On September 28, 2021, as part of the Marie & Willie Chrétien Conference Series, the IRCM will welcome Peter Doherty. The Nobel Prize winner will discuss: Living with COVID-19.

Free and open to all!
Tuesday, September 28, 2021, from 7 p.m.

 
About the conference
"Though we did not at first realize the scope of the problem, SARS-CoV-2 is unlike any virus we’ve had to deal with. At first, though we were saying ‘it’s not the influenza’, the medical and public health approach was more-or-less grounded in the idea that ‘this is a bad ’flu. The fact that, unlike influenza in humans, this virus is also disseminated around the body in the blood, took a while to emerge, as did the reality that a major problem in COVID-19 is the formation of large and small clots that can cause heart attacks, strokes and block gaseous exchange in the lung. The fact that, within a year, we had outstanding vaccines to limit the toll of this disease is a major tribute to modern science. But it’s increasingly clear that the way this virus is changing to become more infectious is beyond our prior experience. We’ll focus on the nature of the disease, what’s happening now and where this may be going. We are living with a fluid situation, and there are no certainties."
Peter C. Doherty University of Melbourne

About Peter DohertyA graduate of the University of Queensland School of Veterinary Science, Peter Doherty shared the 1996 Nobel Medicine Prize for his immunology research and was the 1997 Australian of the Year. Since then, he has fought for evidence-based reality, relating to areas as diverse as childhood vaccination, global hunger and anthropogenic climate change.  So far, he has published 6 “lay” books on science with the latest, “The Incidental Tourist”.