CD8A and viral infectious disease: Our data support inhibitors of GM-CSF in current clinical trials, use of anti-CCL2 (Gracia-Hernandez et al., 2020), the repurposing of immune checkpoint inhibitors (Pezeshki and Rezaei, 2021) to restore/enhance CD8+ T cell cytotoxicity, and potential targets such as FGFRs, cofactors for early-stage viral infection upregulated by MERS-CoV2 leading to lung damage (Hondermarck et al., 2020).