Covid-19 News

    Quote from Fm1

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    Interesting, but I wanted to lookup what scientist had said about the report and found this link,


    discussion


    So in short the statistical method has weaknesses.'

    1. Higher initial viral load in the placebo group which should have been compensated for by randomizing so that the viral load was equalized or at least it should have been compensated for in the statistical analysis.


    2. Many outcomes could be classified as a success, which means that a proper Bonferroni compensation should be used

    when discussing P-values, take 0.05/(number-of-comparisons) in stead of 0.05. Usually one presents all the comparisons

    made and the reader has to do the Bonferoni compensation themself, but less experienced people reading results like this

    just take the P-value in the paper an run with it.


    3. It is unclear if groups was made by looking at the result. This is a cardinal error and if you do it you are ruining your study

    don't do this, if you need to group, then at least do not look at the result but just examine the covariates and make sure you mension it in the paper. Best is to register the test beforehand and have the hypothesis clear from the beginning.


    In all and interesting study but not as strong evidence as one would think.

    US scientists report earliest known COVID-19 case a solid proof; next stage should be focused especially on the US: Chinese epidemiologist

    Next stage virus tracing should be focused on the US: epidemiologist


    https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226339.shtml


    More scientific evidence in countries such as the US and France has emerged to suggest that those countries may have had COVID-19 cases way before they officially confirmed.


    A US government study suggested that the coronavirus may have already been circulating among people one month earlier than it was officially confirmed, and French scientists also presented scientific evidence that the country's cases were caused by an indigenous virus strain prevailing before 2020.


    Chinese scientists urged that such evidence should not go unnoticed, and should serve as evidence that the next-stage virus-tracing investigations should be focused on countries which reported cases earlier than they previously identified, especially the US.


    A study of more than 24,000 samples taken for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research program in the US between January 2 and March 18, 2020 suggested that seven people in five states - Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - may have been infected well before the country's first confirmed cases that were reported in January 21, 2020.


    The results suggest that the virus may have been circulating in Illinois, for example, as early as in December 24, 2019, one month earlier than the US authorities confirmed.


    The data suggests the virus was in the five states far away from the initial hot spots and areas that were considered its points of entry into the country, the study said.


    Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told Global Times on Wednesday that the US should be prioritized in the next-stage investigation, as the country was slow to test people at an early stage, and it possesses so many biological laboratories all around the world. "All bio-weapons related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny," Zeng said.


    Ju Liya, chief scientist of the European precision medicine platform in France, also told the media last week that after having studied the genetic sequence of the viruses from earlier patients, they found the outbreak in France was caused by an indigenous virus, which was prevailing in the country even before 2020.


    She also claimed that the France outbreak had no link with the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first coronavirus case was reported, as the hereditary feature of the virus strain detected in France is very different from that found in COVID-19 patients in China.


    In response to a question about the US study, Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a Wednesday briefing that scientific journals and scientists around the world have pointed out similar evidence, including chief Swedish epidemiologists who believe that there were cases of coronavirus in Sweden as far back as November.


    "It is obvious that the outbreak had multiple origins," said Zhao.


    The spokesperson said under this perspective, next-stage virus-tracing investigations should be focused on various countries and regions, instead of just one. He also urged other countries to cooperate with WHO on virus tracing, like what China did with the organization.


    The WHO and some of its scientists confirmed to the Global Times previously that the agency is working with researchers in Italy and a reference laboratory to retest the samples of a study that suggested the coronavirus may have been circulating in Italy since fall 2019.


    Only China, which upholds the principles of science and justice, had invited the WHO to investigate the virus origins, Zeng noted. He also urged other countries to trace back samples of their previous pneumonia patients, as early as in 2018, to check if there were earlier cases of COVID-19.


    Aside from pointing directions for next-stage virus tracing, scientists also called Western politicians and media to stop politicalizing the issue, as their deeds are stifling genuine scientific research into the virus origins.


    US President Joe Biden in late May ordered US intelligence agencies to report to him in the next three months on whether the COVID-19 virus was come from an animal source or from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).


    Ju said that after she published her paper disproving the connection between France's outbreak and Wuhan, the French government and politicians were angry with her institute. Her institute, which has prominent achievements in virus research and vaccine development, was silenced.


    Western politicians' playing with the "lab-leak" theory or jab at China for being responsible are just tricks to get themselves away from their mishandling of the pandemic, a Beijing-based immunologist who requested anonymity told the Global Times on Wednesday, noting that their politicalizing the issue is standing in the way of scientists to find answers to the pandemic.

    It is interesting how statistics can be made to "prove" almost any point one wants to make..... or is there actual substance?



    Now everyone here knows that the "vaccine warriors" here have trumpeted the prior administrations Covid efforts as being responsible for 300,000+ deaths. (See posts made here by some.... I do not need to point out who!) and that all the troubles were solely the prior presidents and not governors such as Cuomo.


    Yet this graph, from World o Meter which has been approved by the vaccine warriors, show the daily new count in the US actually higher than about this time last year... and the daily new case count higher on average since Jan. 20 than last year, even though a new administration that "follows the science" was in place AND the vaccine was rolled out.


    World o Meter states the US has 616,148 deaths since Feb. 15, 2020. The prior administration left office after 340 days and a horrid toll of 420,544 deaths. Although NO vaccines available. This averaged to 1254 deaths per day! Very sad.


    The new administration, having a vaccine available and "following the science" when they took office, has seen 189,604 perish since. Very sad, or an average of 1289 per day....... what???? Higher than the previous.... that cannot be right!!!!!!!


    I do hope the downward trends continue but we have seen them before. Perhaps they will, but I am keeping my supply of Ivermectin handy anyway!


    Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein


    (In case some get offended.. this whole post is sarcasm.... at least mostly :/ )

    Sorry guys for previous outbursts-but it just comes down to plain GOOD and EVIL CHINESE EMPIRE EXPANSION....THE CHINESE STATE (RED for EVIL) and on the other side WHITE for GOOD in HONG KONG which was a BRITISH democratic State. BLACK or WHITE FBI or CIA...etc etc...throw in an excess of cult-inspired conspiracy theories and this is the mess they have caused the whole SODDING WORLD. Bio-weapon construction factories to bring down Western Civilization. Remarkably effective. :) :) :) AND all supported by a new micro-wave 5G network to spread all the cult garbage - carry on taking them down, at least the teenagers know what to do.....

    Quote from Dr Richard

    plain GOOD and EVIL

    Dr Richard omitted to mention our salvation by the BigPharma angels..led by Archangel Anthony...

    3.2 billion good $ for antivirals..

    "

    tm 01:25
    other words is going to accelerate the clinical testing of promising

    antiviralmedicines that are already in various stages of development including clinical trials

    things like

    the PFIZER protease inhibitor

    the ROCHE RNA polymerase inhibitor

    the MERCK mutagenic nucleoside molnupiravir ( misprounounced as malnupiravir ?( )

    and others that are in the pipeline .....


    Iver... Iver .. Iver-mec-tin .. so hard to pronounce for angels.. is it Satanic?

    For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood,...Ephesians 6.12

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    New Covid study hints at long-term loss of brain tissue, Dr. Scott Gottlieb warns


    https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/…scott-gottlieb-warns.html


    KEY POINTS

    A new U.K. study examined brain imaging before and after a coronavirus infection and looked specifically at the potential effect on the nervous system.

    “In short, the study suggests that there could be some long-term loss of brain tissue from Covid, and that would have some long-term consequences,” Gottlieb said.

    Gottlieb explained to CNBC's "The News with Shepard Smith" that the destruction of brain tissue could explain why Covid patients lost their sense of smell.


    Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned Thursday about the potential for long-term brain loss associated with Covid, citing a new study from the United Kingdom.


    "In short, the study suggests that there could be some long-term loss of brain tissue from Covid, and that would have some long-term consequences," the former FDA chief and CNBC contributor said.

    You could compensate for that over time, so the symptoms of that may go away, but you're never going to regain the tissue if, in fact, it's being destroyed as a result of the virus," said Gottlieb, who serves on the board of Covid vaccine-maker Pfizer.

    The U.K. study examined brain imaging before and after a coronavirus infection and looked specifically at the potential effect on the nervous system.


    Gottlieb explained to CNBC's "The News with Shepard Smith" that the destruction of brain tissue could explain why Covid patients lost their sense of smell.


    "The diminishment in the amount of cortical tissue happened to be in regions of the brain that are close to the places that are responsible for smell," he said. "What it suggests is that, the smell, the loss of smell, is just an effect of a more primary process that's underway, and that process is actually shrinking of cortical tissue."

    Genetically engineered nanoparticle delivers dexamethasone directly to inflamed lungs


    https://phys.org/news/2021-06-…hasone-inflamed-lungs.amp


    Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed immune cell-mimicking nanoparticles that target inflammation in the lungs and deliver drugs directly where they're needed. As a proof of concept, the researchers filled the nanoparticles with the drug dexamethasone and administered them to mice with inflamed lung tissue. Inflammation was completely treated in mice given the nanoparticles, at a drug concentration where standard delivery methods did not have any efficacy.

    The researchers reported their findings in Science Advances on June 16.


    What's special about these nanoparticles is that they are coated in a cell membrane that's been genetically engineered to look for and bind to inflamed lung cells. They are the latest in the line of so-called cell membrane-coated nanoparticles that have been developed by the lab of UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Liangfang Zhang. His lab has previously used cell membrane-coated nanoparticles to absorb toxins produced by MRSA; treat sepsis; and train the immune system to fight cancer. But while these previous cell membranes were naturally derived from the body's cells, the cell membranes used to coat this dexamethasone-filled nanoparticle were not.


    "In this paper, we used a genetic engineering approach to edit the surface proteins on the cells before we collected the membranes. This significantly advanced our technology by allowing us to precisely overexpress certain functional proteins on the membranes or knockout some undesirable proteins," said Zhang, who is a senior author of the paper.


    Joon Ho Park, a graduate student in Zhang's lab and first author of the paper, said the researchers noticed that when endothelial cells become inflamed, they overexpress a protein called VCAM1, whose purpose is to attract immune cells to the site of inflammation. In response, the immune cells express a protein called VLA4, which seeks out and binds to VCAM1.


    "We engineered cell membranes to express the full version of VLA4 all the time," said Park. "These membranes constantly overexpress VLA4 in order to seek out VCAM1 and the site of inflammation. These engineered cell membranes allow the nanoparticle to find the inflamed sites, and then release the drug that's inside the nanoparticle to treat the specific area of inflammation."

    While the nanoparticle won't directly enhance the efficacy of the drug—dexamethasone in this case—concentrating it at the site of interest may mean a lower dosage is required. This study showed that the dexamethasone accumulated at the site of interest at higher levels, and faster, than standard drug delivery approaches.


    "We're delivering the exact same drug used in the clinic, but the difference is we're concentrating the drugs to the point of interest," said Park. "By having these nanoparticles target the inflammation site, it means a larger portion of the medicine will wind up where it's needed, and not be cleared out by the body before it can accumulate and be effective."


    The researchers note that this genetically engineered cell membrane approach is a platform technology that in theory can be used to target not only inflammation in other areas of the body— VCAM1 is a universal signal of inflammation—but much broader use cases as well.


    "This is a versatile platform, not just for lung inflammation but any type of inflammation that upregulates VCAM1," said Park. "This technology can be generalized; this engineered cell membrane-coated nanoparticle doesn't have to overexpress VLA4, it could be swapped out to another protein that can target other areas of the body or accomplish other goals."


    To engineer the cell membranes to overexpress the VLA4 protein, Park and the team start with packaging VLA4 genes into a viral vector. They then insert this reprogrammed viral vector into lab-grown host cells derived from mice. The cells incorporate the genes that the viral vector is carrying into their own genome and as a result, produce membranes that constantly overexpress VLA4.


    The researchers' next step is to study the process using human cell membranes, instead of mice cell membranes, that are engineered to express the human version of VLA4. There are still many steps needed before the technology could be tested in human clinical trials, but the researchers say that these early results from the platform technology are encouraging.


    "By leveraging the established gene editing techniques, this study advances the cell membrane-coated nanoparticles to a new level and opens up new opportunities for targeted drug delivery and other medical applications", concluded by Zhang.

    Five years before a vaccine can 'hold the line' against Covid variants, England's medical chief says


    https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/…ainst-covid-variants.html


    KEY POINTS

    Over 42 million people have had a first dose of a vaccine in Britain — that's about 80% of the adult population — and over 30 million people have had their second dose.

    Trials of booster shots are already underway in Britain and there are reports that the population will receive a third shot before winter this year.


    LONDON — England's top medical officer has warned that the coming winter will continue to be difficult for the country's health system despite the country's successful coronavirus vaccination program.


    A further easing of lockdown restrictions in England was delayed this week due to a surge in cases of the delta variant first discovered in India.



    In a speech to the NHS Confederation Thursday, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said the current wave of Covid infections due to the delta variant would likely be followed by another surge in the winter.


    He said that Covid-19 "has not thrown its last surprise at us and there will be several more [variants] over the next period," according to Sky News. He added that it would likely take five years before there are vaccines that could "hold the line" to a very large degree against a range of coronavirus variants.


    And until then, he said that new vaccination programs and booster shots would be needed.


    Click here to view interactive content

    In the U.K., where the delta variant is now responsible for the bulk of new infections, cases have spiked among young people and the unvaccinated, leading to a rise in hospitalizations in those cohorts.


    It's hoped that Covid-19 vaccination programs can stop the spread of the delta variant and so the race is on to protect younger people who might not be fully vaccinated.



    CNBC Health & Science

    Read CNBC's latest global coverage of the Covid pandemic:


    The fast-spreading delta Covid variant could have different symptoms, experts say


    Costa Rica rejects delivery of China's Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine, says it is not effective enough


    Africa sees 44% spike in new Covid infections, 20% increase in deaths


    WHO says delta Covid variant has now spread to 80 countries, and it keeps mutating


    Analysis from Public Health England released on Monday showed that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective against hospitalization from the delta variant.


    But some vaccines are reported to be less effective against other strains. For example, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said earlier this month that it has started commercial negotiations with AstraZeneca to secure a variant vaccine — which has been adapted to tackle the variant first discovered in South Africa.


    Meanwhile, trials of booster shots are already underway in Britain and there are reports that the population will receive a third shot before winter this year.


    Over 42 million people have had a first dose of a vaccine in Britain — that's about 80% of the adult population — and over 30 million people have had their second dose.

    In a speech to the NHS Confederation Thursday, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said the current wave of Covid infections due to the delta variant would likely be followed by another surge in the winter.


    He said that Covid-19 "has not thrown its last surprise at us and there will be several more [variants] over the next period," according to Sky News. He added that it would likely take five years before there are vaccines that could "hold the line" to a very large degree against a range of coronavirus variants.


    And until then, he said that new vaccination programs and booster shots would be needed.


    In the U.K., where the delta variant is now responsible for the bulk of new infections, cases have spiked among young people and the unvaccinated, leading to a rise in hospitalizations in those cohorts.


    It's hoped that Covid-19 vaccination programs can stop the spread of the delta variant and so the race is on to protect younger people who might not be fully vaccinated.

    Analysis from Public Health England released on Monday showed that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective against hospitalization from the delta variant.


    But some vaccines are reported to be less effective against other strains. For example, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said earlier this month that it has started commercial negotiations with AstraZeneca to secure a variant vaccine — which has been adapted to tackle the variant first discovered in South Africa.


    Meanwhile, trials of booster shots are already underway in Britain and there are reports that the population will receive a third shot before winter this year.


    Over 42 million people have had a first dose of a vaccine in Britain — that's about 80% of the adult population — and over 30 million people have had their second dose.

    The Potential Future of the COVID-19 Pandemic

    Will SARS-CoV-2 Become a Recurrent Seasonal Infection?


    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777343


    There is growing optimism and hope that by virtue of ongoing immunization efforts, seasonality (declining infections through August), and naturally acquired immunity, by spring and early summer 2021 in the US there will be a substantial decline in the number of deaths and hospitalizations related to COVID-19. However, this optimism must be tempered by several important factors. The likelihood of achieving herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2 is low simply because not all individuals in the US are eligible to be vaccinated and a quarter of eligible individuals will likely decline to be immunized. Moreover, the vaccines do not provide full immunity against infection, and the currently available vaccines are less effective against variant B.1.351, and possibly other variants. Accordingly, the public and health systems need to plan for the possibility that COVID-19 will persist and become a recurrent seasonal disease.


    Herd immunity is a theoretical construct from infectious disease modeling that posits that in a population in which every individual is equally likely to encounter every other individual, transmission will not be sustained when immunity through past infection, vaccination, or both reaches the level of 1 − (1/R), where R is the number of infections caused by a single infection in a population in which everyone is susceptible.1 Reality diverges from this simple notion. First, because COVID-19 is clearly seasonal, like other coronaviruses, the herd immunity level will be lower in the summer and higher in the winter. Second, herd immunity depends on how much interaction individuals have with one another, which will vary by state or city after social distancing mandates are lifted. Third, nonrandom mixing (individuals are not equally likely to interact with one another) can lead to modifications of the level of immunity required to stop transmission. Despite these factors, some public health officials suggest that achieving winter herd immunity in the presence of new more contagious variants will require more than 70% to 80% of individuals to be immune.


    Three key considerations will make achieving herd immunity against COVID-19 challenging. First, vaccines will have a reduced effect on preventing infection from the B.1.351 variant. Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have an overall effectiveness against symptomatic disease of approximately 95% for wild-type variants, whereas adenovirus vector vaccines, such as the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine, have effectiveness closer to 70%. Evidence on vaccine efficacy for preventing infection, however, comes only from 1 group in the AstraZeneca trial that showed 55% protection against infection as measured through weekly nasal swabs vs 70% protection for symptomatic disease.2 Furthermore, for the 3 vaccines tested against the B.1.351 variant, Janssen, Novavax, and AstraZeneca reported effectiveness estimates for symptomatic disease of 57%,3 49%,4 and a statistically nonsignificant percentage, respectively. If the B.1.351 variant becomes dominant, a simple calculation suggests that the aggregate effectiveness of vaccines for preventing B.1.351 transmission in the US could be only 50% (ie, based on current effectiveness of 90% to prevent symptomatic disease × 20% reduction of efficacy for preventing infection compared with symptomatic disease and assuming an average reduction in efficacy for B.1.351 of 33% [excluding the statistically insignificant protection from the AstraZeneca vaccine]).


    Second, not enough individuals will receive the vaccine. Because the vaccines are currently not authorized for use in children, only approximately 75% of US individuals are eligible to be immunized. Perhaps more important in the long run, not all individuals are willing be immunized. Data collected daily through Facebook’s Data for Good initiative provide timely information on the proportion of individuals who respond yes or “yes, probably” to the question, Will you take the vaccine if offered it? These positive responses regarding likelihood of vaccine receipt increased in January 2021 and have reached 71%,5 similar to the 72% response in a nationally representative sample.6 Even with an effective approved vaccine for children, if B.1.351 or some other variant becomes dominant, the US can expect vaccine-derived immunity to reach only 37.5% (the estimated potential 50% aggregate efficacy for transmission × 75% of individuals receiving the vaccine) in 2021 if all supply and administration difficulties are overcome.


    Third, there is concern about the extent to which previous infections from one variant protect individuals from reinfection with some new variants. Novavax reported that in a phase 2b clinical trial in South Africa, the COVID-19 incidence rate in the placebo group, predominantly from variant B.1.351, was 3.9% both among individuals with COVID-19 seropositivity and those who were COVID-19 seronegative.7 The interpretation by Novavax of this finding has been that past infection provides no immunity against new variants. If that is true, herd immunity can be achieved only through vaccination. But if B.1.351 spreads widely, vaccine-derived immunity will likely be much lower than the levels required to reach herd immunity by the 2021-2022 northern hemisphere winter.


    Various models suggest continuing COVID-19 surges are possible even without B.1.351 dominance.8 A winter surge of infection with B.1.351 dominance may occur in 2021-2022. Hospitalization and death rates, however, may be expected to be lower, assuming vaccines remain more effective for preventing symptomatic disease and remain effective for preventing severe disease and death. For example, the Janssen vaccine was more than 85% effective against severe disease, even in South Africa, with no hospitalizations or deaths reported in the trial, albeit with a very wide CI for these outcomes.3 If transmission remained similar to what occurred this winter, hospitalizations and deaths should be less in winter 2021-2022. But the magnitude of the winter surge also depends on behavior. Through mask wearing and social distancing, only an estimated 19% of US residents have been infected so far. In the next winter, it will be problematic to maintain social distancing mandates due to public fatigue and the potential lasting effect of the pandemic on the economy. Despite the protection from vaccination, effective R in the absence of concerted social distancing and low levels of mask use could be higher next winter than this winter.


    If new variants continue to appear, winter surges may become the norm. This prospect requires advance planning and consideration of a range of strategies to mitigate the consequences for communities and health systems. Five strategies should be considered and vigorously debated in the months ahead.


    1. Intensify global vaccination efforts. New variants can appear anywhere and more transmission will increase the likelihood of their emergence. Intensified expansion of vaccination in low- and middle-income countries along with high-income countries could help reduce the harm of recurrent seasonal COVID-19 and could reduce the frequency of new variants.


    2. Monitor the epidemic and the emergence of new variants and accelerate the modification of vaccines to enhance their efficacy for emerging high-risk variants if they are shown to significantly reduce vaccine protection. The US, European Union, and other high-income countries should invest in global surveillance, including with genome sequencing, to facilitate early detection of variants and track trends at the local level. Strategies of creating multivalent vaccines and adapting vaccines to new variants through boosters will need to be deployed rapidly to maintain overall vaccine efficacy. If variants continue to emerge, it is possible that annual vaccination will be needed, similar to that for seasonal influenza. However, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data indicate that seasonal influenza vaccine uptake averaged 50% and estimated vaccine efficacy averaged 35% from 2014 to 2019.9 For COVID-19, the identification of new variants and modification of vaccines to be efficacious for these variants would need to be more effective.


    3. Manage and finance winter hospital surges. COVID-19 has burdened intensive care units (ICUs) in the US this winter. Social distancing measures have reduced COVID-19 transmission and substantially reduced influenza transmission. US hospitals have avoided the double pressure on bed availability from both influenza and COVID-19 infection. A shift to recurrent seasonal COVID-19 makes it unlikely governments would adopt social distancing mandates every winter, potentially leading to hospitalizations for influenza and COVID-19. ICU bed availability pressure could require halting elective procedures in peak months such as December and January. Hospitals may need to develop greater capacity to respond to surges with sufficient bed capacity and personnel, and anticipate associated financial implications. Financing mechanisms that address that currently hospital income is driven by elective procedures would need to be considered.


    4. Reduce transmission in peak months through employer and educational institution action. Although it is unlikely that the federal government or state governments will use social distancing mandates every winter, employers and educational institutions could adopt certain measures. Actions could include establishing mandatory vaccination, requiring masks during peak transmission months, and avoiding superspreader events by moving meetings or classes with attendance above a certain number to digital platforms. Requiring vaccination where legally allowed could help increase vaccination rates. Requiring mask use in the winter months could contribute both to reduced transmission in those settings and cultural change toward accepting mask use as normal.


    5. Modify behavior of at-risk individuals. Increased risk of death in a winter surge may be large enough to motivate at-risk individuals to change their behavior. Higher-risk individuals (eg, aged ≥65 years or with comorbidities) would need to consider winter behavioral modification such as mask wearing and avoiding congregate settings such as bars, indoor dining, concerts, and sports events, and any setting in which transmission risk is high.


    It is not clear whether COVID-19 will become a chronic seasonal disease. There is too much uncertainty about the probability and frequency of emergence of new variants, the reduction in vaccine efficacy for each variant, the critical question of cross-variant immunity, and the consistency of safe human behavior. However, the prospect of persistent and seasonal COVID-19 is real. If immunity from infection for the same SARS-CoV-2 variant or vaccine-derived immunity wanes, the prospect would increase further. There is much to learn in the coming months about variants, vaccines, and immunity. Recurrent seasonal COVID-19 could require both health system change and profound cultural adjustment for the life of high-risk individuals in the winter months. There is an urgent need to prepare for such a scenario by aligning surveillance, medical response, public health response, and so

    The online detectives sowing doubts about the origins of the pandemic

    A multi-faceted Twitter group, which includes a Spanish industrial engineer, has spent the past year investigating the possibility that the coronavirus did not emerge from a wet market in Wuhan


    https://english.elpais.com/sci…demic.html?outputType=amp


    At the beginning of Spain’s coronavirus lockdown, 40-year-old industrial engineer Francisco de Asís de Ribera was out of work. A few weeks on, the Madrileño read a CNN news article that said China was restricting academic publications on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Ribera shared the article on Twitter and began researching the issue online from his home in the Chamberí district of the Spanish capital. By May, he was part of a group of two dozen Twitter users from various countries who doubted the theory – at the time undisputed – that the coronavirus had emerged from a wet market in Wuhan. A year later, the work of this spontaneously formed group has helped to open a path of investigation into another possibility: the accidental escape of the virus from a laboratory in the Chinese city. The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to believe the former version, but the findings of this group have raised questions about how we consume information and how we classify ideas as conspiracy theories.

    From Twitter threads and private conversations in direct message chats, Ribera and his fellow researchers organized themselves into a flexible group they called Drastic, an acronym for decentralized, radical, autonomous search team investigating Covid-19. The members still do not know each other personally and their relationship over the past months has been focused on sharing leads from buried documents and reflecting upon them openly, without attracting too much attention. Sticking to Twitter, their work has been to gather, translate and interpret clues scattered across the Chinese internet. “We chose Twitter by a process of elimination,” says Ribera. “On Facebook and Reddit any messages questioning the origin [of the coronavirus] were censored; on Twitter too, but less so.” They did not switch to a messaging platform because some of the participants wanted to remain anonymous.

    The group’s endeavors have led to an addendum in Nature magazine and prompted 10 international media teams, including the BBC, AP, Asahi and The Wall Street Journal, to undertake clandestine expeditions to a copper mine in Yunnan province in southern China about 1,500 kilometers from Wuhan in a bid to shed light on the origin of the virus.

    In April 2012, six laborers between the ages of 30 and 63 went into the mine to clean a copper seam of bat feces. All became ill with pneumonia-like symptoms and three died without a definitive diagnosis. The symptoms were very similar to those experienced by Covid-19 victims, though not contagious.


    “A small group of academics and internet sleuths has been working for months, using the networks to find each other and publish evidence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s activities, especially in relation to the mine,” says The Wall Street Journal’s May 24 report. Ribera has also signed three letters along with a small group of prominent academics in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde, calling for more transparency concerning the origin of the pandemic. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has prevented all reporters from reaching the site of the mine or taking photographs of it.

    I was struck at first by the images on television of hospitals full of sick people and the number of victims,” says Rossana Segreto, an Italian microbiologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who is also a member of Drastic. “Above all, I was struck by the idea that a virus that was new to humans could be so powerful.”


    Segreto found that the virus Chinese researchers called RaTG13 in Nature in February, 2020, had already been named before as BtCo4491 by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She believes that the discovery of that link is Drastic’s greatest contribution to research: “Yes, the link between RaTG13, BtCo4491 and the miners’ pneumonia, and the fact that the sequencing of RaTG13, had not been done after the start of the pandemic, as Nature 2020 said, but before, in 2018 [as the authors themselves ended up confirming in Nature in an addendum],” she says.


    Details on the mine and the miners’ pneumonia came from a thesis and another academic text found in a Chinese archive by an anonymous Twitter user called The Seeker, who has been identified as a self-taught young man in his twenties who lives in eastern India, and whose career covers architecture, painting and film. “I started researching more than a year ago and I don’t know how to put it, but the more I looked, the more I felt I had to keep looking; the more questions came up and the more important the answers were,” he tells EL PAÍS via a direct message on Twitter

    Among the documents turned up by The Seeker’s search were the coordinates of Danaoshan, the village in southern China next to the mine. Last September, after analyzing Google Earth photos of the surrounding area, it occurred to Ribera to look at images from previous years, preserved by Google. In 2011 and 2015, in the middle of the expanse of green, there were some small buildings next to a warehouse. It could have been the entrance to the mine: “I was the first to suggest the exact location of the mine, but it’s a joint achievement,” says Ribera. “It was after The Seeker found the coordinates of the village. And later, with the help of other members of Drastic and other anonymous individuals, we have been able to confirm it.”


    Ribera and his fellow researchers’ Twitter accounts contain a very long public conversation that mixes notes, findings and speculations. “Technology has made this whole story possible,” says Yuri Deigin, a Russian-Canadian entrepreneur and author of a lengthy April 2020 essay on the possibility of an accident at the Wuhan lab. “Search engines and public databases, including free access to scientific articles, was key. Also very useful were social networks as a means of exchanging ideas openly,” he says in a direct message on Twitter.


    All of the research was conducted under the shadow of being labeled a conspiracy theorist – an inevitable consequence of doubting the origin of the virus a year ago. “I’ve learned to be on the conspiracy side of the fence; when I explained, we were called crazy,” says Ribera. “I don’t care. The best thing is to go your own way because nobody understands anything. You have to learn which battles to fight and to prioritize which evidence you want to present. When the truth is on the side usually reserved for conspiracies, you have to be very skeptical because you are surrounded by a lot of real conspiracies.”


    Articles based on clues uncovered by Drastic have been circulating since July, 2020, when the British national newspaper The Times published a long feature on the hypotheses and the mine. But it was not until this year that the persistent trickle of discoveries has placed the origin of the virus under greater public scrutiny. In 2021, the WHO’s expedition to Wuhan failed to provide definitive evidence on the Chinese version; and three letters signed by another handful of academics dubbed The Paris Group by The New York Times (which includes Drastic members Ribera and Segreto, Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist at the Bank of New Zealand, André Goffinet, a professor emeritus at the University of Leuven, and researcher Monali Rahalka from the Agharkar Institute in India), called for greater research into the origin of the coronavirus. Former New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade also wrote a lengthy article on SARS-CoV-2, The Wall Street Journal revealed that there were three possible coronavirus cases at the Wuhan Institute in November 2019 and even US President Joe Biden has ordered an investigation into the origin of the virus.

    None of this, of course, confirms anything. But today the voices calling for more transparency are impossible to ignore, though China does not tend to give in to such pressure. “One problem that the international community and journalists have is that they thought that the origin was going to be solved by a scientific journal article,” says Ribera. “People expect the origin of the coronavirus to come out one day in Nature. And it will. But the solution will not come from there alone. People forget that China is a dictatorship and that it is legitimate to doubt what they say because they have deceived us before.”


    The multidisciplinary nature of the team has been one of its key assets, according to Ribera, both regarding Drastic and the so-called Paris Group. “There are people who know about virology, genetics, microbiology, molecular biology, epidemiology, medicine, pathology, zoology, biophysics, public health, bioinformatics, sociology, biosecurity and data analysis,” he explains. “People think this is only up to virologists and no one else should have a say. But that’s not so.”


    While Ribera says he prefers not to calculate the hours he has spent on this topic, another anonymous member of the group, who goes by the pseudonym Billy Bostickson and sports an avatar of a wounded monkey, calculated that at a rate of $20 (€16.8) an hour, he had invested $40,000 (€33,522) worth of his time in the investigation. And that was only July of last year. The work is meticulous and requires a great deal of patience. “Maybe the secret services should be doing it,” says Ribera.


    But the industrial engineer has the perfect credentials for the challenge. “I’ve worked as a technology consultant for many years, but my thing has always been numbers,” he says. He has several Excel pages with thousands of records for virus sequences, the first patients and trips through China from researchers at the Institute. “To me, it’s like a big sudoku,” he says. “My main value-add is searching, structuring and doing the plumbing, and the archeology on the data. It happens a lot that scientists have not properly understood the data and its biases before starting on their model.”


    Ribera’s lack of haste was useful when it came to sifting through the Chinese PDF files so that Google and DeepL could translate them. Throughout this process, only one Chinese speaker has been involved, mainly to research the mine’s history.

    US subsidizing big pharma while big pharma reaps billions on vaccine contracts.



    U.S. to spend $3 billion for COVID-19 antiviral pills, official says


    https://www.latimes.com/politi…house-3-billion?_amp=true


    WASHINGTON — The United States is devoting more than $3 billion to advance development of antiviral pills for COVID-19, according to an official briefed on the matter.

    The pills, which would be used to minimize symptoms after infection, are in development and could begin arriving by year’s end, pending the completion of clinical trials.


    The White House is scheduled to hold a briefing on its COVID-19 plans with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.

    News of the administration’s plans for the pill was first reported Thursday by the New York Times. The official who confirmed the report spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement.

    FLCCC weekly update


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