COVID-19 News and Discussions

[caltrek]

‘Lab-leak’ and Natural Origin Proponents Face Off—Civilly—in Forum on Pandemic Origins
by Martin Enserink
September 30, 2021

https://www.science.org/content/article ... ic-origins

Introduction:

(Science) The four scientists who participated in a Science-sponsored discussion today about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic differed sharply on several issues, but there was one thing they could agree on: Amid an increasingly politicized media frenzy over the issue—and tons of Twitter vitriol—it’s still possible to have a civilized scientific debate about whether SARS-CoV-2 originated from a “lab leak” or a natural jump from animals to humans that didn’t involve researchers.

Moderated by Science reporter Jon Cohen, the online debate brought together scientists from both sides of the issue. Linfa Wang, a bat coronavirus researcher at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, is convinced the virus originated in nature. Evolutionary virologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona said he had kept an open mind from the start. He signed a May letter in Science asking for more serious investigation of the lab-leak theory but now strongly leans toward a natural origin.

On the other side were evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center—who said he considers a lab origin “highly plausible”—and Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute who specializes in genetic engineering. Chan, who has become one of the most visible proponents of the lab-leak idea and has co-authored a book on the origins issue, paraphrased comedian Jon Stewart to explain why she believes it is just too much of a coincidence that the pandemic began so close to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV): “In 2019, a novel SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] coronavirus, with a novel genetic modification, appeared in a city where there’s a lab studying novel SARS coronaviruses with novel genetic modifications.”

The hourlong discussion touched on many issues including China’s lack of transparency, biosafety procedures at WIV, the possible roles of the Chinese wildlife trade and the Huanan seafood market in spreading the virus, and the implications of a new study reporting the discovery of the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 so far, in bats in a cave in Laos, which Wang argued shows potentially dangerous coronaviruses are common in nature.

[erowind]

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[raklian]

[wjfox]

Covid ‘was spreading virulently in Wuhan’ as early as summer 2019, report suggests

Exclusive: Research claims to have uncovered ‘notable, significant and abnormal’ purchases of PCR lab equipment in second half of the year

By Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter 4 October 2021 • 9:38pm

Covid was spreading "virulently" in Wuhan as early as summer 2019 – far sooner than previously thought, according to an intelligence analysis of spending on PCR testing equipment.

[paywalled]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/ ... ms-report/

[caltrek]

Merck Sells Federally Financed Covid Pill to U.S. for 40 Times What It Costs to Make
by Sharon Lerner
October 5, 2021

https://theintercept.com/2021/10/05/cov ... ridgeback/

Introduction:

(The Intercept) A FIVE-DAY COURSE of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to a report issued last week by drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London. Merck is charging the U.S. government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price.

Last Friday’s announcement that the new medicine cut the risk of hospitalization among clinical trial participants with moderate or mild illness in half could have huge implications for the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Because it’s a pill — as opposed to monoclonal antibodies, a comparable antiviral treatment that is administered intravenously — molnupiravir is expected to be more widely used and, hopefully, will cut the death rate. In the first 29 days of the trial, no deaths were reported among the 385 patients who received the drug, while eight of the people who received a placebo died, according to the statement put out by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, the two companies that are jointly launching it.

In addition to having huge implications for health, the pill could bring staggering profits to both Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. A small Miami-based company, Ridgeback licensed the medicine from Emory University in 2020 and two months later sold the worldwide rights to the drug to Merck for an undisclosed sum. Although Ridgeback remains involved in the development of the drug, some have described the deal as “flipping.”

Like the vast majority of medicines on the market, molnupiravir — which was originally investigated as a possible treatment for Venezuelan equine encephalitis — was developed using government funds. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, provided more than $10 million of funding in 2013 and 2015 to Emory University, as research done by the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International has revealed. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, also provided Emory with more than $19 million in additional grants.

Yet only Merck and Ridgeback will reap the profits from the new antiviral, which according to Quartz could bring in as much as $7 billion by the end of this year.

[raklian]

Want to know what it feels like to be dying from Covid? Do this.




https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medica ... d=msedgntp



Worse than horrifying, right? I'd rather go into a medically induced coma.

[caltrek]

Study of 6 Million Americans Finds No Significant Side Effects From mRNA Vaccines
by Carly Cassella
October 7, 2021

https://www.sciencealert.com/study-of-o ... a-vaccines

Introduction:

(Science Alert) An ongoing monitoring system for the safety of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 has found no serious side effects for either the Pfizer or Moderna shots.

The research is being carried out by federal and private insurance researchers in the United States, with funding and support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Each week since December 14, 2020, the assembled team has followed the medical records of millions of Americans who have received an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, tracking their health before and after vaccination.

Researchers will continue to monitor vaccinated Americans for the next two years, but in the meantime, the interim results should reassure the public that these new shots are very safe.

Analyzing the medical charts of 6.2 million people with one dose of an mRNA vaccine and 5.7 million people with two doses, researchers found no statistical evidence to connect the shots with any of 23 serious outcomes.

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

The Best- and Worst-case Scenarios for Covid-19 this Winter
by Dylan Scott
October 8, 2021

https://www.vox.com/22712737/covid-19-c ... inter-wave

Introduction:

(Vox) The summer wave of Covid-19 cases and deaths is finally starting to fade, but already, winter is within sight.

Last December and January, the United States and much of the world experienced the deadliest surges of the pandemic. At one point, more than 3,000 Americans were dying every day of Covid-19. Nearly 250,000 people died in the United States over December, January, and February.

But this winter may be different, at least in America. Last year, almost nobody was vaccinated against Covid-19. As of October 7, 56 percent of the US population is fully vaccinated, according to the New York Times’s tracker. That includes 84 percent of people over 65, who are generally the most vulnerable to dying from the virus. The Food and Drug Administration will soon consider whether to authorize a vaccine for children as young as 5, which would push vaccination rates higher.

More than half the population being vaccinated is the primary reason for optimism about the coming months. Some number of unvaccinated people have natural immunity as well; there have been 44 million recorded cases of Covid-19 in the US to date.

At some point, the virus starts to run out of people with no protection to infect. While there will be breakthrough cases within the vaccinated population, those people are significantly less likely to develop serious symptoms than if they were unvaccinated. At this stage, the major goals are maintaining hospital capacity to make sure health systems are not so inundated with patients that they must ration care and preventing deaths. The more people with immunity; the fewer deaths we will see. That’s the main reason this winter could be better than last.

[caltrek]

The only two reasons this is a “debate” are to attempt to paint China as incompetent for the purpose of imperial conflict and to deflect from human impact on the ecosystem.

I don't think we should come to conclusions based on the possible political motivations of those making the argument. We could just as easily argue that those who favor the natural transmission from the Wuhan market are also making the case concerning Chinese incompetence in basic health and hygiene practices; or are trying to deflect from the possible problems of lab practices. It has been argued that some who are pushing the Wuhan market natural escape explanation were themselves implicated in collaborating with the Wuhan labs, and are trying to deflect from their possible involvement and share of the blame.

We should stick with the science. Unfortunately, depending upon who you talk to, the science itself seems ambiguous on the matter.

The Origin of COVID-19: Evidence Piles Up, but the Jury’s Still Out
by Matt Field
October 11, 2021

https://thebulletin.org/2021/10/the-ori ... still-out/

Introduction:

(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) It’s been more than 600 days since the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a “cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology,” almost 200 days since the WHO issued a major report on the origins of COVID-19, and more than a month since the Biden administration in the United States released an inconclusive intelligence review on that issue. Yet, despite the many investigations, studies, and scientific debates on how COVID-19 emerged, cold, hard evidence for how people started getting sick in Wuhan in 2019 remains elusive.

Circumstantial evidence, on the other hand, is piling up. Judgements about whether that circumstantial evidence points more toward one of two general theories of the pandemic’s origin—a natural spillover from an animal reservoir versus a leak from a laboratory studying coronaviruses—seems, at this point, to depend on the judger.

Broadly, there’s a growing body of new research and analysis showing how common spillover of animal coronaviruses may be. New research has also identified viruses in nature with striking similarity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. At the same time, a group of online sleuths found and leaked to the press a major grant proposal from 2018 that demonstrates the high-level of interest researchers, including those in Wuhan, had in manipulating bat coronaviruses, suggesting to some that such work could indeed have played a role in causing the pandemic.
On the one hand, the scientists advocating a natural origin for the pandemic can point to the tens of thousands of wild animals that were being sold in Wuhan, including at the Huanan seafood market where many of the initial cases of COVID-19 were reported….

Further extract:

(On the other hand) Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who co-authored a forthcoming book about the pandemic’s origins, told the Science panel, “in 2019, a novel SARS coronavirus with a novel genetic modification appeared in a city where there’s a lab studying novel SARS coronaviruses with novel genetic modifications. We cannot rule out the lab origin right now.”

[weatheriscool]

FDA vaccine advisers recommend emergency use authorization for booster dose of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

Quote

Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously Thursday to recommend emergency use authorization of a booster dose of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine.

The FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee agreed use of a booster dose would be safe and effective in some people six months out from their primary series.

Moderna had asked for emergency use authorization for a half dose of its vaccine to be used as a booster for certain people.

All 19 members of the committee supported authorizing a 50-microgram booster dose -- half the size of the 100-microgram doses used in the primary series of the two-dose vaccine -- at least six months after the second dose, and only for certain groups: people age 65 and older; people ages 18 to 64 who are at high risk of severe Covid-19; and people ages 18 to 64 whose exposure to the coronavirus in their settings or jobs put them at risk for Covid-19 complications or severe illness.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/14/health/f ... index.html

[erowind]

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[Ken_J]

there is an all too common belief that 'finding the responsible party' is the same as solving the problem. It's the global politics equivalent of leaving three crackers at the bottom of the box so that the next person who gets crackers is the one responsible for the crackers being gone, and thus throwing away the empty box and getting the net box of crackers to replace them.

every time there is a major event or a big problem that is in the news there is some big old blame game and a bunch of scape goating. and such a big production is made of identifying the person/s responsible. and then ones a case is made enough for people to pick teams they dust their hands happily and proclaimed the problem is solved now that we 'know who caused it'. Meanwhile the problem continues and worsens.

lung cancer isn't solved be determining if it was caused by asbestos exposure or smoking as a teen. right or wrong in figuring it out does not cure the cancer.

[raklian]

[caltrek]

Erowind: The real crux of the problem here that is being utterly ignored by almost everyone except select scientific researchers, is the connection to the ecological crisis. And that is the existential question. It is bigger than China, America, and all of the other nonsense the media shoves down our throats combined because it will be our end without action and consciousness of it.

Rather than offering a further rebuttal, which would just consist of a repetition of earlier points that I have made, I will agree with you that drawing a connection "to the ecological crisis" is a good point well worth making.

[wjfox]

[Ken_J]

the US is currently around 370000 deaths for the years. We are currently on a downside of a wave. I'm not sure how fall and winter will effect numbers though. It seems we will likely at least have another year and likely another wave before we start to approach that idea of settling into endemic covid.

I strongly suspect that booster shot and new vaccination rates will not be as good as the crap job we've had so far.

I find myself wondering about flu rates in that time as well. will flu get the same numbers it was achieving pre-covid, or will the be competeing for the same population and effect the numbers for each... of will the mild symptoms of covid make some far more vulnerable to deadly outcome from flu?

not to mention waning immunity to covid, new strains, new pandemics.

[erowind]

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[caltrek]

If you are wondering about why the U.S. continues to have one of the highest death tolls from Covid among the developed nations, this should help explain that a good part of it is our love of freedumb:

Lawsuits Demand Unproven Ivermectin for Covid Patients
October 16, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/lawsuits ... -patients/

Introduction:

NEW YORK (AP via Courthouse News) — Mask rules, vaccination mandates and business shutdowns have all landed in the courts during the Covid-19 outbreak, confronting judges with questions of science and government authority. Now they are increasingly being asked to weigh in on the deworming drug ivermectin.

At least two dozen lawsuits have been filed around the U.S., many in recent weeks, by people seeking to force hospitals to give their COVID-stricken loved ones ivermectin, a drug for parasites that has been promoted by conservative commentators as a treatment despite a lack of conclusive evidence that it helps people with the virus.

Interest in the drug started rising toward the end of last year and the beginning of this one, when studies — some later withdrawn, in other countries — seemed to suggest ivermectin had some potential and it became a hot topic of conversation among conservatives on social media.

The lawsuits, several of them filed by the same western New York lawyer, cover similar ground. The families have gotten prescriptions for ivermectin, but hospitals have refused to use it on their loved ones, who are often on ventilators and facing death.

There has been a mix of results in state courts. Some judges have refused to order hospitals to give ivermectin. Others have ordered medical providers to give the medication, despite concerns it could be harmful.

[caltrek]

COVID Super-immunity: One of the Pandemic’s Great Puzzles
by Ewen Callaway
October 14, 2021

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x

Introduction:

(Nature) Around a year ago — before Delta and other variants entered the COVID-19 lexicon — virologists Theodora Hatziioannou and Paul Bieniasz, both at the Rockefeller University in New York City, set out to make a version of a key SARS-CoV-2 protein with the ability to dodge all the infection-blocking antibodies our body makes.

The goal was to identify the parts of spike — the protein SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect cells — that are targeted by these neutralizing antibodies in order to map a key part of our body's attack on the virus. So the researchers mixed and matched potentially concerning mutations identified in lab experiments and circulating viruses, and tested their Franken-spikes in harmless ‘pseudotype’ viruses incapable of causing COVID-19. In a study published this September in Nature1, they reported that a spike mutant containing 20 changes was fully resistant to neutralizing antibodies made by most of the people tested who had been either infected or vaccinated — but not to everyone’s.

Those who had recovered from COVID-19 months before receiving their jabs harboured antibodies capable of defanging the mutant spike, which displays much more resistance to immune attack than any known naturally occurring variant. These peoples’ antibodies even blocked other types of coronaviruses. “It’s very likely they will be effective against any future variant that SARS-CoV-2 throws against them,” says Hatziioannou.

As the world watches out for new coronavirus variants, the basis of such ‘super-immunity’ has become one of the pandemic’s great mysteries. Researchers hope that, by mapping the differences between the immune protection that comes from infection compared with that from vaccination, they can chart a safer path to this higher level of protection.

Conclusion:

Those studying hybrid immunity stress that — whatever the potential benefits — the risks of a SARS-CoV-2 infection mean that it should be avoided. “We are not inviting anybody to get infected and then vaccinated to have a good response,” says Finzi. “Because some of them will not make it through.”