CIR releases COVID-19 animations to address misinformation pandemic

December 2020: In partnership with the British Society for Immunology, the Centre for Inflammation Research have produced a three-part animated series on the human immune system and how immune memories form in response to infections like coronavirus.

Title card for Immune Memory and the Coronavirus animations, showing Earth with pandemic spread lines.

The videos are designed to provide a detailed but lay-friendly overview of the immune system's memory, the innate and adaptive responses, how vaccines take advantage of the secondary immune response and why duration of immune memory varies between diseases.

You can watch the videos in full in the 'Videos and Resources' section of the CIR website.

Watch the videos and find out more

CIR's Academic Lead for Public Engagement, Professor Donald J. Davidson, provided the narration for the videos as well as expert advice on the script. Dr Ryan Thwaites, a specialist in anti-viral responses of the innate immune system at Imperial College, also provided advice before the animations were storyboarded and produced.

In the first three weeks following publication, the video series trailer had been viewed over 16,000 times on Twitter. The videos now have Spanish subtitles, and a group of volunteer staff and students from the Centre have kindly offered to translate subtitles in French, German, Italian, Latvian, Hindi, Bangla (Bengali) and Mandarin Chinese.

This article was published on 12 Jan, 2021