Covid-19 News

Quote from THHuxleynew

Some points about COVID interventions.

In the UK, where numbers of deaths have historically been high, the vaccination program has had an enormous affect, saving lives. There is no doubt that those double vaccinated are much much less likely to go to hospital, to die, to spread COVID to others.

The statistics here are not some complex scientific study - but whole population monitoring. They cannot be denied. Navid W, Mark u etc please comment if you like.

So it is not surprising that those concerned about COVID are so obsessed with vaccines. They work. Much better than anything else.

The UK is not controlled by Bill Gates, nor any sinister QAnon-style conspiracy, nor an elite of lying medics. It has been in the forefront of all the technologies used to combat COVID: mRNA and viral vector vaccines, testing, discovering effective drugs for COVID treatment.

This work has saved countless lives. Dexamethozone alone must by now have saved some 20% of world COVID deaths, since it is effective, cheap, widely available.

The UK is now pushing to test, productionise, and roll out effective anti-virals. We know these exist. We also know that HCQ does not obviously help, that there is as yet no evidence for Ivermectin helping (and I doubt it will).

The one thing that is currently increasing the death toll, and that is under all of our control, is vaccine hesitancy.,

Propagate anti-vax propaganda or subtler anti-vax memes and you increase vaccine hesitancy in other people who you have maybe never met, who are vulnerable, and who die. Everyone has a responsibility to look at the big picture facts and not get carried away on conspiracy theories or interesting but very small scientiifc effects.

Do this over time and the lower than could be vaccine numbers mean the COVID R number gets a bit higher, and that increases deaths exponentially (until an infection saturates).

We have now seen again and again how these effects work on a large scale with the results being dead humans in hospitals -not just numbers in a preprint.

We have also seen again and again how careful and independent the vaccine registration authorities are throughout the world, even though it results in appalling PR. They are all independent, take different views as to risk, update those views when data that comes in and allows them to do so. But all of the vaccines are very very safe. Even so, when the individual (tiny) risk looks worse than the individual benefit authorities recommend the vaccine is not taken.

The sub-thread on here that is propagating nonsensical anti-vax propaganda is harmful, and writ large in society (say on facebook) such things are a real cause of human death and suffering. Those swayed are not mostly sophisticated thinkers, and a general feeling that the establishment is out to do bad things is shared by many and will predispose to believing unfounded scare stories. I bet (may be wrong) if you look at those here advocating vaccine hesitancy you will find that thye, for one reason or another, are at low risk of bad effects from COVID. Whereas those affected, older, ethnic minority populations, in more cramped intergenerational housing, are at much higher risk.

The idea that vaccines could specifically influence human thoughts via interaction with magnetic proteins is so stupendously silly I guess those advocating it have tin hats on permanently and also would not see a critical appraisal of a hypotheis if it bit them in the arm: thay would in that case probably think it was a micro-drone delivered vaccine as part of a plan by Bill gates for world domination.

How sad, and tragic.

THH

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THH,

It is indeed sad and tragic.

I would say most here (there are exceptions) do not "rail against" vaccines and thus it seems you miss the entire point....

You say the vaccines have saved millions, most likely true.... however, if there had not been push back against HCQ and Ivermectin, many millions MORE would have been saved. It is becoming increasingly clear that HCQ and certainly Ivermectin works. All readily available WHILE the vaccines where being developed with no certainty those vaccines would work!

Yet, you seem to not acknowledge this nor even the possibility that this push back and now revealed Fauci coverup was wrong, in error or even possible!! You concentrate on the vaccine when the vaccine is not even really the issue for most of us here. It was the seemingly, intentional hold back of available medicine that could have saved MORE millions WHILE the vaccines were being developed.

Can you at least acknowledge this possibility? If we do not learn for our past mistakes, we will not prevent them in the future! This is the root of what most here have against posts such as yours.

Secondly, you postulate that the vaccines are valuable at saving lives, this is most certainly true. They have been proven to have an impact on Covid19. What MY personal (and many here) issue is, that we do not know what LONG TERM damage these vaccines will have! More and more issues are coming out as time progresses. These vaccines HAVE NOT HAD LONG term testing. But you seem to not acknowledge the possibility that an mRNA vaccine, never widely used on humans with ZERO long term testing is a cause for concern, when early testing was deadly to animals and human testing was halted! Can you acknowledge this?

So we have two points that either you are intentionally ignoring the core issue or simply are misunderstanding what most concerns here....

1) Needless millions died due to the push back on HCQ and Ivermecting WHILE the vaccines were being developed. Most likely because when shown that these medicines worked well, they would have stopped the vaccine rollout, requiring the standard long term testing because a viable treatment was available. "Vaccine warriors" simply will not acknowledge this. If this is not the case, what is your evidence against it. We now have plenty of Ivermectin evidence and even HCQ is being vindicated.... even in Fauci emails to some extent.

It is also being proved, that the whole Covid issue was political and money minded. The Fauci emails are only icing on the cake. Seemingly more likely manmade and holdilng this information back prevented or slowed treatment. This was criminal!!!

2) Can you prove that mRNA vaccines will have NO major side effects and be deemed safe in the long run? If so, please provide the evidence of long term testing. This is the second issue you do not acknowledge that many here are grappling with. Not that the vaccines have some efficacy, but they may not be safe in the long term and this was all pushed through when Ivermectin was available. Long term testing needs to be done, but not by injecting millions without prior testing. I personally know of 5 people that may have died due to these vaccines. (Yes, I know I cannot prove it, but can you prove the vaccines did NOT?)

So the issue you (and another here) seem to miss is that most here are NOT against vaccines. We are against the way the push for these vaccines cost millions of lives by the willful and active push back of HCQ and Ivermectin, the ignoring of Vitamin D, Zinc and other substances that could have helped greatly. Most here are not against masks, but are aggravated that masks were pushed to no end, but no encouragement of Zinc, Vitamin D etc. You might say that "there are no RCTs that prove HCQ works". Well you would only be listening to those who did not WANT it to work. There are others who say it did. I do not think there is even a question about Ivermectin if one is only willing to look. But vaccine warriors cannot look at this evidence, it would damage their stance.

So that is the issue. You labeled your post "Some points about Covid interventions". Much of what you said is correct and I do not have any issue with. What I do have issues with, is the unwillingness to acknowledge the gross misconduct of the mass media, medical field (including Fauci) and handling of this pandemic. That millions of lives could have been saved if Ivermectin was genuinely investigated early on when it was first proposed.

AND that those who trumpet the vaccines so loudly, seem blind to the very plausible fact that these vaccines could be extremely damaging in the long term. This is not proven nor is it unproven. Past testing showed that mRNA vaccines had severe issues and we do not have successful long term trials to show these are without issue. Yet some will not acknowledge that.

I could label my post "Why points of some Covid interventions caused millions of needless deaths".

As with most subjects, they become tribal or "religion". It does not matter what the facts say. Rothwell once stated that Cuomo was a leader that should be followed and used as an example to lead the Covid fight. "That a true leader" should be like....... now we really know don't we.... yet not a word of retraction there.

Same will be for Fauci as well.

Quote from Bob#2

But vaccine warriors cannot look at this evidence, it would damage their stance.

The UK Vaccine warriors (the FM/B/R cabinet) just announced they will damage UK people summer holidays by putting -among others - Portugal on a red list. Portugal has in average 1 death/day thanks to ivermectin. The slight increase in cases plays no role with Ivermectin.

But UK still does not treat people with Ivermectin and also does no prophylaxes with Ivermectin that also fully vaccinated had to take!

So UK shows the world the dirtiest ass you can figure out. A bunch of criminals is ruling the country. Just wait until the first vaccinated start to die it big numbers because of lack of Ivermectin.

Quote from Bob#2

when early testing was deadly to animals and human testing was halted! Can you acknowledge this?

I should have been more clear on this point. By early testing being deadly to animals, I was not referring to testing of the current Covid vaccines, but early MRNA vaccines back in 2010-2013.

My point was that I know of no mRNA vaccines approved for humans, that have went through successful standard trials. I have read where the early mRNA attempts all had serious side effects. The current batch has had short term testing, but not long term testing.

mRNA vaccines are unproven for long term effects safety wise. Period. I can see no argument about this.

If one wants to continually claim that Ivermectin is not proven to work because there are no RCTs (which is untrue), please show me the long term RCTs for the current vaccines. We should not be hypocritical in saying "do not use Ivermectin" because testing has not shown efficacy, yet trumpet mRNA vaccines when there is no long term testing that offsets the prior, very serious negative effects when they were earlier tested!

This hypocritical approach is what causes so strong divisive reactions here. (Indeed, from both sides I do admit!)

-Bob

From the Nederlands

The lockstep psychosis

03:52
That we are holding back excellent first-line drugs, such as ivermectin,

just so that experimental injections can be given accelerated approved vaccine status.

04:02
That we're chit-chatting about "oh, the infections are declining,"

when of course that's what happened last year as well.

04:07
...as it does every year.

i posted a similar article a year ago when a lab leak was proposed and debunked by mainstream media and medical experts. It has happened before!!!

The 'Russian Flu' killed 700,000 people in 1977, many scientists now believe it may have resulted from a lab leak

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/20…d-from-a-lab-leak-n394397

In 1977 a flu broke out in northeast China which eventually spread to Russia and then around the world. It eventually took the lives of approximately 700,000 people around the world most of whom were young. It came to be known as the “Russian flu” because Russia was the first country to report it to the WHO. Scientists who examined its DNA concluded it was nearly identical to a previous strain of the flu virus which had caused an outbreak between 1949 and 1950

In nature, the flu doesn’t remain unchanged for 27 years as it circulates. So the fact that the “Russian flu” was nearly identical to the earlier strain eventually led to the conclusion that the Russian flu was likely the result of a lab leak or possibly a failed attempt to inoculate people with live attenuated virus.

In a research paper published in the journal Nature in 1978, a team of scientists from The City University of New York found that the 1977 virus was genomically similar to the 1950 virus — almost as though the viral evolution had been frozen in time.

It may be possible for an accidental mutation to develop that is similar to a variant from the past — but the scientists deemed it was not plausible to speculate that such back mutations accidentally produced a strain so similar to something that circulated 27 years ago.

This next bit is pretty striking in light of current events:

A 1978 study by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences showed that the virus primarily affected those below the age of 20 — giving support to the theory that those above that age had already been exposed to the same virus before, and thus had developed immunity.

In the same paper, however, the team dismissed the lab leak theory in one sentence, stating that none of the “laboratories concerned” had been storing or working with the H1N1 for a long time

But as this 2015 paper explains, a lab leak (or alternatively a failed immunization effort with live attenuated virus) is now considered the most likely explanation for the Russian flu as alternate explanations have been found to be unconvincing. Again, see if this doesn’t sound familiar:

A biosafety lapse in a research laboratory is now most often cited as the cause of the 1977-1978 reemergence of the H1N1 influenza virus strain (Fig. 2). The evidence in favor of this possibility is the clear unnatural origin of the virus and its temperature sensitivity, suggesting laboratory manipulations. At the time of the epidemic, however, the World Health Organization excluded the lab accident possibility after discussions with influenza virus laboratory researchers in the Soviet Union and China, finding that “the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time”

There’s a graphic showing how various theories have been proposed and discussed by researchers over the years. Since about 2008, the lab leak seems to be the dominant explanation:

But the author of the paper seems to think it’s more likely the release was the result of a vaccine trial using live attenuated virus which wasn’t sufficiently attenuated.

There are two factors that point to the 1977 epidemic as resulting from vaccine challenge or trials: (i) live attenuated influenza virus (LAIV) research was extensive at the time, and (ii) a 1976 H1N1 swine flu outbreak was feared to have pandemic potential and led to a resurgent interest in H1N1 protection and research (12).

Between 1962 and 1973, almost 40,000 children participated in eight LAIV trials in the USSR (13). Scientists at the Peking Vaccine and Serum Institute in China also carried out clinical trials using live vaccines during the same time period (1). Additionally, there are records of the mass production of a live H1N1 vaccine in Odessa, USSR, in 1977 (14, 15). In the early days of research in the 1940s, LAIVs were often able to regain virulence upon administration to humans and cause disease (16). In addition, many strains isolated from the 1977 outbreak (for example, the A/Tientsin/78/77 isolate) were temperature sensitive (ts), meaning that the virus could not replicate at higher temperatures. Temperature sensitivity generally occurs only after a series of laboratory manipulations, typical in generation of LAIVs, and is used as a biological marker of attenuation. While not all of the 1977-1978 strains were temperature sensitive, a comparison of all 1977 strains shows a higher prevalence of the ts phenotype than in 1950 strains, supporting the claim that the outbreak may have resulted from attempts at attenuation for vaccine purposes (1, 17).

Whatever the exact cause, most experts now believe that the “Russian flu” of 1977 was caused by a virus which had been collected sometime around 1950, worked on in a lab and then essentially released back into the world by accident. The Russians and the Chinese denied having done any such thing and the WHO supported those denials at the time, but three decades later most scientists now believe the denials must be false. Flu viruses simply don’t hibernate for 27 years and then suddenly cause an outbreak in an unchanged form.

this is in response to hit and run Huxley, hydroxychloriquine works!!!

Observational Study on 255 Mechanically Ventilated Covid Patients at the Beginning of the USA Pandemic

https://www.medrxiv.org/conten…5.28.21258012v1.full-text

Abstract

Introduction This observational study looked at 255 COVID19 patients who required invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) during the first two months of the US pandemic. Through comprehensive, longitudinal evaluation and new consideration of all the data, we were able to better describe and understand factors affecting outcome after intubation.

Methods All vital signs, laboratory values, and medication administrations (time, date, dose, and route) were collected and organized. Further, each patient’s prior medical records, including PBM data and available ECG, were reviewed by a physician. These data were incorporated into time-series database for statistical analysis.

Results By discharge or Day 90, 78.2% of the cohort expired. The most common pre-existing conditions were hypertension, (63.5%), diabetes (59.2%) and obesity (50.4%). Age correlated with death. Comorbidities and clinical status on presentation were not predictive of outcome. Admission markers of inflammation were universally elevated (>96%). The cohort’s weight range was nearly 7-fold. Causal modeling establishes that weight-adjusted HCQ and AZM therapy improves survival by over 100%. QTc prolongation did not correlate with cumulative HCQ dose or HCQ serum levels.

Discussion This detailed approach gives us better understanding of risk factors, prognostic indicators, and outcomes of Covid patients needing IMV. Few variables were related to outcome. By considering more factors and using new methods, we found that when increased doses of co-administered HCQ and AZM were associated with >100% increase in survival. Comparison of absolute with weight-adjusted cumulative doses proves administration ≥80 mg/kg of HCQ with > 1 gm AZM increases survival in IMV-requiring Covid patients by over 100%. According to our data, HCQ is not associated with prolongation. Studies, which reported QTc prolongation secondary to HCQ, need to be re-evaluated more stringently and with controls.

The weight ranges of Covid patient cohorts are substantially greater than those of most antibiotic RCTs. Future clinical trials need to consider the weight variance of hospitalized Covid patients and need to study therapeutics more thoughtfully.

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins

Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

https://www.vanityfair.com/new…uncover-covid-19s-origins

To some people, it seemed natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV’s labs—a possibility Shi has strenuously denied.

On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.

Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.

Having connected online, Demaneuf and de Maistre began assembling a comprehensive list of research laboratories in China. As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world. Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes. Others were science enthusiasts. Together, they formed a group called DRASTIC, short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Their stated objective was to solve the riddle of COVID-19’s origin.

State Department investigators say they were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box.”

At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China. President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade.

With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other, the DRASTIC researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the wilderness, working on the world’s most urgent mystery. They weren’t alone. But investigators inside the U.S. government asking similar questions were operating in an environment that was as politicized and hostile to open inquiry as any Twitter echo chamber. When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.

“The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S. government,” says David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State Department.

The question is: Why?

II. “A Can of Worms”

Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right steps to prevent a recurrence.

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

As months go by without a host animal that proves the natural theory, the questions from credible doubters have gained in urgency. To one former federal health official, the situation boiled down to this: An institute “funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus” in the same city as that lab. It is “not being intellectually honest not to consider the hypothesis” of a lab escape.

And given how aggressively China blocked efforts at a transparent investigation, and in light of its government’s own history of lying, obfuscating, and crushing dissent, it’s fair to ask if Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute’s lead coronavirus researcher, would be at liberty to report a leak from her lab even if she’d wanted to.

On May 26, the steady crescendo of questions led President Joe Biden to release a statement acknowledging that the intelligence community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios,” and announce that he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days. His statement noted, “The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” But that wasn’t the only failure.

In the words of David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.”

III. “Smelled Like a Cover-Up”

On December 9, 2020, roughly a dozen State Department employees from four different bureaus gathered in a conference room in Foggy Bottom to discuss an upcoming fact-finding mission to Wuhan organized in part by the World Health Organization. The group agreed on the need to press China to allow a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation, with unfettered access to markets, hospitals, and government laboratories. The conversation then turned to the more sensitive question: What should the U.S. government say publicly about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

A small group within the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance bureau had been studying the Institute for months. The group had recently acquired classified intelligence suggesting that three WIV researchers conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronavirus samples had fallen ill in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak was known to have started.

As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.

Only two other labs in the world, in Texas and North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” Dr. Richard Ebright said. “It’s three places.”

Some of the attendees were “absolutely floored,” said an official familiar with the proceedings. That someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe, was…shocking and disturbing.”

Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places. As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box,” said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions “smelled like a cover-up,” said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it.”

Reached for comment, Chris Park told Vanity Fair, “I am skeptical that people genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.” He added that he was simply arguing that it “is making an enormous and unjustifiable leap…to suggest that research of that kind [meant] that something untoward is going on.”

IV. An “Antibody Response”

There were two main teams inside the U.S. government working to uncover the origins of COVID-19: one in the State Department and another under the direction of the National Security Council. No one at the State Department had much interest in Wuhan’s laboratories at the start of the pandemic, but they were gravely concerned with China’s apparent cover-up of the outbreak’s severity. The government had shut down the Huanan market, ordered laboratory samples destroyed, claimed the right to review any scientific research about COVID-19 ahead of publication, and expelled a team of Wall Street Journal reporters.

In January 2020, a Wuhan ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang, who’d tried to warn his colleagues that the pneumonia could be a form of SARS was arrested, accused of disrupting the social order, and forced to write a self-criticism. He died of COVID-19 in February, lionized by the Chinese public as a hero and whistleblower.

“You had Chinese [government] coercion and suppression,” said David Feith of the State Department’s East Asia bureau. “We were very concerned that they were covering it up and whether the information coming to the World Health Organization was reliable.”

As questions swirled, Miles Yu, the State Department’s principal China strategist, noted that the WIV had remained largely silent. Yu, who is fluent in Mandarin, began mirroring its website and compiling a dossier of questions about its research. In April, he gave his dossier to Secretary of State Pompeo, who in turn publicly demanded access to the laboratories there.

It is not clear whether Yu’s dossier made its way to President Trump. But on April 30, 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out an ambiguous statement whose apparent goal was to suppress a growing furor around the lab-leak theory. It said that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified” but would continue to assess “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

It was pure panic,” said former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger. “They were getting flooded with queries. Someone made the unfortunate decision to say, ‘We basically know nothing, so let’s put out the statement.’”

Then, the bomb-thrower-in-chief weighed in. At a press briefing just hours later, Trump contradicted his own intelligence officials and claimed that he had seen classified information indicating that the virus had come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Asked what the evidence was, he said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

Trump’s premature statement poisoned the waters for anyone seeking an honest answer to the question of where COVID-19 came from. According to Pottinger, there was an “antibody response” within the government, in which any discussion of a possible lab origin was linked to destructive nativist posturing.

The revulsion extended to the international science community, whose “maddening silence” frustrated Miles Yu. He recalled, “Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized.”

V. “Too Risky to Pursue”

The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?

The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.

By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the team small, because there were so many people within the government “wholly discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was impossible,” said Pottinger. In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”

As they combed open sources as well as classified information, the team’s members soon stumbled on a 2015 research paper by Shi Zhengli and the University of North Carolina epidemiologist Ralph Baric proving that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they inserted the protein from a Chinese rufous horseshoe bat into the molecular structure of the SARS virus from 2002, creating a new, infectious pathogen.

This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors flagged the danger themselves, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies…too risky to pursue.” In fact, the study was intended to raise an alarm and warn the world of “a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.” The paper’s acknowledgments cited funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and from a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which had parceled out grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development. EcoHealth Alliance is run by Peter Daszak, the zoologist who helped organize the Lancet statement.

That a genetically engineered virus might have escaped from the WIV was one alarming scenario. But it was also possible that a research trip to collect bat samples could have led to infection in the field, or back at the lab.

The NSC investigators found ready evidence that China’s labs were not as safe as advertised. Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research—some involving live SARS-like viruses—had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories.

In 2018, a delegation of American diplomats visited the WIV for the opening of its BSL-4 laboratory, a major event. In an unclassified cable, as a Washington Post columnist reported, they wrote that a shortage of highly trained technicians and clear protocols threatened the facility’s safe operations. The issues had not stopped the WIV’s leadership from declaring the lab “ready for research on class-four pathogens (P4), among which are the most virulent viruses that pose a high risk of aerosolized person-to-person transmission.”

On February 14, 2020, to the surprise of NSC officials, President Xi Jinping of China announced a plan to fast-track a new biosecurity law to tighten safety procedures throughout the country’s laboratories. Was this a response to confidential information? “In the early weeks of the pandemic, it didn’t seem crazy to wonder if this thing came out of a lab,” Pottinger reflected.

Apparently, it didn’t seem crazy to Shi Zhengli either. A Scientific American article first published in March 2020, for which she was interviewed, described how her lab had been the first to sequence the virus in those terrible first weeks. It also recounted how:

[S]he frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

As the NSC tracked these disparate clues, U.S. government virologists advising them flagged one study first submitted in April 2020. Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?

Believing they had uncovered important evidence in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, the NSC investigators began reaching out to other agencies. That’s when the hammer came down. “We were dismissed,” said Anthony Ruggiero, the NSC’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense. “The response was very negative.”

VI. Sticklers for Accuracy

By the summer of 2020, Gilles Demaneuf was spending up to four hours a day researching the origins of COVID-19, joining Zoom meetings before dawn with European collaborators and not sleeping much. He began to receive anonymous calls and notice strange activity on his computer, which he attributed to Chinese government surveillance. “We are being monitored for sure,” he says. He moved his work to the encrypted platforms Signal and ProtonMail.

As they posted their findings, the DRASTIC researchers attracted new allies. Among the most prominent was Jamie Metzl, who launched a blog on April 16 that became a go-to site for government researchers and journalists examining the lab-leak hypothesis. A former executive vice president of the Asia Society, Metzl sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing and served in the Clinton administration as the NSC’s director for multilateral affairs. In his first post on the subject, he made clear that he had no definitive proof and believed that Chinese researchers at the WIV had the “best intentions.” Metzl also noted, “In no way do I seek to support or align myself with any activities that may be considered unfair, dishonest, nationalistic, racist, bigoted, or biased in any way.”

On December 11, 2020, Demaneuf—a stickler for accuracy—reached out to Metzl to alert him to a mistake on his blog. The 2004 SARS lab escape in Beijing, Demaneuf pointed out, had led to 11 infections, not four. Demaneuf was “impressed” by Metzl’s immediate willingness to correct the information. “From that time, we started working together.”

“If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”

Metzl, in turn, was in touch with the Paris Group, a collective of more than 30 skeptical scientific experts who met by Zoom once a month for hours-long meetings to hash out emerging clues. Before joining the Paris Group, Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, had pushed back online against wild conspiracies. No, COVID-19 was not a bioweapon used by the Chinese to infect American athletes at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019. But the more she researched, the more concerned she became that not every possibility was being explored. On May 1, 2020, she published a careful assessment in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing just how a pathogen could have escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She noted that a September 2019 paper in an academic journal by the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had outlined safety deficiencies in China’s labs. “Maintenance cost is generally neglected,” he had written. “Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

Alina Chan, a young molecular biologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, found that early sequences of the virus showed very little evidence of mutation. Had the virus jumped from animals to humans, one would expect to see numerous adaptations, as was true in the 2002 SARS outbreak. To Chan, it appeared that SARS-CoV-2 was already “pre-adapted to human transmission,” she wrote in a preprint paper in May 2020.

But perhaps the most startling find was made by an anonymous DRASTIC researcher, known on Twitter as @TheSeeker268. The Seeker, as it turns out, is a young former science teacher from Eastern India. He had begun plugging keywords into the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, a website that houses papers from 2,000 Chinese journals, and running the results through Google Translate.

One day last May, he fished up a thesis from 2013 written by a master’s student in Kunming, China. The thesis opened an extraordinary window into a bat-filled mine shaft in Yunnan province and raised sharp questions about what Shi Zhengli had failed to mention in the course of making her denials.

VII. The Mojiang Miners

In 2012, six miners in the lush mountains of Mojiang county in southern Yunnan province were assigned an unenviable task: to shovel out a thick carpet of bat feces from the floor of a mine shaft. After weeks of dredging up bat guano, the miners became gravely ill and were sent to the First Affiliated Hospital at the Kunming Medical University in Yunnan’s capital. Their symptoms of cough, fever, and labored breathing rang alarm bells in a country that had suffered through a viral SARS outbreak a decade earlier.

The hospital called in a pulmonologist, Zhong Nanshan, who had played a prominent role in treating SARS patients and would go on to lead an expert panel for China’s National Health Commission on COVID-19. Zhong, according to the 2013 master’s thesis, immediately suspected a viral infection. He recommended a throat culture and an antibody test, but he also asked what kind of bat had produced the guano. The answer: the rufous horseshoe bat, the same species implicated in the first SARS outbreak.

Within months, three of the six miners were dead. The eldest, who was 63, died first. “The disease was acute and fierce,” the thesis noted. It concluded: “the bat that caused the six patients to fall ill was the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat.” Blood samples were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which found that they were positive for SARS antibodies, a later Chinese dissertation documented.

On February 3, 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak already spreading beyond China, Shi Zhengli and several colleagues published a paper noting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s genetic code was almost 80% identical to that of SARS-CoV, which caused the 2002 outbreak. But they also reported that it was 96.2% identical to a coronavirus sequence in their possession called RaTG13, which was previously detected in “Yunnan province.” They concluded that RaTG13 was the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2.

In the following months, as researchers around the world hunted for any known bat virus that might be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli offered shifting and sometimes contradictory accounts of where RaTG13 had come from and when it was fully sequenced. Searching a publicly available library of genetic sequences, several teams, including a group of DRASTIC researchers, soon realized that RaTG13 appeared identical to RaBtCoV/4991—the virus from the cave where the miners fell ill in 2012 with what looked like COVID-19.

In July, as questions mounted, Shi Zhengli told Science magazine that her lab had renamed the sample for clarity. But to skeptics, the renaming exercise looked like an effort to hide the sample’s connection to the Mojiang mine.

Their questions multiplied the following month when Shi, Daszak, and their colleagues published an account of 630 novel coronaviruses they had sampled between 2010 and 2015. Combing through the supplementary data, DRASTIC researchers were stunned to find eight more viruses from the Mojiang mine that were closely related to RaTG13 but had not been flagged in the account. Alina Chan of the Broad Institute said it was “mind-boggling” that these crucial puzzle pieces had been buried without comment.

In October 2020, as questions about the Mojiang mine shaft intensified, a team of journalists from the BBC tried to access the mine itself. They were tailed by plainclothes police officers and found the road conveniently blocked by a broken-down truck.

Shi, by now facing growing scrutiny from the international press corps, told the BBC: “I’ve just downloaded the Kunming Hospital University’s student’s master’s thesis and read it…. The conclusion is neither based on evidence nor logic. But it’s used by conspiracy theorists to doubt me. If you were me, what would you do?”

VIII. The Gain-of-Function Debate

On January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, got a phone call from his counterpart Dr. George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Gao described the appearance of a mysterious new pneumonia, apparently limited to people exposed at a market in Wuhan. Redfield immediately offered to send a team of specialists to help investigate.

But when Redfield saw the breakdown of early cases, some of which were family clusters, the market explanation made less sense. Had multiple family members gotten sick via contact with the same animal? Gao assured him there was no human-to-human transmission, says Redfield, who nevertheless urged him to test more widely in the community. That effort prompted a tearful return call. Many cases had nothing to do with the market, Gao admitted. The virus appeared to be jumping from person to person, a far scarier scenario.

Redfield immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A team could rule it out as a source of the outbreak in just a few weeks, by testing researchers there for antibodies. Redfield formally reiterated his offer to send specialists, but Chinese officials didn’t respond to his overture.

Redfield, a virologist by training, was suspicious of the WIV in part because he’d been steeped in the yearslong battle over gain-of-function research. The debate engulfed the virology community in 2011, after Ron Fouchier, a researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, announced that he had genetically altered the H5N1 avian influenza strain to make it transmissible among ferrets, who are genetically closer to humans than mice. Fouchier calmly declared that he’d produced “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you could make.”

In the ensuing uproar, scientists battled over the risks and benefits of such research. Those in favor claimed it could help prevent pandemics, by highlighting potential risks and accelerating vaccine development. Critics argued that creating pathogens that didn’t exist in nature ran the risk of unleashing them.

In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new funding for gain-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more virulent or transmissible. But a footnote to the statement announcing the moratorium carved out an exception for cases deemed “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight). It put the onus for ensuring the safety of any such research on the federal department or agency funding it. This left the review process shrouded in secrecy. “The names of reviewers are not released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely secret,” said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch, whose advocacy against gain-of-function research helped prompt the moratorium. (An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that “information about individual unfunded applications is not public to preserve confidentiality and protect sensitive information, preliminary data, and intellectual property.”)

Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”

British-born Peter Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit with the laudable goal of preventing the outbreak of emerging diseases by safeguarding ecosystems. In May 2014, five months before the moratorium on gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework.

By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to 990 tax exemption forms it filed with the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance.

EcoHealth Alliance’s practice of divvying up large government grants into smaller sub-grants for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway within the field of virology. The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said on behalf of the organization and Daszak, “We have no comment.”)

As the pandemic raged, the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV wound up in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. At a White House COVID-19 press briefing on April 17, 2020, a reporter from the conspiratorial right-wing media outlet Newsmax asked Trump a factually inaccurate question about a $3.7 million NIH grant to a level-four lab in China. “Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?” the reporter asked.

Trump responded, “We will end that grant very quickly,” adding, “Who was president then, I wonder.”

A week later, an NIH official notified Daszak in writing that his grant had been terminated. The order had come from the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci later testified before a congressional committee. The decision fueled a firestorm: 81 Nobel Laureates in science denounced the decision in an open letter to Trump health officials, and 60 Minutes ran a segment focused on the Trump administration’s shortsighted politicization of science.

Daszak appeared to be the victim of a political hit job, orchestrated to blame China, Dr. Fauci, and scientists in general for the pandemic, while distracting from the Trump administration’s bungled response. “He’s basically a wonderful, decent human being” and an “old-fashioned altruist,” said the NIH official. “To see this happening to him, it really kills me.”

Story continues https://www.vanityfair.com/new…uncover-covid-19s-origins

Quote from Fm1

The Russians and the Chinese denied having done any such thing and the WHO supported those denials at the time, but three decades later most scientists now believe the denials must be false.

This has been discussed half a year ago see: The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate.pdf

Same as today: The FM/R/J WHO head is and always was fully involved in gain of research. The Wuhan lab did it already back to 2012..2014 with beefing up a flue virus (H1N1) the same way they did it later to get CoV-19.

People knowing this strain describe it as ultimate bio weapon - much worse than Ebola or pest in the middle ages.

NIH scientists say they may have found a promising new oral antiviral drug for Covid

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/…-oral-antiviral-drug.html

Scientists may have found a promising new treatment for Covid-19 after an experimental oral antiviral drug demonstrated the ability to prevent the coronavirus from replicating, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday, citing a new study.

The drug, called TEMPOL, can reduce Covid-19 infections by impairing an enzyme the virus needs to make copies of itself once it's inside human cells, which could potentially limit the severity of the disease, researchers at the NIH said. The drug was tested in an experiment of cell cultures with live viruses.

We urgently need additional effective, accessible treatments for COVID-19," Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, director of the NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, wrote in a statement. "An oral drug that prevents SARS-CoV-2 from replicating would be an important tool for reducing the severity of the disease."

The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

While vaccines have been incredibly useful in driving down Covid-19 cases in the United States and other parts of the world, scientists say treatments are still badly needed for those who get infected with the virus.

The U.S. is still reporting an average of roughly 16,300 infections per day as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Gilead Sciences' remdesivir is the only drug that has received full U.S. approval from the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of Covid, and that needs to be administered in a hospital intravenously.

Pfizer, which developed the first authorized Covid-19 vaccine in the U.S. with German drugmaker BioNTech, is also developing an oral drug for Covid that can be taken at home at the first sign of illness. Researchers hope the medication will keep the disease from progressing and prevent hospital trips. It began an early stage trial in March.

Tempol

Tempol is a membrane-permeable radical scavenger and metal-independent superoxide dismutase-mimetic. Treatment of dinitrobenzene sulfonic (DNBS) acid-induced colitis rats with tempol significantly reduced the appearance of diarrhea and loss in body weight. This was associated with a reduction in the degree of both neutrophil infiltration and lipid peroxidation in the inflamed colon [62]. Tempol attenuated the colon shortening and damage score in DSS-induced colitis mice.

Edaravone, a free radical scavenger, and tempol suppressed serum IL-6 levels and increased colonic myeloperoxidase levels in DSS-induced colitis mice [63].

IAC, bis(1-hydroxy-2,2,6,6-tetramethgyl-4-piperidinyl)decandioate, is an innovative nonpeptidyl, low molecular weight radical scavenger that is reactive with most oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon radical species. IAC inhibited the reduction in body weight gain and decreased colonic damage, inflammation, and TNF-α levels in DNBS-induced colitis [64].

Prohibitin is a regulator of antioxidant and its levels were decreased during colitis and cultured intestinal epithelial cells overexpressing prohibitin were protected from oxidative stress. It is a regulator of nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 expression (a transcriptional regulator of oxidant responses) in intestinal epithelial cells during oxidative conditions. Prohibitin prevented inflammation-associated oxidative stress and injury through sustained activation of nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 [65].

Allopurinol is used for the treatment of gout and is a scavenger of oxygen-derived free radicals. Xanthine oxidase is capable of generating superoxide anions by converting hypoxanthine to xanthine and uric acid. In experimental colitis induced by intracolonic administration of 5% acetic acid, specific superoxide anion scavenger methoxypolyethylene glycol:superoxide dismutase and reactive oxygen metabolite scavenger salfasalazine significantly decreased the severity of inflammation. The xanthine oxidase inhibitors, tungsten and pterin aldehyde, failed to improve inflammation, but another xanthine oxidase inhibitor, allopurinol, did limit the inflammation. In this colitis model, the xanthine oxidase pathway is not a major source of ROS.

Pfizer Jab Has 5 Times Less Antibodies Against Covid Delta Variant: Lancet Study

https://www.ndtv.com/world-new…6362?amp=1&akamai-rum=off

COVID-19 Delta Strain: The study also shows that levels of these antibodies that are able to recognise and fight the virus are lower with increasing age, and that levels decline over time, providing additional evidence in support of plans to deliver a booster dose to vulnerable people.

Quote from Fm1

[S]he frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

This is a key statement as she does not work in the bio-weapon lab.

Quote from Fm1

Pfizer Jab Has 5 Times Less Antibodies Against Covid Delta Variant: L

They should stop this bullshit Pfizer vaccine. Lancet is very kind with them not so Cell: Multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants escape neutralizationby vaccine-induced humoral immunity.pdf

Quote from Wyttenbach

This is a key statement as she does not work in the bio-weapon lab.

This statement is the smoking gun

Their questions multiplied the following month when Shi, Daszak, and their colleagues published an account of 630 novel coronaviruses they had sampled between 2010 and 2015. Combing through the supplementary data, DRASTIC researchers were stunned to find eight more viruses from the Mojiang mine that were closely related to RaTG13 but had not been flagged in the account. Alina Chan of the Broad Institute said it was “mind-boggling” that these crucial puzzle pieces had been buried without comment.

FLCCC weekly update

Quote from Bob#2

od point

You say the vaccines have saved millions, most likely true....

The evidence (whole population from the UK) for large life-saving effect of vaccines is clear as the nose on your face, and indisputable. So "most likely true" does not do it justice

however, if there had not been push back against HCQ and Ivermectin, many millions MORE would have been saved. It is becoming increasingly clear that HCQ and certainly Ivermectin works. All readily available WHILE the vaccines where being developed with no certainty those vaccines would work!

Yet, you seem to not acknowledge this

I do not acknowledge it because I have seen no such evidence. Following the science carefully (at the start) it quickly became clear quite how flaky and inconclusive observational studies are. that is not to say they provide no information, just that anyone advocating a drug that has been widely studies (like HCQ and now IVM) can find many many observational studies that appear to support it. that would be expected, just from the randomness in such studies and the fact that negative studies will never get completed (even if registered) positive studies will get widespread publicity. I have not looked at this recently. If you can point me to one of the statistical "studies of studies" with very good methodology it might help - but even then as I've said preferential completion of positives makes an overall comparison of observational studies unhelpful.

When last I looked the randomised clinical trial data was mixed or negative for these two drugs. There are obviously many ways they can be used and I certainly don't claim they might not have some utility, used in the right way. Equally they might overall do harm - as was the case with some of the widely used SARS drugs.

nor even the possibility that this push back and now revealed Fauci coverup was wrong, in error or even possible!! You concentrate on the vaccine when the vaccine is not even really the issue for most of us here. It was the seemingly, intentional hold back of available medicine that could have saved MORE millions WHILE the vaccines were being developed.

I don't think anything is certain in medicine, the vaccine safety statistics are amongst the most certain info in medicine and as you point out no-one can ever rule out some unexpected disguised long-term side effect. That is true for almost everything, like for example eating chocolate. (other than the known possible side effect of getting fatter of course). At the low rates these things are measured no-one would ever know what common or garden activities had adverse side effects. On this thread I am just echoing the established science which is that there is no evidence for these things (see note above about spurious nature - for reasons understandable - of observational trials). there is evidence against HCQ in high doses, where it might expect to do the most good. But of course if its activity as as an anti-viral it will be effective only given much earlier - prophylatically. Then it is competing with vaccines on safety - because it must be given to a whole load of people who do not have COVID on the off-chance one of them might get it.

I'm still not saying HCQ, of IVM, or rotyal jelly, or anything else you care to name might not help as an anti-viral. Just that the burden of proof to know using such things you are doing more good than harm is high, and there is no strong other evidence to expect either of those drugs to be effective in the concentrations considered safe. Whereas there are other drugs that have much better prospects.

Can you at least acknowledge this possibility? If we do not learn for our past mistakes, we will not prevent them in the future! This is the root of what most here have against posts such as yours.

It seems I am the one acknowledging possibility. Whereas assuming something is a mistake on no evidence is surely the reverse. I freely admit that anything might be a mistake. We just have to do the best we can based on percentage arguments.

Secondly, you postulate that the vaccines are valuable at saving lives, this is most certainly true. They have been proven to have an impact on Covid19. What MY personal (and many here) issue is, that we do not know what LONG TERM damage these vaccines will have! More and more issues are coming out as time progresses. These vaccines HAVE NOT HAD LONG term testing. But you seem to not acknowledge the possibility that an mRNA vaccine, never widely used on humans with ZERO long term testing is a cause for concern, when early testing was deadly to animals and human testing was halted! Can you acknowledge this?

There are various issues here. Vaccines, or any other drugs, might have long-term side effects. The chances are very low in the case of vaccines which have been studied more than anything else, where there is no plausible theoretical mechanism, nor pragmatic data, for this. mRNA vaccines might be different from other vaccines but why? When you look at physiological effects it is difficult to see long-term differences on somatic chnage. There might be short-term issues - but that is what the very extensive testing has shown thus far is not a problem.

But let me put it the other way round. We know for sure that COVID has long-term side effects at a relatively high rate (long COVID). It can be very unpleasant, we don't yet know what is the incidence. We can be pretty certain that just as vaccines vastly reduce symptomatic disease, hospitalisation, death, so they will rediuce long COVID. That is because we understand the mechanisms by which it can cause harm deregulating the immune system and making blood vessels leaky. Killing viruses with a vaccine at an early stage reduced viral load and hence likelihood of that.

So on your metric - long-term side effects - vaccines win hands down. let me take your argument back to you: not acknowledging these obvious things when comparing vaccines with not taking vaccines, as seems to be done here, is not learning from the past and ignoring hard data.

So we have two points that either you are intentionally ignoring the core issue or simply are misunderstanding what most concerns here....

1) Needless millions died due to the push back on HCQ and Ivermectin WHILE the vaccines were being developed. Most likely because when shown that these medicines worked well, they would have stopped the vaccine rollout, requiring the standard long term testing because a viable treatment was available. "Vaccine warriors" simply will not acknowledge this. If this is not the case, what is your evidence against it. We now have plenty of Ivermectin evidence and even HCQ is being vindicated.... even in Fauci emails to some extent.

I don't acknowledge it because I have seen no evidence of it.

It is also being proved, that the whole Covid issue was political and money minded. The Fauci emails are only icing on the cake. Seemingly more likely manmade and holdilng this information back prevented or slowed treatment. This was criminal!!!

That type of proof is not proof - it is character assasination. And Fauci's character - good or bad - is separate from his scientific judgement. In any case living in the UK I could not care about Fauci's judgement. the overall views of experts who are well-informed and without an axe to grind is in line with what I'm saying here. making scientific arguments by finding fault with - or adulating - individual scientists is just bad science.

2) Can you prove that mRNA vaccines will have NO major side effects and be deemed safe in the long run? If so, please provide the evidence of long term testing. This is the second issue you do not acknowledge that many here are grappling with. Not that the vaccines have some efficacy, but they may not be safe in the long term and this was all pushed through when Ivermectin was available. Long term testing needs to be done, but not by injecting millions without prior testing. I personally know of 5 people that may have died due to these vaccines. (Yes, I know I cannot prove it, but can you prove the vaccines did NOT?)

There is absolutely no reason to think that the risk profile is different from other vaccines, no mechanism to make this. Now, it is reasonable to ask whether vaccines have long-term effects. Just as we ask do infections have long-term effects. The answer to both is YES. However the long-term effects of vaccines are positive (reduced disease over a range wider than just the targeted infection). The effects of COVID (specifically) are profoundly negative. Vaccines have been used widely for a long time and studied widely. They do not have adverse effects at levels anything like as high as most drugs, nor as the diseases they prevent.

So the issue you (and another here) seem to miss is that most here are NOT against vaccines. We are against the way the push for these vaccines cost millions of lives by the willful and active push back of HCQ and Ivermectin, the ignoring of Vitamin D, Zinc and other substances that could have helped greatly. Most here are not against masks, but are aggravated that masks were pushed to no end, but no encouragement of Zinc, Vitamin D etc. You might say that "there are no RCTs that prove HCQ works". Well you would only be listening to those who did not WANT it to work. There are others who say it did. I do not think there is even a question about Ivermectin if one is only willing to look. But vaccine warriors cannot look at this evidence, it would damage their stance.

I WANT Vit C and Zinc to work. The evidence is that they do not, much. Sure, deficiencies are bad and should be remedied which means most people should take Vit D, and those with poor diet maybe take zinc. Pushing masks is a no-brainer because they are the one intervention that affects disease rates exponentially (because it alters R) and is very low cost, no side effects, immediate, etc. The evidence is that vaccines work very well (it was expected they would work at least a bit - we are lucky they work so well). The evidence is that HCQ and IVM do not obviously work. It is not strong - you would need many different RCTs with different regimens and dosings to be sure HCQ could never help. Some of those regimens, like the RECOVERY one, would do harm. regardless - RCTs are expensive in many ways and we shoulkd be testing the best possible candifdates - there is no info I've seen here that puts HCQ or IVM in that category.

So that is the issue. You labeled your post "Some points about Covid interventions". Much of what you said is correct and I do not have any issue with. What I do have issues with, is the unwillingness to acknowledge the gross misconduct of the mass media, medical field (including Fauci) and handling of this pandemic. That millions of lives could have been saved if Ivermectin was genuinely investigated early on when it was first proposed.

I disagree the mainstream media has gross misconduct here - beyond a normal simplified and cavalier reporting of scientific issues. Where for example those reporting Dr. Z's sucess rates at prevention using HCQ without giving the context (his patients has an average age same 25 years younger than typical due to coming from an Orthodox jewish community with a very unusual and skewed demographic) are guilty of gross misconduct. In many cases through not understanding this bias. But those so ignorant they make schoolboy errors have no business trashing the medical establishment - some of which at least can do proper science. (I'm not saying all research doctors are rational - or unbiassed - or anything. Just that there are enough like that, and the inevitable per person biasses cancel out).

AND that those who trumpet the vaccines so loudly, seem blind to the very plausible fact that these vaccines could be extremely damaging in the long term. This is not proven nor is it unproven. Past testing showed that mRNA vaccines had severe issues and we do not have successful long term trials to show these are without issue. Yet some will not acknowledge that.

That is true of anything in life. Including posting on lenr-forum. Vaccines are however very well tested, and very well understood, and very carefully scrutinsed, so much less likely to be problematic than any other medical intervention.

I could label my post "Why points of some Covid interventions caused millions of needless deaths".

As with most subjects, they become tribal or "religion". It does not matter what the facts say. Rothwell once stated that Cuomo was a leader that should be followed and used as an example to lead the Covid fight. "That a true leader" should be like....... now we really know don't we.... yet not a word of retraction there.

Same will be for Fauci as well.

Good point. You won't find me being tribal in this area, nor arguing on the basis of people good or bad. I leave such "I follow my leader who is a great man" stuff to politics, and at the moment particularly, it seems, to my great regret, US politics. Following leaders is always dangerous. In the best of cases it works well. In many cases it is disastrous. It is how we lose democracy - when we put people, and what they urge us to do, above debate and trying to see the rational points of view on both sides of an argument.

Quote from Wyttenbach

They should stop this bullshit Pfizer vaccine. Lancet is very kind with them not so Cell: Multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants escape neutralizationby vaccine-induced humoral immunity.pdf

mass population evidence trumps lab speculation.

Sure, Pfizer vaccine works less well against Delta variant with its many escape mutations.

But...

The hospital data from the UK in Delta COVID hostpots shows only 5% of patients double vaccinated - in a cohort where most (>80%) of the high-risk population has so been.

you don't need to be a stats genioius to see that even against Delta - Pfizer is still excellent.

The Imperial College vaccine trial (saRNA) is accompanied by their view that they can repurpose their vaccine within 3 weeks to deal with escape mutated variants.

I'd expect at current variant emergence rate that a given vaccine would remain effective enough for 12 months. It is not easy to predict, though, and frankly we are breeding variants to reinfect people with natural antibodies, and also vaccine-induced antibodies by having high COVID rates in some countries.

If the cost of beating COVID is one vaccine per year (like a flu jab) then we can count ourselves lucky. It is getting more deadly as it becomes more transmissable.

Quote from Shane D.

"For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right."

No, it was not. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times reported this in detail in the news sections and the editorial sections. No one dismissed it. Let's call that hypothesis #1. Two other hypotheses were rejected out of hand:

2. That the virus was engineered.

3. That the virus was deliberately released from the lab.

In the mass media and here in this forum, these other two have been constantly confused with the first hypothesis. I do not understand why. They are completely different.

#3 seems unlikely for the reasons I gave before: mainly because makes no sense to release a bioweapon before you are at war. The enemy will develop counter-measures.

Hypothesis #1 and #3 might both be true, but that seems unlikely. What is the point of releasing a naturally occuring virus that kills mainly old people?