8:23 AM 4/27/2020 - Is The SARS-CoV-2 a man-made virus combining HIV and SARS? - Review
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Tech Startups - Coronavirus Is a Man Made Virus "manipulated" for HIV research ...
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"Shi Zhengli, China’s leading experts on bat coronaviruses and the Deputy Director of the P4 lab, found in a study that SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied. “That could point to a potential lab accident from basic scientific research”, she said..."
Is The SARS-CoV-2 a man-made virus combining HIV and SARS? - GS
Luc Montagnier: Is The SARS-CoV-2 a man-made virus combining HIV and SARS? - GS
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1147-am-4262020-i-think-that-covid-19.html
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To: Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna - AISE:
<a href="mailto:info@sicurezzanazionale.gov.it">info@sicurezzanazionale.gov.it</a>
Dear Sirs:
I think, that the Covid-19 infection was brought to Lombardy by the tourists returning from the Munich Oktoberfest in 2019. I respectfully recommend to you to look into this connection and to explore it fully by tracing the contacts, among the other relevant avenues of investigations. See the details in my blogs.
Sincerely, Michael Novakhov
11:47 AM 4/26/2020
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/did-covid-19-virus-originate-from-lab.html
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html
Figure—Phylogenetic tree showing evolutionary relationships between different coronaviruses—mostly bat coronaviruses and some pangolin coronaviruses (by Trevor Bedford). Different lab strains of SARS-CoV-1 (referred to as SARS-CoV here) are represented by yellow dots. WIV1, another common lab strain, is indicated with a black arrow.
Tech Startups - Coronavirus Is a Man Made Virus "manipulated" for HIV research ...
______________________________________________________________________
"Shi Zhengli, China’s leading experts on bat coronaviruses and the Deputy Director of the P4 lab, found in a study that SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied. “That could point to a potential lab accident from basic scientific research”, she said..."
Is The SARS-CoV-2 a man-made virus combining HIV and SARS? - GS
Luc Montagnier: Is The SARS-CoV-2 a man-made virus combining HIV and SARS? - GS
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-Was the purpose of this scandal to expose Wuhan Lab Bioweapons programs and to close it? Did the New Abwehr put the virus there? Was this hypothesis investigated?— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) April 27, 2020
News - Shi Zhengli: SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses... https://t.co/ncr3hcmdtt pic.twitter.com/eM1I08SPH6
-Was the virus introduced into this lab from outside by spies?— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) April 27, 2020
Shi Zhengli found that SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied. “That could point to a potential lab accident... https://t.co/eNDiozikwC pic.twitter.com/EVQcnRzQdM
-Was Corona engineered in Wuhan to be used as a biological weapon? - https://t.co/bNt596wSfr— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) April 27, 2020
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The China Centre for Virus Culture Collection-the largest virus bank in Asia-is located in the far outskirts of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. The US claims this high-security biosafety laboratory to be the cradle of the pandemic.
Initially, China’s scientists misguided the international community saying the virus likely jumped from an animal to humans in a wet market that sells wildlife in Wuhan. However, the very existence of the lab confirms that the germ spread not from the wet market but from the facility. The United States has now mainstreamed its allegations. The Secretary of State Pompeo has said the officials were doing a “full investigation” into how the virus “got out into the world”.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology-the epicentre of Corona crisis-is home to the China Centre for Virus Culture Collection, which preserves more than 1,500 strains. The complex contains Asia’s first maximum security lab equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4)-dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission, such as Ebola.
The P4 epidemiological laboratory was built in collaboration with French bio-industrial firm-Institut Merieux and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and among a handful of labs around the world cleared to handle the P4. It houses a P3 laboratory too.
American media voiced concern that the virus may have come-accidentally-from Wuhan facility. The US diplomatic cables revealed inadequate safety standards over researchers’ handling of the SARS-like bat coronaviruses there. The pandemic’s “patient zero” may have been infected by a strain of bat virus being studied at the facility and gone into the population in Wuhan. Trump said “more and more, we’re hearing the story” and the United States was “doing a very thorough investigation”.
Various conspiracy theories have flourished online but the institute declined to comment as it had nothing to say in defence. It received samples of the then-unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on January 2 and submitted information to the WHO on January 11. China blames others but itself promoted conspiracy theory that the US army may have brought the virus to China.
Scientists allege that the virus originated in bats before being passed to humans through an intermediary species like endangered pangolin, whose scales are illegally trafficked in China for traditional medicine. Chinese scientists’ January study revealed how the first COVID-19 patient had no connection to Wuhan’s infamous animal market, and neither did 13 of the first 41 confirmed cases.
Shi Zhengli, China’s leading experts on bat coronaviruses and the Deputy Director of the P4 lab, found in a study that SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied. “That could point to a potential lab accident from basic scientific research”, she said and warned almost a year back that the SARS-like coronavirus outbreaks linked to bats could happen in China. Truth can never be hidden. It will come out soon uncovering more of authoritarian China’s elaborate cover-up. The lab accident caused Corona pandemic and wet market is only a convenient ruse. In 2018, the US scientists visiting Wuhan facility worried about inadequate safety and management weaknesses and feared that research on bat coronaviruses could risk a new SARS-like pandemic. The UN experts must inspect China’s Wuhan Lab and other similar facilities. Something fishy happened in Wuhan out of carelessness and the world will never know. While working on bats blood, it spilled over the suit of the virologist and he left for home without disinfecting or following Standard of Operating Procedures (SOP’s). The SARS-CoV-2, is a man-made virus, artificially mutated combining HIV+ SARS. This biological warfare weapon was engineered at Wuhan. Beijing says the WHO has found no evidence that coronavirus was man made and created in Wuhan lab. But China’s complicity with the WHO is now open. The WHO has lost the US funding. What controversy? It’s the truth. The world will never forgive China for this lackadaisical approach.
Virus labs capture live video footage but China is hiding it. All video footage and other records from November till date will reveal the truth. Chinese investigation can’t be relied upon as Chinese lie on the face with no guilt or fear as they do not believe in religion and have no cultural morale. China must come clean and support investigation by a combined team of international inspectors from the US, France, the UK, Russia and Germany allowing full access to all labs and records. Wuhan lab must be shut down for the safety of the world.
China allowed the virus to spread all over the world, while controlling it within the country. If China smelt the rat and isolated Wuhan from the rest of China, why it kept Wuhan connected to the whole world? China’s kids play endangered the lives of people all over the world.
China allowed the virus to spread all over the world, while controlling it within the country. If China smelt the rat and isolated Wuhan from the rest of China, why it kept Wuhan connected to the whole world? China’s kids play endangered the lives of people all over the world.
Photo Credit : Getty Images
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China refuses to allow independent international investigation into the origin of the coronavirus. Determining pandemics origins further challenged by decimation of U.S. intelligence resources in region.
Legal Insurrection has been following reports that the Wuhan Coronavirus spread from a research laboratory in the capital city of Hubei Province in central China, noting that one China expert indicated that Chinese Communist Party officials could have allowed its citizens to travel the globe and spread the contagion.
Politico is now reporting that other nations may seize on this biowarfare concept.
The Pentagon and the intelligence community are more forcefully investigating the possibility that adversaries could use the novel coronavirus as a bioweapon, according to defense and intelligence officials, in a shift that reflects the national security apparatus’ evolving understanding of the virus and its risks.Officials emphasized that the change does not mean they believe the virus was purposefully created to be weaponized—the intelligence community is still investigating the virus’ potential origins, but there is currently no hard intelligence or scientific evidence to support the theory that it spread from a lab in China, people briefed on the matter said.Meanwhile, the intelligence community has also begun gaming out the potential for bad actors to weaponize the virus, particularly against high-level targets, and the Defense Department has recently shifted its focus toward monitoring the possibility more closely, said three people familiar with the matter.
Meanwhile, the full background on the source of the virus and the incipient stages of the outbreak in Wuhan may remain unknown for quite some time. The Chinese are rejecting all calls for an international probe into the origins of the pathogen.
A top diplomat in the UK, Chen Wen told the BBC the demands were politically motivated and would divert China’s attention from fighting the pandemic.Information about the origin of Covid-19 and how it initially spread could help countries tackle the disease.The virus is thought to have emerged at a wildlife market in the city of Wuhan late last year.
A report from European Union officials initially accused China of spreading disinformation about the crisis, in an effort to deflect blame. Now, they are walking back the criticism.
Without international-scale consequences or significant repercussions for the way it handled the onset of the pandemic, China has no motivation to changes its policies. Furthermore, there will not be a serious disincentive for malign actors to tinker around with the use of biological assault tactics.
Finally, determining where the virus came and what the Chinese did during the initial stages of the outbreak will pose significant challenges because China decimated U.S. intelligence apparatus in its country years ago.
…Reports emerged in 2017 that China had dealt a huge blow to the CIA’s infrastructure within its borders. From 2010 through to around 2013, according to The New York Times, more than a dozen carefully curated assets in China were jailed or killed — with one even brazenly shot outside a government building as a perceived warning to others.“It was devastating. The setback probably delayed the U.S. national security community from fully comprehending Beijing’s move toward a more oppressive and assertive policy,” Patrick Cronin, Asia-Pacific security chair for the Hudson Institute, told Fox News. “The gap in a sharper understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s true aims bought it more time to enact greater information suppression at home and more aggressive political warfare abroad.”The moves were deemed one of the worst in the agency’s modern history.“We didn’t lose just a single spy. We lost entire networks,” said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow and lead China expert at the Heritage Foundation. “That means that many of the various people who worked for us were all rolled up, which, in turn, would have devastated the credibility of our own agency and affected our ability to recruit new people.”
If there is no way to determine what went wrong so that preventative measures can be established, and no incentive for China to change, then it seems safe to assume we will face another version of Wuhan coronavirus in the future.
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Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks  | ||
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| We Still Dont Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us | ||
Omar Rodriguez organizes bodies in the Gerard J. Neufeld funeral home in Elmhurst on April 22. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Were committed to keeping our readers informed. Weve removed our paywall from essential coronavirus news stories. Become a subscriber to support our journalists. Subscribe now. Over the last few weeks, the country has managed to stabilize the spread of the coronavirus sufficiently enough to begin debating when and in what ways to reopen, and to normalize, against all moral logic, the horrifying and ongoing death toll thousands of Americans dying each day, in multiples of 9/11 even now with the virus seemingly under control. The death rate is no longer accelerating, but holding steady, which is apparently the point at which an onrushing terror can begin fading into background noise. Meanwhile, the disease itself appears to be shape-shifting before our eyes. In an acute column published April 13, the New York Times Charlie Warzel listed 48 basic questions that remain unanswered about the coronavirus and what must be done to protect ourselves against it, from how deadly it is to how many people caught it and shrugged it off to how long immunity to the disease lasts after infection (if any time at all). Despite the relentless, heroic work of doctors and scientists around the world, he wrote, theres so much we dont know. The 48 questions he listed, he was careful to point out, did not represent a comprehensive list. And those are just the coronaviruss known unknowns. In the two weeks since, weve gotten some clarifying information on at least a handful of Warzels queries. In early trials, more patients taking the Trump-hyped hydroxychloroquinine died than those who didnt, and the FDA has now issued a statement warning coronavirus patients and their doctors from using the drug. The World Health Organization got so worried about the much-touted antiviral remdesivir, which received a jolt of publicity (and stock appreciation) a few weeks ago on rumors of positive results, the organization leaked an unpublished, preliminary survey showing no benefit to COVID-19 patients. Globally, studies have consistently found exposure levels to the virus in most populations in the low single digits meaning dozens of times more people have gotten the coronavirus than have been diagnosed with it, though still just a tiny fraction of the number needed to achieve herd immunity. In particular hot spots, the exposure has been significantly more widespread one survey in New York City found that 21 percent of residents may have COVID-19 antibodies already, making the city not just the deadliest community in the deadliest country in a world during the deadliest pandemic since AIDS, but also the most infected (and, by corollary, the farthest along to herd immunity). A study in Chelsea, Massachusetts, found an even higher and therefore more encouraging figure: 32 percent of those tested were found to have antibodies, which would mean, at least in that area, the disease was only a fraction as severe as it mightve seemed at first glance, and that the community as a whole could be as much as halfway along to herd immunity. In most of the rest of the country, the picture of exposure we now have is much more dire, with much more infection almost inevitably to come. But there is one big question that didnt even make it onto Warzels list that has only gotten more mysterious in the weeks since: How is COVID-19 actually killing us? We are now almost six months into this pandemic, which began in November in Wuhan, with 50,000 Americans dead and 200,000 more around the world. If each of those deaths is a data point, together they represent a quite large body of evidence from which to form a clear picture of the pandemic threat. Early in the epidemic, the coronavirus was seen as a variant of a familiar family of disease, not a mysterious ailment, however infectious and concerning. But while uncertainties at the population level confuse and frustrate public-health officials, unsure when and in what form to shift gears out of lockdowns, the disease has proved just as mercurial at the clinical level, with doctors revising their understanding of COVID-19s basic pattern and weaponry indeed often revising that understanding in different directions at once. The clinical shape of the disease, long presumed to be a relatively predictable respiratory infection, is getting less clear by the week. Lately, it seems, by the day. As Carl Zimmer, probably the countrys most respected science journalist, asked virologists in a tweet last week, is there any other virus out there that is this weird in terms of its range of symptoms? You probably have a sense of the range of common symptoms, and a sense that the range isnt that weird: fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath have been, since the beginning of the outbreak, the familiar, oft-repeated group of tell-tale signs. But while the CDC does list fever as the top symptom of COVID-19, so confidently that for weeks patients were turned away from testing sites if they didnt have an elevated temperature, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, as many as 70 percent of patients sick enough to be admitted to New York States largest hospital system did not have a fever. Over the past few months, Bostons Brigham and Womens Hospital has been compiling and revising, in real time, treatment guidelines for COVID-19 which have become a trusted clearinghouse of best-practices information for doctors throughout the country. According to those guidelines, as few as 44 percent of coronavirus patients presented with a fever (though, in their meta-analysis, the uncertainty is quite high, with a range of 44 to 94 percent). Cough is more common, according to Brigham and Womens, with between 68 percent and 83 percent of patients presenting with some cough though that means as many as three in ten sick enough to be hospitalized wont be coughing. As for shortness of breath, the Brigham and Womens estimate runs as low as 11 percent. The high end is only 40 percent, which would still mean that more patients hospitalized for COVID-19 do not have shortness of breath than do. At the low end of that range, shortness of breath would be roughly as common among COVID-19 patients as confusion (9 percent), headache (8 to 14 percent), and nausea and diarrhea (3 to 17 percent). That the ranges are so wide themselves tells you that the disease is presenting in very different ways in different hospitals and different populations of different patients leading, for instance, some doctors and scientists to theorize the virus might be attacking the immune system like HIV does, with many others finding the disease is triggering something like the opposite response, an overwhelming overreaction of the immune system called a cytokine storm. The most bedeviling confusion has arisen around the relationship of the disease to breathing, lung function, and oxygenation levels in the blood typically, for a respiratory illness, a quite predictable relationship. But for weeks now, front-line doctors have been expressing confusion that so many coronavirus patients were registering lethally low blood-oxygenation levels while still appearing, by almost any vernacular measure, pretty okay. Its one reason theyve begun rethinking the initial clinical focus on ventilators, which are generally recommended when patients oxygenation falls below a certain level, but seemed, after a few weeks, of unclear benefit to COVID-19 patients, who may have done better, doctors began to suggest, on lesser or different forms of oxygen support. For a while, ventilators were seen so much as the essential tool in treating life-threatening coronavirus that shortages (and the presidents unwillingness to invoke the Defense Production Act to manufacture them quickly) became a scandal. But 80 percent of New York patients put on ventilators died. In China, the figure was 86 percent. On April 20 in the New York Times, an ER doctor named Richard Levitan who had been volunteering at Bellevue proposed that the phenomenon of seemingly stable patients registering lethally low oxygen levels might be explained by silent hypoxia the air sacs in the lung collapsing, not getting stiff or heavy with fluid, as is the case with the pneumonias doctors had been using as models in their treatment of COVID-19. But whether this explanation is universal, limited to the patients at Bellevue, or somewhere in between is not yet entirely clear. A couple of days later, in a pre-print paper others questioned, scientists reported finding that the ability of the disease to mutate has been vastly underestimated investigating the disease as it appeared in just 11 patients, they said they found 30 mutations. The most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the weakest type, the South China Morning-Post reported. These strains also killed the cells the fastest. That same day, the Washington Post reported on another theory gaining traction among American doctors treating the disease that one key could be the way COVID-19 affects the blood of patients, producing much more clotting. Autopsies have shown that some peoples lungs are filled with hundreds of microclots, the Post reported. Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or a heart attack. But the bigger-picture perspective the newspaper offered is perhaps more eye-opening and to the point: One month ago, as the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident that they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a very contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. But theyve since become increasingly convinced that covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.That is a dizzying list. But it is not even comprehensive. In a fantastic survey published April 17 (How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes, by Meredith Wadman, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Catherine Matacic), Science magazine took a thorough, detailed tour of the ever-evolving state of understanding of the disease. Despite the more than 1,000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week, Science concluded, a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen. In a single illuminating chart, Science lists the following organs as being vulnerable to COVID-19: brain, eyes, nose, lungs, heart, blood vessels, livers, kidneys, intestines. That is to say, nearly every organ: And the disparate impacts were significant ones: Heart damage was discovered in 20 percent of patients hospitalized in Wuhan, where 44 percent of those in ICU exhibited arrhythmias; 38 percent of Dutch ICU patients had irregular blood clotting; 27 percent of Wuhan patients had kidney failure, with many more showing signs of kidney damage; half of Chinese patients showed signs of liver damage; and, depending on the study, between 20 percent and 50 percent of patients had diarrhea. On April 15, the Washington Post reported that, in New York and Wuhan, between 14 and 30 percent of ICU patients had lost kidney function, requiring dialysis. New York hospitals were treating so much kidney failure they need more personnel who can perform dialysis and have issued an urgent call for volunteers from other parts of the country. They also are running dangerously short of the sterile fluids used to deliver that therapy. The result, the Post said, was rationed care: patients needing 24-hour support getting considerably less. On Saturday, the paper reported that [y]oung and middle-aged people, barely sick with COVID-19, are dying from strokes. Many of the patients described didnt even know they were sick: The patients chart appeared unremarkable at first glance. He took no medications and had no history of chronic conditions. He had been feeling fine, hanging out at home during the lockdown like the rest of the country, when suddenly, he had trouble talking and moving the right side of his body. Imaging showed a large blockage on the left side of his head. Oxley gasped when he got to the patients age and covid-19 status: 44, positive.But the patients age wasnt the only abnormality of the case: As Oxley, an interventional neurologist, began the procedure to remove the clot, he observed something he had never seen before. On the monitors, the brain typically shows up as a tangle of black squiggles like a can of spaghetti, he said that provide a map of blood vessels. A clot shows up as a blank spot. As he used a needlelike device to pull out the clot, he saw new clots forming in real-time around it.These strokes, several doctors who spoke to the Post theorized, could explain the high number of patients dying at home four times the usual rate in New York, many or most of them, perhaps, dying quite suddenly. According to the Brigham and Womens guidelines, only 53 percent of COVID-19 patients have died from respiratory failure alone. Its not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And its common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are, still, feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasnt even stabilized. Perhaps more importantly, its a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is not just a public-health crisis but a scientific one as well. And that as deep as it may feel we are into the coronavirus, with tens of thousands dead and literally billions in precautionary lockdown, we are still in the very early stages, when each new finding seems as likely to cloud or complicate our understanding of the coronavirus as it is to clarify it. Instead, confidence gives way to uncertainty. In the space of a few months, weve gone from thinking there was no asymptomatic transmission to believing it accounts for perhaps half or more of all cases, from thinking the young were invulnerable to thinking they were just somewhat less vulnerable, from believing masks were unnecessary to requiring their use at all times outside the house, from panicking about ventilator shortages to deploying pregnancy massage pillows instead. Six months since patient zero, we still have no drugs proven to even help treat the disease. Almost certainly, we are past the Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals stage of this pandemic. But how far past? | ||
| 11:47 AM 4/26/2020 - I think, that the Covid-19 infection was brought to Lombardy by the tourists returning from the Munich Oktoberfest in 2019. | ||
___________________________________________________________________ - https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1147-am-4262020-i-think-that-covid-19.html _________________________________________________________ To: Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna - AISE: <a href="mailto:info@sicurezzanazionale.gov.it">info@sicurezzanazionale.gov.it</a> Dear Sirs: I think, that the Covid-19 infection was brought to Lombardy by the tourists returning from the Munich Oktoberfest in 2019. I respectfully recommend to you to look into this connection and to explore it fully by tracing the contacts, among the other relevant avenues of investigations. See the details in my blogs. Sincerely, Michael Novakhov 11:47 AM 4/26/2020 _________________________________________ Blogs | In Brief |
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-death-rate-potentially-lower.html
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Omar Rodriguez organizes bodies in the Gerard J. Neufeld funeral home in Elmhurst on April 22. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
We’re committed to keeping our readers informed.
We’ve removed our paywall from essential coronavirus news stories. Become a subscriber to support our journalists. Subscribe now.
We’ve removed our paywall from essential coronavirus news stories. Become a subscriber to support our journalists. Subscribe now.
Over the last few weeks, the country has managed to stabilize the spread of the coronavirus sufficiently enough to begin debating when and in what ways to “reopen,” and to normalize, against all moral logic, the horrifying and ongoing death toll — thousands of Americans dying each day, in multiples of 9/11 even now with the virus seemingly “under control.” The death rate is no longer accelerating, but holding steady, which is apparently the point at which an onrushing terror can begin fading into background noise. Meanwhile, the disease itself appears to be shape-shifting before our eyes.
In an acute column published April 13, the New York Times’ Charlie Warzel listed 48 basic questions that remain unanswered about the coronavirus and what must be done to protect ourselves against it, from how deadly it is to how many people caught it and shrugged it off to how long immunity to the disease lasts after infection (if any time at all). “Despite the relentless, heroic work of doctors and scientists around the world,” he wrote, “there’s so much we don’t know.” The 48 questions he listed, he was careful to point out, did not represent a comprehensive list. And those are just the coronavirus’s “known unknowns.”
In the two weeks since, we’ve gotten some clarifying information on at least a handful of Warzel’s queries. In early trials, more patients taking the Trump-hyped hydroxychloroquinine died than those who didn’t, and the FDA has now issued a statement warning coronavirus patients and their doctors from using the drug. The World Health Organization got so worried about the much-touted antiviral remdesivir, which received a jolt of publicity (and stock appreciation) a few weeks ago on rumors of positive results, the organization leaked an unpublished, preliminary survey showing no benefit to COVID-19 patients. Globally, studies have consistently found exposure levels to the virus in most populations in the low single digits — meaning dozens of times more people have gotten the coronavirus than have been diagnosed with it, though still just a tiny fraction of the number needed to achieve herd immunity. In particular hot spots, the exposure has been significantly more widespread — one survey in New York City found that 21 percent of residents may have COVID-19 antibodies already, making the city not just the deadliest community in the deadliest country in a world during the deadliest pandemic since AIDS, but also the most infected (and, by corollary, the farthest along to herd immunity). A study in Chelsea, Massachusetts, found an even higher and therefore more encouraging figure: 32 percent of those tested were found to have antibodies, which would mean, at least in that area, the disease was only a fraction as severe as it might’ve seemed at first glance, and that the community as a whole could be as much as halfway along to herd immunity. In most of the rest of the country, the picture of exposure we now have is much more dire, with much more infection almost inevitably to come.
But there is one big question that didn’t even make it onto Warzel’s list that has only gotten more mysterious in the weeks since: How is COVID-19 actually killing us?
We are now almost six months into this pandemic, which began in November in Wuhan, with 50,000 Americans dead and 200,000 more around the world. If each of those deaths is a data point, together they represent a quite large body of evidence from which to form a clear picture of the pandemic threat. Early in the epidemic, the coronavirus was seen as a variant of a familiar family of disease, not a mysterious ailment, however infectious and concerning. But while uncertainties at the population level confuse and frustrate public-health officials, unsure when and in what form to shift gears out of lockdowns, the disease has proved just as mercurial at the clinical level, with doctors revising their understanding of COVID-19’s basic pattern and weaponry — indeed often revising that understanding in different directions at once. The clinical shape of the disease, long presumed to be a relatively predictable respiratory infection, is getting less clear by the week. Lately, it seems, by the day. As Carl Zimmer, probably the country’s most respected science journalist, asked virologists in a tweet last week, “is there any other virus out there that is this weird in terms of its range of symptoms?”
You probably have a sense of the range of common symptoms, and a sense that the range isn’t that weird: fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath have been, since the beginning of the outbreak, the familiar, oft-repeated group of tell-tale signs. But while the CDC does list fever as the top symptom of COVID-19, so confidently that for weeks patients were turned away from testing sites if they didn’t have an elevated temperature, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, as many as 70 percent of patients sick enough to be admitted to New York State’s largest hospital system did not have a fever.
Over the past few months, Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been compiling and revising, in real time, treatment guidelines for COVID-19 which have become a trusted clearinghouse of best-practices information for doctors throughout the country. According to those guidelines, as few as 44 percent of coronavirus patients presented with a fever (though, in their meta-analysis, the uncertainty is quite high, with a range of 44 to 94 percent). Cough is more common, according to Brigham and Women’s, with between 68 percent and 83 percent of patients presenting with some cough — though that means as many as three in ten sick enough to be hospitalized won’t be coughing. As for shortness of breath, the Brigham and Women’s estimate runs as low as 11 percent. The high end is only 40 percent, which would still mean that more patients hospitalized for COVID-19 do not have shortness of breath than do. At the low end of that range, shortness of breath would be roughly as common among COVID-19 patients as confusion (9 percent), headache (8 to 14 percent), and nausea and diarrhea (3 to 17 percent). That the ranges are so wide themselves tells you that the disease is presenting in very different ways in different hospitals and different populations of different patients — leading, for instance, some doctors and scientists to theorize the virus might be attacking the immune system like HIV does, with many others finding the disease is triggering something like the opposite response, an overwhelming overreaction of the immune system called a “cytokine storm.”
The most bedeviling confusion has arisen around the relationship of the disease to breathing, lung function, and oxygenation levels in the blood — typically, for a respiratory illness, a quite predictable relationship. But for weeks now, front-line doctors have been expressing confusion that so many coronavirus patients were registering lethally low blood-oxygenation levels while still appearing, by almost any vernacular measure, pretty okay. It’s one reason they’ve begun rethinking the initial clinical focus on ventilators, which are generally recommended when patients oxygenation falls below a certain level, but seemed, after a few weeks, of unclear benefit to COVID-19 patients, who may have done better, doctors began to suggest, on lesser or different forms of oxygen support. For a while, ventilators were seen so much as the essential tool in treating life-threatening coronavirus that shortages (and the president’s unwillingness to invoke the Defense Production Act to manufacture them quickly) became a scandal. But 80 percent of New York patients put on ventilators died. In China, the figure was 86 percent.
On April 20 in the New York Times, an ER doctor named Richard Levitan who had been volunteering at Bellevue proposed that the phenomenon of seemingly stable patients registering lethally low oxygen levels might be explained by “silent hypoxia” — the air sacs in the lung collapsing, not getting stiff or heavy with fluid, as is the case with the pneumonias doctors had been using as models in their treatment of COVID-19. But whether this explanation is universal, limited to the patients at Bellevue, or somewhere in between is not yet entirely clear. A couple of days later, in a pre-print paper others questioned, scientists reported finding that the ability of the disease to mutate has been “vastly underestimated” — investigating the disease as it appeared in just 11 patients, they said they found 30 mutations. “The most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the weakest type,” the South China Morning-Post reported. “These strains also killed the cells the fastest.”
That same day, the Washington Post reported on another theory gaining traction among American doctors treating the disease — that one key could be the way COVID-19 affects the blood of patients, producing much more clotting. “Autopsies have shown that some people’s lungs are filled with hundreds of microclots,” the Post reported. “Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or a heart attack.”
But the bigger-picture perspective the newspaper offered is perhaps more eye-opening and to the point:
One month ago, as the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident that they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a very contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. But they’ve since become increasingly convinced that covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.
That is a dizzying list. But it is not even comprehensive. In a fantastic survey published April 17 (“How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes,” by Meredith Wadman, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Catherine Matacic), Science magazine took a thorough, detailed tour of the ever-evolving state of understanding of the disease. “Despite the more than 1,000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week,” Science concluded, “a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.”
In a single illuminating chart, Science lists the following organs as being vulnerable to COVID-19: brain, eyes, nose, lungs, heart, blood vessels, livers, kidneys, intestines. That is to say, nearly every organ:
And the disparate impacts were significant ones: Heart damage was discovered in 20 percent of patients hospitalized in Wuhan, where 44 percent of those in ICU exhibited arrhythmias; 38 percent of Dutch ICU patients had irregular blood clotting; 27 percent of Wuhan patients had kidney failure, with many more showing signs of kidney damage; half of Chinese patients showed signs of liver damage; and, depending on the study, between 20 percent and 50 percent of patients had diarrhea.
On April 15, the Washington Post reported that, in New York and Wuhan, between 14 and 30 percent of ICU patients had lost kidney function, requiring dialysis. New York hospitals were treating so much kidney failure “they need more personnel who can perform dialysis and have issued an urgent call for volunteers from other parts of the country. They also are running dangerously short of the sterile fluids used to deliver that therapy.” The result, the Post said, was rationed care: patients needing 24-hour support getting considerably less. On Saturday, the paper reported that “[y]oung and middle-aged people, barely sick with COVID-19, are dying from strokes.” Many of the patients described didn’t even know they were sick:
The patient’s chart appeared unremarkable at first glance. He took no medications and had no history of chronic conditions. He had been feeling fine, hanging out at home during the lockdown like the rest of the country, when suddenly, he had trouble talking and moving the right side of his body. Imaging showed a large blockage on the left side of his head. Oxley gasped when he got to the patient’s age and covid-19 status: 44, positive.The man was among several recent stroke patients in their 30s to 40s who were all infected with the coronavirus. The median age for that type of severe stroke is 74.
But the patient’s age wasn’t the only abnormality of the case:
As Oxley, an interventional neurologist, began the procedure to remove the clot, he observed something he had never seen before. On the monitors, the brain typically shows up as a tangle of black squiggles — “like a can of spaghetti,” he said — that provide a map of blood vessels. A clot shows up as a blank spot. As he used a needlelike device to pull out the clot, he saw new clots forming in real-time around it.“This is crazy,” he remembers telling his boss.
These strokes, several doctors who spoke to the Post theorized, could explain the high number of patients dying at home — four times the usual rate in New York, many or most of them, perhaps, dying quite suddenly. According to the Brigham and Women’s guidelines, only 53 percent of COVID-19 patients have died from respiratory failure alone.
It’s not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And it’s common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are, still, feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasn’t even stabilized. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is not just a public-health crisis but a scientific one as well. And that as deep as it may feel we are into the coronavirus, with tens of thousands dead and literally billions in precautionary lockdown, we are still in the very early stages, when each new finding seems as likely to cloud or complicate our understanding of the coronavirus as it is to clarify it. Instead, confidence gives way to uncertainty.
In the space of a few months, we’ve gone from thinking there was no “asymptomatic transmission” to believing it accounts for perhaps half or more of all cases, from thinking the young were invulnerable to thinking they were just somewhat less vulnerable, from believing masks were unnecessary to requiring their use at all times outside the house, from panicking about ventilator shortages to deploying pregnancy massage pillows instead. Six months since patient zero, we still have no drugs proven to even help treat the disease. Almost certainly, we are past the “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” stage of this pandemic. But how far past?
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1147-am-4262020-i-think-that-covid-19.html
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To: Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna - AISE:
<a href="mailto:info@sicurezzanazionale.gov.it">info@sicurezzanazionale.gov.it</a>
Dear Sirs:
I think, that the Covid-19 infection was brought to Lombardy by the tourists returning from the Munich Oktoberfest in 2019. I respectfully recommend to you to look into this connection and to explore it fully by tracing the contacts, among the other relevant avenues of investigations. See the details in my blogs.
Sincerely, Michael Novakhov
11:47 AM 4/26/2020
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Blogs | In Brief
| Blogs |
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| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 10:47 AM 4/26/2020 - mikenov on Twitter: RT @PressTV: President Rouhani: #Iran closely watching US moves |
| Sun, 26 Apr 2020 10:51:37 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1047-am-4262020-mikenov-on-twitter-rt.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1047-am-4262020-mikenov-on-twitter-rt.html</a> ______________________________________________________________ Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 12:35am mikenov on Twitter mikenov on Twitter: #FBINews #CIA #ODNI #USIntelligenceCiommunity #USMilitary #Senate #House #Cointelpro #FBIPerverts #FBIBrainless #FBIStupid # |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 2:18 PM 4/25/2020 » Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus origins 25/04/20 10:24 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks |
| Sat, 25 Apr 2020 14:18:29 -0400 Coronavirus Puts Italys Most Vicious Mobsters Back on the Street <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-puts-italys-most-vicious-mobsters-back-on-the-street?source=twitter&via=desktop" rel="nofollow">https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-puts-italys-most-vicious-mobsters-back-on-the-street?source=twitter&via=desktop</a> via @thedailybeast _______________________________________________________________ <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/did-covid-19-virus-originate-from-lab.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/did-covid-19-virus-originate-from-lab.html</a> |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror - Saturday April 25th, 2020 at 10:41 AM |
| Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:27:24 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html</a> COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror Saturday April 25th, 2020 at 10:41 AM Comments On: COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses To Bioterror 1 Share People wearing face masks are seen in the Times Square subway station during the outbreak of the coronavirus |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » Fighting The Infodemic: How Fake News Is Making Coronavirus Even More Dangerous 25/04/20 02:22 from Google Alert - COVID-19 is used as a Bioweapon |
| Sat, 25 Apr 2020 07:47:52 -0400 A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » Fighting The Infodemic: How Fake News Is Making Coronavirus Even More Dangerous25/04/20 02:22 from Google Alert - COVID-19 is used as a Bioweapon » Amid COVID-19 Scare, Keralite Youth From UK Reaches Kozhikode for |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » FBI Warns of Emerging Health Care Fraud Schemes Related to COVID-19 Pandemic 24/04/20 19:37 from Google Alert - coronavirus criminal investigations |
| Fri, 24 Apr 2020 20:35:14 -0400 A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » FBI Warns of Emerging Health Care Fraud Schemes Related to COVID-19 Pandemic24/04/20 19:37 from Google Alert - coronavirus criminal investigations » Top federal, state prosecutors form Delaware COVID-19 Anti-Fraud |
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1047-am-4262020-mikenov-on-twitter-rt.html
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mikenov on Twitter
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Fri, 24 Apr 2020 20:06:31 -0400
#FBINews #CIA #ODNI #USIntelligenceCiommunity
#USMilitary #Senate #House #Cointelpro #FBIPerverts
#FBIBrainless #FBIStupid #FBIIdiots #DismantleStupidFBI
#FBINazis #FBISubverted #AmericanKGB
STUPID Dogs of the State #FBI The #SecretPolice Of #America
mikenov on Twitter
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Fri, 24 Apr 2020 19:57:39 -0400
The STUPID Dogs of the State: FBI The Secret Police Of America
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ROME (AP) — As Italy prepares to emerge from the West’s first and most extensive coronavirus lockdown, it is increasingly clear that something went terribly wrong in Lombardy, the hardest-hit region in Europe’s hardest-hit country.
Italy had the bad luck of being the first Western nation to be slammed by the outbreak, and its total of 26,000 fatalities lags behind only the US in the global death toll. Italy’s first homegrown case was recorded February 21, at a time when the World Health Organization was still insisting the virus was “containable” and not nearly as infectious as the flu.
But there’s also evidence that demographics and health care deficiencies combined with political and business interests to expose Lombardy’s 10 million people in ways unseen anywhere else, particularly the most vulnerable in nursing homes.
Virologists and epidemiologists say what went wrong there will be studied for years, given how the outbreak overwhelmed a medical system considered one of Europe’s best. In neighboring Veneto, the impact was significantly more controlled.
Prosecutors are deciding whether to lay any criminal blame for the hundreds of dead in nursing homes, many of whom aren’t even counted in Lombardy’s official death toll of 13,269.
By contrast, Lombardy’s front-line doctors and nurses are being hailed as heroes for risking their lives to treat the sick under extraordinary levels of stress, exhaustion, isolation and fear.
Even after Italy registered its first homegrown case, doctors didn’t understand the unusual way COVID-19 could present itself, with some patients experiencing a rapid decline in their ability to breathe.
“This was clinical information we didn’t have,” said Dr. Maurizio Marvisi, a pneumologist at the San Camillo private clinic in hard-hit Cremona.
Lombardy region president Attilio Fontana arrives to attend a news conference presenting a new hospital Ospedalefieramilano to treat coronavirus patients in Milan, Italy, March 31, 2020. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Because Lombardy’s intensive care units were filling up within days of Italy’s first cases, many primary care physicians tried to treat and monitor their patients at home, even putting them on supplemental oxygen. That strategy proved deadly, since many people died at home or soon after being hospitalized, having waited too long to call an ambulance.
Italy was forced to rely on home care in part because of its low ICU capacity: After years of budget cuts, Italy went into the emergency with 8.6 ICU beds per 100,000 people, below the average of 15.9 within the developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As a result, Italy’s primary care physicians became the front-line filter of COVID-19 patients, an army of mostly self-employed general practitioners who work outside the public hospital system.
Since only those showing strong symptoms were being tested because Lombardy’s labs couldn’t process any more, these family doctors didn’t know if they themselves were positive, much less their patients.
The doctors also had no guidelines on when to admit the sick or refer them to specialists and didn’t have the same access to protective equipment as hospitals.
Some 20,000 Italian medical personnel have been infected and 150 doctors have died.
Two days after Italy registered its first case in the Lombardy province of Lodi, sparking a quarantine in 10 towns, another positive case was registered more than an hour’s drive away in Alzano in the province of Bergamo.
By March 2, the Superior Institute of Health recommended Alzano and nearby Nembro be sealed off like the Lodi towns. But political authorities never implemented that recommendation, allowing the infection to spread for a second week until all of Lombardy was locked down March 7.
Asked why he didn’t seal off Bergamo province sooner, Premier Giuseppe Conte argued that Lombardy’s regional government could have done so on its own. Lombardy’s governor, Attilio Fontana, said if there was a mistake, ‘’it was made by both. I don’t think that there was blame in this situation.’’
In this April 16, 2020 file photo, medical staff tend to a patient in the emergency COVID-19 ward at the San Carlo Hospital in Milan, Italy. (AP Photo/Antonio Calann)
Lombardy has one-sixth of Italy’s 60 million people and is the most densely populated region, home to the business capital in Milan and the country’s industrial heartland. Lombardy also has more people over 65 than any other region, as well as 20% of Italy’s nursing homes, a demographic time bomb for COVID-19 infections.
“Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, we should have done a total shutdown in Lombardy, everyone at home and no one moves,” said Andrea Crisanti, a microbiologist and virologist advising Veneto’s regional government. But he acknowledged how hard that was, given Lombardy’s outsize role in Italy’s economy.
“Probably for political reasons, it wasn’t done,” he told reporters.
Unions and mayors of some of Lombardy’s hardest-hit cities now say the country’s main industrial lobby group, Confindustria, put enormous pressure on authorities to resist production shutdowns, claiming the economic cost would be too great in a region responsible for 21% of Italy’s GDP.
On February 28, a week into Italy’s outbreak and well after more than 100 cases had been registered in Bergamo, the province’s branch of Confindustria launched a social media campaign aimed at reassuring skittish investors. It insisted the outbreak was no worse than elsewhere and that production in provincial steel mills and other industries were unaffected.
Even after the national government locked down all of Lombardy March 7, it allowed factories to stay open, sparking strikes from workers worried that their health was being sacrificed.
“It was a huge error. They should have taken the example where the first cluster was found,” said Giambattista Morali of the metalworkers’ union in the Bergamo town of Dalmine.
While the regional government focused on finding new ICU beds, its testing capacity lagged and Lombardy’s nursing homes were left to fend for themselves.
Of particular attention to Milan prosecutors investigating deaths in care facilities was the March 8 decision by the regional government to allow recovering COVID-19 patients to be housed in nursing homes to free up hospital beds.
Another regional decree March 30 told nursing home directors to not hospitalize sick residents over 75 if they had other health problems and avoid further risking their health during transport.
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Coronavirus Puts Italy’s Most Vicious Mobsters Back on the Street https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-puts-italys-most-vicious-mobsters-back-on-the-street?source=twitter&via=desktop … via @thedailybeast
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/did-covid-19-virus-originate-from-lab.html
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Blogs | In Brief
| Blogs |
|---|
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror - Saturday April 25th, 2020 at 10:41 AM |
| Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:27:24 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html</a> COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror Saturday April 25th, 2020 at 10:41 AM Comments On: COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses To Bioterror 1 Share People wearing face masks are seen in the Times Square subway station during the outbreak of the coronavirus |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » Fighting The Infodemic: How Fake News Is Making Coronavirus Even More Dangerous 25/04/20 02:22 from Google Alert - COVID-19 is used as a Bioweapon |
| Sat, 25 Apr 2020 07:47:52 -0400 A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » Fighting The Infodemic: How Fake News Is Making Coronavirus Even More Dangerous25/04/20 02:22 from Google Alert - COVID-19 is used as a Bioweapon » Amid COVID-19 Scare, Keralite Youth From UK Reaches Kozhikode for |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » FBI Warns of Emerging Health Care Fraud Schemes Related to COVID-19 Pandemic 24/04/20 19:37 from Google Alert - coronavirus criminal investigations |
| Fri, 24 Apr 2020 20:35:14 -0400 A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » FBI Warns of Emerging Health Care Fraud Schemes Related to COVID-19 Pandemic24/04/20 19:37 from Google Alert - coronavirus criminal investigations » Top federal, state prosecutors form Delaware COVID-19 Anti-Fraud |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » Water shortage leaves poorer Mexicans high and dry in coronavirus fight 24/04/20 14:00 from Google Alert - coronavirus in water |
| Fri, 24 Apr 2020 20:33:05 -0400 A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » Water shortage leaves poorer Mexicans high and dry in coronavirus fight24/04/20 14:00 from Google Alert - coronavirus in water » Coronavirus updates: US death toll surpasses 5000024/04/20 13:48 from Google Alert - |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: There is nothing new in #Chumakov's interview, he just repeats the claims made first and originally by #Montagnier, which do deserve the serious attention and appear to be valid. The purpose of MK publication is to |
| Fri, 24 Apr 2020 12:30:37 -0400 There is nothing new in #Chumakov's interview, he just repeats the claims made first and originally by #Montagnier, which do deserve the serious attention and appear to be valid. The purpose of MK publication is to reinforce the same #GERMAN #INTEL #COVER: Wuhan Lab as culprits pic.twitter.com/VYRJGh9xWE Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) April 24, 2020 - <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/</a> |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: Give some LYSOL to THE IDIOT!!! Cleanse yourself, America! Long overdue! ...Donald Trump may try to delay November election | US news | The Guardian | |
| Fri, 24 Apr 2020 10:05:35 -0400 Give some LYSOL to THE IDIOT!!! Cleanse yourself, America! Long overdue!...Donald Trump may try to delay November election | US news | The Guardian <a href="https://t.co/T3oJ1v7khF" rel="nofollow">https://t.co/T3oJ1v7khF</a> Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) April 24, 2020 #CIA #FBI #ODNI #DIA #USMilitary #US #Senate #House #Disinfect #America: #Give #Lysol to #Trump! #Let him #drink his #bitter #cup! #Take your own #Medicine, the # |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: Herd immunity: Why some think it could end the coronavirus pandemic - 23/04/20 21:40 | Michael Novakhov - Posts on Twitter - 250 |
| Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:23:10 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/herd-immunity-why-some-think-it-could.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/herd-immunity-why-some-think-it-could.html</a> Michael Novakhov - Posts on Twitter - 250 | Page _____________________________________ » mikenov on Twitter: Herd immunity: Why some think it could end the coronavirus pandemic - CNN cnn.com/2020/04/23/hea23/04/20 21:40 from Michael Novakhov on Twitter from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)Herd immunity: Why some |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » De-mystifying the Coronavirus Statistics. Read Carefully: The Risks Are Exceedingly Low! 23/04/20 10:56 from Google Alert - coronavirus statistics |
| Thu, 23 Apr 2020 18:25:49 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/de-mystifying-coronavirus-statistics.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/de-mystifying-coronavirus-statistics.html</a> » De-mystifying the Coronavirus Statistics. Read Carefully: The Risks Are Exceedingly Low!23/04/20 10:56 from Google Alert - coronavirus statistics A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » Trump disregards science as chaos overtakes coronavirus response 23/04/20 00:30 from Google Alert - coronavirus |
| Thu, 23 Apr 2020 18:24:45 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/trump-disregards-science-as-chaos.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/trump-disregards-science-as-chaos.html</a> » Trump disregards science as chaos overtakes coronavirus response23/04/20 00:30 from Google Alert - coronavirus A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » Las Piñas begins |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: The New Abwehr punishes Italy with Covid-19 for betrayal of Nazi Germany in WW2 - 3:19 AM 4/23/2020 - Google Searches |
| Thu, 23 Apr 2020 03:32:24 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-new-abwehr-punishes-italy-with.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-new-abwehr-punishes-italy-with.html</a> __________________________________________________________________ The New Abwehr punishes Italy with Covid-19 for betrayal of Nazi Germany in WW2Coronavirus in ItalyCoronavirus superspreading events in ItalyCoronavirus superspreading events locations are also the major locations of the end of WW2Coronavirus |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: » Iran extends closure of religious sites amid pandemic 21/04/20 18:30 from Google Alert - coronavirus in iran |
| Wed, 22 Apr 2020 15:30:53 -0400 A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 12:50 PM 4/22/2020 - Commemoration by the NEW ABWEHR: Coronavirus superspreading events locations are also the major locations of the end of WW2 | Very convenient opportunities |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 12:50 PM 4/22/2020 - Commemoration by the NEW ABWEHR: Coronavirus superspreading events locations are also the major locations of the end of WW2 | Very convenient opportunities for the intentional, deliberate sprea |
| Wed, 22 Apr 2020 12:54:36 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1250-pm-4222020-commemoration-by-new.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1250-pm-4222020-commemoration-by-new.html</a> Yet, he, cautioned against comparing death rates among countries, as he said the numbers in different countries were highly distorted and not representative of the true picture. <a href="https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/germany-staggers-world-low-covid-19-death-rate" rel="nofollow">https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/germany-staggers-world-low-covid-19-death-rate</a> Commemoration by the NEW ABWEHR: |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 12:19 PM 4/22/2020 - "ZIZ iz zi real Victory Parade, und ziz iz zi real 75th Anniversary of the end of the WW2, und ziz iz zi real COMMEMORATION!!!", zayz zi New Abwehr. "Take your crowns off, PUPPETS!!! und my new |
| Wed, 22 Apr 2020 12:40:57 -0400 "ZIZ iz zi real Victory Parade, und ziz iz zi real 75th Anniversary of the end of the WW2, und ziz iz zi real COMMEMORATION!!!", zayz zi New Abwehr. "Take your crowns off, PUPPETS!!! und my new Viruz-z-z will help you wiz ZIZ!!!" - 12:19 PM 4/22/2020 ____________________________________________________________________ Commemoration by the NEW ABWEHR: Coronavirus superspreading events |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 9:08 AM 4/22/2020 - German Karneval and the start of Covid-19 Pandemic |
| Wed, 22 Apr 2020 09:08:47 -0400 ABC 33/40 - Carnival revelers poke fun at world leaders in Germany | WBMA ____________________________________________________________________ German Karneval and the start of Covid-19 Pandemic - Google Search |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 21/04/20 13:48 - 22/04/20 07:03 - CoronaVirus News Review |
| Wed, 22 Apr 2020 08:33:41 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/210420-1348-220420-0703.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/210420-1348-220420-0703.html</a> ____________________________________ » Tim Wise on Trump, the coronavirus and the pandemic of white privilege22/04/20 07:03 from Google Alert - FBI on plan to use coronavirus as a biological weapon » Are you eating, teaching? Poll hopes to measure virus impact21/04/20 13:48 from Google Alert - Coronavirus in New Rochelle, |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 20/04/20 17:45 from Google Alert - Coronavirus in New Rochelle, N.Y. - 21/04/20 17:26 from Blogs - CoronaVirus News Review |
| Wed, 22 Apr 2020 08:19:22 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/200420-1745-from-google-alert.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/200420-1745-from-google-alert.html</a> _________________________________________________________________________________________ 20/04/20 17:45 from Google Alert - Coronavirus in New Rochelle, N.Y. 21/04/20 17:26 from BlogsThis graphic shows the deadly strain that hit Europe (in blue) and the mild strain that mostly hit the US such as Seattle (in orange) |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 21/04/20 16:20 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites) we provide direct evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity. Patient-derived mutations imp |
| Tue, 21 Apr 2020 17:26:25 -0400 This graphic shows the deadly strain that hit Europe (in blue) and the mild strain that mostly hit the US such as Seattle (in orange) ________________________________________________________________ <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-is-covid-19-mild-for-some-deadly.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-is-covid-19-mild-for-some-deadly.html</a> ________________________________________________________________ Why is COVID-19 mild for some, deadly |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 12:21 PM 4/21/2020 - CoronaVirus News Review: The Daily 202: As coronavirus prompts early prison releases, Trump hints at pardons for former ... 20/04/20 11:56 |
| Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:23:23 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1221-pm-4212020-coronavirus-news-review.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1221-pm-4212020-coronavirus-news-review.html</a> » The Daily 202: As coronavirus prompts early prison releases, Trump hints at pardons for former ...20/04/20 11:56 from Google Alert - criminal investigations of coronavirus outbreak in new york ____________________________________________________________ CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 9:38 PM 4/20/2020 - CoronaVirus News: » New guidelines released to address stagnant water in shut-down buildings 20/04/20 18:18 from Google Alert - coronavirus in water |
| Mon, 20 Apr 2020 21:42:12 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/938-pm-4202020-coronavirus-news.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/938-pm-4202020-coronavirus-news.html</a> A masked Statue of Liberty outside a Brooklyn home on Tuesday.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times CoronaVirus News CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » New guidelines released to address stagnant water in shut-down buildings20/04/20 18:18 from Google Alert - coronavirus in water » |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: My Hypothesis: SarsCov-2 was gradually weaponized by the New Abwehr from the early 2000s, as the BioWar sequel to 9/11, with SARS and MERS as the intermediary designs and steps. | Mike Novas Shared NewsLinks Revie |
| Mon, 20 Apr 2020 16:52:21 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/my-hypothesis-sarscov-2-was-gradually.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/my-hypothesis-sarscov-2-was-gradually.html</a> My Hypothesis: Sars Cov-2 was gradually weaponized by the New Abwehr from the early 2000s, as the BioWar sequel to 9/11, with SARS and MERS as the intermediary designs and steps. This process may have been conducted in a lab via the bio-engineering or by the "natural" cultivation, but the end result was the |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 11:27 AM 4/20/2020 - CoronaVirus News - From 19/04/20 02:56 - Science step by step, revealing the secrets of coronavirus - To Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: Coronavirus bandana masked bandits terrorize Am |
| Mon, 20 Apr 2020 11:30:06 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1127-am-4202020-coronavirus-news-from.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/1127-am-4202020-coronavirus-news-from.html</a> » Science step by step, revealing the secrets of coronavirus19/04/20 02:56 from Google Alert - coronavirus pulmonary symptoms » Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: Coronavirus bandana masked bandits terrorize America and Canada - Mike Novas Shared NewsLinks Review In 250 Brief Posts20/04/20 10:16 from |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: Coronavirus bandana masked bandits terrorize America and Canada - Mike Novas Shared NewsLinks Review In 250 Brief Posts |
| Mon, 20 Apr 2020 10:16:10 -0400 Coronavirus bandana masked bandits terrorize America and Canada - <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/NmUt9NXqJxUqCne29" rel="nofollow">https://images.app.goo.gl/NmUt9NXqJxUqCne29</a> Mike Novas Shared NewsLinks Review In 250 Brief Posts Michael Novakhov SharedNewsLinks CoronaVirus News | CoronaVirus News Review In Brief » The FBI News Review <a href="http://fbinewsreview.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">fbinewsreview.blogspot.com</a> Blog by Michael Novakhov: 8:05 AM 3/25/2020 Why New York? |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: Coronavirus immunity: genetic factors - 9:50 AM 4/19/2020 |
| Sun, 19 Apr 2020 09:50:55 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-immunity-genetic-factors.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-immunity-genetic-factors.html</a> The authors show that individual HLA, haplotype, and full genotype variability likely influence the capacity to respond to SARS-CoV-2, and note that certain alleles, in particular, could be associated with more severe infection, as... with SARS-CoV. |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: 8:07 AM 4/19/2020 - C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying Coronavirus Testing, Officials Say - nytimes.com | Coronavirus news: Skin rashes emerge as possible symptom of COVID-19, dermatologists say - abc7news.com |
| Sun, 19 Apr 2020 08:09:33 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/807-am-4192020-cdc-labs-were.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/807-am-4192020-cdc-labs-were.html</a> C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying Coronavirus Testing, Officials Say <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/cdc-coronavirus-lab-contamination-testing.html?smid=tw-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/cdc-coronavirus-lab-contamination-testing.html?smid=tw-share</a> Michael Novakhov - Posts on Twitter - 250 | Page _____________________________________ » mikenov on Twitter: Coronavirus news: Skin |
| Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov: Coronavirus and skin | » Skin rashes could be a sign of coronavirus, dermatologists warn 18/04/20 23:58 from Google Alert - coronavirus |
| Sun, 19 Apr 2020 05:11:20 -0400 <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-and-skin-skin-rashes-could.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-and-skin-skin-rashes-could.html</a> ____________________________________________________________ » Skin rashes could be a sign of coronavirus, dermatologists warn18/04/20 23:58 from Google Alert - coronavirus Coronavirus and skin - GS Skin rashes could be potential sign of coronavirus, dermatologists warn - GS Coronavirus dermatological |
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» mikenov on Twitter: #Tweets And #News - From #MichaelNovakhov: #COVID19 #Crisis Has #Exposed #US #Weaknesses to Biote... tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-…
25/04/20 12:29 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
#Tweets And #News - From #MichaelNovakhov: #COVID19 #Crisis Has #Exposed #US #Weaknesses to Biote... tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 4:29pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 12:29 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
#Tweets And #News - From #MichaelNovakhov: #COVID19 #Crisis Has #Exposed #US #Weaknesses to Biote... tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 4:29pm mikenov on Twitter
» COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror - Saturday April 25th, 2020 at 10:41 AM
25/04/20 12:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov. <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html</a> COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror Saturday April 25 th ,...
25/04/20 12:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Tweets And News - From Michael Novakhov. <a href="https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html" rel="nofollow">https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html</a> COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror Saturday April 25 th ,...
» mikenov on Twitter: Coronavirus Puts Italy’s Most Vicious Mobsters Back on the Street thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-pu… via @thedailybeast
25/04/20 11:59 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Coronavirus Puts Italy’s Most Vicious Mobsters Back on the Street thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-pu… via @thedailybeast Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 3:59pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 11:59 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Coronavirus Puts Italy’s Most Vicious Mobsters Back on the Street thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-pu… via @thedailybeast Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 3:59pm mikenov on Twitter
» COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror
25/04/20 10:41 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Comments on: COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror. People wearing face masks are seen in the Times Square subway station during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19,)...
25/04/20 10:41 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Comments on: COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror. People wearing face masks are seen in the Times Square subway station during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19,)...
» mikenov on Twitter: COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror algemeiner.com/2020/04/24/cov…
25/04/20 10:41 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror algemeiner.com/2020/04/24/cov… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:41pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 10:41 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
COVID-19 Crisis Has Exposed US Weaknesses to Bioterror algemeiner.com/2020/04/24/cov… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:41pm mikenov on Twitter
» mikenov on Twitter: Sinaloa Cartel Shares Food Bags Bearing Bin Laden’s Face in Mexican Border State breitbart.com/border/2020/04… via @BreitbartNews
25/04/20 10:35 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Sinaloa Cartel Shares Food Bags Bearing Bin Laden’s Face in Mexican Border State breitbart.com/border/2020/04… via @BreitbartNews Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:35pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 10:35 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Sinaloa Cartel Shares Food Bags Bearing Bin Laden’s Face in Mexican Border State breitbart.com/border/2020/04… via @BreitbartNews Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:35pm mikenov on Twitter
» German Biological Weapons
25/04/20 10:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . The First World War was a period of transition between the pre-modern and modern ages of warfare. The war saw cavalries but also trench warfare, the beginning of air and tank use, and multilateral inv...
25/04/20 10:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . The First World War was a period of transition between the pre-modern and modern ages of warfare. The war saw cavalries but also trench warfare, the beginning of air and tank use, and multilateral inv...
» mikenov on Twitter: German Biological Weapons globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/germ…
25/04/20 10:28 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
German Biological Weapons globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/germ… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:28pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 10:28 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
German Biological Weapons globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/germ… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:28pm mikenov on Twitter
» Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins
25/04/20 10:24 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Comments on: Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak i...
25/04/20 10:24 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Comments on: Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak i...
» mikenov on Twitter: Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins - Health Feedback healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-…
25/04/20 10:23 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins - Health Feedback healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020...
25/04/20 10:23 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins - Health Feedback healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020...
» mikenov on Twitter: hypothesis for natural zoonosis is the one that fits all available evidence, is most parsimonious, and best satisfies the concept of Occam’s Razor—that the simplest solution is most likely the right one. healthfeedback.org/did-the-covi
25/04/20 10:23 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
hypothesis for natural zoonosis is the one that fits all available evidence, is most parsimonious, and best satisfies the concept of Occam’s Razor—that the simplest solution is most likely the right one. healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-...
25/04/20 10:23 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
hypothesis for natural zoonosis is the one that fits all available evidence, is most parsimonious, and best satisfies the concept of Occam’s Razor—that the simplest solution is most likely the right one. healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-...
» mikenov on Twitter: Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-… via @HealthFeedback
25/04/20 10:21 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-… via @HealthFeedback Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 20...
25/04/20 10:21 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins healthfeedback.org/did-the-covid-… via @HealthFeedback Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 20...
» mikenov on Twitter: New York state's coronavirus death toll surpasses 16,000 nypost.com/2020/04/24/new… via @nypmetro
25/04/20 10:20 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
New York state's coronavirus death toll surpasses 16,000 nypost.com/2020/04/24/new… via @nypmetro Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:20pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 10:20 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
New York state's coronavirus death toll surpasses 16,000 nypost.com/2020/04/24/new… via @nypmetro Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:20pm mikenov on Twitter
» mikenov on Twitter: New COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in monkeys. Next step: humans. livescience.com/experimental-c…
25/04/20 10:07 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
New COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in monkeys. Next step: humans. livescience.com/experimental-c… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:07pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 10:07 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
New COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in monkeys. Next step: humans. livescience.com/experimental-c… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:07pm mikenov on Twitter
» mikenov on Twitter: Department of Corrections gives plan to release around 2,000 inmates during COVID-19 wset.com/news/coronavir…
25/04/20 10:05 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Department of Corrections gives plan to release around 2,000 inmates during COVID-19 wset.com/news/coronavir… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:05pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 10:05 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Department of Corrections gives plan to release around 2,000 inmates during COVID-19 wset.com/news/coronavir… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:05pm mikenov on Twitter
» mikenov on Twitter: Coronavirus: Nearly 90% of Brits say they're coping well during the COVID-19 outbreak news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-yo…
25/04/20 10:03 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Coronavirus: Nearly 90% of Brits say they're coping well during the COVID-19 outbreak news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-yo… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:03pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 10:03 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Coronavirus: Nearly 90% of Brits say they're coping well during the COVID-19 outbreak news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-yo… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 2:03pm mikenov on Twitter
» mikenov on Twitter: Plans are in the works to close the field hospital at the Javits Center and send the USNS Comfort hospital ship home, as cases in the city decline, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency official connectradio.fm/2020/04/24/
25/04/20 10:02 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Plans are in the works to close the field hospital at the Javits Center and send the USNS Comfort hospital ship home, as cases in the city decline, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency official connectradio.fm/2020/04/24/co...
25/04/20 10:02 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Plans are in the works to close the field hospital at the Javits Center and send the USNS Comfort hospital ship home, as cases in the city decline, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency official connectradio.fm/2020/04/24/co...
» mikenov on Twitter: Photos of the Brooklyn Bridge empty, eerie during coronavirus outbreak - Business Insider businessinsider.com/brooklyn-bridg…
25/04/20 09:58 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Photos of the Brooklyn Bridge empty, eerie during coronavirus outbreak - Business Insider businessinsider.com/brooklyn-bridg… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:58pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 09:58 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Photos of the Brooklyn Bridge empty, eerie during coronavirus outbreak - Business Insider businessinsider.com/brooklyn-bridg… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:58pm mikenov on Twitter
» mikenov on Twitter: Mutual mistrust will wreck Netanyahu-Gantz ‘coronavirus emergency government’ haaretz.com/israel-news/.p…
25/04/20 09:54 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Mutual mistrust will wreck Netanyahu-Gantz ‘coronavirus emergency government’ haaretz.com/israel-news/.p… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:54pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 09:54 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Mutual mistrust will wreck Netanyahu-Gantz ‘coronavirus emergency government’ haaretz.com/israel-news/.p… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:54pm mikenov on Twitter
» mikenov on Twitter: Coronavirus outbreak strikes another U.S. Navy ship news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-ou…
25/04/20 09:47 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Coronavirus outbreak strikes another U.S. Navy ship news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-ou… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:47pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 09:47 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
Coronavirus outbreak strikes another U.S. Navy ship news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-ou… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:47pm mikenov on Twitter
» Coronavirus outbreak strikes another U.S. Navy ship
25/04/20 09:47 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines. Another COVID-19 outbreak at sea has forced a U.S. Navy destroyer to return to port. Eighteen sailors from the Kidd, a destroyer underway in the eastern Pa...
25/04/20 09:47 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines. Another COVID-19 outbreak at sea has forced a U.S. Navy destroyer to return to port. Eighteen sailors from the Kidd, a destroyer underway in the eastern Pa...
» mikenov on Twitter: ‘COVID toes,' odd rashes: Health care professionals explore role skin problems could have in coronavirus diagnosis - cleveland.com cleveland.com/news/2020/04/c…
25/04/20 09:44 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
‘COVID toes,' odd rashes: Health care professionals explore role skin problems could have in coronavirus diagnosis - <a href="http://cleveland.com" rel="nofollow">cleveland.com</a> cleveland.com/news/2020/04/c… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:44pm mikenov on Twitter
25/04/20 09:44 from TWEETS BY MIKENOV from mikenova (1 sites)
‘COVID toes,' odd rashes: Health care professionals explore role skin problems could have in coronavirus diagnosis - <a href="http://cleveland.com" rel="nofollow">cleveland.com</a> cleveland.com/news/2020/04/c… Posted by mikenov on Saturday, April 25th, 2020 1:44pm mikenov on Twitter
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https://tweetsandnews.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-us.html
People wearing face masks are seen in the Times Square subway station during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19,) in New York City, April 17, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Jeenah Moon.
Preparation failures combined with the fast spread of the COVID-19 virus have exposed America’s vulnerabilities to terrorists, several bioterrorism specialists told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
These failures have included an inadequate inventory of ventilators, personal protective equipment such as face shields, gloves and gowns, and an inability to handle the patient onslaught in cities like New York that have been in terrorists’ crosshairs for decades.
“I think that people are certainly observing what is happening with COVID-19 and how it is spread, and thinking about how to use that [information] tactically,” said Asha George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. “ISIS and al-Qaida, and presumably other terrorist organizations, they are pursuing biological agents, and they are pursuing chemical weapons for terrorist purposes.”
Pandemic and bioterrorism preparedness are inseparable, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in 2013.
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People wearing face masks are seen in the Times Square subway station during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19,) in New York City, April 17, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Jeenah Moon.
Preparation failures combined with the fast spread of the COVID-19 virus have exposed America’s vulnerabilities to terrorists, several bioterrorism specialists told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
These failures have included an inadequate inventory of ventilators, personal protective equipment such as face shields, gloves and gowns, and an inability to handle the patient onslaught in cities like New York that have been in terrorists’ crosshairs for decades.
“I think that people are certainly observing what is happening with COVID-19 and how it is spread, and thinking about how to use that [information] tactically,” said Asha George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. “ISIS and al-Qaida, and presumably other terrorist organizations, they are pursuing biological agents, and they are pursuing chemical weapons for terrorist purposes.”
Pandemic and bioterrorism preparedness are inseparable, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in 2013.
April 24, 2020 12:04 pm
The US Intelligence Community’s January 2019 threat assessment warned of the “potential for adversaries to develop novel biological warfare agents.”
George attributes the current lack of preparedness to the “apathy” of the policymakers responsible for funding and implementing bioterrorism and pandemic countermeasures. who never thought a pandemic like COVID-19 would happen.
“From the standpoint of risk analysis, recency bias — that is, an overwhelming focus on events that have happened most recently — is one of the most nefarious psychological blinders,” an October Security magazine article warned. “It nudges us toward considering what is important now but can prevent both a thorough review of the past and an imaginative look into the future. Our immediate past has elevated issues such as cybersecurity and drones to the top of risk forecasts. These are critical, but biological threats (or ‘biothreats’) deserve our attention more than ever.”
The failure of prior 21st century pandemics, including SARS, the bird flu, H1N1 and Ebola, to live up to fears lulled security professionals into a state of complacency, the article said.
“As a culture, we’re good at saying, ‘Well, we’re really good responders, and so we’ll just respond.’ What we’re finding out now is that it just doesn’t work,” George said.
Worryingly, terrorists sought chemical and biological weapons long before COVID-19.
In 2014, journalists recovered an ISIS operative’s laptop containing information on bioweapons, and documents justifying their use. Some of the files detailed how to weaponize the bubonic plague from infected animals.
“If Muslims cannot defeat the kafir [unbelievers] in a different way, it is permissible to use weapons of mass destruction,” one of the documents said.
A 2018 ISIS propaganda video called on Muslims living in Western countries and Russia to carry out biological attacks, noting that biological weapons are silent killers in contrast to bombs or the airliners used in the 9/11 attacks. It discussed using inhaled viruses and bacteria.
“Islam prohibits the use of this type of mass terrorism [but] allows it in the exception of repelling aggression and reciprocity,” the video said. “With simple equipment, extract harmful viruses and bacteria then release them.”
Several ISIS-linked plots involving biological weapons have been foiled.
Kenyan authorities broke up a 2016 anthrax attack plot by an ISIS-linked group.
A Wisconsin woman, Wabeha Dais, pleaded guilty last year to providing ISIS supporters with a recipe to produce the toxic chemical ricin, which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) lists as a bioweapon.
Al-Qaeda attempted to create biological weapons in Afghanistan prior to the US invasion in 2001.
“You can spread [some biological agents] the same way that this particular organism is spreading whether it is natural or otherwise just by human-to-human transmission, where it infects a lot of people,” said former CIA operative Sam Faddis, who headed the agency’s counter-terrorism unit that tracked weapons of mass destruction. “Why would a group like ISIS care? If you use tactics routinely where you strap explosives to your body and blow yourself up and are willing to blow up synagogues, churches and mosques, why would you not be willing to infect your own people?”
Diseases such as the pneumonic plague that are spread via coughing could have a similar impact because it’s spread by droplets transmitted by coughing, Faddis said.
Using an infected person on a suicide mission of infecting others is not out of the question, George said.
Some biological agents are available on the Dark Web. Utah authorities arrested a Salt Lake City woman, Janie Lynn Ridd, in December on charges that she attempted to obtain a bioweapon. She used $300 in bitcoin to buy an antibiotic-resistant bacterium that causes staph infections.
“That sort of stuff has been going on forever on a scale that most people aren’t aware of, and is going on now at an even greater rate,” Faddis said. “If you are looking at biological warfare and you are looking at the kind of crude mechanisms that terrorists use … it’s not that hard to work with biological organisms and all you really need is a good lab tech.”
RAND Corporation bioterrorism scholar David Gerstein, who served as acting undersecretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, shares concern that terrorists could use the Dark Web to facilitate a bioterrorism plot.
“I think anytime you’ve got the Dark Web and you’ve got information that’s out there and becomes available to people who might misuse it, that’s a concern,” Gerstein said. “I think we know that many of these capabilities are becoming more available and more democratized, hence their chance of misuse.”
However, research has shown that creating designer viruses is harder than many people think.
“In bioterrorism, there are some nuances that make it complex for a terrorist to do,” Gerstein said. “Could you create a biological mess? Yes. But you may kill yourself in the process, so there are some disincentives along the way.”
Lab security has come under scrutiny in recent years. A security breach may have been linked to the 2001 anthrax attack against Senate offices, the Supreme Court and NBC News. FBI investigators concluded that Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMARIID), was responsible. He committed suicide in 2008 before he could be charged.
In 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) cited China for allowing SARS to escape a government lab in Beijing on two separate occasions.
Failings exposed by the COVID-19 crisis have long been known to bioterrorism researchers.
The Bush, Obama and Trump administrations all developed detailed bioterror action plans, but this current pandemic shows they were not implemented this time.
“The government comes up with these strategies, and some of them are pretty good,” Gerstein said. “But what happens is that they sort of put out these strategies but forget that a strategy is not just the objectives; it’s also the resources to accomplish the objectives. So, most of these strategies simply do not come to fruition.”
A shortage of surgical masks occurred during the 2009 H1N1 Swine flu pandemic just as it has in the current COVID-19 outbreak. In 2010, a Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism report card gave US bioterrorism preparedness an F. There was “no national plan to coordinate federal, state, and local efforts following a bioterror attack, and the United States lacks the technical and operational capabilities required for an adequate response,” it said.
Obama-era budget battles resulted in a failure to replenish the surgical masks that contributed to the current lack of preparedness.
“We weren’t prepared the day Donald Trump came into office. We weren’t prepared at any time during the Obama administration,” Faddis said. “This is not a political thing. This is not a somebody else got it right and somebody else screwed it up kind of a thing. We have focused on this the way we have focused on so many things in Washington. We build a bureaucracy. We draw a line diagram. We throw a lot of money. And that’s just kind of assumed therefore that equals accomplishment.”
COVID-19 presents a call for planners and policymakers to shift to being proactive to save lives during the next bioterrorist attack or pandemic, George said.
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The First World War was a period of transition between the pre-modern and modern ages of warfare. The war saw cavalries but also trench warfare, the beginning of air and tank use, and multilateral involvement. Both France and Germany had active biological weapons programs during the war.
The German biological weapons program is best described as a sabotage program. Its aim was to undermine the enemy's economic capacity to wage war. The program appears to have been independent of civilian oversight and was undertaken despite the General Staff's position that biological warfare was illegal. Notwithstanding, there was widespread agreement that anti-human pathogens should not be developed. Consequently, the German program considered only anti-animal and anti-crop pathogens; there is no evidence that Germany attempted to infect humans with any type of biological agent. Germany's main targets were neutral nations that supplied the Allied Powers. The most extensive efforts were directed against the US (prior to its entry into World War I), although Argentina, Romania, Norway, and possibly Spain were also targeted.
Despite Germany's use of biological weapons during the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles- which specifically prohibited the use of chemical weapons-did not mention biological weapons. After WWI both Germany and France continued their biological weapons research and development, and many other nations began programs.
Although many foreign powers assumed that Germany had an active and advanced biological weapons program during the inter war years, this was not the case. Although Germany did pursue rearmament, despite prohibitions following World War I, German biological weapons efforts were sporadic at best. Indeed, Germany's offensive program may have been undertaken solely in response to suppositions that France and the USSR were interested in developing their own BW programs. The evidence suggests that Germany did not pursue formal biological weapons research during this period.
The biological weapons programs of the inter-war period continued throughout World War II. Among German intelligence had evaluated the Canadian, British, US, and Soviet programs, and were able to gain information on dissemination techniques after the fall of France in 1940. In addition, several Soviet deserters provided Germany with information about the Soviet program, leading Germany to conclude that the USSR had an advanced program that encompassed as many as eight facilities and test sites. Germany also believed that the USSR was experimenting with a number of agents, including those that cause anthrax, glanders, and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). Similarly, Germany determined that the UK was working with anthrax, dysentery, glanders, and plague. German intelligence reports had also reached similar conclusions about Canadian research. Finally, Germany gained information about the US program in Edgewood Arsenal (Maryland) and Pine Bluff (Arkansas), indicating that anthrax and FMD, among others, were being studied and tested.
Despite these numerous intelligence reports, Hitler reaffirmed his opposition to biological warfare- even as a tool of retaliation. Instead, Hitler directed research towards defensive measures in the event of a BW attack by an Allied Power. The Nazis performed experiments on prisoners in their concentration camps. Prisoners were infected with Rickettsia prowazekii, Rickettsia mooseri, the Hepatitis A virus, and Plasmodia spp. Experiments were done primarily to aid in the development of preventive vaccines.
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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in December 2019, many hypotheses have been advanced to explain where the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) actually came from. Initial reports pointed to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China, as the source of infection, however later studies called this into question. Given the uncertainty, many have suggested that a laboratory in Wuhan may be the actual source of the novel coronavirus. In this Insight article, we examine the three most widespread origin stories for the novel coronavirus, and examine the evidence for or against each proposed hypothesis. The hypotheses are listed in order from least likely to most likely, based on currently available evidence.
Although none of the individual pieces of evidence described below definitively identify the virus’ origin, the preponderance of evidence when taken together currently points to a natural origin with a subsequent zoonotic transmission from animals to humans, rather than a bioengineering or lab leak origin.
Contents
This hypothesis began circulating in February 2020. To date, it has been largely rejected by the scientific community. Some of the early claims have their roots in a preprint (a study in progress which has not been peer-reviewed or formally published) uploaded to ResearchGate by Chinese scientists Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, who claimed that “somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan”.
However, the only piece of evidence the authors provided to support their conclusion was the proximity of both the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to the seafood market. The authors later withdrew their article, saying that their speculation about the possible origins “was not supported by direct proofs.” Copies of the original article can still be found online.
The withdrawal of the preprint did not stop this hypothesis from spreading—instead it continued to grow in complexity, with some claiming that the virus showed signs of genetic engineering. Some of these claims were based on a preprint uploaded to BioRxiv, purporting to show that genetic material from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) had been inserted into the novel coronavirus.
This study was found to have significant flaws in design and execution and was also later withdrawn, as reported in our review explaining that “No, ‘HIV insertions’ were not identified in the 2019 coronavirus”. However, the poor quality of the preprint did not prevent this baseless speculation from being promoted by blogs such as Zero Hedge, Infowars, Natural News, and even some scientists like Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who co-discovered HIV, but has recently become a promoter of numerous unsupported theories.
Indeed, scientists who examined the preprint highlighted that these so-called insertions are very short genetic sequences which are also present in many other life forms, such as the bacterium Magnetospirillum magnetotacticum, the spider Araneus ventricosus, and the parasites Cryptosporidium and Plasmodium malariae, which cause cryptosporidiosis and malaria, respectively[1,2]. Trevor Bedford, virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and professor at the University of Washington, explained on Twitter that “a simple BLAST of such short sequences shows [a] match to a huge variety of organisms. No reason to conclude HIV. […] These ‘inserts’ are nothing of the sort proposed by the paper and instead arose naturally in the ancestral bat virus.”
In other words, the sequences analyzed by the study authors were so short that it is easy to find similarities to a wide variety of organisms, including HIV. An analogy would be to search for a short and commonly-used word, like “sky”, in a search engine and claim that the search results show content that is identical or similar to each other solely because of that one word.
Another version of the engineered-virus story stated that a “pShuttle-SN” sequence is present in the novel coronavirus. The pShuttle-SN vector was used during efforts to develop candidates for a SARS vaccine[3] and was therefore used to support claims of human engineering. These claims appeared in blogs such as Infowars, Natural News, and The Epoch Times. However, analysis of the genomic sequence of the novel coronavirus showed that no such man-made sequence was present, as reported in our review.
Other claims regarding the purported manmade origins of the virus have linked it to bioweapons research. These have appeared in articles such as a 22 February 2020 story by the New York Post, which we also reviewed and scientists found to be of low scientific credibility. The article provided no evidence that the novel coronavirus is linked to bioweapons research.
On 17 March 2020, a group of scientists published findings from a genomic analysis of the novel coronavirus in Nature Medicine[4], which established that SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin, likely originating in pangolins or bats (or both) and later developing the ability to infect humans. Their investigation focused mainly on the so-called spike (S) protein, which is located on the surface of the enveloping membrane of SARS-CoV-2. The S protein allows the virus to bind to and infect animal cells. After the 2003-2005 SARS outbreak, researchers identified a set of key amino acids within the S protein which give SARS-CoV-1 a super-affinity for the ACE2 target receptor located on the surface of human cells[5,6].
Surprisingly, the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 does not contain this optimal set of amino acids[4], yet is nonetheless able to bind ACE2 with a greater affinity than SARS-CoV-1[7]. Taken together, these findings strongly suggest that SARS-CoV-2 evolved independently of human intervention and undermine the claim that it was manmade[1]. This is because if scientists had attempted to engineer improved ACE2 binding in a coronavirus, the best strategy would have been to harness the already-known and efficient amino acid sequences described in SARS-CoV-1 in order to produce a more optimal molecular design for SARS-CoV-2. The authors of the Nature Medicine study[4] concluded that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
In summary, the hypothesis that the virus is manmade or engineered in any way is unsupported and inconsistent with available evidence, leading Bedford to assess the probability of this hypothesis being correct as extremely unlikely. Kristian Andersen, professor at the Scripps in San Diego declared during an online seminar, “I know there has been a lot of talk about Chinese bioweapons, bioengineering, and engineering in general. All of that, I can say, is fully inconsistent with the data”.
Like Andersen, other scientists have repeatedly explained that there is no evidence to support the claim that the virus was human engineered. In a statement published on 19 February in The Lancet, 27 eminent public health scientists in the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Australia, and Asia cited numerous studies from multiple countries which “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife[8-15] as have so many other emerging pathogens.”
Many have pointed out that even though the virus was unlikely engineered, it still might have been purposely or accidentally released from a lab. Claims about a possible laboratory release often point to
a laboratory in China
as the source, more specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), given that
one of its laboratories studies bat coronaviruses
. Similarly speculative claims have also implicated laboratories in
the U.S.
and
Canada
.
However, there is no evidence in either scientific publications or public announcements indicating that a virus resembling SARS-CoV-2 had been studied or cultured in any lab prior to the outbreak. While this of course does not rule out the possibility that scientists were working on it in secret, as of today, this claim is speculative and unsupported by evidence.
A January 2020 study in The Lancet, which found that about one-third of the initial round of infections had no connection to the Huanan seafood market[15], has been suggested as evidence that the virus may have leaked from a nearby lab. Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers, said in this CNN article:
“It is absolutely clear the market had no connection with the origin of the outbreak virus, and, instead, only was involved in amplification of an outbreak that had started elsewhere in Wuhan almost a full month earlier.”
Ebright also told CNN that “The possibility that the virus entered humans through a laboratory accident cannot and should not be dismissed.”
Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor at Flinders University who specializes in vaccine development, also supported the hypothesis that the virus could have escaped from a lab. In this article, he stated that “no corresponding virus has been found to exist in nature” and cited as-yet unpublished work, saying that the hypothesis is “absolutely plausible”. Petrovsky suggested that the virus “could have escaped [the biosecure facility in Wuhan] either through accidental infection of a staff member who then visited the fish market several blocks away and there infected others, or by inappropriate disposal of waste from the facility that either infected humans outside the facility directly or via a susceptible vector such as a stray cat that then frequented the market and resulted in transmission there to humans.”
Some have argued that instead of originating in nature, the virus could have been generated through simulated evolution in the lab. Christian Stevens, from the Benhur Lee lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, explained in this article the extreme unlikelihood of this scenario.
Briefly, the mutations in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the S protein in SARS-CoV-2 resembles that of some pangolin coronaviruses. These mutations are also what make SARS-CoV-2 much better at infecting humans compared to SARS-CoV-1. Such mutations could be evolved in the lab through simulated evolution, however the “likelihood of simulated natural selection stumbling on the near exact RBD from a previously unknown pangolin coronavirus is mathematically unlikely,” said Stevens.
Furthermore, scientists would have had to know about these mutations in the S protein of some pangolin coronaviruses before the outbreak, and then tried to evolve a bat coronavirus with the same characteristics through animal experiments. As these mutations in pangolin coronaviruses were not identified until after the outbreak[16], it does not make sense for scientists to have performed such experiments in the lab, as there would have been little to no scientific justification for doing so.
Other considerations are the polybasic cleavage site and the O-linked glycan additions to the S protein, which have not been identified in bat betacoronaviruses nor the pangolin betacoronaviruses sampled so far. However, evidence indicates that these features are much more likely to have arisen in the presence of an immune system, suggesting that this is a natural adaptation by the virus to a live host, either an animal or a human. Because lab-based cell cultures do not have immune systems, Stevens explained that it is extremely unlikely that the virus would have developed such features using cell culture approaches, thereby undermining the lab-generated claims that some have proposed.
What about using animal models for evolution, which would provide selective pressure from an immune system? Stevens also examined this possibility and explained that “there is no known animal model that would allow for selection of human-like ACE2 binding and avoidance of immune recognition. This strongly suggests that SARS-CoV-2 could not have been developed in a lab, even by a system of simulated natural selection.”
In other words, the overall combination of features observed in SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have arisen through experiments, even simulated evolution, because the experimental tools are not available at the moment.
Zhengli Shi, the head of the laboratory studying bat coronaviruses at the WIV, clarified in a Scientific American report published on 11 March, that during the early days of the outbreak, she had her team check the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 against the bat coronavirus strains being studied in her lab to ensure that the outbreak had not resulted from “any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal”. They found that “none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.”
However, this testimony has not satisfied those who allege a cover-up of a lab accident due to inadequate biosecurity, intentional release, or plain carelessness. Recent opinion pieces published by the Washington Post—one on 2 April 2020 and another on 14 April 2020—have also fueled speculation that the virus was accidentally released from a laboratory at the WIV due to biosafety lapses reportedly documented in diplomatic cables from 2018. The authors of these opinion pieces were careful to distance themselves from earlier claims that the coronavirus was bioengineered or resulted from “deliberate wrongdoing”, as one author stated. In any event, the accidental release scenario is currently being considered by scientists and U.S. intelligence and national security officials.
Indeed, despite safeguards, laboratory accidents can and do occur, and some have even caused outbreaks. In 2007, an outbreak of hand-foot-mouth (HFM) disease among livestock in the U.K. was linked to a faulty gas valve connected to labs involved in researching and producing HFM vaccines. And in 2004, a re-emergence of SARS occurred in Beijing, China, as a result of two lab accidents.
Scientists’ assessments of the likelihood of Hypothesis 2
In an article published on 6 April, experts expressed skepticism at the “lab leak” hypothesis. Vincent Racaniello, a professor of virology at Columbia University, said “I think it has no credibility.” And Simon Anthony, an assistant professor at Columbia who studies the ecology and evolution of viruses, stated, “it all feels far-fetched […] Lab accidents do happen, we know that, but […] there’s certainly no evidence to support that theory.”
In an April 10th article, Amesh Adalja from Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security stated that he thought the “lab leak” hypothesis had “a lower probability than the pure zoonotic theory. I think as we get a better understanding of where the origin of this virus was, and get closer to patient zero, that will explain some of the mystery.” Bill Hanage, associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said “If there is evidence to really support this theory beyond the coincidence of the location of the lab, then I haven’t seen it, and I don’t make decisions on the basis of coincidence.”
Several scientists have taken to Twitter to ponder the “lab leak” hypothesis made by the Washington Post opinion articles:
“Overall, we have virus group, molecular features, market association, and environmental samples all pointing strongly towards zoonosis. The location in Wuhan is the only thing at all suggestive of lab escape. I see strength of evidence entirely for zoonosis.”
“We don’t know how this virus emerged, but all evidence points to spillover from its natural reservoir, whether that be a bat or some other intermediate species, pangolins or otherwise. Pushing this unsupported ‘accident’ theory hinders efforts to actually determine virus origin.”
“The bottom line is that those vague diplomatic cables do not provide any specific information suggesting that [SARS-CoV-2] emerged from incompetence or poor biosafety protocols or anything else.”
—Angela Rasmussen [referencing the 14 April Washington Post opinion piece]
“Most likely either 1) virus evolved to its current pathogenic state via a non-human host and then jumped to humans, or 2) a non-pathogenic version of the virus jumped from an animal into humans then evolved to a pathogenic state.”
“All current data supports that the ancestral station strain of the virus is in bats—they serve as the zoonotic reservoir. Then a spillover event occured into humans, perhaps aided by another mammal, although that’s debatable.”
“There is strong evidence that the #SARSCoV2 #coronavirus is NOT an engineered bioweapon.That said, it’s important to be upfront that we do not have sufficient evidence to exclude entirely the possibility that it escaped from a research lab doing gain of function experiments.”
In summary, the hypothesis that the virus escaped from a lab is supported largely by circumstantial evidence and is not supported by genomic analyses and publicly available information. In the absence of evidence for or against an accidental lab leak, one cannot rule it out as the actual source of the outbreak. “I don’t think we have real data to say when these things began, in large part because the data are being held back from inspection,” said Gerald Keusch, associate director of the Boston University National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, in this LiveScience article.
Given allegations of a cover-up, it appears that only an open and transparent review of the laboratory activities at WIV can allow us to confirm or reject this unlikely hypothesis.
Virologists explain that the most likely hypothesis is that the outbreak started with a naturally-occurring zoonotic infection—one that is transmitted from animals to humans—rather than a lab breach. This is largely due to what we know of the virus’ genomic features, which strongly indicate a natural origin. For example, if a virus had escaped from a laboratory, its genome would likely be most similar to those of the viral strains cultured in that lab. However, as shown in this phylogenetic tree by Bedford (see figure below), SARS-CoV-2 does not cluster in the same branch as the SARS-like coronavirus WIV1 (WIV1) and SARS-CoV-1, which are commonly cultured lab strains with the closest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 at the WIV facility, which is the lab that some have suggested might be a potential source of a lab leak. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 aligns most closely with coronaviruses isolated in the wild from bats and pangolins, indicating that it is more likely to have come from a natural source than from a lab:
Figure—Phylogenetic tree showing evolutionary relationships between different coronaviruses—mostly bat coronaviruses and some pangolin coronaviruses (by Trevor Bedford). Different lab strains of SARS-CoV-1 (referred to as SARS-CoV here) are represented by yellow dots. WIV1, another common lab strain, is indicated with a black arrow.
Furthermore, SARS-CoV-2 displays evolutionary features which suggest that the virus originated in animals and jumped to humans. The closest sequenced ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 is RaTG13, a bat coronavirus with about 96% genome sequence identity[8]. But SARS-CoV-2 also has features that distinguish it from RaTG13 and other SARS-like coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-1. As mentioned in the previous section, these features are: mutations in the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the S protein, a polybasic cleavage site, and a nearby O-linked glycan addition site in the S protein[4]. The mutations in the RBD of the S protein resemble those of some pangolin coronaviruses, suggesting that the virus made a jump from bats to an intermediate (perhaps pangolins), and then later to humans.
To briefly re-cap from the previous section discussing the hypothesis of a lab origin, Christian Stevens explained in this article that the polybasic cleavage site and the O-linked glycan additions to the S protein have not been identified in bat betacoronaviruses nor the pangolin betacoronaviruses sampled so far. However, evidence indicates that these features are much more likely to have arisen in the presence of an immune system, suggesting that this is a natural adaptation by the virus to a live host, either an animal or a human.
And again, “there is no known animal model that would allow for selection of human-like ACE2 binding and avoidance of immune recognition,” Stevens explained. “This strongly suggests that SARS-CoV-2 could not have been developed in a lab, even by a system of simulated natural selection.” In other words, the overall combination of features observed in SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have arisen through experiments, even simulated evolution, because the experimental tools are not available at the moment.
Finally, Christian Stevens highlighted that the Ka/Ks ratio of the virus strongly indicates that the virus did not come from lab-simulated evolution. The Ka/Ks ratio calculates the level of synonymous mutations (which do not produce any functional change in proteins) and non-synonymous mutations (which produce functional changes in proteins). Non-synonymous mutations are more likely to occur in the presence of selective pressure, such as a need to adapt to a new environment:
“Because synonymous mutations should have no effect, we expect them to happen at a relatively consistent rate. That makes them a good baseline that we can compare the number of non-synonymous mutations to. By calculating the ratio between these two numbers we can differentiate between three different types of selection:
- Purifying selection: This virus is already a great fit where it is and cannot afford to change because every change makes it worse. You should see very few non-synonymous changes here.
- Darwinian selection: This virus is not a good fit where it is and has to change and get better or it’s going to die out. You should see many non-synonymous changes.
- Neutral selection: There is no pressure on this virus either way. Non-synonymous changes and synonymous changes should come at about the same rate.
We would expect a virus that is learning to exist in a new context would be undergoing Darwinian selection and we would see a high rate of non-synonymous changes in some part of the genome. This would be the case if the virus were being designed via simulated natural selection, we would expect at least some part of the genome to show Darwinian selection.”
An analysis by Bedford demonstrates that the level of non-synonymous mutations between SARS-CoV-2 and the naturally occurring RaTG13 are highly similar, standing at 14.3% and 14.2%, respectively.
“Both of these numbers indicate a purifying selection, with very few non-synonymous changes. This holds true across the entire genome with no part of it showing Darwinian selection. This is a very strong indicator that SARS-CoV-2 was not designed using forced selection in a lab,” Stevens concluded.
Taken together, the information presented here suggests that it is much more likely that SARS-CoV-2 was generated naturally and transmitted zoonotically, without any engineering or lab growth. Especially given the fact that the
prior probability
for the zoonotic hypothesis is high. Indeed,
zoonotic infections
(transmission of pathogens from animals/insects to humans) are not only plausible but common throughout the world, and have also caused outbreaks in the past. For example,
the SARS outbreak
, which began in 2002, was linked to civet cats. Outbreaks of
Middle East respiratory syndrome
have been linked to contact with camels.
Nipah virus infection
has been linked to fruit bats and caused outbreaks in Asia. Mosquitoes transmit viruses such as
Zika
,
dengue
, and
chikungunya
, while ticks also carry a range of pathogens, such as
Lyme disease
and
Rocky Mountain spotted fever
. In fact,
according to the World Health Organization
, about 60% of emerging diseases are zoonotic infections.
In summary, the hypothesis that the virus escaped from a lab is supported largely by circumstantial evidence and is not supported by publicly available information. In the case of the hypothesis that the outbreak began with zoonotic infection, at the moment genomic analyses are consistent with a natural origin for the virus and support the idea that the outbreak began zoonotically. Unlike the manmade virus and lab escape hypotheses, there is no compelling evidence against the hypothesis for natural zoonosis. As Stevens concluded, the hypothesis for natural zoonosis is the one that fits all available evidence, is most parsimonious, and best satisfies the concept of Occam’s Razor—that the simplest solution is most likely the right one.
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Christian Stevens from the Benhur Lee lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine has provided a comprehensive explanation of the multiple scientific studies examining the origin of the coronavirus.
Scientists explained in this 23 April NPR article why they found the lab accident hypothesis unlikely. In fact, the article states that “there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else.”
REFERENCES
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Another COVID-19 outbreak at sea has forced a U.S. Navy destroyer to return to port.
Eighteen sailors from the Kidd, a destroyer underway in the eastern Pacific Ocean, have tested positive, the Navy announced Friday. The ship, which has a crew of about 350, is returning to port, according to Navy spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Megan Isaac, who said operational security prevented her from identifying the destroyer’s destination. Its home port is Everett, Wash.
The Kidd is the second Navy ship to be sidelined by COVID-19, following the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which was forced to extend a previously scheduled port call in Guam because of an outbreak that ultimately infected more than 800 sailors.
The destroyer left its last port of call, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on March 20, according to Isaac. The more than one-month gap between its departure from Pearl Harbor and the first COVID-19 diagnosis suggests that one or more sailors were infected while in Hawaii, but asymptomatic. The ship had previously visited Guam in mid-February, according to a Navy news release.
The Kidd was conducting independent counter-narcotic operations when the drama began Thursday, according to Isaac. After a sailor aboard the ship began displaying symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, he was medically evacuated to San Antonio, where he tested positive, Defense Department spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said Friday.
Based on lessons learned from its Theodore Roosevelt experience, within 24 hours the Navy sent an eight-person “specialized medical evaluation team” to the ship, where the team began testing the rest of the crew and doing contact tracing, according to Hoffman.
By Friday morning, 17 more sailors had tested positive, according to the Navy. “Testing continues, and we expect additional cases,” a Navy statement said. “All measures are being taken to evaluate the extent of the COVID-19 transmission on the ship.”
The ship is preparing to “quickly” return to port, “where [the team] will undertake efforts to clean the ship, they will remove a portion of the crew from the ship and work to get everybody back to health and get the ship back to sea,” Hoffman said. After the ship has been cleaned and disinfected in accordance with guidance from the Navy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “onboard test results will inform operational decisions,” the Navy statement said.
The sailor who was medically evacuated Thursday “is already improving and will self-isolate,” said Rear Adm. Don Gabrielson, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command and U.S. Fourth Fleet, in the Navy statement. “We are taking every precaution to ensure we identify, isolate, and prevent any further spread onboard the ship.”
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Written by Dana Sanchez
There is no hard evidence to support the theory that coronavirus spread from a lab, but the Pentagon and intelligence community continue investigating the possibility that adversaries could use it as a bioweapon.
The Defense Department has recently shifted its focus toward monitoring the possibility more closely, three people familiar with the matter told Politico.
The U.S. has reported 912,010 coronavirus cases and 51,453 deaths.
Senior Navy leaders still don’t know where the outbreak originated that spread like wildfire through the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. At least 840 crew members have been infected.
Capt. Brett Crozier was accused of poor judgment and fired after the Washington Post obtained an email of his warnings about the spread of the virus on board. COVID-19 temporarily crippled the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the middle of a Pacific deployment. Crozier was infected, the vessel has been out of service for weeks and the crisis went all the way up the Navy chain of command.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced a 60-day moratorium on all international and domestic troop travel in March, delaying deployments and temporary duty assignments. Service members must do 14-day quarantines if they have to travel, including submarine crews and special operations units.
There are limitations, Esper told reporters in March. “Tell me, how do I do six-feet distancing in an attack submarine? Or how do I do that in a bomber with two pilots sitting side by side?”
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 70: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin goes solo to discuss the COVID-19 crisis. He talks about the failed leadership of Trump, Andrew Cuomo, CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and New York Mayor de Blasio.
The Navy has evacuated more than 4,200 crew members from the USS Theodore Roosevelt. That’s more than 85 percent of the crew, and they’re in quarantine, just as Crozier urgently called for.
The risk of coronavirus being repurposed as an offensive weapon increases as more is learned about the disease, and that’s likely one reason why the national security community has begun to take the possibility seriously, said Andy Weber. Weber served as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs under President Barack Obama. “In terms of bioterrorism, COVID is very accessible,” he said. “Samples are available all over the world.”
The risk of COVID-19 being weaponized on a large scale is low, biodefense experts said. Because it is so infectious, attempts to spread it would likely backfire on whoever tries. But the FBI has warned local police agencies that members of extremist groups are encouraging one another to spread the virus.
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ROME (Reuters) - The first COVID-19 infections in Italy date back to January, according to a scientific study presented on Friday, shedding new light on the origins of the outbreak in one of the world’s worst-affected countries.
Italy began testing people after diagnosing its first local patient on Feb 21 in Codogno, a small town in the wealthy Lombardy region.
Cases and deaths immediately surged, with scientists soon suspecting that the virus had been around, unnoticed, for weeks.
Stefano Merler, of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, told a news conference with Italy’s top health authorities that his institute had looked at the first known cases and drawn clear conclusions from the subsequent pace of contagion.
“We realized that there were a lot of infected people in Lombardy well before Feb. 20, which means the epidemic had started much earlier,” he said.
“In January for sure, but maybe even before. We’ll never know,” he said, adding that he believed the immediate surge in cases suggested the virus was probably brought to Italy by a group of people rather than a single individual.
A separate study based on a sample of cases registered in April said 44.1% of infections occurred in nursing homes and another 24.7% spread within families. A further 10.8% of people caught the virus at hospital and 4.2% in the workplace.
Italy was the first major western country to face the viral disease, which originated in China late last year and has spread around the world. Italian authorities have recorded some 190,000 confirmed cases and 25,500 deaths.
In a bid to prevent the outbreak, Italy halted air traffic to and from China on Jan. 31 after two Chinese tourists tested positive in Rome. But scientists say it was probably too late.
Another team of Italian scientists has said the coronavirus may have reached Italy from Germany, not directly from China, in the second half of January.
Reporting by Angelo Amante, editing by Gavin Jones and Philippa Fletcher
With nearly 200,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, Italy has been atop of a global list of infections and deaths caused by the new coronavirus since ...
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Far-right extremists have been linked to bombing plots tied to the coronavirus pandemic, spotted holding anti-Semitic signs at protests outside state capitols, and seen trafficking on fringe platforms in all manner of conspiracy theories about the virus.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage millions of lives and paralyze much of the economy, these right-wing activists in the United States are seizing every opportunity to reach out to thousands of potential followers and expand their ranks.
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