D614G as the one in 1,300 Aminoacids "natural" random mutation of the Sars-Cov-2 or the distributed lab designed variant, uniquely suited for the human host?

What is more probable, statistically and intuitively: D614G as the one in 1,300 Aminoacids "natural" random mutation of the Sars-Cov-2 or the distributed lab designed variant, uniquely suited for the human host, and at that particular (and also the geopolitical) time and point in the unfolding Pandemic of the Disease X-19 in January - February of 2020? I'll go for the "lab designed". - M.N.  - 10:31 AM 7/3/2020
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"At a glance, the mutation seemed trivial. About 1,300 amino acids serve as building blocks for a protein on the surface of the virus. In the mutant virus, the genetic instructions for just one of those amino acids — number 614 — switched in the new variant from a “D” (shorthand for aspartic acid) to a “G” (short for glycine)."
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10:45 AM 7/3/2020

Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks℠ | InBrief | 
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Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks
Newer variant of COVID-19causing virus dominates global infections
Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus - Google Search
New coronavirus mutation spreads faster but doesn't make people sicker, study confirms
8:19 AM 7/3/2020 - If the creation of Sars-Cov-2 in a lab is possible in principle, then many labs have to be considered and suspected; the German, Russian, and others among them, not just the Chinese ones. The geographical location of this creation is the secondary matter, and the newly baked virus can be transferred into any other location, as the result of the Special Intelligence Operation. - M.N.
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8:33 AM 7/1/2020 - The #Covid19 #MunichCluster appears to be the #source of #infection as indicated by the #D614GMutation, and it has to be in the forefront of the #Epidemiological and #Criminal #Investigations of the #DiseaseX19
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Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks
Newer variant of COVID-19causing virus dominates global infections
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from News Releases. Virus with D614G change in Spike out-competes original strain, but may not make patients sicker LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 2, 2020 Research out today in the journal Cell shows that a specific change in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus virus genome, previously associated with increased viral transmission and the spread of COVID-19, is more infectious in cell culture. The variant in question, D614G, makes a small but effective change in the viruss Spike protein, which the virus uses to enter human cells.Bette Korber, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the study, noted, The D614G variant first came to our attention in early April, as we had observed a strikingly repetitive pattern. All over the world, even when local epidemics had many cases of the original form circulating, soon after the D614G variant was introduced into a region it became the prevalent form. Geographic information from samples from the GISAID COVID-19 viral sequence database enabled tracking of this highly recurrent pattern, a shift in the viral population from the original form to the D614G variant. This occurred at every geographic level: country, subcountry, county, and city. Two independent lines of experimental evidence that support these initial results are included in todays paper. These additional experiments, led by Professor Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., at the La Jolla Institute, and by Professor David Montefiori, Ph.D., at Duke University, showed that the D614G change increases the viruss infectivity in the laboratory. These new experiments, as well as more extensive sequence and clinical data and improved statistical models, are presented in the Cell paper. More in vivo work remains to be done to determine the full implications of the change. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a low mutation rate overall (much lower than the viruses that cause influenza and HIV-AIDS). The D614G variant appears as part of a set of four linked mutations that appear to have arisen once and then moved together around the world as a consistent set of variations. Its remarkable to me, commented Will Fischer of Los Alamos, an author on the study, both that this increase in infectivity was detected by careful observation of sequence data alone, and that our experimental colleagues could confirm it with live virus in such a short time. Fortunately, the clinical data in this paper from Sheffield showed that even though patients with the new G virus carried more copies of the virus than patients infected with D, there wasnt a corresponding increase in the severity of illness," said Saphire, who leads the Gates Foundation-supported Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC).  Korber noted, These findings suggest that the newer form of the virus may be even more readily transmitted than the original form whether or not that conclusion is ultimately confirmed, it highlights the value of what were already good ideas: to wear masks and to maintain social distancing. Research partners from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Duke University, and the University of Sheffield initially published work on this analysis on the bioRxiv site in an April 2020 preprint. That work also included observations of COVID-19 patients from Sheffield that suggested an association of the D614G variant with higher viral loads in the upper respiratory tract. It is possible to track SARS-CoV-2 evolution globally because researchers worldwide are rapidly making their viral sequence data available through the GISAID viral sequence database, Korber said. Currently tens of thousands of sequences are available through this project, and this enabled Korber and the research team to identify the emergence of the D614G variant. GISAID was established to encourage collaboration among influenza researchers, but early in the epidemic the consortium established a SARS-CoV-2 database, which soon became the de facto standard for sharing outbreak sequences among researchers worldwide. The study, "Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus" (DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.06.043) was supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR); Genome Research Limited, operating as the Wellcome Sanger Institute;  CoVIC, INV-006133 of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mastercard, Wellcome; private philanthropic support, as well as the Overton family; a FastGrant, from Emergent Ventures, in aid of COVID-19 research; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Interagency Agreement No. AAI12007-001-00000, and the Los Alamos Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. Additional study authors included S. Gnanakaran, H. Yoon, J. Theiler, W. Abfalterer, N. Hengartner, E.E. Giorgi, T. Bhattacharya, B. Foley, K.M. Hastie, M.D. Parker, D.G. Partridge, C.M. Evans, T.M. Freeman, T.I. de Silva, C. McDanal, L.G. Perez, H. Tang, A. Moon-Walker, S.P. Whelan, C.C. LaBranche.
Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus - Google Search
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Search Results Web results Newer variant of COVID-19-causing virus dominates global ... www.sciencedaily.com releases 2020/07 <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com" rel="nofollow">www.sciencedaily.com</a> releases 2020/07 Cached 17 hours ago - The study, "Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus" was supported by the ... Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that ... www.cell.com cell pdf <a href="http://www.cell.com" rel="nofollow">www.cell.com</a> cell pdf Jun 10, 2020 - Journal Pre-proof. Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus. B. Korber, W.M. ... Making sense of mutation: what D614G means for the COVID ... www.cell.com cell pdf <a href="http://www.cell.com" rel="nofollow">www.cell.com</a> cell pdf 19 hours ago - Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that. D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus. Cell 182. Lloyd-Smith, J.O., Schreiber, S.J., Kopp, ... The coronavirus is mutating - The Washington Post www.washingtonpost.com science 2020/06/29 cor... <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com" rel="nofollow">www.washingtonpost.com</a> science 2020/06/29 cor... Cached 4 days ago - This coronavirus mutation has taken over the world. ... But as Egon Ozer, an infectious-disease specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School ... officially designated D614G but known more familiarly to scientists as G. ... A mutation in the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus changes just one ...
New coronavirus mutation spreads faster but doesn't make people sicker, study confirms
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . "It is now the dominant form infecting people," Erica Ollmann Saphire of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology and the Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium, who worked on the study, told CNN. Now the team has not only checked more genetic sequences, but they have also run experiments involving people, animals and cells in lab dishes that show the mutated version is more common and that it's more infectious than other versions. "We do know that the new virus is fitter. It doesn't look at first glance as if it is worse," Saphire said. The mutation affects the spike protein -- the structure the virus uses to get into the cells it infects. Now the researchers are checking to see whether this affects whether the virus can be controlled by a vaccine. Current vaccines being tested mostly target the spike protein, but they were made using older strains of the virus. The study, published in the journal Cell, confirms earlier work suggesting the mutation had made the new variant of virus more common. The researchers call the new mutation G614, and they show that it has almost completely replaced the first version to spread in Europe and the US, one called D614. No effect on patient survival "Our global tracking data show that the G614 variant in Spike has spread faster than D614," theoretical biologist Bette Korber of Los Alamos National Laboratory and colleagues wrote in their report. "We interpret this to mean that the virus is likely to be more infectious," they added. "Interestingly, we did not find evidence of G614 impact on disease severity." This could be good news, said Lawrence Young, a professor of medical oncology at the UK's University of Warwick, who was not involved in the study. "The current work suggests that while the G614 variant may be more infectious, it is not more pathogenic. There is a hope that as SARS-CoV-2 infection spreads, the virus might become less pathogenic," he said in a statement. The team tested samples taken from patients across Europe and the US and sequenced the genomes. They compared these genome sequences to what's been shared publicly. Comparing these sequences helped them draw a map of the spread of the two forms. "Through March 1, 2020, the G614 variant was rare outside of Europe, but the end of March it had increased in frequency worldwide," they wrote. Even when the D614 form had caused widespread epidemics, in places such as Wales and Nottingham in England, as well as in Washington state, G614 took over once it appeared, they found. "The increase in G614 frequency often continues well after stay-at-home orders are in place and past the subsequent two-week incubation period," they added. There are a few exceptions, including the Santa Clara, California, area and Iceland, where the older, D614 form was never replaced by the newer, G variant. Three to nine times more infectious The new version seems to multiply faster in the upper respiratory tract -- the nose, sinuses and throat -- which would explain why it passes around more easily, the researchers said. But tests on 1,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients in Britain showed those infected with the new version did not fare any worse than those who caught the original strain. David Montefiore of Duke University and colleagues tested the virus in the lab. "We were able to test whether the G form of the virus was more infectious than the D form," Montefiore, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development, told CNN. "All the results agreed that the G form was three to nine times more infectious than the D form," he added. "We now had experimental evidence that supported, in part, what Bette was seeing in her analysis of the sequences across the globe -- the G form had a fitness advantage in terms of infectivity." The lab tests of the virus in action confirmed what the genetic maps had shown. "These findings suggest that the newer form of the virus may be even more readily transmitted than the original form. Whether or not that conclusion is ultimately confirmed, it highlights the value of what were already good ideas: to wear masks and to maintain social distancing," Korber said in a statement. Other mutations often go along with the G614 mutation, but it's not clear what effect they have. "The earliest sequence we detected that carried all four mutations was sampled in Italy on Feb. 20," they wrote. "Within days, this haplotype was sampled in many countries in Europe." The G614 mutation can be neutralized by convalescent serum -- the blood product taken from people who have recovered from a coronavirus infection, Saphire said. Her team tested blood donated by six coronavirus survivors in San Diego. "We looked to see whether the range of antibodies in the blood of the people was just as effective at neutralizing the new virus as the old virus and it was. It was, in fact, a little better," she said. "That was a relief." The researchers had worried that if the new mutation made the virus grow faster and to higher levels, it would take more immune system effort to neutralize it. "In these six San Diegans, that wasn't the case," Saphire said. More work is needed, of course, to solidify the findings and to see what the changes mean for the epidemic and for patients, the researchers said. "There are potential consequences for the vaccines. We are actively investigating those possible consequences," Montefiore said. And, of course, they're keeping an eye out for other mutations. "We might have dodged a bullet with this particular mutation, Saphire said. "However, that is not to say that another mutation couldn't come on top of this one," she added. "It would behoove us to remain vigilant."
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Signed in as Michael_Novakhov Share this story on NewsBlur Shared stories are on their way...
8:19 AM 7/3/2020 - If the creation of Sars-Cov-2 in a lab is possible in principle, then many labs have to be considered and suspected; the German, Russian, and others among them, not just the Chinese ones. The geographical location of this creation is the secondary matter, and the newly baked virus can be transferred into any other location, as the result of the Special Intelligence Operation. - M.N.
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Covid-19-Review. If the creation of Sars-Cov-2 in a lab is possible in principle, then many labs have to be considered and suspected; the German, Russian, and others among them, not just the Chinese ones. The geographical location of this creation is the secondary matter, and the newly baked virus can be transferred into any other location, as the result of the Special Intelligence Operation. - M.N.  8:19 AM 7/3/2020 ___________________________________________________________________ The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin  If the creation of #SarsCov2 in a #LAB is possible #InPrinciple, then #German, #Russian, & other labs can be suspected, not only the #Chinese ones. #Virus can be transferred into any location, by the Special #Intelligence-Info #Operation, and so it looks.  - The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin What are the chances, after all, that the epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak should occur within literal walking distance of the leading research and collection centre in the world for SARS-like bat... <a href="http://independentsciencenews.org" rel="nofollow">independentsciencenews.org</a>  ______________________________________________________________________________ Covid-19 origins - GS Gain of function experiment - GS The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin - GS - JUNE 2, 2020 The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin - By Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD If the public has learned a lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic it is that science does not generate certainty. Do homemade face masks work? What is the death rate of COVID-19? How accurate are the tests? How many people have no symptoms? And so on. Practically the lone undisputed assertion made so far is that all the nearest known genetic relatives of its cause, the Sars-CoV-2 virus, are found in horseshoe bats (Zhou et al., 2020). Therefore, the likely viral reservoir was a bat. - Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly. - By Milton Leitenberg, June 4, 2020 - NEWS  05 JUNE 2020 | nature news article The biggest mystery: what it will take to trace the coronavirus source: SARS-CoV-2 came from an animal but finding which one will be tricky, as will laying to rest speculation of a lab escape. - David Cyranoski - Nature _____________________________________________________________________ Is COVID-19 the dreaded 'Disease X' scientists warned us about? _______________________________________________________________________ Disease X-19 News Review In Brief | On RSS Dog http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.rss http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.atom __________________________________________ » mikenov on Twitter: RT @thehill: JUST IN: Trump challenges Biden to take cognitive test hill.cm/Jzu8YT1 pic.twitter.com/Y1srbgKJl1 03/07/20 07:51 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) JUST IN: Trump challenges Biden to take cognitive test hill.cm/Jzu8YT1 pic.twitter.com/Y1srbgKJl1 Posted by thehill on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:40am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:51am 163 likes, 44 retweets mikenov o... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @CBSNews: 105 University of Washington students in frat houses test positive for coronavirus cbsn.ws/38mBKRo 03/07/20 07:47 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) 105 University of Washington students in frat houses test positive for coronavirus cbsn.ws/38mBKRo Posted by CBSNews on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:03am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:47am 259 likes, 203 retweets mikenov... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @MailOnline: Two UN workers are suspended after video of people having sex in official vehicle in Israel sparked outcry https://t.co/mwa 03/07/20 07:47 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Two UN workers are suspended after video of people having sex in official vehicle in Israel sparked outcry trib.al/fRYP77b Posted by MailOnline on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:25am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:47am 12 l... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @dwnews: Something is killing elephants by the hundreds in Botswana and its not poachers. pic.twitter.com/ImqqzEMHqe 03/07/20 07:46 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Something is killing elephants by the hundreds in Botswana and its not poachers. pic.twitter.com/ImqqzEMHqe Posted by dwnews on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:10am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:46am 59 likes, 78 retweet... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @CNNPolitics: Eight Secret Service agents assigned to Vice President Mike Pence's detail tested positive for the coronavirus ahead of hi 03/07/20 07:46 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Eight Secret Service agents assigned to Vice President Mike Pence's detail tested positive for the coronavirus ahead of his Arizona trip, which forced a one-day delay cnn.it/2ZsNApa pic.twitter.com/VSMubX2unW Posted by CNNPolitics on Fri... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @cnni: A surprising new study found that the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped Covid-19 patients better survive 03/07/20 07:45 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) A surprising new study found that the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped Covid-19 patients better survive in the hospital. cnn.it/2C6xnOc Posted by cnni on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 10:48am Retweeted by mikenov on Fri... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @TimesofIsrael: Report: Israeli cyberattack caused Iran nuclear site fire, F35s hit missile base timesofisrael.com/report-israeli 03/07/20 07:45 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Report: Israeli cyberattack caused Iran nuclear site fire, F35s hit missile base timesofisrael.com/report-israeli Posted by TimesofIsrael on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:15am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:45am 42 likes,... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @MailOnline: China admits coronavirus pandemic 'exposes the problems' of the county's wet markets trib.al/EbQTfa1 03/07/20 07:44 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) China admits coronavirus pandemic 'exposes the problems' of the county's wet markets trib.al/EbQTfa1 Posted by MailOnline on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:10am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:44am 43 likes, 23 retweets mike... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @thedailybeast: Fauci: The coronavirus may have mutated to be more infectious trib.al/DGLaI7s 03/07/20 07:44 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Fauci: The coronavirus may have mutated to be more infectious trib.al/DGLaI7s Posted by thedailybeast on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:40am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:44am 68 likes, 54 retweets mikenov on Twitter » mikenov on Twitter: Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly. - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-th 03/07/20 07:43 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly. - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-th Posted by mikenov on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 11:43am mikeno... » mikenov on Twitter: If the creation of #SarsCov2 in a #LAB is possible #InPrinciple, then #German, #Russian, & other labs can be suspected, not only the #Chinese ones. #Virus can be transferred into any location, by the Special #Intelligence-Info #Ope 03/07/20 07:33 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) If the creation of #SarsCov2 in a #LAB is possible #InPrinciple, then #German, #Russian, & other labs can be suspected, not only the #Chinese ones. #Virus can be transferred into any location, by the Special #Intelligence-Info #Opera... » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 and pork: German pig industry suffers after slaughterhouse closure 03/07/20 07:15 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) ... and processing plant tested positive for COVID - 19 . The Toennies plant in Rheda-Wiedenbrueck in North Rhine-Westphalia normally slaughters and ... Google Alert - covid-19 and pork Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakho... » Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Novakhov (16 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 neurological symptoms: Using Epo to treat COVID-19 03/07/20 07:03 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) The growth factor could mitigate severe disease progression and protect patients from long-term neurological effects when the SARS-CoV-2 virus ... Google Alert - covid-19 neurological symptoms Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Nova... » Disease X-19 Origins from Michael_Novakhov (3 sites): Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 origins: FACTBOX-China suspends meat imports from various origins amid COVID-19 pandemic 03/07/20 07:03 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) The move comes as COVID-19 infections have reached more than 10.94 million globally, with 521,125 deaths. China's customs office had already ... Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 origins Disease X-19 Origins from Michael_Novakhov (3 sites) » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 and pork: FACTBOX-China suspends meat imports from various origins amid COVID-19 pandemic 03/07/20 07:03 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) ... has been hit by the novel coronavirus suspends exports of pork products to China from June 17 June 20 China suspends imports of frozen pork and ... Google Alert - covid-19 and pork Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov... » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - Covid-19: Genetic factors: Impact of COVID-19 on Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing (DTC-GT) 2020 by Industry Analysis ... 03/07/20 06:52 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Impact of COVID - 19 on Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing (DTC-GT) 2020 by Industry Analysis, Growth Opportunity, Future ... Next, the document will study the factors responsible for hindering and enhancing growth in the industry. Googl... » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 and pork: As Employees Continue to Battle COVID-19 to Make Meat, Smithfield Rewards Essential Workers ... 03/07/20 06:52 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Meat brand Farmer Johnowned by pork giant Smithfield Foods which produces Dodger Dogs at its Vernon, CA facilityrecently embarked on a 12- ... Google Alert - covid-19 and pork Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 ... » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - coronavirus statistics: UK coronavirus deaths: Nearly 20000 care home residents have died with Covid-19, ONS statistics ... 03/07/20 06:52 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Death certificates for 19,394 residents mentioned novel coronavirus between 2 March and 12 June, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. Google Alert - coronavirus statistics Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 ... » Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Novakhov (16 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 neurological symptoms: Is it allergic rhinitis or COVID-19? Here's how to find out 03/07/20 06:52 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) The vast range of symptoms that comes with the ongoing COVID - 19 ... Many people also report neurological symptoms of disorientation and lack of ... Google Alert - covid-19 neurological symptoms Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_N... » Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Novakhov (16 sites): Google Alert - coronavirus pulmonary symptoms: Monitoring COVID-19 plasma viscosity 03/07/20 06:41 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) In COVID -19 patients, a rise in plasma viscosity increases the risk of a blood clot forming (thrombosis). Routine plasma, blood and serum viscosity ... Google Alert - coronavirus pulmonary symptoms Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michae...
The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Independent Science News | Food, Health and Agriculture Bioscience News. By Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD If the public has learned a lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic it is that science does not generate certainty. Do homemade face masks work? What is the death rate of COVID-19? How accurate are the tests? How many people have no symptoms? And so on. Practically the lone undisputed assertion made so far is that all the nearest known genetic relatives of its cause, the Sars-CoV-2 virus, are found in horseshoe bats (Zhou et al., 2020). Therefore, the likely viral reservoir was a bat. However, most of these ancestor-like bat coronaviruses cannot infect humans (Ge et al., 2013). In consequence, from its beginning, a key question hanging over the pandemic has been: How did a bat RNA virus evolve into a human pathogen that is both virulent and deadly? The answer almost universally seized upon is that there was an intermediate species. Some animal, perhaps a snake, perhaps a palm civet, perhaps a pangolin, served as a temporary host. This bridging animal would probably have had an ACE2 cellular receptor (the molecule which allows cellular entry of the virus) intermediate in protein sequence (or at least structure) between the bat and the human one (Wan et al., 2020). In the press and in the scientific literature, scenarios by which this natural zoonotic transfer might have occurred have been endlessly mulled. Most were fuelled by early findings that many of the earliest COVID-19 cases seem to have occurred in and around Wuhans Huanan live animal market. [The latest data are that 14 of the 41 earliest cases, including the first, had no connection to the animal market (Huang et al. 2020)]. Since the two previous coronavirus near-pandemics of SARS (2002-3) and MERS (2012) both probably came from bats and both are thought (but not proven) to have transitioned to humans via intermediate animals (civets and dromedaries respectively), a natural zoonotic pathway is a reasonable first assumption (Andersen et al., 2020). The idea, as it applied to the original (2002) SARS outbreak, is that the original bat virus infected a civet. The virus then evolved briefly in this animal species, but not enough to cause a civet pandemic, and then was picked up by a human before it died out in civets. In this first human (patient zero) the virus survived, perhaps only barely, but was passed on, marking the first case of human to human transmission. As it was successively passed on in its first few human hosts the virus rapidly evolved, adapting to better infect its new hosts. After a few such tentative transmissions the pandemic proper began. Perhaps this scenario is approximately how the current COVID-19 pandemic began. But one other troubling possibility must be dispensed with. It follows from the fact that the epicentre city, Wuhan (pop. 11 million), happens to be the global epicentre of bat coronavirus research (e.g. Hu et al., 2017). Prompted by this proximity, various researchers and news media, prominently the Washington Post, and with much more data Newsweek, have drawn up a prima facie case that a laboratory origin is a strong possibility (Zhan et al., 2020; Piplani et al., 2020). That is, one of the two labs in Wuhan that has worked on coronaviruses accidentally let a natural virus escape; or, the lab was genetically engineering (or otherwise manipulating) a Sars-CoV-2-like virus which then escaped. Unfortunately, in the US at least, the question of the pandemics origin has become a political football; either an opportunity for Sinophobia or a partisan blame game. But the potential of a catastrophic lab release is not a game and systemic problems of competence and opacity are certainly not limited to China (Lipsitch, 2018). The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently constructing a new and expanded national Bio and Agro-defense facility in Manhattan, Kansas. DHS has estimated that the 50-year risk (defined as having an economic impact of $9-50 billion) of a release from its lab at 70%. When a National Research Council committee inspected these DHS estimates they concluded The committee finds that the risks and costs could well be significantly higher than that. A subsequent committee report (NAP, 2012) continued: the committee was instructed to judge the adequacy and validity of the uSSRA [updated Site-Specific Risk Assessment]. The committee has identified serious concerns about (1) the misapplication of methods used to assess risk, (2) the failure to make clear whether and how the evidence used to support risk assessment assumptions had been thoroughly reviewed and adequately evaluated, (3) the limited breadth of literature cited and the misinterpretation of some of the significant supporting literature, (4) the failure to explain the criteria used to select assumptions when supporting literature is conflicting, (5) the failure to consider important risk pathways, and (6) the inadequate treatment of uncertainty. Those deficiencies are not equally problematic, but they occur with sufficient frequency to raise doubts about the adequacy and validity of the risk results presented. In most instances (e.g., operational activities at the NBAF), the identified problems lead to an underestimation of risk; in other instances (e.g., catastrophic natural hazards), the risks may be overestimated. As a result, the committee concludes that the uSSRA is technically inadequate in critical respects and is an insufficient basis on which to judge the risks associated with the proposed NBAF in Manhattan, Kansas. China, meanwhile, having opened its first in Wuhan in 2018, is planning to roll out a national network of BSL-4 labs (Yuan, 2019). Like many other countries, it is investing significantly in disease surveillance and collection of viruses from wild animal populations and in high-risk recombinant virus research with Potential Pandemic Pathogens (PPPs). On May 4th, nations and global philanthropies, meeting in Brussels, committed $7.4 billion to future pandemic preparedness. But the question hanging over all such investments is this: the remit of the Wuhan lab at the centre of the accidental release claims is pandemic preparedness. If the COVID-19 pandemic began there then we need to radically rethink current ideas for pandemic preparation globally. Many researchers already believe we should, for the sake of both safety and effectiveness (Lipsitch and Galvani, 2014; Weiss et al., 2015; Lipsitch, 2018). The worst possible outcome would be for those donated billions to accelerate the arrival of the next pandemic. Historical lab releases, a brief history An accidental lab release is not merely a theoretical possibility. In 1977 a laboratory in Russia (or possibly China), most likely while developing a flu vaccine, accidentally released the extinct H1N1 influenza virus (Nakajima et al., 1978). H1N1 went on to become a global pandemic virus. A large proportion of the global population became infected. In this case, deaths were few because the population aged over 20 yrs old had historic immunity to the virus. This episode is not widely known because only recently has this conclusion been formally acknowledged in the scientific literature and the virology community has been reluctant to discuss such incidents (Zimmer and Burke, 2009; Wertheim, 2010). Still, laboratory pathogen escapes leading to human and animal deaths (e.g. smallpox in Britain; equine encephalitis in South America) are common enough that they ought to be much better known (summarised in Furmanski, 2014). Only rarely have these broken out into actual pandemics on the scale of H1N1, which, incidentally, broke out again in 2009/2010 as Swine flu causing deaths estimated variously at 3,000 to 200,000 on that occasion (Duggal et al., 2016; Simonsen et al. 2013). Many scientists have warned that experiments with PPPs, like the smallpox and Ebola and influenza viruses, are inherently dangerous and should be subject to strict limits and oversight (Lipsitch and Galvani, 2014; Klotz and Sylvester, 2014). Even in the limited case of SARS-like coronaviruses, since the quelling of the original SARS outbreak in 2003, there have been six documented SARS disease outbreaks originating from research laboratories, including four in China. These outbreaks caused 13 individual infections and one death (Furmanski, 2014). In response to such concerns the US banned certain classes of experiments, called gain of function (GOF) experiments, with PPPs in 2014, but the ban (actually a funding moratorium) was lifted in 2017. For these reasons, and also to ensure the effectiveness of future pandemic preparedness efforts­, it is a matter of vital international importance to establish whether the laboratory escape hypothesis has credible evidence to support it. This must be done regardless of the problemin the USof toxic partisan politics and nationalism. The COVID-19 Wuhan lab escape thesis The essence of the lab escape theory is that Wuhan is the site of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Chinas first and only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility. (BSL-4 is the highest pathogen security level). The WIV, which added a BSL-4 lab only in 2018, has been collecting large numbers of coronaviruses from bat samples ever since the original SARS outbreak of 2002-2003; including collecting more in 2016 (Hu, et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018). Led by researcher Zheng-Li Shi, WIV scientists have also published experiments in which live bat coronaviruses were introduced into human cells (Hu et al., 2017). Moreover, according to an April 14 article in the Washington Post, US Embassy staff visited the WIV in 2018 and had grave safety concerns about biosecurity there. The WIV is just eight miles from the Huanan live animal market that was initially thought to be the site of origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wuhan is also home to a lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (WCDPC). It is a BSL-2 lab that is just 250 metres away from the Huanan market. Bat coronaviruses have in the past been kept at the Wuhan WCDPC lab. Thus the lab escape theory is that researchers from one or both of these labs may have picked up a Sars-CoV-2-like bat coronavirus on one of their many collecting (aka virus surveillance) trips. Or, alternatively, a virus they were studying, passaging, engineering, or otherwise manipulating, escaped. Scientific assessments of the lab escape theory On April 17 the Australian Science Media Centre asked four Australian virologists: Did COVID-19 come from a lab in Wuhan? Three (Edward Holmes, Nigel McMillan and Hassan Vally) dismissed the lab escape suggestion and Vally simply labeled it, without elaboration, a conspiracy. The fourth virologist interviewed was Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University. Petrovsky first addressed the question of whether the natural zoonosis pathway was viable. He told the Media Centre: no natural virus matching to COVID-19 has been found in nature despite an intensive search to find its origins. That is to say, the idea of an animal intermediate is speculation. Indeed, no credible viral or animal host intermediaries, either in the form of a confirmed animal host or a plausible virus intermediate, has to-date emerged to explain the natural zoonotic transfer of Sars-CoV-2 to humans (e.g. Zhan et al., 2020). In addition to Petrovskys point, there are two further difficulties with the natural zoonotic transfer thesis (apart from the weak epidemiological association between early cases and the Huanan wet market). The first is that researchers from the Wuhan lab travelled to caves in Yunnan (1,500 Km away) to find horseshoe bats containing SARS-like coronaviruses. To-date, the closest living relative of Sars-CoV-2 yet found comes from Yunnan (Ge et al., 2016). Why would an outbreak of a bat virus therefore occur in Wuhan? Moreover, China has a population of 1.3 billion. If spillover from the wildlife trade was the explanation, then, other things being equal, the probability of a pandemic starting in Wuhan (pop. 11 million) is less than 1%. Zheng-Li Shi, the head of bat coronavirus research at WIV, told Scientific American as much: I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China. Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animalsparticularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, Could they have come from our lab? Wuhan, in short, is a rather unlikely epicentre for a natural zoonotic transfer. In contrast, to suspect that Sars-CoV-2 might have come from the WIV is both reasonable and obvious. Was Sars-CoV-2 created in a lab? In his statement, Petrovsky goes on to describe the kind of experiment that, in principle, if done in a lab, would obtain the same result as the hypothesised natural zoonotic transferrapid adaptation of a bat coronavirus to a human host. Take a bat coronavirus that is not infectious to humans, and force its selection by culturing it with cells that express human ACE2 receptor, such cells having been created many years ago to culture SARS coronaviruses and you can force the bat virus to adapt to infect human cells via mutations in its spike protein, which would have the effect of increasing the strength of its binding to human ACE2, and inevitably reducing the strength of its binding to bat ACE2. Viruses in prolonged culture will also develop other random mutations that do not affect its function. The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus. Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention. In other words, Petrovsky believes that current experimental methods could have led to an altered virus that escaped. Passaging, GOF research, and lab escapes The experiment mentioned by Petrovsky represents a class of experiments called passaging. Passaging is the placing of a live virus into an animal or cell culture to which it is not adapted and then, before the virus dies out, transferring it to another animal or cell of the same type. Passaging is often done iteratively. The theory is that the virus will rapidly evolve (since viruses have high mutation rates) and become adapted to the new animal or cell type. Passaging a virus, by allowing it to become adapted to its new situation, creates a new pathogen. The most famous such experiment was conducted in the lab of Dutch researcher Ron Fouchier. Fouchier took an avian influenza virus (H5N1) that did not infect ferrets (or other mammals) and serially passaged it in ferrets. The intention of the experiment was specifically to evolve a PPP. After ten passages the researchers found that the virus had indeed evolved, to not only infect ferrets but to transmit to others in neighbouring cages (Herfst et al., 2012). They had created an airborne ferret virus, a Potential Pandemic Pathogen, and a storm in the international scientific community. The second class of experiments that have frequently been the recipients of criticism are GOF experiments. In GOF research, a novel virus is deliberately created, either by in vitro mutation or by cutting and pasting together two (or more) viruses. The intention of such reconfigurations is to make viruses more infectious by adding new functions such as increased infectivity or pathogenicity. These novel viruses are then experimented on, either in cell cultures or in whole animals. These are the class of experiments banned in the US from 2014 to 2017. Some researchers have even combined GOF and passaging experiments by using recombinant viruses in passaging experiments (e.g. Sheahan et al., 2008). Such experiments all require recombinant DNA techniques and animal or cell culture experiments. But the very simplest hypothesis of how Sars-CoV-2 might have been caused by research is simply to suppose that a researcher from the WIV or the WCDCP became infected during a collecting expedition and passed their bat virus on to their colleagues or family. The natural virus then evolved, in these early cases, into Sars-CoV-2. For this reason, even collecting trips have their critics. Epidemiologist Richard Ebright called them the definition of insanity. Handling animals and samples exposes collectors to multiple pathogens and returning to their labs then brings those pathogens back to densely crowded locations. Was the WIV doing experiments that might release PPPs? Since 2004, shortly after the original SARS outbreak, researchers from the WIV have been collecting bat coronaviruses in an intensive search for SARS-like pathogens (Li et al., 2005). Since the original collecting trip, many more have been conducted (Ge et al., 2013; Ge et al., 2016; Hu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018). Petrovsky does not mention it but Zheng-Li Shis group at the WIV has already performed experiments very similar to those he describes, using those collected viruses. In 2013 the Shi lab reported isolating an infectious clone of a bat coronavirus that they called WIV-1 (Ge et al., 2013). WIV-1 was obtained by introducing a bat coronavirus into monkey cells, passaging it, and then testing its infectivity in human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor (Ge et al., 2013). In 2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-authored a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF research on bat coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015). In this particular set of experiments the researchers combined the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone into a single engineered live virus. The spike was supplied by the Shi lab. They put this bat/human/mouse virus into cultured human airway cells and also into live mice. The researchers observed notable pathogenesis in the infected mice (Menachery et al. 2015). The mouse-adapted part of this virus comes from a 2007 experiment in which the Baric lab created a virus called rMA15 through passaging (Roberts et al., 2007). This rMA15 was highly virulent and lethal to the mice. According to this paper, mice succumbed to overwhelming viral infection. In 2017, again with the intent of identifying bat viruses with ACE2 binding capabilities, the Shi lab at WIV reported successfully infecting human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor with four different bat coronaviruses. Two of these were lab-made recombinant (chimaeric) bat viruses. Both the wild and the recombinant viruses were briefly passaged in monkey cells (Hu et al., 2017). Together, what these papers show is that: 1) The Shi lab collected numerous bat samples with an emphasis on collecting SARS-like coronavirus strains, 2) they cultured live viruses and conducted passaging experiments on them, 3) members of Zheng-Li Shis laboratory participated in GOF experiments carried out in North Carolina on bat coronaviruses, 4) the Shi laboratory produced recombinant bat coronaviruses and placed these in human cells and monkey cells. All these experiments were conducted in cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors. The overarching purpose of such work was to see whether an enhanced pathogen could emerge from the wild by creating one in the lab. (For a very informative technical summary of WIV research into bat coronaviruses and that of their collaborators we recommend this post, written by biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin). It also seems that the Shi lab at WIV intended to do more of such research. In 2013 and again in 2017 Zheng-Li Shi (with the assistance of a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance) obtained a grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The most recent such grant proposed that: host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice (NIH project #5R01Al110964-04). It is hard to overemphasize that the central logic of this grant was to test the pandemic potential of SARS-related bat coronaviruses by making ones with pandemic potential, either through genetic engineering or passaging, or both. Apart from descriptions in their publications we do not yet know exactly which viruses the WIV was experimenting with but it is certainly intriguing that numerous publications since Sars-CoV-2 first appeared have puzzled over the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds with exceptionally high affinity to the human ACE2 receptor at least ten times more tightly than the original SARS (Zhou et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020; Wan et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020; Letko et al., 2020). This affinity is all the more remarkable because of the relative lack of fit in modelling studies of the SARS-CoV-2 spike to other species, including the postulated intermediates like snakes, civets and pangolins (Piplani et al., 2020). In this preprint these modellers concluded This indicates that SARS-CoV-2 is a highly adapted human pathogen. Given the research and collection history of the Shi lab at WIV it is therefore entirely plausible that a bat SARS-like cornavirus ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 was trained up on the human ACE2 receptor by passaging it in cells expressing that receptor. [On June 4 an excellent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists went further. Pointing out what we had overlooked, that the Shi lab also amplified spike proteins of collected coronaviruses, which would make them available for GOF experimentation (Ge et al., 2016).] How do viruses escape from high security laboratories? Pathogen lab escapes take various forms. According to the US Government Accountability Office, a US defense Department laboratory once inadvertently sent live Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, to almost 200 laboratories worldwide over the course of 12 years. The laboratory believed that the samples had been inactivated. In 2007, Britain experienced a foot and mouth disease outbreak. Its origin was a malfunctioning waste disposal system of a BSL-4 laboratory leaking into a stream from which neighbouring cows drank. The disposal system had not been properly maintained (Furmanski, 2014). In 2004 an outbreak of SARS originating from the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Beijing, China, began, again, with the inadequate inactivation of a viral sample that was then distributed to non-secure parts of the building (Weiss et al., 2015). Writing for the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists in February 2019, Lynn Klotz concluded that human error was behind most laboratory incidents causing exposures to pathogens in US high security laboratories. While equipment failure was also a factor, of the 749 incidents reported to the US Federal Select Agent Programme between 2009-2015, Klotz concluded that 79% resulted from human error. But arguably the biggest worry is incidents that go entirely unreported because escape of the pathogen goes undetected. It is truly alarming that a significant number of pathogen escape events were uncovered only because investigators were in the process of examining a completely different incident (Furmanski, 2014). Such discoveries represent strong evidence that pathogen escapes are under-reported and that important lessons still need to be learned (Weiss et al., 2015). The safety record of the WIV The final important data point is the biosafety history of the WIV. The WIV was built in 2015 and became a commissioned BSL-4 lab in 2018. According to Josh Rogin of the Washington Post, US embassy officials visited the WIV in 2018. They subsequently warned their superiors in Washington of a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. And according to VOA News, a year before the outbreak, a security review conducted by a Chinese national team found the lab did not meet national standards in five categories. Credible reports from within China also question lab biosafety and its management. In 2019, Yuan Zhiming, biosecurity specialist at the WIV, cited the challenges of biosafety in China. According to Yuan: several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes and Currently, most laboratories lack specialized biosafety managers and engineers. He recommends that We should promptly revise the existing regulations, guidelines, norms, and standards of biosafety and biosecurity. Nevertheless, he also notes that China intends to build 5-7 more BSL-4 laboratories (Yuan, 2019). And in February 2020, Scientific American interviewed Zheng-Li Shi. Accompanying the interview was a photograph of her releasing a captured bat. In the photo she is wearing a casual pink unzipped top layer, thin gloves, and no face mask or other protection. Yet this is the same researcher whose talks give chilling warnings about the dire risks of human contact with bats. All of which tends to confirm the original State Department assessment. As one anonymous senior administration official told Rogin: The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from a lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and theres almost nothing on the other side. The leading hypothesis is a lab outbreak For all these reasons, a lab escape is by far the leading hypothesis to explain the origins of Sars-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheer proximity of the WIV and WCDCP labs to the outbreak and the nature of their work represents evidence that can hardly be ignored. The long international history of lab escapes and the biosafety concerns from all directions about the labs in Wuhan greatly strengthen the case. Especially since evidence for the alternative hypothesis, in the form of a link to wild animal exposure or the wildlife trade, remains extremely weak, being based primarily on analogy with SARS one (Bell et al,. 2004; Andersen et al., 2020). Nevertheless, on April 16th Peter Daszak, who is the President of the EcoHealth Alliance, told Democracy Now! in a lengthy interview that the lab escape thesis was Pure baloney. He told listeners: There was no viral isolate in the lab. There was no cultured virus thats anything related to SARS coronavirus 2. So its just not possible. Daszak made very similar claims on CNNs Sixty Minutes: There is zero evidence that this virus came out of a lab in China. Instead, Daszak encouraged viewers to blame hunting and eating wildlife. Daszaks certainty is highly problematic on several counts. The closest related known coronaviruses to Sars-CoV-2 are to be found at the WIV so a lot depends on what he means by related to. But it is also dishonest in the sense that Daszak must know that culturing in the lab is not the only way that WIV researchers could have caused an outbreak. Third, and this is not Daszaks fault, the media are asking the right question to the wrong person. As alluded to above, Daszak is the named principal investigator on multiple US grants that went to the Shi lab at WIV. He is also a co-author on numerous papers with Zheng-Li Shi, including the 2013 Nature paper announcing the isolation of coronavirus WIV-1 through passaging (Ge et al., 2013). One of his co-authorships is on the collecting paper in which his WIV colleagues placed the four fully functional bat coronaviruses into human cells containing the ACE2 receptor (Hu et al. 2017). That is, Daszak and Shi together are collaborators and co-responsible for most of the published high-risk collecting and experimentation at the WIV. An investigation is needed, but who will do it? If the Shi lab has anything to hide, it is not only the Chinese Government that will be reluctant to see an impartial investigation proceed. Much of the work was funded by the US taxpayer, channeled there by Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance. Virtually every credible international organisation that might in principle carry out such an investigation, the WHO, the US CDC, the FAO, the US NIH, including the Gates Foundation, is either an advisor to, or a partner of, the EcoHealth Alliance. If the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak originated from the bat coronavirus work at the WIV then just about every major institution in the global public health community is implicated. But to solve many of these questions does not necessarily require an expensive investigation. It would probably be enough to inspect the lab notebooks of WIV researchers. All research scientists keep detailed notes, for intellectual property and other reasons, but especially in BSL-4 labs. As Yuan Zhiming told Nature magazine in an article marking the opening of the facility in Wuhan: We tell them [staff] the most important thing is that they report what they have or havent done. Meticulous lab records plus staff health records and incident reports of accidents and near-accidents are all essential components (or should be) of BSL work. Their main purpose is to enable the tracking of actual incidents. Much speculation could be ended with the public release of that information. But the WIV has not provided it. This is puzzling since the Chinese government has a very strong incentive to produce those records. Complete transparency would potentially dispel the gales of blame coming its way; especially on the question of whether Sars-CoV-2 has an engineered or passaged origin. If Zheng-Li Shi and Peter Daszak are correct that nothing similar to Sars-CoV-2 was being studied there, then those notebooks should definitively exonerate the lab from having knowingly made an Actual Pandemic Pathogen. Given the simplicity and utility of this step this lack of transparency suggests that there is something to hide. If so, it must be important. But then the question is: What? A thorough investigation of the WIV and its bat coronavirus research is an important first step. But the true questions are not the specific mishaps and dissemblings of Drs Shi or Daszak, nor of the WIV, nor even of the Chinese government. Rather, the bigger question concerns the current philosophy of pandemic prediction and prevention. Deep enquiries should be made about the overarching wisdom of plucking and counting viruses from the wild and then performing dangerous what if recombinant research in high tech but fallible biosafety labs. This is a reductionistic approach, we also note, that has so far failed to predict or protect us from pandemics and may never do so. Footnote: This article was updated on June 3rd to broaden the estimates of Swine Flu deaths, from 3,000 to 3- to 200,000. If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks.
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Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Search Results Scholarly articles for Epidemics, Society, History, Bioterrorism, and BioWarfare History of biological warfare and bioterrorism - Barras - Cited by 109 Biological warfare and bioterrorism: a historical review - Riedel - Cited by 205 Biological warfare, bioterrorism, and biocrime - Jansen - Cited by 99 Web results Biological warfare and bioterrorism: a historical review - NCBI www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pmc articles PMC1200679 <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov" rel="nofollow">www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov</a> pmc articles PMC1200679 Cached Similar Biological warfare agents may be more potent than conventional and chemical ... The description of these historical attempts of using diseases in biological warfare ... The medical community as well as the public should become familiar with ... by S Riedel - 2004 - Cited by 205 - Related articles
How Epidemics End | Boston Review
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Science & Nature How Epidemics End Contrary to hopes for a tidy conclusion to the COVID-19 pandemic, history shows that outbreaks of infectious disease often have much murkier outcomesincluding simply being forgotten about, or dismissed as someone elses problem. June 30, 2020 Jeremy A. Greene, Dora Vargha Jun 30, 2020 25 Min read time Topics: science and technology COVID-19 history Share: AddThis Sharing Buttons Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to EmailShare to More Death Table from Tuberculosis in the United States, prepared for the International Congress on Tuberculosis, September 21 to October 12, 1908. Image: U.S. National Library of Medicine Contrary to hopes for a tidy conclusion to the COVID-19 pandemic, history shows that outbreaks of infectious disease often have much murkier outcomesincluding simply being forgotten about, or dismissed as someone elses problem. Recent history tells us a lot about how epidemics unfold, how outbreaks spread, and how they are controlled. We also know a good deal about beginningsthose first cases of pneumonia in Guangdong marking the SARS outbreak of 20023, the earliest instances of influenza in Veracruz leading to the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 200910, the outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in Guinea sparking the Ebola pandemic of 201416. But these stories of rising action and a dramatic denouement only get us so far in coming to terms with the global crisis of COVID-19. The coronavirus pandemic has blown past many efforts at containment, snapped the reins of case detection and surveillance across the world, and saturated all inhabited continents. To understand possible endings for this epidemic, we must look elsewhere than the neat pattern of beginning and endand reconsider what we mean by the talk of ending epidemics to begin with. Historians have long been fascinated by epidemics in part because, even where they differ in details, they exhibit a typical pattern of social choreography recognizable across vast reaches of time and space. Even though the biological agents of the sixth-century Plague of Justinian, the fourteenth-century Black Death, and the early twentieth-century Manchurian Plague were almost certainly not identical, the epidemics themselves share common features that link historical actors to present experience. As a social phenomenon, the historian Charles Rosenberg has argued, an epidemic has a dramaturgic form. Epidemics start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, following a plot line of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift towards closure. And yet not all diseases fit so neatly into this typological structure. Rosenberg wrote these words in 1992, nearly a decade into the North American HIV/AIDS epidemic. His words rang true about the origins of that diseasethanks in part to the relentless, overzealous pursuit of its Patient Zerobut not so much about its end, which was, as for COVID-19, nowhere in sight. In the case of the new coronavirus, we have now seen an initial fixation on origins give way to the question of endings. In March The Atlantic offered four possible timelines for life returning to normal, all of which depended the biological basis of a sufficient amount of the population developing immunity (perhaps 60 to 80 percent) to curb further spread. This confident assertion derived from models of infectious outbreaks formalized by epidemiologists such as W. H. Frost a century earlier. If the world can be defined into those susceptible (S), infected (I) and resistant (R) to a disease, and a pathogen has a reproductive number R0 (pronounced R-naught) describing how many susceptible people can be infected by a single infected person, the end of the epidemic begins when the proportion of susceptible people drops below the reciprocal, 1/R0. When that happens, one person would infect, on average, less than one other person with the disease. These formulas reassure us, perhaps deceptively. They conjure up a set of natural laws that give order to the cadence of calamities. The curves produced by models, which in better times belonged to the arcana of epidemiologists, are now common figures in the lives of billions of people learning to live with contractions of civil society promoted in the name of bending, flattening, or squashing them. At the same time, as David Jones and Stefan Helmreich recently wrote in these pages, the smooth lines of these curves are far removed from jagged realities of the day-to-day experience of an epidemicincluding the sharp spikes in those reopening states where modelers had predicted continued decline. In other words, epidemics are not merely biological phenomena. They are inevitably framed and shaped by our social responses to them, from beginning to end (whatever that may mean in any particular case). The questions now being asked of scientists, clinicians, mayors, governors, prime ministers, and presidents around the world is not merely When will the biological phenomenon of this epidemic resolve? but rather When, if ever, will the disruption to our social life caused in the name of coronavirus come to an end? As peak incidence nears, and in many places appears to have passed, elected officials and think tanks from opposite ends of the political spectrum provide roadmaps and frameworks for how an epidemic that has shut down economic, civic, and social life in a manner not seen globally in at least a century might eventually recede and allow resumption of a new normal. Readers Also Liked The Shape of Epidemics Waves have taken pride of place in the COVID-19 crisis, serving not just to predict but also to persuade. Their special blend of mathematical and moral messaging will shape the future of the pandemic. David S. Jones, Stefan Helmreich New Pathogen, Old Politics We should be wary of simplistic uses of history, but we can learn from the logic of social responses. Alex de Waal Models v. Evidence COVID-19 has revealed a contest between two competing philosophies of scientific knowledge. To manage the crisis, we must draw on both. Jonathan Fuller These two faces of an epidemic, the biological and the social, are closely intertwined, but they are not the same. The biological epidemic can shut down daily life by sickening and killing people, but the social epidemic also shuts down daily life by overturning basic premises of sociality, economics, governance, discourse, interactionand killing people in the process as well. There is a risk, as we know from both the Spanish influenza of 191819 and the more recent swine flu of 20089, of relaxing social responses before the biological threat has passed. But there is also a risk in misjudging a biological threat based on faulty models or bad data and in disrupting social life in such a way that the restrictions can never properly be taken back. We have seen in the case of coronavirus the two faces of the epidemic escalating on local, national, and global levels in tandem, but the biological epidemic and the social epidemic dont necessarily recede on the same timeline. For these sorts of reasons we must step back and reflect in detail on what we mean by ending in the first place. The history of epidemic endings has taken many forms, and only a handful of them have resulted in the elimination of a disease. History reminds us that the interconnections between the timing of the biological and social epidemics are far from obvious. In some cases, like the yellow fever epidemics of the eighteenth century and the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, the dramatic symptomatology of the disease itself can make its timing easy to track. Like a bag of popcorn popping in the microwave, the tempo of visible case-events begins slowly, escalates to a frenetic peak, and then recedes, leaving a diminishing frequency of new cases that eventually are spaced far enough apart to be contained and then eliminated. In other examples, however, like the polio epidemics of the twentieth century, the disease process itself is hidden, often mild in presentation, threatens to come back, and ends not on a single day but over different timescales and in different ways for different people. Campaigns against infectious diseases are often discussed in military terms, and one result of that metaphor is to suggest that epidemics too must have a singular endpoint. We approach the infection peak as if it were a decisive battle like Waterloo, or a diplomatic arrangement like the Armistice at Compiègne in November 1918. Yet the chronology of a single, decisive ending is not always true even for military history, of course. Just as the clear ending of a military war does not necessarily bring a close to the experience of war in everyday life, so too the resolution of the biological epidemic does not immediately undo the effects of the social epidemic. The social and economic effects of the 19181919 pandemic, for example, were felt long after the end of the third and putatively final wave of the virus. While the immediate economic effect on many local businesses caused by shutdowns appears to have resolved in a matter of months, the broader economic effects of the epidemic on labor-wage relations were still visible in economic surveys in 1920, again in 1921, and in several areas as far as 1930. And yet, like World War One with which its history was so closely intertwined, the influenza pandemic of 191819 appeared at first to have a singular ending. In individual cities the epidemic often produced dramatic spikes and falls in equally rapid tempo. In Philadelphia, as John Barry notes in The Great Influenza (2004), after an explosive and deadly rise in October 1919 that peaked at 4,597 deaths in a single week, cases suddenly dropped so precipitously that the public gathering ban could be lifted before the month was over, with almost no new cases in following weeks. A phenomenon whose destructive potential was limited by material laws, the virus burned through available fuel, then it quickly faded away.  As Barry reminds us, however, scholars have since learned to differentiate at least three different sequences of epidemics within the broader pandemic. The first wave blazed through military installations in the spring of 1918, the second wave caused the devastating mortality spikes in the summer and fall of 1918, and the third wave began in December 1918 and lingered long through the summer of 1919. Some cities, like San Francisco, passed through the first and second waves relatively unscathed only to be devastated by the third wave. Nor was it clear to those still alive in 1919 that the pandemic was over after the third wave receded. Even as late as 1922, a bad flu season in Washington State merited a response from public health officials to enforce absolute quarantine as they had during 191819. It is difficult, looking back, to say exactly when this prototypical pandemic of the twentieth century was really over. Who can tell when a pandemic has ended? Today, strictly speaking, only the World Health Organization (WHO). The Emergency Committee of the WHO is responsible for the global governance of health and international coordination of epidemic response. After the SARS coronavirus pandemic of 20023, this body was granted sole power to declare the beginnings and endings of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC). While SARS morbidity and mortalityroughly 8,000 cases and 800 deaths in 26 countrieshas been dwarfed by the sheer scale of COVID-19, the pandemics effect on national and global economies prompted revisions to the International Health Regulations in 2005, a body of international law that had remained unchanged since 1969. This revision broadened the scope of coordinated global response from a handful of diseases to any public health event that the WHO deemed to be of international concern and shifted from a reactive response framework to a pro-active one based on real-time surveillance and detection and containment at the source rather than merely action at international borders. This social infrastructure has important consequences, not all of them necessarily positive. Any time the WHO declares a public health event of international concernand frequently when it chooses not to declare onethe event becomes a matter of front-page news. Since the 2005 revision, the group has been criticized both for declaring a PHEIC too hastily (as in the case of H1N1) or too late (in the case of Ebola). The WHOs decision to declare the end of a PHEIC, by contrast, is rarely subject to the same public scrutiny. When an outbreak is no longer classified as an extraordinary event and no longer is seen to pose a risk at international spread, the PHEIC is considered not to be justified, leading to a withdrawal of international coordination. Once countries can grapple with the disease within their own borders, under their own national frameworks, the PHEIC is quietly de-escalated. As the response to the 201416 Ebola outbreak in West Africa demonstrates, however, the act of declaring the end of a pandemic can be just as powerful as the act of declaring its beginningin part because emergency situations can continue even after a return to normal has been declared. When WHO Director General Margaret Chan announced in March 2016 that the Ebola outbreak was no longer a public health event of international concern, international donors withdrew funds and care to the West African countries devastated by the outbreak, even as these struggling health systems continued to be stretched beyond their means by the needs of Ebola survivors. NGOs and virologists expressed concern that efforts to fund Ebola vaccine development would likewise fade without a sense of global urgency pushing research forward. Part of the reason that the role of the WHO in proclaiming and terminating the state of pandemic is subject to so much scrutiny is that it can be. The WHO is the only global health body that is accountable to all governments of the world; its parliamentary World Health Assembly contains health ministers from every nation. Its authority rests not so much on its battered budget as its access to epidemic intelligence and pool of select individuals, technical experts with vast experience in epidemic response. But even though internationally sourced scientific and public health authority is key to its role in pandemic crises, WHO guidance is ultimately carried out in very different ways and on very different time scales in different countries, provinces, states, counties, and cities. One state might begin to ease up restrictions to movement and industry just as another implements more and more stringent measures. If each countrys experience of lockdown has already been heterogeneous, the reconnection between them after the PHEIC is ended will likely show even more variance. So many of our hopes for the termination of the present PHEIC now lie in the promise of a COVID-19 vaccine. Yet a closer look at one of the central vaccine success stories of the twentieth century shows that technological solutions rarely offer resolution to pandemics on their own. Contrary to our expectations, vaccines are not universal technologies. They are always deployed locally, with variable resources and commitments to scientific expertise. International variations in research, development, and dissemination of effective vaccines are especially relevant in the global fight against epidemic polio. The development of the polio vaccine is relatively well known, usually told as a story of an American tragedy and triumph. Yet while polio epidemics that swept the globe in the postwar decades did not respect national borders or the Iron Curtain, the Cold War provided context for both collaboration and antagonism. Only a few years after the licensing of Jonas Salks inactivated vaccine in the United States, his technique became widely used across the world, although its efficacy outside of the United States was questioned. The second, live oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin, however, involved extensive collaboration in with Eastern European and Soviet colleagues. As the success of the Soviet polio vaccine trials marked a rare landmark of Cold War cooperation, Basil OConnor, president of the March of Dimes movement, speaking at the Fifth International Poliomyelitis Conference in 1960, proclaimed that in search for the truth that frees man from disease, there is no cold war. Yet the differential uptake of this vaccine retraced the divisions of Cold War geography. The Soviet Union, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were the first countries in the world to begin nationwide immunization with the Sabin vaccine, soon followed by Cuba, the first country in the Western Hemisphere to eliminate the disease. By the time the Sabin vaccine was licensed in the United States in 1963, much of Eastern Europe had done away with epidemics and was largely polio-free. The successful ending of this epidemic within the communist world was immediately held up as proof of the superiority of their political system. Western experts who trusted the Soviet vaccine trials, including the Yale virologist and WHO envoy Dorothy Horstmann, nonetheless emphasized that their results were possible because of the military-like organization of the Soviet health care system. Yet these enduring concerns that authoritarianism itself was the key tool for ending epidemicsa concern reflected in current debates over Chinas heavy-handed interventions in Wuhan this yearcan also be overstated. The Cold War East was united not only by authoritarianism and heavy hierarchies in state organization and society, but also by a powerful shared belief in the integration of paternal state, biomedical research, and socialized medicine. Epidemic management in these countries combined an emphasis on prevention, easily mobilized health workers, top-down organization of vaccinations, and a rhetoric of solidarity, all resting on a health care system that aimed at access to all citizens. Still, authoritarianism as a catalyst for controlling epidemics can be singled out and pursued with long-lasting consequences. Epidemics can be harbingers of significant political changes that go well beyond their ending, significantly reshaping a new normal after the threat passes. Many Hungarians, for example, have watched with alarm the complete sidelining of parliament and the introduction of government by decree at the end of March this year. The end of any epidemic crisis, and thus the end of the need for the significantly increased power of Viktor Orbán, would be determined by Orbán himself. Likewise, many other states, urging the mobilization of new technologies as a solution to end epidemics, are opening the door to heightened state surveillance of their citizens. The apps and trackers now being designed to follow the movement and exposure of people in order to enable the end of epidemic lockdowns can collect data and establish mechanisms that reach well beyond the original intent. The digital afterlives of these practices raise new and unprecedented questions about when and how epidemics end. Although we want to believe that a single technological breakthrough will end the present crisis, the application of any global health technology is always locally determined. After its dramatic successes in managing polio epidemics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the oral poliovirus vaccine became the tool of choice for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in the late 1980s, as it promised an end to summer fears globally. But since vaccines are in part technologies of trust, ending polio outbreaks depends on maintaining confidence in national and international structures through which vaccines are delivered. Wherever that often fragile trust is fractured or undermined, vaccination rates can drop to a critical level, giving way to vaccine-derived polio, which thrives in partially vaccinated populations. In Kano, Nigeria, for example, a ban on polio vaccination between 2000 and 2004 resulted in a new national polio epidemic that soon spread to neighboring countries. As late as December 2019 polio outbreaks were still reported in fifteen African countries, including Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nor is it clear that polio can fully be regarded as an epidemic at this point: while polio epidemics are now a thing of the past for Hungaryand the rest of Europe, the Americas, Australia, and East Asia as wellthe disease is still endemic to parts of Africa and South Asia. A disease once universally epidemic is now locally endemic: this, too, is another way that epidemics end. Indeed, many epidemics have only ended through widespread acceptance of a newly endemic state. Consider the global threat of HIV/AIDS. From a strictly biological perspective, the AIDS epidemic has never ended; the virus continues to spread devastation through the world, infecting 1.7 million people and claiming an estimated 770,000 lives in the year 2018 alone. But HIV is not generally described these days with the same urgency and fear that accompanied the newly defined AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. Like coronavirus today, AIDS at that time was a rapidly spreading and unknown emerging threat, splayed across newspaper headlines and magazine covers, claiming the lives of celebrities and ordinary citizens alike. Nearly forty years later it has largely become a chronic disease endemic, at least in the Global North. Like diabetes, which claimed an estimated 4.9 million lives in 2019, HIV/AIDS became a manageable conditionif one had access to the right medications. Those who are no longer directly threatened by the impact of the disease have a hard time continuing to attend to the urgency of an epidemic that has been rolling on for nearly four decades. Even in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, activists in the United States fought tooth and nail to make their suffering visible in the face of both the Reagan administrations dogged refusal to talk publicly about the AIDS crisis and the indifference of the press after the initial sensation of the newly discovered virus had become common knowledge. In this respect, the social epidemic does not necessarily end when biological transmission has ended, or even peaked, but rather when, in the attention of the general public and in the judgment of certain media and political elites who shape that attention, the disease ceases to be newsworthy. Polio, for its part, has not been newsworthy for a while, even as thousands around the world still live with polio with ever-decreasing access to care and support. Soon after the immediate threat of outbreaks passed, so did support for those whose lives were still bound up with the disease. For others, it became simply a background fact of lifesomething that happens elsewhere. The polio problem was solved, specialized hospitals were closed, fundraising organizations found new causes, and poster children found themselves in an increasingly challenging world. Few medical professionals are trained today in the treatment of the disease. As intimate knowledge of polio and its treatment withered away with time, people living with polio became embodied repositories of lost knowledge. History tells us public attention is much more easily drawn to new diseases as they emerge rather than sustained over the long haul. Well before AIDS shocked the world into recognizing the devastating potential of novel epidemic diseases, a series of earlier outbreaks had already signaled the presence of emerging infectious agents. When hundreds of members of the American Legion fell ill after their annual meeting in Philadelphia in 1976, the efforts of epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control to explain the spread of this mysterious disease and its newly discovered bacterial agent, Legionella, occupied front-page headlines. In the years since, however, as the 1976 incident faded from memory, Legionella infections have become everyday objects of medical care, even though incidence in the U.S. has grown ninefold since 2000, tracing a line of exponential growth that looks a lot like COVID-19s on a longer time scale. Yet few among us pause in our daily lives to consider whether we are living through the slowly ascending limb of a Legionella epidemic. Nor do most people living in the United States stop to consider the ravages of tuberculosis as a pandemic, even though an estimated 10 million new cases of tuberculosis were reported around the globe in 2018, and an estimated 1.5 million people died from the disease. The disease seems to only receive attention in relation to newer scourges: in the late twentieth century TB coinfection became a leading cause of death in emerging HIV/AIDS pandemic, while in the past few months TB coinfection has been invoked as a rising cause of mortality in COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst these stories it is easy to miss that on its own, tuberculosis has been and continues to be the leading cause of death worldwide from a single infectious agent. And even though tuberculosis is not an active concern of middle-class Americans, it is still not a thing of the past even in this country. More than 9,000 cases of tuberculosis were reported in the United States in 2018overwhelmingly affecting racial and ethnic minority populationsbut they rarely made the news. While tuberculosis is the target of concerted international disease control efforts, and occasionally eradication efforts, the time course of this affliction has been spread out so longand so clearly demarcated in space as a problem of other placesthat it is no longer part of the epidemic imagination of the Global North. And yet history tells a very different story. DNA lineage studies of tuberculosis now show that the spread of tuberculosis in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America was initiated by European contact and conquest from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth. In the early decades of the twentieth century, tuberculosis epidemics accelerated throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia due to the rapid urbanization and industrialization of European colonies. Although the wave of decolonizations that swept these regions between the 1940s and the 1980s established autonomy and sovereignty for newly post-colonial nations, this movement did not send tuberculosis back to Europe. These features of the social lives of epidemicshow they live on even when they seem, to some, to have disappearedshow them to be not just natural phenomena but also narrative ones: deeply shaped by the stories we tell about their beginnings, their middles, their ends. At their best, epidemic endings are a form of relief for the mainstream we that can pick up the pieces and reconstitute a normal life. At their worst, epidemic endings are a form of collective amnesia, transmuting the disease that remains into merely someone elses problem. What are we to conclude from these complex interactions between the social and the biological faces of epidemics, past and present? Like infectious agents on an agar plate, epidemics colonize our social lives and force us to learn to live with them, in some way or another, for the foreseeable future. Just as the postcolonial period continued to be shaped by structures established under colonial rule, so too are our post-pandemic futures indelibly shaped by what we do now. There will be no simple return to the way things were: whatever normal we build will be a new onewhether many of us realize it or not. Like the world of scientific facts after the end of a critical experiment, the world that we find after an the end of an epidemic crisiswhatever we take that to belooks in many ways like the world that came before, but with new social truths established. How exactly these norms come into being depends a great deal on particular circumstances: current interactions among people, the instruments of social policy as well as medical and public health intervention with which we apply our efforts, and the underlying response of the material which we applied that apparatus against (in this case, the coronavirus strain SARS-CoV-2). While we cannot know now how the present epidemic will end, we can be confident that it in its wake it will leave different conceptions of normal in realms biological and social, national and international, economic and political. Though we like to think of science as universal and objective, crossing borders and transcending differences, it is in fact deeply contingent upon local practicesincluding norms that are easily thrown over in an emergency, and established conventions that do not always hold up in situations of urgency. Today we see civic leaders jumping the gun in speaking of access to treatments, antibody screens, and vaccines well in advance of any scientific evidence, while relatively straightforward attempts to estimate the true number of people affected by the disease spark firestorms over the credibility of medical knowledge. Arduous work is often required to achieve scientific consensus, and when the stakes are highespecially when huge numbers of lives are at riskheterogeneous data give way to highly variable interpretations. As data moves too quickly in some domains and too slowly in others, and sped-up time pressures are placed on all investigations the projected curve of the epidemic is transformed into an elaborate guessing game, in which different states rely on different kinds of scientific claims to sketch out wildly different timetables for ending social restrictions. These varied endings of the epidemic across local and national settings will only be valid insofar as they are acknowledged as such by othersespecially if any reopening of trade and travel is to be achieved. In this sense, the process of establishing a new normal in global commerce will continue to be bound up in practices of international consensus. What the new normal in global health governance will look like, however, is more uncertain than ever. Long accustomed to the role of international scapegoat, the WHO Secretariat seems doomed to be accused either of working beyond its mandate or not acting fast enough. Moreover, it can easily become a target of scapegoating, as the secessionist posturing of Donald Trump demonstrates. Yet the U.S. presidents recent withdrawal from this international body is neither unprecedented nor unsurmountable. Although Trumps voting base might not wish to be grouped together with the only other global power to secede from the WHO, after the Soviet Unions 1949 departure from the group it ultimately brought all Eastern Bloc back to task of international health leadership in 1956. Much as the return of the Soviets to the WHO resulted in the global eradication of smallpoxthe only human disease so far to have been intentionally eradicatedit is possible that some future return of the United States to the project of global health governance might also result in a more hopeful post-pandemic future. As the historians at the University of Oslo have recently noted, in epidemic periods the present moves faster, the past seems further removed, and the future seems completely unpredictable. How, then, are we to know when epidemics end? How does the act of looking back aid us in determining a way forward? Historians make poor futurologists, but we spend a lot of time thinking about time. And epidemics produce their own kinds of time, in both biological and social domains, disrupting our individual senses of passing days as well as conventions for collective behavior. They carry within them their own tempos and rhythms: the slow initial growth, the explosive upward limb of the outbreak, the slowing of transmission that marks the peak, plateau, and the downward limb. This falling action is perhaps best thought of as asymptotic: rarely disappearing, but rather fading to the point where signal is lost in the noise of the new normaland even allowed to be forgotten.
Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All Real Context News (RCN)
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Real Context News (RCN). By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) We will never find an explanationfor the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The viruss last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart. Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), The Demon in the Freezer (2002) Eradication It was one of the most inspiring moments of the entire Cold War. In what has been acknowledged by many to be the single most important triumph of public health in human history, on December 9, 1979, the WHO certified smallpox eradicated from nature, and, to much fanfare at the May, 1980 session of the World Health Assembly (the WHOs governing body) formally celebrated this achievement publicly with a unified declaration acknowledging the singular triumph.  The diseaseterrorizing humanity for thousands of years and responsible for more deaths than any single other diseasemay have wiped 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone, but now, no more. This triumph was the culmination of two decades of effort from the global healthcare community led by the WHO, first with an effort inspired and proposed by a top Soviet scientist in 1959 that fell far short, with many very skeptical that any disease could be eradicated, so support for the efforts was lukewarm and halfhearted.  Still, the effort did drastically reduce infection and mortality of the disease.  Some did not give up on the dream of total eradication , though.  A second effort picked up where the first faltered, with the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program beginning in 1967, a year in which some two million died from the disease out of 10-15 million cases (rapid vaccination saved many infected before symptoms worsened, reducing the death rate, and these figures were down from some 50 million cases annually in the 1950s). For the next decade, doctors and medical staff scoured the globebraving even natural disasters and civil warsto find all cases of smallpox and then ring-vaccinate everyone around the cases, much like cutting down trees in a forest on fire to stop the spread of the fire.  The technique worked extremely well, and the last recorded case of naturally-occurring smallpox in world history was in 1977 in Somalia.  The following year, another person died because of a mishap at a university lab that was studying smallpox.  Efforts were kept up to keep the virus from making a comeback, and they were successful: by the end of 1979, the virus was certified to be extinct from naturethe first and last disease thus far to suffer that fateand there has not been a known case since. In the words of Richard Preston (author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases), those carrying out the campaign had forged themselves into an army of peace.  With a weapon in their hands, a needle with two points, they had searched the corners of the earth for the virus, opening every door and lifting every scrap of cloth.  They would not rest, they would not stand aside, and they gave all they had until variola [i.e., smallpox] was gone.  No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit. At the height of the Cold War, the two rivals tearing the world apartthe United States and the Soviet Unioncame together to lead one of the great services for humanity that history has ever known.  Two bitter foes that were constantly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation proved that, even amid the greatest of disputes and tensions, enemies could still work together to make the word a better place, to save lives and put their common interest and those of humanity as a whole ahead of their differences.  There are few examples in history of anything like this, and nothing that matches the amount of lives saved by this common effort during a global geopolitical conflict between the two lead actors. Eventually , smallpox would only be only officially preserved in two facilities: Americas CDC in Atlanta and Russias Vector Institute (the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR that was a major facility of the Soviet biowarfare program known, as I have discussed elsewhere, as Biopreparat) in Koltsovo, Russia, the top  government disease research facilities in America and Russia, respectively. By the time Preston would write his 2002 book on smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer, the then-top scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USARMRIID, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. earlier had located a big chunk of its now-defunct biowarfare program), Dr. Peter Jahrling (played by Topher Grace in last years NetGeo miniseries, The Hot Zone, based on Prestons book), would frequently quip:  If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp. Weaponization As I pointed out in my earlier-referenced related piece, since the Eradication and at the end of the Cold War, because of high-level defectors from Biopreparat, the world learned that the Soviet Union even at the height of the Eradication has a massive biowarfare program that included smallpox, and the Soviets were not the only ones pursuing bioweapons and smallpox stocks, also as discussed earlier.  Additionally, it became clear that the Soviets were working with smallpox outside the designated Vector Institute. At the same time, with the increasing concerns about global warming in the 1990s, we get into the possibility of smallpox in the bodies of long-dead victims frozen in the now melting tundra permafrost, smallpox that could be unleashed and infect yet again from nature. But the main concern is not the tundra smallpox. Now we see how the Soviets got their lamp and genie. We learned from the highest-level Biopreparat defector (Col. Kanatjan Alibekov, now Ken Alibek) that when there were raging epidemics of smallpox in India during the Eradication in the 1960s, the Soviets had a medical team operating there in 1967, helping to push back the spread of the disease there.  That team was accompanied by agents of the K.G.B., the Soviets notorious intelligence and security service.  They were on a mission to find a particularly nasty strain of smallpox, which they did in 1967, bringing the super-sub-strainknown as India-1 or India-1967back to the Soviet Union with them.  This sub-strain was a far more virulent and stable sub-strain than other strains of variola major (already the far deadlier of two main smallpox strains, the weaker one being variola minor) and one that has a far shorter incubation period and was harder to diagnose, making it ideal for bioweapons relative to existing variola major stockpiles the Soviets had at the time.  Within a few years, India-1 was their flagship strain for smallpox bioweapons, with twenty tons of it being produced every year to keep it as fresh and deadly as possible. The K.G.B has used the well-intentioned Eradication program as a cover to find the raw materials for a nightmare bioweapon, and it succeeded in keeping this secret from the West for two decades, during which it carried out intense research, development, and testing with the sub-strain. We should still be thankful for the visionaries and dedicated health professionals from the Soviet Union who helped make Eradication a reality, and for the Soviet Governments generous donations of enormous amounts of smallpox vaccine to fuel the effort.  The sincerity of these health workers should not be questioned. However, as is so often in the world, even where there are good actors and motives, there can be bad ones right alongside them, and this was the case with the Soviet Eradication effort.  As Preston notes: We will never find an explanationfor the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The viruss last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart. 2020: A Year of Threat Convergences If we jump forward to Italy now during its terrible coronavirus outbreak, we may be seeing a repeat of history. As noted earlier, Italy was requesting U.S. assistance from our troops stationed there since World War II because we had not been proactive in offering help to our beleaguered NATO ally.  But President Vladimir Putin of Russia beat us to the punch, embarrassingly preempting significant U.S. military aid by nearly a month and one-upping us in a public relations nightmare by sending a military medical aid convoy to Italy, to much Russian fanfare and broadcast constantly with gusto by Russian media to the rest of the world.  The mission was dubbed From Russia with Love (sharing a title with one of the most famous James Bond films and novels) with that phrase written in Italian on a graphic of two heartsone colored in the colors Russias flag, one in Italysplaced on the Russian military vehicles delivering the aid.  From Russia with Love was also, tellingly, written on the graphic in English above the Italian even though the aid was being delivered to Italy.  In the wider context of the geopolitical tug-of-war for Europe between Russia and the U.S., Russia scored another win, again beating the U.S. in a form of unconventional, asymmetric warfare. But not all was as advertised. The highly respected Italian daily La Stampaone of Italys oldest newspapersdid some digging, and found that, according to anonymous Italian government officials, the aid Russia sent was not particularly helpful and the whole effort was more about public-relations and an effort to undermine NATO, with one official saying that Eighty percent of Russian supplies are totally useless or of little use to Italy and two Italian military officials echoing that sentiment. Unsurprisingly, the Russian Defence Ministry directly attacked and seemed to threaten La Stampa and the journalist behind the story, Jacopo Iacoboni, calling his story fake news, making sure to post the smear in English.  Even in this delicate situation, the Italian Defense and Foreign Affairs Ministries, while thanking Russia for its aid, condemned the Russian Defence Ministrys attacks on the Italian free press.  The mission is now winding down, seemingly not having been very effective. The disinformational, propagandistic aspects of the whole operation only became more evident when Italy revealed that it had received only 150 ventilators from Russia (not the 600 the Russian Ambassador to Italy claimed) and mysterious WhatsApp groups surfaced offering 200 euros to Italians to make and post videos praising the Russian aid effort on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (less but still some money for posts with just text). Along with the aid, Russia sent over 120 of its top officers from one of Russias main Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense (RChBD) military units.  If one buys Russias stated aim for this outing, it is somewhat strange that it sent biowarfare specialists to Italy, which is supposed to have some of the best personnel, equipment, and expertise in when it comes to nuclear, biological, and chemical unit capacities.  The unit is also suspiciously being led in Gen. Sergey Kikot, the number-two commander of all of Russias RChBD forces. Gen. Kikot is perhaps most famous internationally for being one of Russias most prominent disinformationists and apologists for Assads regime as part of Russias overall Syria disinformation operations and support for Assad, with Kikot issuing strong denials that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and that the White Helmetsthe brave Syrian civilian volunteers who try to save other civilians in the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime and Russian military attackswere staging fake footage of such attacks, absurd statements which have gone against the findings of NATO allies, experts, human rights groups, and watchdogs, including the United Nations-associated Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the chief international chemical weapons inspections authority. It would be unthinkable in this kind of a situation for there not to be intelligence officers from Russias military intelligence branch, the G.R.U., embedded within Russias unit in Italy.  In this case, being deployed in a NATO country during a pandemic is an invaluable opportunity for intelligence collection and even for intelligence operations. But it is also worth noting that the G.R.U. is often the tip of Putins spear in both the Kremlins conventional and unconventional operations.  The G.R.U. has been active on the ground in Russias invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Crimea and its support for rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It also has had its commandosRussias elite Spetsnaz special forcesplay important roles on the battlefield in Syria, including in Aleppo and Palmyra; it was even overseeing the Russian mercenaries who attacked a joint U.S.-S.D.F. position in Syria in February, 2018.  Furthermore, the G.R.U. has been one of Putins point organizations in his war on Western democracy, engaging in cyberwarfare, destabilization, and disinformation efforts against NATO countries in Europe and other U.S. allies, in addition to its infamous efforts against the U.S. during the 2016 election (what I have called the First Russo-American Cyberwar). But when thinking about why elite Russian biowarfare specialists and G.R.U. intelligence operatives would be in Italy, we should perhaps think less about 2016 and more about 1967, when the K.G.B. accompanied medical teams to India during the Smallpox Eradication Program. The G.R.U. is one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B. It is uncertain what all the precise activity the Russian biowarfare units and any G.R.U. operatives in Italy have been up to, but this scenario seems awfully familiar.  Whatever their purpose, this whole episode should serve as a reminder of the ability of the Russians to see unconventional opportunities in all situations, including public health crises, and to reinforce how unprepared we are in general to stand up to such efforts.  Years from now, we hopefully will not be caught off guard if we discover the Russians have engineered some sort of supercoronavirus, nor, on a far simpler level, allow Russia or another rival to upstage our efforts to assist our allies and friends abroad during a pandemic. We also must hope that we are better prepared here at home in a far deeper sense than adding to and reorganizing our federal governments organizational chart.  My soon-to-be-released proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response would be a major leap forward in a big-picture national policy sense, but there is so much more that needs to be done throughout our society.  For it was not just our government that failed us, but different aspects of our media, our business sector, our religious institutions across faiths, celebrities and various other elites, plenty of rank-and-file Americans along with them, our very culture itself.  And it is the societal failings that are embedded deep in our society that have not only been major factors in making our response to COVID-19 so shockingly poor, but have also have contributed significantly to many of our failures in unconventional, asymmetric warfare over decades.  It is those societal failings that were so brilliantly exploited by Russia in 2016, too, but Russia has also used our weaknesses to help amplify and perpetuate our failing coronavirus response, finding plenty of existing conspiracy theories, mistrust, and hate in America to amplify and plenty of Americans willing to believe and peddle Russias own false narratives, whether in 2016 or today in our current coronavirus climate. In other words, at each step of the way, millions of Americans were gleefully along for the ride, the very definitions of useful idiots, taking Russias disinformation and making it their misinformation.  That is happening even now, in our 2020 election. Putin is himself former K.G.B., and part of his genius is that he and his intelligence-crowds longstanding K.G.B.-inspired techniques accurately assessed our domestic weaknesses, figuring out how to magnify many of them with their own operations in a variety of settings, from elections to pandemics: they look for anything and anyone that will help divide America and make us weaker, with this pandemic just being a gift of an opportunity for the Kremlin. America certainly had its own strains of ignorance without any Russian meddling (to quote the great J. G. A. Pocock, it is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it), but Russian disinformation and cyberwarfare thrives on this ignorance.  As part of Moscows campaign to knowingly falsely blame the U.S. for a multitude of thingsfrom the downing of civilian airliner MH17 (shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian missile given by Russia to pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists_ to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the then-Soviet UnionRussia is now blaming the U.S. for engineering the coronavirus as a bioweapon (or sometimes 5G is to blame; yeah, the Russians are a huge part of that, too).  This follows similar efforts to blame the U.S. for spreading Ebola, HIV/AIDS, even swine flu.  The Kremlin has also been boosting Americas dangerous anti-vaxxer movement.  Overall, when it comes to health, Russia has engaged in campaigns to stoke Americans fears of diseases, make us more susceptible to disease, and weaken our overall trust in U.S. healthcare and medical expertise, trust that is essential for any kind of response to a public health crisis in a democracy to be effective. The same organs of disinformation behind Russias firehose of falsehood (to quote a RAND report) for all recent disinformation campaigns are being utilized in this latest coronavirus campaign, and, like the other campaigns, it is achieving results: a recent Pew study showed that close to a third of Americans believe in the totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that coronavirus was man-made in some sort of lab and is not natural, with one quarter saying they are not sure either way.  To be fair, top elements of the Trump Administration are pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, and China has been joining Russia in promoting the idea that the U.S. is behind the virus.  While the survey does not specify where the virus originated or who was behind it, the right-wing in America has been pushing the Chinese lab theory and, as I have noted elsewhere, anti-Semitic explanations and sentiments regarding the virus.  The Chinese lab theory is now favored by the president himself, along with Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and top Trump trade and China advisor Peter Navarro.  Apart from numerous and varied other widespread disinformation campaigns and misinformation vectors, very active and present Russian disinformation still makes up an important portion of the overall disinformation being bandied about, contributing to an overall atmosphere of conspiracy, distrust, confusion, fear, and just plain bad information, casting doubt and adding more non-reality based noise to the conversation, so regardless of whether Americanswho are being widely exposed to these conspiracy theoriesare convinced by Russian propaganda or not that the U.S. that created the virus, the Russian efforts still contribute substantially to a deteriorating informational climate.  Specifically, these efforts further feed an atmosphere suggesting specifically that coronavirus was created in a lab somewhere while generally helping to saturate that atmosphere with bad information, muddying the waters and obfuscating the truth for many Americans.   It certainly does not help that the top current U.S. political leaders and many lower-level politicians in addition to media outlets in the country are embracing similar false theories even if the culprits making the virus vary.  And three other factors serve as additional amplifiers poisoning the atmosphere here: that Americans are increasingly subscribing to fantastical conspiracy theories in general, that conspiracy theories are more attractive and powerful in times of crisis, and that studies confirm a large portion of Americans are simply bad at discerning fact from fiction and are easily confused. These dynamics are as good as any at illustrating how Russian efforts and homegrown efforts and attitudes play together like a symphony orchestra performance conducted by Putin to play to his ends.  The last concert he conducted, with his Kremlin Symphony Orchestra performing original Putin works, did not go very well for us, and this new one could very well be worse. In the midst of Russias coronavirus disinformation and 2020 election interference efforts targeting the U.S., as another example of both ends feeding into Russian interests, the Trump Administration allowed Russiaeven as a hostile actorto deliver coronavirus aid to us on American soil in a publicized way, a shocking yet par-for-the-course act for the current administration. And so Russia keeps up its public relations stunts and disinformation, hoping to deflect attention from incriminating events at home as coronavirus infections soar to make Russia alternate with Brazil as the third and second-most infected country in the world even by the official numbers, with the reality being that there are virtually certainly government efforts to suppress a far grimmer actual toll (some medical staff are reportedly being instructed not to record coronavirus deaths as caused by coronavirus).  There have even been three Russian medical professionals questioning or distraught by Russias coronavirus response who fell out of windows in just two weeks, two dying and one critically injured; such accidents or worse tend to befall a wide variety or whistleblowers, journalists, critics of the Putin, and others Putin wants to make disappear. What will not disappear are the threats posed by Russian disinformation, cyberwarfare, election interference, and the Kremlins undisclosed biowarfare program. Unless the U.S. has since obtained direct and continued intelligence on the exact nature of the genetically engineered strains and man-made Frankenstein viruses described by top defectorshighly unlikelyit is almost certain that the U.S. would be defenseless against such bioagents deliberately designed to overcome existing vaccines, medicine, and treatment.  Looking at how much coronavirus has crippled the U.S., if America was not able to work on specific remedies designed to counter these Russian superagents by directly studying them over time directly and rigorously testing biodefense measuresnew vaccines, medicineagainst these new agents, it would be impossible for us to come up with anything that could effectively protect Americans from them, let alone have the remedies mass-manufactured and ready for distribution and safe usage.  A first strike with such weapons would likely be the only strike necessary to incapacitate most of Americas defenses and to destroy America as we know it.  As discussed, apocalyptic-minded bioterrorists would be more likely to use a nightmare bioweapon.  Yet however unlikely such a strike from a state like Russia would be, being ill-prepared will only increase that likelihood. The current international Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) treaty prohibiting offensive bioweapons and related researchto which Russia is a signatoryis a legal one, but without any verification or control mechanisms.  We must absolutely have a more forceful international bioweapons inspections system and use all peaceful means to force Russia into compliance.  Ideally, this would be through the United Nations, except Russia will clearly veto such binding frameworks and resolutions, or, even if it did not, would surely veto any Security Council efforts to specifically hold Russia to account or to submit to and/or comply with robust inspections.  It will instead fall on the U.S., Canada, the EU, Japan, and other allied and like-minded nations to collectively impose their own sanctions on Russia to force compliance or demonstrate a stiff economic price for non-compliance, much like was the case after Russias invasions of Ukraines eastern and Crimean regions.  Setting an example with Russia would set a proper tone for the unfolding century, and other rogue states would also see the costs of pursuing bioweapons and be more inclined to play by the rules if Russia is brought to heel.  And each state that is brought to heel can be part of a mandatory coalition to combat bioterrorism as part of their respective arrangements, with the BWC being rewritten to include robust counterbioterrorism provisions and severe penalties for supporting or failing to act against bioterrorism or for failing to properly secure sensitive materials involving deadly disease research. A Collective Responsibility to Do Better The actions suggested just above constitute dealing with unconventional, asymmetric warfare at the highest levels. But the lowest levels are just as important. We must also deal with our societal ills that make us so susceptible to disinformation, Russian or otherwise.  To a significant degree, preparing for unconventional, asymmetric information warfare and cyberwarfare also prepares us for pandemics, biowarfare, and bioterrorism: at the core of each is a willingness to defer to experts and to cultivate our minds to be able to properly vet what is coming from a position of factual vetting and properly understanding who and what is targeting us to take advantage of our weaknesses, biases, and predispositions.  Leaving our minds susceptible to disinformation and misinformationwhether it is about our elections and candidates or our public health system and information on a deadly diseaseis like allowing our computer networks to go without security software, allowing our enemies to manipulate us and take advantage of our weaknesses to weaken our nation.  Thus, whether dealing with coronavirus, bioweapons, or Russian disinformation, taking concrete steps to tackle one will often pay off in our fight against the others.  And we have little reason to doubt that Russia will integrate coronavirus into its ambitious 2020 election interferenceor, more aptly termed, Second Russo-American Cyberwaror doubt that Russia is looking at and developing ways to turn coronavirus into a bioweapon as it did with smallpox and so many other bioagents in the past. Hence, biosecurity, disinformation security, and election security come together as part of the larger unconventional, asymmetric landscape. In her conclusion to her must-read article Disinformation, Democracy, and the Rule of Law, former FBI counterintelligence agent and current Yale University senior lecturer on national security Asha Rangappa notes the complex, multidimensional aspects of Russias unconventional, asymmetric warfare against the United States: Much of the public discussion on Russias disinformation operations in the U.S. has focused on their impact on the 2016 election and how they might affect elections in the future.  But the damage that Russia seeks to inflict through its disinformation campaign isnt limited to electoral contests.  Rather, its long-term strategy has been to erode faith in the primary pillars upon which our democracy is basedincluding the rule of law and the institutions that support it.  So far, Russias efforts are yielding fruit, and technological and legislative fixes alone will be insufficient to counter them.  Defending against Russian disinformation in the long term will require a strategy to fortify Americas social fabric with an understanding of shared civic values that can serve as a prophylactic against Russias future attacks.  She makes it all too clear that the government alone cannot save us from the manipulations of Russias disinformation and other techniques of division: The framing of the Russian disinformation threat as a cybersecurity issue makes it tempting to look to the government, or to social media companies, to fix the problem. Regulatory and technological solutions are needed, and may well make it harder for Russia to employ the kinds of information warfare that it used in 2016.  But they will not address the fundamental vulnerability which Russia successfully exploited, which is the increasing social and political fissures in society and the resulting erosion of social trust in the U.S. over the past decades. As a solution, Rangappa exhorts us to shore up the American weaknesses Russia exploits with a rebirth and renewal of citizenship, community, and civic life: A model to rebuild social capital in Americaand strengthen social trustcan feel unsatisfying, since it is intangible, difficult to measure, and disperses responsibility on us, as citizens.  At the same time, however, it can be empowering, as it offers a way for Americans to take ownership of a large part of the solution.  Russias attack on our democracy is an invitation for us to examine our relationship with fellow citizens, and how technology has affected the way we engage with them online and in real life.  By reclaiming democratic values that transcend political differences, and leveraging the most effective vehicles we have to disseminate them (including social media!), the U.S. can generate an immunity to Russias destabilization efforts which will endure over the long term. In the syllabus for one of her classes that is very much an extension of her essay, Professor Rangappa provides a road map for the way forward with a robust list of materials, including: Orwells legendary 1984 (to help bolster our defenses against not only totalitarianism and groupthink but also Orwellian disinformation and the manipulation of language so endemic in its use by troublemakers both at home and abroad) The singular de Tocquevilles ever-relevant, ever-insightful, ever-enduring Democracy in America (to understand our unique historical strengths and weaknesses and how they have factored into our democracy) Amu Chuas Political Tribes, an account of American tribalism (a force that we must understand and fight against more effectively, as it is tearing our country apart) Robert Putnams seminal Bowling Alone (to understand how important social capital and civic engagement are in creating and maintaining a strong society) The documentary Active Measures (to properly understand the methods by which Putin is attacking and harming our democracy) Schoolhouse Rock(the episodes on American government and history, to show how learning about civics can be fun and also appeal to young Americans) Professor Rangappas cocktail of learning is a foundation for a national societal strategy: Understand how anti-democratic forces work to distort reality and language, along with rewriting history, in a war on reality we have to win Know ourselves from an objective perspective (the good, the bad, and the ugly) Understand how corrosive our own tribalism in America is and how we can fight it even before taking into account foreign efforts to exploit it Gain a newfound appreciation for social capital and civic engagement so that we can restructure society to prioritize these vital pillars of healthy democracy Know our chief foreign enemy, Vladimir Putin, and his methods, as well as how and why he has been successful in damaging America Remember how important it is to start with civics and understanding our history and system overall and at a young age so that we may revive our moribund civics curricula for all American students going forward Ultimately, such a strategy and priority-resetting will help us revive and further realize our Founding Fathers vision for America. Virtue, then, along with biodefense and information warfare, is also a national security issue. If you are rolling your eyes a bit with the serious suggestion that we as individuals must be better and do more, know that this consideration of virtue was of primary concern to the Founding Fathers and many great men before and after them.  They might not have used the term national security the way we do and I just did, but it was still a primary national security issue for our Founders nonetheless. Few have articulated this sentiment as well and with such authority, and perhaps none better, then James Madison himselfeventual fourth president and architect and overall author of the U.S. Constitutionwhen he was making the case to the public in 1788, in writing and anonymously, for the adoption of that Constitution in The Federalist, in No. 55, to be exact: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.  Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.  Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. In other words, We the People must be worthy enough as a peopleenough of us individually so that it is true in a collective senseor this whole democracy thing is not going to work out so well. Yes, in the short term, we must act boldly at the highest levels of our government and international bodies to prepare for the next pandemic and our first major bioawarfare or bioterrorist attack.  But in the long-run, we must fix our ailing society which produced such an unconscionable, unforgivable response to the novel coronavirus in the first place.  And as ambitious as my soon-to-be-unveiled cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response proposal will be demonstrated to be in relation to the first goal, it will be that second task that will be the far more challenging one. Cassandra: Even then I told my people all the grief to come Aieeeee! the pain, the terror! the birth-pang of the seer who tells the truth it whirls me, oh, the storm comes again, the crashing chords! Leader[/Chorus]: Poor creature, you and the end you see so clearly. I pity you. Agamemnon, 1216-1344, by Aeschylus (458 BCE), Robert Fagles translation © 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome See Brians full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions. If you appreciate Brians unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!! Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Related Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America's Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons Excerpt 3 of 5, adapted to stand alone, from a May 26, 2020 SPECIAL REPORT on coronavirus By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic2-Americas History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with June 26, 2020 In "Americas"
Google Alert - sars cov 2 as bioweapon: Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Disease X-19 as the Bio-weapon from Michael_Novakhov (3 sites). The K.G.B has used the well-intentioned Eradication program as a cover to find the raw materials for a nightmare bioweapon, and it succeeded in ...  Google Alert - sars cov 2 as bioweapon
Google Alert - COVID-19 is used as a Bioweapon: State-backed COVID-19 disinfo spreads faster and farther than local news outlets in 4 languages ...
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Disease X-19 as the Bio-weapon from Michael_Novakhov (3 sites). State-backed COVID-19 disinfo spreads faster and farther than local news ... Questionable tales on COVID-19 from state-backed retailers in Russia, ... bioweapon with a counter-theory that it's a U.S. bioweapon launched in and blamed on China. ... This website uses cookies to improve your experience.  Google Alert - COVID-19 is used as a Bioweapon
Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 origins: No link between origin of COVID-19 & Wuhan lab
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Disease X-19 Origins from Michael_Novakhov (3 sites). France has recently announced that it does not have information to corroborate a possible link between the origin of the novel. COVID-19. Sentinel ...  Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 origins
Google Alert - coronavirus origins: How Epidemics End
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Disease X-19 Origins from Michael_Novakhov (3 sites). Contrary to hopes for a tidy conclusion to the COVID-19 pandemic, history shows that outbreaks of infectious disease often have much murkier ...  Google Alert - coronavirus origins
COVID-19 strain in Beijing outbreak may have come from Southeast Asia: Study, World News
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . A new coronavirus outbreak Beijing that has infected more than 300 people since early June could have originated in South or Southeast Asia, according to a study by Harvard University researchers. According to the China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the study is based the genetic sequencing of three virus strains and it shows that the virus found in Beijing cases is an imported strain of COVID-19. Also read: Swine flu strain with 'human pandemic potential' found increasingly in China 7,643 samples from across the world were compared with these genes by Georg Hahn, a research associate with the Biostatistics Department of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and his team. The Harvard study was published on the preprint website <a href="http://medRxiv.org" rel="nofollow">medRxiv.org</a> on Wednesday and still has to be peer-reviewed. The three genomes showed the greatest resemblance to cases in Europe from February to May, and to cases in South and Southeast Asia from May to June. Also read: Beijing's Xinfadi market in focus after virus reportedly detected on salmon chopping boards They were also similar to a small number of infections seen in China in March, suggesting the strain could have appeared first in China and then returned to the country three months later, the authors said. "As the most recent cases in these branches are almost exclusively from South(east) Asia, this could suggest that the new cases in Beijing were re-introduced by transmissions from South(east) Asia," they wrote. The outbreak traced to Beijing's huge Xinfadi wholesale market on June 11 had infected 329 people by the end of Wednesday. Quarantine restrictions and large-scale testing of residents began soon after the first cases were identified, and China also required all shipments of imported meat to be tested for COVID-19 before they could leave its ports. The study comes amid the emergence of a swine flu strain with ''human pandemic potential'' found increasingly in Chinese slaughterhouses and can grow and multiply in the cells lining human airways. The SARS-CoV-2 virus was believed to have originated in a market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December last year and has now infected more than 10 million people and killed more than 500,000 worldwide. However, some studies suggest it could have been circulating much earlier after crossing the species barrier from horseshoe bats native not only to southwest China, but also Laos and Myanmar.
Coronaviruses and Bioweapons | Field Notes
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from North Coast Journal. Despite researchers showing that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the current pandemic, was not created in a lab in Wuhan, China, polls show that nearly half of all Americans prefer the rumors to science. Predictably, much depends on one's political persuasion: Twice as many Republicans believe this is either definitely or probably true. So, once again (having addressed this in a previous column, "Blame Evolution," March 26), it's possible to state with near-certainty that at least two features of the virus rule out an artificial origin: The overall molecular structure or "backbone" of the virus differs substantially from known coronaviruses, instead resembling those found in bats and pangolins. A bioengineer creating a new pathogenic coronavirus would surely have started out with the backbone of a virus already known to be harmful to humans rather than reinventing the wheel, as it were. The spike protein is so effective at binding to human ACE-2 cells that researchers concluded that it could only have evolved naturally, not created by genetic engineering. According to Scripps Research immunologist Kristian Andersen, "By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes." Although SARS-CoV-2 wasn't engineered, suspicion that it might have been isn't that far out of line, given our species' history with bioweapons. Such weapons come in two forms: natural and artificial. European ancestors, who knew all about fighting "dirty wars" with naturally occurring pathogens, spread the smallpox virus to Native communities in clothes and blankets, contaminated the enemy's water supply with rabid dogs and catapulted anthrax-infected sheep over castle walls. Anthrax is a particularly effective infectious bioweapon. It's spread by contact with the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, which humans can pick up just by inhaling anthrax spores. Workers exposed to dead animals or in contact with wool and animal hides are particularly at risk. Even more virulent versions of anthrax can be artificially created in laboratories. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, "Anthrax ... is easy to produce in large quantities, highly lethal, relatively easy to develop as a weapon, easily spread over a large area and easily stored and dangerous for a long time." In 1972, the U.S. and the USSR signed the Biological Weapons Convention, which went into effect in 1975. However, the USSR was still developing anthrax as a bioweapon in 1979 when, on April 2, an accidental leak from a secret stockpile of an artificial anthrax strain in Sverdlovsk, 900 miles east of Moscow, resulted in more than 100 deaths. In a more recent incident in the U.S., a week after the 9/11 attacks, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to media offices and (later) to two Democratic senators, resulting in 22 people being infected, five of whom died. So even though SARS-CoV-2 almost certainly isn't a bioweapon, we should be on the alert for future attacks. According to microbiologist Mohammad Moniruzzaman of Virginia Polytech, "Engineering viruses or bacteria is actually not that difficult. Scientists are already modifying bacteria to produce hundreds of different proteins or drug components. It should be possible to engineer a pathway in a bacterium that produces molecules highly toxic for humans." Hopefully, our experience this time around with quarantine, social isolation, hand-washing and contact tracing will give us a heads-up when the next pathogenic bacterium or virus natural or artificial comes calling. Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) misses his usual column-writing venues: coffee shops.
3:23 PM 7/1/2020 - Coronavirus Can Cause Lasting Lung Damage...
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Covid-19-Review. Is COVID-19 the dreaded 'Disease X' scientists warned us about? _______________________________________________________________________ Disease X-19 News Review In Brief | On RSS Dog http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.rss http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.atom __________________________________________ » Saved Stories - Disease X-19: Google Alert - gastrointestinal coronavirus: Coronavirus Can Cause Lasting Lung Damage But the Effects May Ease Over Time 01/07/20 14:45 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) The lungs are the organ most commonly affected by COVID -19, with a ... the kidneys, heart, gastrointestinal tract, nervous system and clotting system. Google Alert - gastrointestinal coronavirus Saved Stories - Disease X-19 » Saved Stories - Disease X-19: Google Alert - coronavirus in israel: Coronavirus app could track your location during quarantine 01/07/20 14:44 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Speaking to News 6 from Tel Aviv, Israel , Bettesh said his app is helping public health officials around the world monitor people who test positive for ... Google Alert - coronavirus in israel Saved Stories - Disease X-19 » Saved Stories - Disease X-19: Google Alert - Coronavirus and US Military: Gaps In The Russian Bounties Story; Fauci Warns Of 100k Cases A Day 01/07/20 14:44 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) And will the U.S. respond to reports of Russian bounties on American soldiers ? This is CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Tuesday, ... Google Alert - Coronavirus and US Military Saved Stories - Disease X-19
Scientists produce first open source all-atom models of COVID-19 'spike' protein
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . The virus SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the known cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The "spike" or S protein facilitates viral entry into host cells.
The D614G mutation of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enhances viral infectivity and decreases neutralization sensitivity to individual convalescent sera | bioRxiv
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . The D614G mutation of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enhances viral infectivity and decreases neutralization sensitivity to individual convalescent sera Jie Hu, Chang-Long He, Qing-Zhu Gao, Gui-Ji Zhang, Xiao-Xia Cao, Quan-Xin Long, Hai-Jun Deng, Lu-Yi Huang, Juan Chen, View ORCID ProfileKai Wang, Ni Tang, Ai-Long Huang doi: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.20.161323" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.20.161323</a> This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. ABSTRACT FULL TEXT INFO/HISTORY METRICS SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL PREVIEW PDF Abstract Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The spike protein that mediates SARS-CoV-2 entry into host cells, is one of the major targets for vaccines and therapeutics. Thus, insights into the sequence variations of S protein are key to understanding the infection and antigenicity of SARS-CoV-2. Here, we observed a dominant mutational variant at the 614 position of S protein (aspartate to glycine, D614G mutation). Using pseudovirus-based assay, we found that S-D614 and S-G614 protein pseudotyped viruses share a common receptor, human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which could be blocked by recombinant ACE2 with the fused Fc region of human IgG1. However, S-D614 and S-G614 protein demonstrated functional differences. First, S-G614 protein could be cleaved by serine protease elastase-2 more efficiently. Second, S-G614 pseudovirus infected 293T-ACE2 cells significantly more efficiently than the S-D614 pseudovirus, Moreover, 93% (38/41) sera from convalescent COVID-19 patients could neutralize both S-D614 and S-G614 pseudotyped viruses with comparable efficiencies, but about 7% (3/41) convalescent sera showed decreased neutralizing activity against S-G614 pseudovirus. These findings have important implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission and immune interventions.
8:33 AM 7/1/2020 - The #Covid19 #MunichCluster appears to be the #source of #infection as indicated by the #D614GMutation, and it has to be in the forefront of the #Epidemiological and #Criminal #Investigations of the #DiseaseX19
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Covid-19-Review. The #Covid19 #MunichCluster appears to be the #source of #infection as indicated by the #D614GMutation, and it has to be in the front of the #Epidemiological and #Criminal #Investigations of the #DiseaseX19 8:33 AM 7/1/2020 The Covid-19 Munich Cluster appears to be the source of infection as indicated by the D614G Mutation, and it has to be in the forefront of the Epidemiological and Criminal Investigations of the Disease X-19 - GS Michael Novakhov - Posts on Twitter - 250 | Page  _____________________________________ » mikenov on Twitter: tribuneindia.com/news/nation/gr 01/07/20 08:26 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites) tribuneindia.com/news/nation/gr Posted by mikenov on Wednesday, July 1st, 2020 11:26am mikenov on Twitter » mikenov on Twitter: » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 superspreaders: Groom dies, over 100 test positive for Covid after wedding in Bihar01/07/20 00:18 from Disease X-19 google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t 01/07/20 08:24 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites) » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 superspreaders: Groom dies, over 100 test positive for Covid after wedding in Bihar 01/07/20 00:18 from Disease X-19 google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t Pos... » mikenov on Twitter: Covid-19-Review: 6:35 PM 6/30/2020 - Biden: Trump Has Failed at Hom... covid-19-review.blogspot.com/2020/06/635-pm 30/06/20 19:49 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites) Covid-19-Review: 6:35 PM 6/30/2020 - Biden: Trump Has Failed at Hom... covid-19-review.blogspot.com/2020/06/635-pm Posted by mikenov on Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 10:49pm mikenov on Twitter » mikenov on Twitter: RT @FFRAFAction: Germany's defence minister says she has ordered partial dissolution of elite KSK commando force, which has come under grow 30/06/20 17:55 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites) Germany's defence minister says she has ordered partial dissolution of elite KSK commando force, which has come under growing criticism over right-wing extremism in its ranks. << So many Nazis in *German* elite forces they must b... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @YahooNews: Two workers at an Ohio Little Caesars location were fired after making a pizza with the pepperoni arranged in a swastika htt 30/06/20 17:54 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites) Two workers at an Ohio Little Caesars location were fired after making a pizza with the pepperoni arranged in a swastika yhoo.it/2NIEUFC pic.twitter.com/C21leQ2irg Posted by YahooNews on Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 8:30pm Retweeted by miken... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @CBSNews: Iconic lion statues outside New York Public Library wear giant face masks, reminding others to do the same https://t.co/JCw8Jk 30/06/20 17:53 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites) Iconic lion statues outside New York Public Library wear giant face masks, reminding others to do the same cbsn.ws/2YM630R Posted by CBSNews on Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 8:39pm Retweeted by mikenov on Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 8:53pm 1175 ... » mikenov on Twitter: RT @thehill: Question: "Do you think Russia should be allowed back into the G7?"Sen. Mitch McConnell: "Absolutely not." https://t.co/zxqq 30/06/20 17:53 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites) Question: "Do you think Russia should be allowed back into the G7?" Sen. Mitch McConnell: "Absolutely not."  hill.cm/ZalyTHx pic.twitter.com/5y5ARTOXor Posted by thehill on Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 8:40pm Retweeted by mikenov on Tuesday,...
6:35 PM 6/30/2020 - Biden: Trump Has Failed at Home on Virus, Abroad With Putin
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Covid-19-Review. 6:35 PM 6/30/2020 Disease X-19 News Review - from Michael Novakhov _______________________________________________ Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (16 sites)  Covid-19 Review: The Pandemic As The Bio-Info-Weapon: Saved Stories None: Biden: Trump Has Failed at Home on Virus, Abroad With Putin NBC 10 Philadelphia Biden: Trump Has Failed at Home on Virus, Abroad With Putin  NBC 10 Philadelphia  Saved Stories None Covid-19 Review: The Pandemic As The Bio-Info-Weapon Covid-19 Review: The Pandemic As The Bio-Info-Weapon: Saved Stories None: Trumps ties to Putin under fresh scrutiny in wake of Russia bounty reports The Guardian Trumps ties to Putin under fresh scrutiny in wake of Russia bounty reports  The Guardian Pelosi on Trump: With him, all roads lead to Putin  POLITICO Analyst: Under Trump, Putin feels he can get away with murder  CNN Tre45on Trends After Report That Trump Knew Putin Put Bounty On US Troops  HuffPost View Full Coverage on Google News  Saved Stories None Covid-19 Review: The Pandemic As The Bio-Info-Weapon Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Novakhov (16 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 neurological symptoms: Lyme disease, coronavirus, EEE to create 'perfect storm' this summer Lyme disease, coronavirus, EEE to create 'perfect storm' this summer ... can progress to neurologic symptoms such as confusion or behavior changes.  Google Alert - covid-19 neurological symptoms Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Novakhov (16 sites) Saved Stories - Disease X-19: Google Alert - Coronavirus and US Navy: Covid swamps Trump Country Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. ... Still scarred by the relentless U.S. infection numbers I started by keeping my mask on. ... by the Coast Guard and Navy, which has two facilities in Jacksonville, ordering ...  Google Alert - Coronavirus and US Navy Saved Stories - Disease X-19 Saved Stories - Disease X-19: Google Alert - Coronavirus and white supremacy: 'Black communities were essentially already sick before coronavirus': Pandemic highlights ... 'Black communities were essentially already sick before coronavirus': ... deeply rooted disease in this country: Structural racism and white supremacy.  Google Alert - Coronavirus and white supremacy Saved Stories - Disease X-19 Saved Stories - Disease X-19: Google Alert - Coronavirus and cyber attacks: Australia recruits 500 cyber spies as China tensions rise He did not name the nation responsible for the attacks but cyber security ... call for an inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan.  Google Alert - Coronavirus and cyber attacks Saved Stories - Disease X-19 Saved Stories - Disease X-19: Google Alert - Coronavirus and cyber attacks: Australia Spending Nearly $1 Billion on Cyberdefense as China Tensions Rise SYDNEY, Australia Confronting a surge of cyberattacks attributed to the ... It follows what Prime Minister Scott Morrison has described as a sharp ... by calling for an international inquiry into the roots of the coronavirus outbreak.  Google Alert - Coronavirus and cyber attacks Saved Stories - Disease X-19
30/06/20 06:29 | The Munich Cluster of Covid-19 - GS | SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in northern Italy since December 2019: evidence from environmental monitoring | Covid-19 The Munich Cluster Mutation: D614G |
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Covid-19-Review. The coronavirus is mutating - The Washington Post This coronavirus mutation has taken over the world. Scientists are trying to understand why. A mutation that seems trivial could be making the virus spread more easily. <a href="http://washingtonpost.com" rel="nofollow">washingtonpost.com</a> The Munich Cluster of Covid-19 - GS D614G mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein - GS Spike protein mutation takes over A mutation in the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus changes just one amino acid in a chain of about 1,300, but it might make a difference in how the virus attacks human cells.  The mutation (called D614G), which first appeared in January, is found in what has become the dominant variant of the coronavirus. New weekly samples in Nextrains global subsample ________________________________________________________ D614G mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein - GS Covid-19 The Munich Cluster Mutation: D614G - GS Covid-19 Los Alamos Study - GS ______________________________________________ Disease X-19 News Review In Brief | On RSS Dog 6:38 AM 6/30/2020 https://covid-19-review.blogspot.com/2020/06/300620-0629-from-disease-x-19-from.html http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.rss http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.atom __________________________________________ Selected Stories » mikenov on Twitter: SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in northern Italy since December 2019: evidence from environmental monitoring | medRxiv medrxiv.org/content/10.110 29/06/20 20:37 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in northern Italy since December 2019: evidence from environmental monitoring | medRxiv medrxiv.org/content/10.110  Posted by mikenov on Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 12:37am mikenov on Twitter » Disease X-19 Origins from Michael_Novakhov (3 sites): Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 origins: WHO to probe coronavirus origins as chief warns "worst is yet to come" 30/06/20 03:41 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) By the numbers: More than 505,500 people have died from COVID-19 and over 10.3 million have tested positive for the virus worldwide as of Tuesday ... Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 origins Disease X-19 Origins from Michael_Novakhov (3 si... » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - covid-19 in meat plants: Meat factories free of 'active' Covid 19 cases following raft of new measures 29/06/20 21:30 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Meat processors insisted this week that there are no "active cases" of Covid - 19 in Irish plants and that "stringent control and mitigation measures" were ... Google Alert - covid-19 in meat plants Disease X-19 ... » Disease X-19 Regions from Michael_Novakhov (8 sites): Google Alert - coronavirus in italy: Italy was a cautionary tale. Now, it's returning to normal 29/06/20 21:07 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Months ago, the US looked on in horror as the Covid -19 outbreak devastated Italy . Now, as Italy is returning to normal, the US is experiencing a surge ... Google Alert - coronavirus in italy Disease X-19 Regions from Michael_Novak... » Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites): Google Alert - Coronavirus: various strains and illness severity: Coronavirus: The Covid-19 mutation that has taken over the world 29/06/20 20:56 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) By May, it was found in 95 per cent of all the genomes Ozer sequenced. ... Coronavirus : Covid-19's mutations, and a mysterious illness in children * Coronavirus : 'Highly contagious' Covid-19 strain mutation - researchers ... bind to th... ______________________________________________________________________ Current Stories » Covid-19-Review: 29/06/20 17:35 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Disease X-19 News Review In Brief _________________________________________ » Saved Stories - Disease X-19 - News Review: Google Alert - new york times on coronavirus: Am 30/06/20 06:29 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Disease X-19 News Review In Brief  |  On RSS Dog <a href="https://covid-19-review.blogspot.com/2020/06/290620-1735-from-disease-x-19-from.html" rel="nofollow">https://covid-19-review.blogspot.com/2020/06/290620-1735-from-disease-x-19-from.html</a> <a href="http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.rss" rel="nofollow">http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXEJ3CMQ/feeder.rss</a> <a href="http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXE" rel="nofollow">http://feed.informer.com/digests/A9MXE</a>... » Disease X-19 Publications from Michael_Novakhov (5 sites): Google Alert - new york times on coronavirus: What Coronavirus Researchers Can Learn From Economists 30/06/20 05:00 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Using randomization (by, say, flipping a coin to assign patients to a new ... Unfortunately, randomized trials take time which is a problem when doctors need answers now. ... Patients hospitalized with critically ill Covid -19 infectio... » Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Novakhov (16 sites): Google Alert - coronavirus symptoms: COVID-19 can spread without people showing symptoms. How do we prepare for that? 30/06/20 05:00 from Disease X-19 from Michael_Novakhov (82 sites) Goldberg and his colleagues decided they would test every resident for the coronavirus , just to be sure they were not inadvertently sending people with ... Google Alert - coronavirus symptoms Disease X-19 Symptoms from Michael_Nova...
Google Alert - Coronavirus and US Military: Did the Military World Games Spread COVID-19?
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Disease X-19 and Security from Michael_Novakhov (10 sites). A strong correlation exists in COVID-19 cases reported at U.S. military facilities that are home bases of members of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan.  Google Alert - Coronavirus and US Military
The Coronavirus Pandemics Wider Health-Care Crisis
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Gwen Darien is a three-time cancer survivor. When she was thirty-five, she was diagnosed with lymphoma; in her fifties, she was treated for breast cancer; two years ago, she learned that she had endometrial cancer. With curly black hair and an indomitable personality, she embodies vibrancy, courage, and resilience. Even so, last month, when she received a call from her doctors office about an upcoming visit, she decided to postpone it indefinitely. I was very unnerved, she told me. I thought about all the risks. First, Id have to get transportationUber or train or subway. Then Id have to walk into the doctors office, near a hospital with COVID-19 patients. Then Id have to be in the office with other people, even if they are socially distanced. Id much rather just wait. During the pandemic, many patients and physicians have felt this kind of hesitation. Some people with chronic illnesses, fearful of entering a medical setting or even venturing outside, have stopped seeing doctors altogether. Others have tried to make appointments but found clinics closed and routine care suspended. At many hospitals, non-urgent or elective care has been postponed for months. Its difficult to say for sure what the effects of such postponements have been and will be. But statistics show that, across the United States, so-called excess deathsdeaths beyond those that are historically typicalhave surged. Although many of these deaths can be attributed to COVID-19, delayed or cancelled care is probably a contributing factor, too. An analysis of death certificates shows that a fifth of the twenty-four thousand excess deaths that occurred in New York City between March 11th and May 2nd were caused by factors other than COVID-19; according to a study currently in pre-publication review, hospitals saw a thirty-eight-per-cent drop in serious heart-attack cases in March alone, suggesting that even people with acute, life-threatening illnesses have been avoiding medical visits. (The American College of Cardiology has gone so far as to issue a statement urging people to seek medical attention if theyre having cardiac symptoms.) A nationwide survey conducted in April found that a quarter of cancer patients receiving active treatment had seen their care delayed. Ultimately, its not just people with COVID-19 who are suffering; those with other illnesses are affected by the pandemic, too. The coronavirus crisis itself continues to deepen. Although the first peak has passed in a few major cities, cases have held steady in many parts of the country and are rising in twenty-six states. North Carolina saw its highest single-day increase in coronavirus cases on June 12th; Florida, Arizona, and Texas saw record spikes this week. Some of this growth reflects increased testing, but, in many places, deaths caused by the virus are also risinga sign that the spike is real and not a statistical artefact. The U.S. still records more than thirty thousand new cases each day; according to projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national death toll could reach a hundred and forty thousand by the Fourth of July; the countrys public-health response remains scattershot, with grossly inadequate testing and contact tracing; and mass protests and planned reopenings, which are continuing despite the risks, have given the virus new breathing room. America as a whole seems to have entered a long viral plateau. The pandemic is now a rolling collection of mini-epidemics that surge and subside as the virus bobs and weaves its way across the country. It will be a long time before life returns to normal. The persistence of the pandemic is creating serious challenges, many of them unforeseen, for the health-care system. Even before the pandemic, many hospitals were in precarious financial condition: in 2018, the average hospital had a two-per-cent operating margin and less than two months of cash on hand; the situation was worse for rural hospitals, a fifth of which were already at risk of closing due to financial problems. Having lost billions of dollars in revenue, hospitals must now figure out how to reintroduce routine care while keeping patients safe and preparing for possible surges of COVID-19. (As my colleague Atul Gawande has written, it is possible for hospitals to reopen without becoming vectors for the virus; doing so, however, requires time, resources, and personnel.) Hospitals in Massachusetts are losing $1.4 billion in revenue per month, and project total losses of five billion dollars by the end of July. The Mayo Clinic alone, which runs twenty-three hospitals nationwide, is set to lose three billion dollars this year. The American Hospital Association estimates that, altogether, U.S. hospitals are bleeding fifty billion dollars a month during the pandemic. The hundreds of thousands of doctors in independent practice have more limited capital reserves, and many may be forced to shutter their operations or merge them with others. In the context of the economy as a whole, these losses are substantial. According to the Department of Commerce, the American economy shrank by nearly five per cent in the first quarter of 2020. Nearly half of this changethe biggest single-quarter drop since the Great Recessionhad to do with reductions in health care. In a few months time, the coronavirus has accomplished what lawmakers have been trying to do for decades: by flattening the curve of infection, we have bent the curve of health-care spending. But its been bent haphazardly, by the hurried cancellation or postponement of colonoscopies and mammograms, hip replacements and cataract surgeries, stress tests and root canalsand those unsustainable choices will have real consequences for the health of patients. As the virus continues to spread, the clinical damage will almost certainly compound. Its vitally important, thereforeboth for the health of individuals and of the system as a wholefor doctors to resume seeing patients who dont have COVID-19. In April, medical organizations, including the American Hospital Association, began releasing road maps for the resumption of regular care; since then, governors have announced various protocols in their own states. The details vary, but the basic principles are the same: wait for a sustained reduction in COVID-19 cases; insure an adequate supply of personal protective equipment (P.P.E.); test constantly; and plan to throttle back on the expansion of services if the virus surges again. The more fine-grained question, of exactly which procedures should be prioritized and which delayed, is usually left unanswered. Vivek Prachand, a surgeon at the University of Chicago, has been thinking about this problem since early March, when hospitals first started grappling with how to rank procedures in terms of their clinical urgency. Often, he told me, the decisions were being made by individual physicians or small committees within hospitals. It was really just surgeons saying, O.K., go ahead, or, No, we need to hold off, he said. You can imagine the emotional and ethical challenges of being in that position. He and his colleagues have developed a rubric to help guide such decisions during the pandemic, which they call the Medically Necessary, Time-Sensitive System, or MENTS. Prachand dislikes referring to care as elective, because the term suggests that procedures are optional or unnecessary; really, elective care is just care that can be scheduled. (Setting a broken arm is urgent care; brain surgery, most of the time, isnt.) To help set the schedule, the MENTS protocol asks three kinds of questions. First, it assesses procedural factors, such as how long the surgery will take, how many clinicians will be exposed, how much P.P.E. will be used, and how likely the patient is to be intubated or require a prolonged stay in the hospital. Second, it grades the dangers presented by the problems the surgery hopes to solve, asking how bad the condition will get if doctors wait, and whether there are any effective non-surgical remedies. Finally, it sizes up how much viral risk the operation poses to the patient. Is she immunosuppressed? Does she have an underlying lung disease? What are the chances that shes already been exposed to the virus? The answers to all of these questions are combined into a formula that yields a recommendation about when the team should proceed.
Google Alert - coronavirus antibodies test: FBI warns of fake COVID-19 antibody tests
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites). Scammers have found yet another way to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, by selling fake antibody tests. A real antibody test will screen ...  Google Alert - coronavirus antibodies test
Google Alert - coronavirus antibodies test: Beware of fake coronavirus antibody tests, the FBI warns
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Disease X-19 Epidemiology from Michael_Novakhov (39 sites). The FBI said this month that fraudsters are touting fake or unproven antibody tests and marketing them to people to steal Social Security numbers or ...  Google Alert - coronavirus antibodies test

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