Covid-19 News

    Covid-19: US says it has new evidence coronavirus may have come from a Chinese laboratory


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    The US said on Friday it had new information suggesting the Covid-19 pandemic could have emerged from a Chinese laboratory and not through contact with infected animals, the latest salvo in the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to pressure Beijing over the virus’s origins. Specifically, the US Department of State said it had obtained evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in the autumn of 2019 – before the first identified case was identified in the city – with symptoms it said were consistent with either Covid-19 or common seasonal illnesses.

    C.D.C. Warns the New Virus Variant Could Fuel Huge Spikes in Covid-19 Cases


    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0…th/covid-cdc-variant.html


    Federal health officials warned on Friday that a far more contagious variant of the coronavirus first identified in Britain could become the dominant source of infection in the United States by March, and would likely lead to a wrenching surge in cases and deaths that would further burden overwhelmed hospitals.


    This dire forecast from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made plain what has been suspected for weeks now: The nation is in an urgent race to vaccinate as many Americans as possible before the variant spreads across the country.


    Could become the dominate strain? guess what guys, it already has. CDC, always a few weeks late!


    Treat early, treat often and treat all!

    As reported yesterday a form of the south african mutation is now spreading in the US southwest rapidly. Months ago I posted concerns of a mutation seen in China in April, N439k, that made the virus harder to detect through testing. The strain seemed to be donated by the D614 mutation and petered out, but instead mutated to the 501Y.V1 south african strain along the N439k protein pathway.


    Why new coronavirus variants 'suddenly arose' in the U.K. and South Africa


    https://www.nationalgeographic…k-and-south-africa/#close


    A few case studies hint at this kind of rapid evolution for chronically ill SARS-CoV-2 patients. In a recent preprint article, Gupta and his colleagues document mutation of the virus after a patient received three treatments of convalescent plasma starting at day 63 of their illness. Two of the viral mutations developed in genes that code for the spike protein. Something similar happened inside a 65-year-old cancer patient who survived after 105 days with the virus. And one of the mutations recently spotted in the South African variant—N439K—may allow the virus to bypass monoclonal antibody drugs, according to a preprint released by the COVID-19 Genomics Consortium in November.



    Without rapid full vaccination, which we know is impossible with the 2 dose 28 day wait, early treatment is the only way out of this. Millions are going to die or suffer life long complications if we continue to follow present protocol of go home and wait. Treat early, treat often, treat all, do something!!!

    When people say about Covid-19 “there are no experts” it is a very glib phrase.


    So what does this mean?

    Does it mean that we do not have persons who know everything about Covid-19?

    Obviously not because no expert knows everything about any topic.

    There are scientists who spend their whole careers studying one species of plant or animal yet do not know “everything”.

    So an “expert” does not have to know everything but clearly needs to be a leader in knowledge within their area.


    Covid-19 is a “new” virus so there is much learning to be done.

    But it is not the case that we know nothing.

    Clearly we have experts in virology, pandemics, epidemiology and various areas of medicine, including experts who specialise in the study of Corona viruses.

    Additionally scientists were able to get data on the new virus, including genetic analyses, remarkably quickly.

    As we are seeing, with each new strain there is more science and learning that needs to be done, but that does not mean “there are no experts” for the new strain. There will very quickly be scientists who know more than other scientists and it is then their job to disseminate that information.


    The problem is when people glibly say “there are no experts” then perceptually it flattens the playing field so that any flaky scientist or fringe theory can be put on the same level as data and opinion from more authoritative sources.

    That is also not to say that said authoritative sources cannot be wrong and should not be pressed for supporting evidence.

    We are now a year or so into this pandemic and there is masses of science and data. Arguably the biggest problem at the moment is to sift the quality from the dross and the facts from the garbage.

    Some countries, including the U.S., have focused heavily on the use of vaccines to combat their outbreaks. While vaccines are a useful tool, they will not end the pandemic alone, Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's health emergencies program, said at the news conference.


    "We warned in 2020 that if we were to rely entirely on vaccines as the only solution, we could lose the very controlled measures that we had at our disposal at the time. And I think to some extent that has come true," Ryan said, adding the colder seasons and the recent holidays also may have also played a role in the spread of the virus.

    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

    New coronavirus variants could cause more reinfections, require updated vaccines


    https://www.sciencemag.org/new…-require-updated-vaccines


    When the number of COVID-19 cases began to rise again in Manaus, Brazil, in December 2020, Nuno Faria was stunned. The virologist at Imperial College London and associate professor at the University of Oxford had just co-authored a paper in Science estimating that three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus—more than enough, it seemed, for herd immunity to develop. The virus should be done with Manaus. Yet hospitals were filling up again. “It was hard to reconcile these two things,” Faria says. He started to hunt for samples he could sequence to find out whether changes in the virus could explain the resurgence.


    On 12 January, Faria and his colleagues posted their initial conclusions on the website virological.org. Thirteen of 31 samples collected in mid-December in Manaus turned out to be part of a new viral lineage they called P.1. Much more research is needed, but they say one possibility is that in some people, P.1 eludes the human immune response triggered by the lineage that ravaged the city earlier in 2020.

    That’s NOT what I meant and I think you know it.

    The “playing field” is filled with people doing research, but only the people that support Jeds agenda are “experts”.


    “IF”,

    People doing research on existing approved medications that have been cleared for other ailments are found to be effective when treating Covid 19, they are “flaky scientists”?


    No, of course not, these experiments must be carried out using the scientific method, and approved medical protocols and procedures.

    Then, if found effective, should be considered as treatments

    However, the bureaucracy that is Government

    moving at its typical glacial pace, only considers treatments that meet their agenda.

    Quote from Roseland67

    As would you Jed.


    You say “home remedies” as if it’s granny from the Beverly Hillbillies, cooking up a batch of Opossum stew.

    External Content youtu.be
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    Quote from sam12

    External Content youtu.be
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    Best post of the whole thread !

    Quote from Roseland

    That’s NOT what I meant and I think you know it.

    It is not just you that has used this phrase, it has been used by several contributors and in many media outlets.


    Actually I did not know what you meant, but I am glad of the clarification and would totally agree with your statement that we must not be too close eyed about sources for remedy.

    Certainly those remedies then need to be properly tested.

    I know that some worry about about self serving authorities that may try to close down remedies that are not to their agenda.

    My hope is that even if there are such authorities in the USA, UK or whatever that science is transnational and if India or China or Brazil finds an effective remedy it will quickly be taken up by the many that need it.

    For instance it may be that some interests are pushing the Pfizer vaccine, but at the moment only a small portion of the world has access to this so the rest need to press on with what alternatives they can get.


    I did not mention Jed.

    Most of us (including me) have upset Jed at some point.

    But I value his contributions, as I value yours.

    Many scientists citing two scandalous COVID-19 papers ignore their retractions


    https://www.sciencemag.org/new…-ignore-their-retractions


    COVID-19 “is such a hot topic that publishers are willing to publish without proper vetting,” even in the face of retractions that made global headlines, says Elizabeth Suelzer, a reference librarian at the Medical College of Wisconsin who has written about problematic citations to a retracted 1998 study in The Lancet falsely linking vaccination to autism.


    Both of the retracted COVID-19 papers, one in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the other in The Lancet, were based on what appeared to be a huge database of patient records compiled from hospitals worldwide by Surgisphere, a small company operated by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai, who was a co-author on each article. The 22 May 2020 Lancet paper ostensibly showed that hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug promoted by President Donald Trump and others, could harm rather than help COVID-19 patients. Its publication led to a temporary halt in a major clinical trial and inflamed an already-divisive debate over the drug, which has proved to be no help against COVID-19. The 1 May NEJM article corroborated other evidence that people already taking certain blood pressure medicines did not face a greater risk of death if they developed COVID-19.


    Questions soon arose about the validity, and even existence, of the Surgisphere database, however, and the retractions followed on 4 June. But of the 200 papers examined by Science—all published after the retractions—105 inappropriately cited one of the disgraced studies. In several cases it was a primary source for a meta-analysis combining multiple studies to draw overarching conclusions. In most, the studies were cited as scientific support or context. Science also found a handful of articles that uncritically cited an influential April preprint based on the same Surgisphere data set, which described the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as beneficial in critical COVID-19 cases. (There is no standard way to retract preprints, however.)

    External Content youtu.be
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    If Covid-19 Did Start With a Lab Leak, Would We Ever Know?


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    instance, both investigations include Peter Daszak, disease ecologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a research nonprofit with a history of conducting research into SARS-related coronaviruses and their effects on humans, including collaborative work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wuhan Institute happens to be the only laboratory in China that is allowed to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens, and it’s located at the apparent ground zero of the current outbreak.


    If there were a lab leak—and, again, most experts do not believe that the available evidence points in this direction—then both the Wuhan Institute and its US partner would be on a short list of candidates to investigate. It should be obvious that no one with any connection to either organization can play a formal role in any truly independent investigation into the pandemic’s origins. (Of course their expert input could and should be solicited through other means.)


    It’s also worth noting that Daszak expressed certainty, very early in the crisis, that the disease originated in the wild. Last winter, just after the WHO first named the virus, he drafted a formal statement to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” and to “stand with” colleagues in Wuhan and across China. More than two dozen other scientists would sign that letter, which was published by The Lancet on Feb. 19, 2020. Emails obtained via Freedom of Information Act suggest that Daszak organized the effort from the start.

    Quote from Fm1

    If there were a lab leak—and, again, most experts do not believe that the available evidence points in this direction—then both the Wuhan Institute and its US partner would be on a short list of candidates to investigate.

    If you talk privately with experts then they say the exact opposite! The virus is of course lab-made.


    Why?


    The best viral match found so far is a no brainer 93% match. The virus has some more than 20'000 bases and if 7% do change then this means you need 1400 point mutations that happen once in two weeks in average. This is just the best case. The bad thing about this is that you must show (prove) the "whole" 1400 base changes chain and also the potential carriers of the chains.

    So this, the most natural pathway, is completely impossible as we know all wild bat virus so far.


    There is a rescue path known as pattern insert. Such an insert can happen e.g. when a cell is infected by two virus in parallel. It also can happen - less likely - if a chunk of the virus or host DNA is erroneously inserted.


    But here too there is a high hurdle. The AIDS virus homologous ACE-2 spike generating genes add-ons are distributed over the RNA and occur in 4 different locations. It is completely impossible that the same insert happened at 4 unrelated positions at the same time.

    So in the first case we would need at least 60 years of miraculous single mutations that all survived and replicated in the fastest possible time frame. In the second case a check-pot event would be needed that would need the invocation of a goodness...


    What else: We know the Wuhan Lab did the same trick some 10 years ago already with a flu virus. The only way out would be to test each animal in China for new, unknown virus and then try to explain by what mean e.g. a bat could fly 1000 miles to Wuhan. Or the modern Chinese excuse version - how a frozen Salomon could make it into a human nose....

    beware it's still flu season with little to no known local transmission, but it's out there!


    Iraqi authorities detect bird flu outbreak in Salahudin province


    http://outbreaknewstoday.com/i…salahudin-province-40256/


    The laboratory tests proved that poultry in Samarra, some 120 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, was infected with bird flu,” Ammar Khalil, governor of the province, said.


    Over 60,000 chickens in the province were detected to have acquired the bird flu, as authorities are advising citizens to be on ‘high alert’ in confronting the virus.


    All the chickens in the fields infected with the virus were culled, and the fields’ halls were sanitized, in addition to blocking and scanning 3 km of areas surrounding the fields.

    Virtual session: Dr Fauci expresses fear about COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy against South African variant


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    LAHORE: The world-renowned physician and immunologist from the US Dr Anthony Fauci expressed fear about COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy against South African variant of coronavirus, which seems slightly more complex than the UK variant.


    “Since British scientists noted the UK variant tends to increase transmissibility than its virulence, the South African variant is little bit complicated that may render vaccine’s effectiveness vulnerable,” Dr Fauci said while speaking to a group of global health reporters ahead of “HIV Research for Prevention” (HIVR4P) conference. An International AIDS Society’s (IAS) virtual conference, which was originally scheduled for Cape Town last November, is now taking place online over the last week of January and the first week of February.


    So by continuing to jab the world population, are we helping the virus to become vaccine resistant ?

    the continent has no vaccine as china hasn't delivered as promised. Without early treatment the death toll will be biblical.


    Coronavirus second wave surges across Africa


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    A growing coronavirus second wave is threatening to overwhelm fragile healthcare systems across Africa after months of relatively mild impact across the continent, officials have warned.


    Authorities in Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as international organisations, say hospital capacity and oxygen supplies are running out as the continent-wide death rate this month surpassed the global average for the first time.


    Treat early, treat often, and treat all

    more flu news


    H9N2 avian influenza case reported in Guangdong Province, China


    http://outbreaknewstoday.com/h…ong-province-china-82113/


    The case was a 1-year-and 4-month-old male from Yunfu, Guangdong Province, China, who had exposure to domestic poultry prior to the onset of illness. He developed mild symptoms on 28 December, 2020 and was admitted to a hospital on 29 December. As of 4 January 2021, no family cluster was reported. This is the first case to be reported from China in 2021.


    In addition, six new cases of human infection with avian influenza A(H9N2) virus were reported on Dec. 9, 2020.

Subscribe to our newsletter

It's sent once a month, you can unsubscribe at anytime!

View archive of previous newsletters

* indicates required

Your email address will be used to send you email newsletters only. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Our Partners

Supporting researchers for over 20 years
Want to Advertise or Sponsor LENR Forum?
CLICK HERE to contact us.