Now, in eLife, Alessandra Renieri and colleagues at the University of Siena and a number of other institutes in Italy – including Chiara Fallerini, Sergio Daga, and Stefania Mantovani as joint first authors – report five cases of men (three under 50, and two in their mid-60s) with severe COVID-19 who carry rare TLR7 variants (Fallerini et al., 2021). Here, TLR7 is linked to COVID-19.