford University, Centre for AIDS Research. For 8 years Professor Palmer directed the core virology laboratory for the HIV Drug Resistance Program at the National Institutes of Health in the USA. Her expertise in identifying parts of HIV proteins likely to stimulate human white cell responses has now been applied to an on-going COVID-19 project at Westmead.
