For months there have been rumors that Coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. The only P4 (high security lab) in China happens to be in Wuhan, near the fish markets and people there happen to be working on synthetic coronaviruses with S proteins that happen to infect ACE2 receptors in humans. But if Mother Nature wanted to generate her own viruses, it’s hard to beat wet markets in high density Chinese hubs. And there were papers too saying the gene analysis, etc, fitted 96% with the bat-pangolin-human story.
But now we find, long before the CCP was asking for sympathy, authorities were asking the staff to destroy all those lab viruses:
“Existing virus samples must be destroyed. Information about the samples, related papers and related data are all prohibited from release. “
— Hubei Health committee on Jan 1st. (See the Epoch Times Documentary below).
And told the staff to say nothing to anyone, anywhere, anytime, ever:
“Notice regarding the strict prohibition of disclosure of any information related to the Wuhan unknown pneumonia.
National Health Commission clearly mandates that all detection, empirical data, results and conclusions related to this outbreak cannot be published on self-media or social media, nor disclosed to any media (including state media) or collaborative organization s (including any technical services companies).” 30 minute mark.
— Email from The Director General of the Wuhan Institute, Jan 2nd, 2020
So the Wuhan lab was ordered to destroy all their synthetic Coronaviruses on Jan 1st. Which is a strange thing to do if a similar, but different virus was evolving in the Fish Market around the corner. But it’s the obvious thing to do if a careless lab member made a mistake and leaked it from the lab. Especially if those viruses had distinctive HIV sequences embedded in them. Which the man who discovered HIV says they do.
Dr Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 disagrees and is saying that the virus was man made.
According to Professor Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for “discovering” HIV as the cause of the AIDS epidemic together with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that was manipulated and accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in the last quarter of 2019.
“With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine for the daily podcast at Pourquoi Docteur, adding that others have already explored this avenue: Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus, … the HIV virus (AIDS virus), but they were forced to withdraw their findings as the pressure from the mainstream was too great. — The podcast is in French
Worth watching: The Epoch Times Documentary on the Origin of CCP Virus (Coronavirus).
The Epoch Times are an organization of dissident reporters, staunchly anti-communist. They interview medical and political experts and we also find out the Chinese lab was set up with some US funds and with a lot of French support. Obama cut off funds in 2014. But the West has made it as easy as possible, offering help, expertise, and training.
…
Patient zero may have been a scientist at the P4 virus lab in Wuhan called Huang Yanling who unfortunately died. The Director of the Lab, Dr Shi Zengli — was the person who isolated a virus from bats that has the key S Protein spike that enables a bat virus to get inside human ACE2 cells. In February, after her institute had “nothing to do with the outbreak” she was sacked, presumably because she did such a good job. Her replacement was Major General Chen Wei. It’s interesting to know when the military are doing the microbiology? (h/t JanEarth)
Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them. You heard me right.
Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach.
According to Mosher, in mid February President Xi decided China needed “A national system to control biosecurity risks” … “to protect the people’s health,” Xi said, because lab safety is a “national security” issue.
Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, a biosecurity expert — thinks it was an accidental leak too. He says the Nature paper claiming SARS Cov-2 is natural has to rely on a bunch of assumptions:
… points out that scientists in Wuhan have collected and publicized a bat coronavirus called RaTG13, one that is 96 percent genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2. The Nature Medicine authors are arguing “against the hypothesis that the published, lab-collected, lab-stored bat coronavirus RaTG13 could be a proximal progenitor of the outbreak virus.” But, Ebright says, the authors relied on assumptions about when the viral ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans; how fast it evolved before that; how fast it evolved as it adapted to humans; and the possibility that that the virus may have mutated in cell cultures or experimental animals inside a lab.
Obviously there will be a lot more to say about this. Especially because Donald Trump says he will look very closely at whether Coronavirus came from the Wuhan lab.
It’s officially denied:
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Thursday: “I want to remind you that the head of the World Health Organisation has stated many times that there is no evidence that the new coronavirus was produced in the laboratory. Many well-known experts in the world also believe that there is no scientific basis for such claims as laboratory leaks.”
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” a team of 27 scientists from outside China said in a statement in the Lancet medical journal in February.
“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” they said, adding that scientists from around the world overwhelmingly conclude that the coronavirus originated in wildlife.
Looks like a “Consensus” then, and Scientists-Against-Trump have spoken. It would be better if they could have debated it out so we could hear both sides. There are quite a few papers that at a glance make a solid case for the natural evolution of the virus. Eg Zhou et al 2020, and Prof Lu et al. But instead the scientists have flipped straight into lectures about how only bad prejudiced people would ask these questions.
People inside China and out of it are going to get very angry if they don’t get some good answers.
h/t Lance, WXcycles, JanEarth OriginalSteve, many others.
Far from being imposed from above, lockdowns in the face of a pandemic are just democracy in action. Faced with a deadly new disease people just want to be safe, and they want their loved ones to be safe too. Even if they might lose their job.
Has there ever been such a radical plan that was this radically popular?
YouGov says 93 per cent of people support the plan unveiled the by the prime minister, with just four per cent opposed and the rest saying they do not know.
The poll said 75 per cent strongly supported the measures, with 17 per cent saying they “somewhat” supported them.
It found that voters in Britain are strongly behind the government’s science led strategy to tackle coronavirus and back the police in taking a tough stance against those who are not respecting social distancing with 60 percent believing “the terms or rules of the current lockdown are about right”.
Only 6 percent say they are “excessive” while 31 percent say they are “not enough” and should go further than the current lockdown.
Actually working from home might be better than working at work:
…in a suggestion that lockdown measures have changed how people want to live their lives in the long term 53 percent of those who are now being forced to work from home would like to work from home more after the crisis ends and 31 percent of those unable to work from home say they are now “more likely” to seek a job that could allow them to work from home.
New polling also suggests that Trump’s desire to end this period of quarantines and sheltering in place is out of step with the public’s wishes. In a poll by Morning Consult taken March 20 to 22, a plurality of Americans said they strongly support a “national quarantine,” and nearly three-quarters of Americans express at least some support for the idea.
Coronavirus crisis: Exclusive poll reveals West Australians want nation placed in ‘full lockdown’ to slow spread of COVID-19
The West Australian (paywalled).
West Australians want the nation placed into “full lockdown” to slow the coronavirus spread, despite two-thirds being worried about losing their jobs in the next six months.
The latest People’s Voice Poll from Painted Dog Research found 71 per cent of the more than 500 West Australians surveyed believed the Morrison Government should enforce a lockdown.
Unexpectedly, it was younger West Australians aged between 18 and 39 who were the most supportive of a lockdown (80 per cent), compared with 68 per cent aged 40-59 years.
The real question is why is this even news? The WHO is there to prevent mass pandemics from spreading and killing people, and they have not saved one single country in 2020. The US wasted $900 million dollars, 15% of the WHO budget, on an organization so corrupt it has been captured and become a Chinese advertising agency directly working against the interests of the Western nations that fund it.
Mr Trump, speaking as the US death toll from COVID-19 passed 25,000, said the United Nations health agency had “failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable”.
He said the group had promoted China’s “disinformation” about the virus, and said the outbreak could have been contained at its source and lives could have been saved if the WHO had done a better job of investigating initial reports coming out of China.
The big news is that Australia, and most other countries are still funding the WHO. When will our media start asking why we do that? Is Scott Morrison afraid of the UN, afraid of China, or afraid of the ABC?
President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership capability, Tedros said.
He said that China has released information in an open and transparent manner, identified the pathogen in a record-short time and shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in a timely manner with the WHO and other countries.
China’s measures are not only protecting its people, but also protecting the people in the whole world, he said. — FMPRC
The answer is because the mainstream media act as if the WHO are Gods, and never ask them a hard question.
UPDATE: When the media do, they might want to ask about this WHO tweet on January 14th. The first cases of the SARS-Cov-2 Virus were circulating in November in Wuhan.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,” the organization had said.- FoxNews” h/t to Leo Morgan #21 below.
The Guardian is still apologizing for the WHO – claiming lamely that it said the right things, but doesn’t have any power. They quoted Tedros on March 11 warning of ““alarming levels of inaction” from many countries. “. But by then the virus was everywhere, tens of thousands were infected and coronavirus was practically slapping world leaders in the face.
If the WHO was controlled by Donald Trump, the socialist mainstream media would be all over its failures. But because the UN is a mini World Government, effectively The Vatican of left wing loving writers, it gets a free pass.
Enough is Enough. Here’s that petition again, just in case you haven’t already signed it, but we need to send letters to the media, and to our ministers to find out why we send money to a group that is worse than useless.
Not only do we not need Tedros Adhanom, we don’t need the WHO, The UN, or The ABC and BBC either. None of them were serving Australians, Brits, or Americans, or even Ethiopians. How many will now succumb to Coronavirus that might have been saved?
We need antibody tests to find the number of asymptomatic Covid-19 cases, but the German Heinsberg study was poorly done. Apparently there aren’t many good antibody tests available yet.
The early results of a small study in Germany on the town of Gangelt suggested that as many as 15% of the town might have caught an asymptomatic form of coronavirus and already had antibodies to it. This would mean that death rates to coronavirus were much lower — a mere 0.37%, not 2% (or so), and that aiming for Herd Immunity was a realistic policy. It was picked up in many newspapers and turned into headlines that may have misled a lot of people, including the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Five different reasons the results may be spurious
The test may have detected antibodies to the harmless common cold form of coronavirus instead of the deadly SARS-Cov-2 type. Cross reactivity of antibodies can be ruled out through a time consuming test that seemingly was not done.
The town infections were started in a cluster by one superspreader at a large carnival. Does that mean the virus spread first through a younger cohort? That would explain both the rapid spread and low fatality rate.
The data is preliminary and apparently not published in full. No one can analyze it properly. E.g. What were the ages of the people that tested positive?
It’s not a random test. The researchers selected households, not individuals. People in a household are much more likely to infect each other, and households with children will also be likely to have asymptomatic cases. Family groups may have been overrepresented compared to singles or older couples.
Even if the antibodies are to Covid-19, that doesn’t mean a person is immune to covid-19, just that they had it.
Other estimates of asymptomatic infections suggest the unknown asymptomatic infections are not 15 times larger, but only 2 or 3 times bigger than known infections of Covid-19. An Austrian team found that only 0.33% of the population was infected about a week after the peak, and estimated just 1% of Austrians were infected. Iceland showed a similar number — around 0.3 -0.8% were infected and that was only twice the number of known infections. These latter tests are RNA tests, which can only find an active infection, not people who have been cleared of the virus. Antibody tests will be more useful (hopefully) but they are barely there, and some are unreliable.
…It is probably even methodologically incorrect. Above all, it is unclear whether the antibody test used can show what it is said to have shown, namely immunity to the new virus. The Braunschweig infection epidemiologist Gérard Krause from the Helmholtz Institute for Infection Research had already told the Süddeutsche Zeitung a few days ago that there are currently no widely available tests that could reliably demonstrate immunity to Sars-CoV-2.
On Thursday after the press conference, the virologist Drosten also referred to the problem that some of the tests already available detect antibodies against completely harmless colds, which are also corona viruses. “We are now just a month after the end of the cold season,” said Drosten. According to the Helmholtz Institute, a third of the colds are caused by these four known, harmless corona viruses. After a positive antibody test, only time-consuming neutralization tests have so far shown that the person in question actually went through an infection with the new pandemic pathogen. At the PK in Gangelt, however, there was no question of such neutralization tests.
For example, Streeck’s team selected households for the tests and tested all people in these households. This is legitimate so far – however: “You should not take all the results from these households and convert them into percent, but at most one person per household,” explained epidemiologist Krause on Thursday. The reason: within the household the risk of infection is many times higher than in the general population, a complete count of all family members therefore results in an excessive percentage for immunity, which cannot be transferred to the general public. But that’s exactly what was done in Streeck’s study
Dr Simon Clarke, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology, University of Reading
“The finding that 14% of the population of Gangelt in Germany have antibodies to the virus causing COVID19 is interesting, but does not in any way prove that 14% of the population are immune, as these reports suggest. While it’s undeniably a good sign, merely having some antibodies does not necessarily prove immunity, as is often casually asserted. We don’t know what the correlates of protection, the measurable signs that someone has immunity to a disease, are for this virus and neither do we know how long any immunity would last.”
Prof David Heymann, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology
“It is important to understand the sensitivity and specificity of the serological test used in the German studies to be sure the test is not picking up antibody to other corona viruses (4 different common cold causing coronaviruses have been isolated in humans during the past years and 3 more serious ones (SARSCoV1 and 2, and MERSCoV).
Perhaps readers who understand German can help me find the data? The original link to the report has been taken down.
Across the US all-cause mortality is down as as people avoid catching the flu, getting run over, and other risks. But in New York where coronavirus has hit hardest, all-cause mortality is at record highs.
This is nothing like the seasonal flu
For the whole month of March, deaths in New York were twice as high as normal. This includes not just extra coronavirus deaths but all other causes. Deaths were even higher than the number of known coronavirus deaths, leaving cardiologists worried that there may have been an increase in other conditions like heart attacks or strokes, because people were afraid to go to hospital or couldn’t get help in time.
This is an underestimate. The authors expect this number to rise as more paperwork gets completed. It’s still only a small excess in a giant country, but it hints at the scale of the event were no quarantine measures put in place, no flights stopped, and the virus allowed to spread naturally. The current epidemic is stabilizing in New York, but if major action wasn’t taken, this would be the early weeks of a pandemic about to sweep across all fifty states. And this would not be the peak week, but just a point on a rapidly rising exponential curve.
For those who wonder if this is just a case of poor data or misdiagnosis, no, something unusually bad is really going on. This is not just the normal flu “mislabelled”.
These numbers contradict the notion that many people who are dying from the new virus would have died shortly anyway. And they suggest that the current coronavirus death figures understate the real toll of the virus…
…
The increase in all-cause mortality could be due to people being unable or afraid to access normal medical care.
But even if the current count is perfect, roughly 9,780 people have died of all causes over the past month in New York City, about 5,000 more than is typical.
The numbers for the last two weeks of the period are even more stark: nearly 7,000 dead, more than three times as many deaths as would normally be expected this time of year.
But the deaths over the last month dwarf what would be expected from seasonal variations, and look more like a mass casualty event. The city’s medical examiner’s office is holding bodies in refrigerated trailers outside of hospitals. City emergency medical technicians are declaring deaths in homes and on the streets instead of bringing people to hospitals.
Though the New York Times authors do not suggest it, given that coronavirus patients suffer from both an increase in blood pressure and in blood clotting, it is possible that a mild coronavirus case may increase risk factors for heart attacks and strokes too.
For the first time we have true randomized testing –and it shows that Austria was officially picking up about a quarter of the real number of infections in the population. So when Austria was officially saying 7,000 were infected, the true number was 28,500. Finally, this puts a solid limit on the chance that asymptomatic rate of infection was high. There is no iceberg.
About 75% of cases were mild or truly asymptomatic (and thus not getting officially tested), but it was still only a small slice of the population — just one third of one percent.
The co-founder of Sora, Christoph Hofinger, told a news conference: “Based on this study, we believe that 0.33% of the population in Austria was acutely infected in early April.” Given the margin of error, the figure was 95% likely to be between 0.12% and 0.76%.
99% of the population is still vulnerable
The Austrian chancellor estimates only 1% of the population had had the infection (presumably he is including an estimate of people who had already had the virus, cleared it, and tested negative).
The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who saw initial findings a few days ago, said on Monday that the rate of infection was around 1%. This disproved the idea of herd immunity, which requires widespread infection, as a viable policy option, he said.
Austria has sampled 1,554 people with help from a polling company from April 1 – 6. The nose and throat swabs they used will have found active infections, not past ones. But the peak of infections was March 26, so this will still have included some, perhaps many, of those people who were infected the week before. It depends on how long people shed virus for, and like everything with this virus, that’s not simple. Some people shed for a long time even weeks, but others don’t.
Ten times worse than the flu
Austria has officially recorded 6,941 cases in total of which 337 have died. So the mortality rate for diagnosed cases is 5% and likely to rise due to the lag of one to two weeks (and even longer) before deaths occur. So the mortality rate of all infections (including asymptomatic) is more like 1.2%, making this at least ten times deadlier than the flu. (It may be worse if Austria was able to protect the 80+ and other vulnerable groups).
We can see that testing around 1 – 6th April should give a realistic estimate of the scale of infections. Nose and throat swabs are probably a PCR test looking for two RNA segments unique to the virus. PCR means Polymerase Chain Reaction, where small amounts of DNA or RNA get amplified up so they can be tested.
Austria was among the early movers in Europe to try to contain the outbreak, clamping down on public life and enforcing social distancing when cases were still in the hundreds and few had died. The country will start to relax some of the measures next week, when small shops and hardware and gardening stores can reopen, but it will keep schools and other stores closed until May.
The only way to figure out the true rate of asymptomatic infections is with an antibody test (also known as a serum test), but that’s not possible yet, though many labs are reportedly close. These tests require a blood sample, but will hopefully show how many people were exposed to the virus, at least for a few months after the infection.
For doctors or nurses reading — there’s a call to share this widely
An information event on this online SUNDAY April 12 8pm US Eastern time. (Open, free to anyone who wants to listen). That’s 10am Monday morning EST Australia.
This is not the flu. Most of the time apparently it’s not ARDS either. Coronavirus it turns out — is a vascular disease as much as lung disease. In fact in 70-80% of ICU patients putting them on a ventilator straight away may make the situation worse.
Currently patients in ICUs have about a 50:50 chance of making it out alive. The odds are terrible. Doctors have been reporting how people can degenerate suddenly into a life threatening crisis situation. Now, perhaps this explains it. This kind of hypothesis is one of the reasons we really want to crush the curve, now, because we are so underprepared and there is so much to learn. If this is right it will save many lives.
This could solve several mysteries at once
This virus causes heart damage, it raises clotting factors. People seem fine, then they relapse.
One recent paper found people with high levels of D-dimer, a clotting factor, are the most likely to die. In another mystery, some autopsies show heart damage and inflammation occurred, yet there was no virus present in the heart tissue. It also explains why people with heart disease and high blood pressure could be the most at risk group.
There are two different lung conditions in Covid patients; one is not ARDS
The news from ICU specialists is that Coronavirus patients are presenting with two very different lung conditions. The most common one is the L type (unknown til now) and these people still have an elastic working lung, but they are desperately in need of oxygen. The second type is the H type, which L types may degenerate to, which is worse, a heavy lung, filled with fluid, and is the ARDS-type crisis.
This virus appears to trigger a normal healthy vascular reflex in a diabolical way
In a normal infection if the small parts of the lung called the alveoli are filling up with fluid or pus, the blood circulation around it will squeeze or vasoconstrict. This forces the blood to flow to the other parts of the lung instead, where there isn’t so much damage, and blood can still pick up oxygen. That’s a good way for our vascular system to compensate and route blood around the damaged part of the lung.
The coronavirus is causing something similar to high altitude sickness
This reflexive vasoconstriction gets us into trouble at high altitudes where oxygen levels are low. Because the levels are ubiquitously low throughout the lung, the whole blood supply throughout the lung tries to constrict at once, which is a major problem. The back pressure in the pulmonary artery builds up right back to the heart. The pressure becomes so high it causes fluid to leak, and the thinnest, most delicate membranes are in the lungs. If these collapse, the fluid suddenly fills some alveoli and it’s a crisis. This condition is known as high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE). In mountain climbers, it’s treatable, we just get the oxygen up (or the person down to where the oxygen is). That isn’t enough with Covid patients.
Something like this HAPE high altitude event seems to be occurring in Coronavirus patients due to the virus. Covid-19 binds to an enzyme involved in controlling the vasoconstriction. It targets and sticks to the ACE2 enzyme, stopping it working. Normally ACE1 raises angiotensin II and ACE2 lowers it. Angiotensin II raises blood pressure (ACE Inhibitors, the very common drugs against hypertension, act against ACE1 to lower blood pressure). So if the virus multiplies to the point it takes out all the ACE2, then there is nothing stopping Angiotensin from creating a vasoconstriction crisis (or a type of cytokine storm).
As the blood pressure builds it will force the fluids into the alveoli, flooding the lungs, dropping the oxygen levels in a vicious cycle. The high pressure may also increase blood clotting which could block flow, clogging up the blood vessels further. But the clotting problem may be due to antibodies against the virus. At this point, the patient (I gather) probably does need a ventilator but the odds are awful and it’s remarkable that doctors can keep many people alive with this kind of damage rapidly spreading through the lungs and back to the heart.
Assuming this pans out, it will make treatment so much better and also help us figure out who is at risk of ending up in ICU. Is it genetic changes to the ACE2 enzyme which allow the virus to bind better? Is it people who produce more ACE2 (or less)? It opens lots of questions about ACE inhibitor drugs.
ABBREVIATIONS
HPV: Hypoxic Pulmonary Vasoconstriction
HAPE: High Altitude Pulmonary Edema
Type L patients: They have good lung elasticity – i.e. A low ventilation to perfusion ratio. Most patients start this way but some in ICU may progress to Type H where fluid may fill the lungs and make them heavy.
REFERENCES and RESOURCES
Free Online Event Dr. Seheult is speaking at on Sunday, April 12: https://awr.org/health
Nearly 200 people in the US in their thirties have died from coronavirus, among the nearly 800 people under age 50 who have died following the outbreak.
At least 45 Americans in their twenties have died from the Covid-19 disease caused by the virus, not including another nine deaths involving people under 20 years old, according to data collected by The Washington Post.
One third of young deaths had no known co-morbidity. Doctors have little idea what factors increase their risk. It may be genes, which is yet another reason to hammer this down and delay this round. Gene and blood tests might enable us to figure out who was high risk of being hospitalized.
How many deaths among the under 50 will the average person tolerate before they stop sending their kids to school out of fear?
Australia remains the star Lucky Country compared to overseas. Infections are low, deaths are even lower. It’s all so much better than the desperate situation in Europe and the US. These are enviable, fantastically small numbers. Politicians are afraid to say so, lest the population relax, and party too much this Easter and the “unknowns” increase. (Which might well happen).
At the moment, the trend that matters most is the daily new cases of unknown transmission and it is trending down. There is community spread, but social isolation is shrinking it. This is what “Crushing the Curve” looks like. Right now there are still asymptomatic spreaders out there, but they are infecting less than one other person each (Ro < 1), so the infection is on its way to extinguishing itself — assuming we keep up the distancing.
But these great figures are not a reason to let up on social isolation, they’re a reason to go harder. We want to achieve the Golden Holy Grail — no new infections, and business as usual with no lockdowns, no curfews and a zone of freedom.
Australia is the Lucky Country, and doing the right thing
Why is the situation so good here:
A giant nuclear ball cleans streets every day with infra red heat and UV sterilization.
Indoor room temperature means viral survival time is lower, and thus less easily spread.
The population is at its healthiest — close to annual peak levels of Vitamin D levels.
Deaths are lower because long distance travellers (the greatest source of infections) are a younger cohort — mainly 20 – 60 years old. Also possibly because there is less Vit D deficiency (see point 3). Though this will change with local spread and winter is coming.
Thank the sun: the north end of Australia is only 12 degrees from the equator, and the top of Tasmania is as far from the equator as is Rome (41°). So nearly the whole nation is effectively situated between Rome and the equator — with most of the big cities getting the same kind of sunlight as Athens to Jerusalem do. Compared to the US — Tasmania stretches north of Salt Lake City or New York, but Darwin is “down” in Nicaragua. Most Australians in four of the five big capitals get about the same intensity sunlight as Los Angeles and Atlanta.
After the Hammer strikes a winning blow, we can start the Dance
The states with no sign of community transmission will soon be able to start a staged return to normal business, as long as they are testing widely, and as long as they strictly guard all borders and enforce two week lockdowns. Within weeks they could open up cafes and restaurants, gyms and sporting facilities. Wearing masks would be good insurance. Schools could open after that as long as the tests continue and no community spread is seen. Finally, large events would be the delayed — they may need to wait until the chance of cases coming across borders is very low. That may be months. Obviously international travel will be the last thing to return to normal. But as each state clears hurdles and becomes a clean zone, interstate travel with only those states can resume.
At all times though, we remain only one runaway infection from the start of a new exponential curve.
The whole nation is getting it under control:
Covid19data has the graphs. But not for Queensland. There doesn’t seem to be published data.
This is just what I was hoping for. But we must aim for extinction of this dangerous rogue code.
In NSW notice the decline in community spread (orange segments, below).
This is excellent news. NSW needs to work on shrinking the spread from known cases, but the current measures appear to be slowing the spread from healthy carriers. The light blue transmission segments below show “Known Local transmission” — meaning probably from people just before or after they got symptoms and got tested. We need to get better at testing and isolating these cases faster. Symptomatic people likely shed more virus than asymptomatic people do.
NSW Australian, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
The ACT
It would make sense to close the ACT from NSW (or probably to close the rest of NSW off from Sydney, depending on regional test results). If people in the ACT understood this, they would be lobbying to do that so they could restart things sooner.
No untraceable cases at all. Remarkable.
ACT Australian, Covid Cases, graph, April 10, 2020.
In Victoria
Hopefully the latest blip in local transmission (light blue) can be crushed asap. But there are good signs that untraceable community spread is shrinking in Victoria (orange).
Victoria, Australia, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
Western Australia
In WA there is not as much detail. There are a few new cases of unknown transmission still ticking over (2 new “not traced yet” cases last night to add to this graph). The state has only just started testing anyone with fever, and has the second highest rate of positive tests in the nation (see below) suggesting that it needs to do more testing. No champagne yet. There are now 506 known cases — with 11 new ones overnight, nine of which were from cruise ships.
Because WA has regional quarantines, sections of the state could be reopened sooner. The price is roadblocks but the payoff is freedom within the region. The health minister said “he didn’t think it was going to be possible to eradicate the disease. “What we want to do is control it”. It’s not clear why he thinks we can’t exterminate this.
Western Australian, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
South Australia
In SA there appear to be 4 – 7 cases “under investigation” — which must be “unknown”. It would be good to get more specific reporting. But only three new cases in the entire state have been found in the last two days. That’s got to be good.
South Australia also appears to be doing enough testing.
South Australian, Covid Cases, April 10, 2020.
Tasmania
Tasmania is hard to analyze. It isn’t doing enough testing. There is still a recent rise in known cases and four days ago, a spate of ten or so unknown cases.
Australian, Covid Cases, graph, April 10, 2020.
The Northern Territory
No one can complain about this! The NT looks great and (see below) appears to be doing enough testing too. It’s been saved by lower incomes — not so many people could afford to fly to Aspen or London in the last two months.
Australian, Covid Cases, graph, April 10, 2020.
Testing – WA Tasmania and Victoria all need to do more
Compared to that, Australia is only returning 2% positive in the worst case.
Tests per capita for covid-19 cases
WA and Tasmania are not doing enough testing and showing a higher positive rate per test.
NSW shows a high rate but is testing more people per capita. The most reliable results are from South Australia.
The rate of positive testing for covid-19 cases
Deaths are lower because Australians with coronavirus are younger
Demographics show that Australians who have been infected are predominantly in the 20 – 70 age group. As local transmission takes over from those who caught it on arduous long distance flights — we will see death rates increase due to the spread among the 70 – 100 age cohort.
Finally, one world leader calls a spade a turkey. The US is the largest funder to the World Health Organisation, yet the WHO acts in China’s best interests. On January 31 the WHO could have saved the world by isolating China. Instead, the chief raved about President Xi and advised that flights should stay open because it will harm the economy:
“Travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies,” the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. [Jan 31]
“We want to look into the World Health Organization because they really called it wrong,” Trump said. “They missed the call, they could have called it months earlier, they would have known, they should have known, and they probably did know.”
The president noted that the WHO actually criticized his travel ban from China that he set in late January.
“Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said about travel bans just days after Trump banned travel from China.
“They seem to be very China-centric,” he said. “That’s a nice way of saying it, but they seem to be very China-centric, and they seem to err always on the side of China.
It’s a warning shot across the bows. He may keep funding them, or he may not. By exposing them, he’s letting the WHO and China know that game is up. But he’s staying at the table, so expecting Tedros-the-belt-and-road-rep-from-China to come up with some goods. What’s on Trumps wish list: Chloroquine? PPE? Antibiotics?
It’s about time.
In other news, Trump is saving Boris Johnson from his own medical system:
President Trump is so worried about the health of Prime Minister Boris Johnson — currently in intensive care with Chinese Coronavirus — that he has offered U.S. medical support.
The chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, has banned doctors from treating Covid-19 with anything other than paracetamol and in severe cases, oxygen.
According to the Guardian, President Trump said shortly after PM Johnson was moved to intensive care:
“I’ve asked two of the leading companies … They’ve come with the solutions and just have done incredible jobs – and I’ve asked him to contact London immediately,” Trump said. “They’ve really advanced therapeutics … and they have arrived in London already. The London office has whatever they need. We’ll see if we can be of help. We’ve contacted all of Boris’s doctors, and we’ll see what is going to take place, but they are ready to go.”
“They’ve had meetings with the doctors, and we’ll see whether or not they want to go that route,” Trump added. “But when you’re in intensive care it’s a big deal. So they’re there and they’re ready.
“Low vitamin D status in winter permits viral epidemics.”
Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma,heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. Eskimos didn’t need to go white — they were still getting D from offal and plenty of fish.
Unlike most vitamins, D is also correlated with “that holy grail” — a reduction in all cause mortality. So even if a D supplement doesn’t help against coronavirus, side effects include less cancer and fewer heart attacks. Not too shabby for a five cent supplement.
The cost of one night in intensive care would provide vitamin D supplements for a month for 3,000 people.
…
Vitamin D or Cholecalciferol, is probably one of the main reasons that coughs and colds and death itself, almost always peak in winter when people have lower vitamin D levels. Of course, winter is also a happy-hour for most viruses because temperatures are cooler and people crowd indoors more.
Researchers Grant et al, put out a call for people to supplement with D during this pandemic, pointing out that this will reduce the incidence of the co-morbidities that are hit hardest by Coronavirus. They also point out that D reduces respiratory tract infections, and is actively involved in our own anti-viral defences in at least three different ways. Vitamin D induces cathelicidin and defensins (polypeptides that our immune system uses like surface-to-air missiles against bacteria or enveloped viruses). D also reduces production of proinflammatory cytokines (the messengers that elict the deadly cascade of inflammation).
...more and more evidence indicates that vitamin D is involved in regulating various cells of the innate and adaptive immune system [13]. Vitamin D has a broad role in regulating inflammatory responses in models of inflammations [14], [15], [16]. Vitamin D receptor knockout mice which were treated with LPS, displayed a more distinct inflammatory response than wildtype mice [17]. In addition, we previously demonstrated that vitamin D deficiency (VDD) contributed directly to the ARDS…
Using serum 25(OH)D <50 nmol/L in the same surveys would translate to 44.9, 2.1, and 32.6 million individuals in Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, respectively, having deficiency as defined by this threshold.
Deficiencies are more likely in older people which may also contribute to the demographics of Covid-19.
Obviously, deficiencies are much more likely in people with darker skins, especially in high latitude areas. If D were important in Covid cases, we’d expect to see a higher rate in blacks in higher latitude winter climates, and sadly that’s exactly what we see. It’s confounded by a squadron of factors but in Chicago, Blacks have four times the chance of dying from Covid-19 as whites do despite being a similar percentage of the population. Obviously poverty and co-morbidities increase the risk, but low Vitamin D also helps create the co-mobidities. h/t Bill in Oz
If D3 supplements reduced the risk of ARDS by even 10% it would be a bargain.
Lest you think this is just weak correlation, the bane of so many nutritional studies, there is not only a mechanism to explain why D might matter, but three:
Vitamin D Supplementation Could Prevent and Treat Influenza, Coronavirus, and Pneumonia Infections
Grant W.B. et al
Low vitamin D status in winter permits viral epidemics. During winter, people who do not take vitamin D supplements are likely to have low serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentrations. Vitamin D can reduce the risk of viral epidemics and pandemics in several ways. First, higher 25(OH)D concentrations reduce the risk of many chronic diseases, including cancers, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory tract infections (RTIs), diabetes mellitus, and hypertension. Patients with chronic diseases have significantly higher risk of death from RTIs than otherwise healthy people. Second, vitamin D reduces risk of RTIs through three mechanisms: maintaining tight junctions, killing enveloped viruses through induction of cathelicidin and defensins, and reducing production of proinflammatory cytokines by the innate immune system, thereby reducing the risk of a cytokine storm leading to pneumonia. Observational and supplementation trials have reported higher 25(OH)D concentrations associated with reduced risk of dengue, hepatitis, herpesvirus, hepatitis B and C viruses, human immunodeficiency virus, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus infections, and pneumonia. Results of a community field trial reported herein indicated that 25(OH)D concentrations above 50 ng/ml (125 nmol/l) vs. <20 ng/ml were associated with a 27% reduction in influenza-like illnesses. From the available evidence, we hypothesize that raising serum 25(OH)D concentrations through vitamin D supplementation could reduce the incidence, severity, and risk of death from influenza, pneumonia, and the current COVID-19 epidemic.
Vitamin D levels are also lower in people who have heart attacks, diabetes, pnumonia, and they’re low in China, Italy and South Korea:
More important, people with chronic diseases have lower 25(OH)D concentrations and increased
inflammation. A study in Triese, Italy, reported that patients with a mean age of 67 ± 12 years
who developed acute myocardial infarction had mean serum 25(OH)D concentrations in winter
of 11 ± 2 ng/ml [52]. A study conducted in Wenzhou, China (28°N), on diabetics and control
subjects aged 43 ± 11 years reported that diabetics had mean 25(OH)D concentration of 13 vs.
16 ng/ml for control subjects [53]. An observational study conducted in Qinhuangdao, China,
compared serum 25(OH)D concentrations for hospital patients with pneumonia vs. those without
[54]. Serum 25(OH)D concentrations for those with pneumonia were 9 ± 2 ng/ml, whereas those
for the nonpneumonia group were 14 ± 4 ng/ml, p = 0.000.
People with low Vitamin D levels are twice as likely to die:
Bluntly, blood levels of Vitamin D are associated with all cause mortality. Your odds of dying from just about anything, except maybe car accidents, are almost twice as high if your blood serum levels are in the lowest quantile (0-9ng/ml) compared to the top quantile (above 35ng/ml). Mortality levels off around 36ng/ml and higher (which is 90 nmol/l.)
Twenty-five studies identified a significant inverse relationship between 25(OH)D concentration and age-adjusted all-cause mortality hazard rates (Figure 2). In 5 studies,21,34,35,37,47 an inverse trend was present, but was not statistically significant. In 2 studies, 1 in the United States48 and 1 in Linxian, China,50 no association was seen. — Garland, 2014
Dose — 1000IU per day
A target range of 25(OH)D of greater than 30 ng/mL could be achieved in most individuals by intake of approximately 1000 IU per day of vitamin D3,12 which is one quarter the National Academy of Sciences–Institute of Medicine tolerable upper level of intake of 4000 IU per day at ages 9 years and older.69
Vitamin D levels in pregnant women affects a childs lungs six years later, brains ten years later and bones twenty years after they are born:
Vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy affects offspring. In a community-based study of 901 mother and offspring pairs, researchers found that maternal vitamin D deficiency (serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D < 50 nmol/L) at 18 weeks’ pregnancy was associated with impaired lung development at age 6 in offspring, neurocognitive difficulties at age 10, increased risk of eating disorders in adolescence, and lower peak bone mass at age 20. [12, 13, 14]
Vitamins mostly help people who are deficient (though as stated above, this is quite common with D). Any sole vitamin will have some downstream effect on other essential molecules which may be depleted.
The form D3 (cholecalciferol) is likely to help more than D2 (ergocalciferol). D3 is associated with a reduction in all cause mortality and a reduction of cancer risk, but D2 is not. High dose, longer term D supplements can cause deficiencies in other vitamins, like, Vitamin A. Ideally take Vitamin K as well (more on that at some other point). If you happen to supplement with boron beware that it may help bodies hang on to D3 levels for longer. There are, no doubt, a lot of other examples of complex interactions.
Ideally, we’d get a blood test to see if any supplement was needed, but it probably isn’t worth the risk in the current pandemic. Most of our Vitamin D comes from sun exposure, not from diet, though some people have lower levels due to genetic variations. Are you getting enough (and obviously, in Australia, not too much?) Most sunscreens will stop vitamin D production, and glass windows do too.
TILDA researchers in Ireland have put out a Covid and Vit D report recommending 400IU – 1000IU as a winter supplement or for high risk groups or housebound people. Ireland does not fortify foods with Vitamin D. Nor does China or South Korea.
If you want to eat your Vitamin D, head for Salmon, sardines, tuna, and Cod liver oil. Eggs, too. But it’s difficult to get enough D from your diet. You need something like 9 oz of salmon a day.
PS: Best not drive out to get your vitamin D. People can post it.
George Pell was on the wrong side of every fashionable cause: An old white man, a christian, and a climate skeptic. He threatened the religion of political correctness in every way, and a witch hunt made him target number one. Despite his position of power and influence, the best evidence the pogrom could find was the word of one boy, decades later, with no corroborating evidence. The irrational groupthink fashion swept through juries, judges and even the Victorian Court of Appeal. But today in Australia the High Court, the final last chance for justice, freed George Pell from jail 7-0.
Great news, Australia still has a justice system.
He was convicted and imprisoned over the most heinous of all crimes on the word of one anonymous complainant, whose testimony was unsupported by any other witnesses, or any forensic evidence. The same fate could befall any Victorian.
The media lynch mob and the entire Victorian legal system stand condemned. The unanimous decision of the High Court is a conclusive repudiation of everyone involved in the false imprisonment of Cardinal George Pell, every politician, every cop, every lawyer, every journalist, every coward…
It seems distant and forgotten but in 2011, Pell was not just a little bit skeptical, he was a well informed and outspoken skeptic (see his impeccable reasoning carefully stated in a GWPF speech below). He was also at one point third highest ranking Cardinal at the Vatican.
Pell would have been a target no matter whether he was a climate skeptic, but imagine he had embraced the climate scare wholeheartedly. Would it have protected him? Would that have meant the witchhunt would have picked a different high ranking Catholic?
In his first statement since his conviction Cardinal Pell, 78, said he had no ill-will towards his accuser, whose story was rejected 7-0 by the High Court.
And if being a climate believer can hold off the wolves, would that mean those who are guilty of real crimes are more likely to wear the believer cloak?
Those who used real victims of sexual assault as mascots in their political pogrom have done so much damage to that cause. The ghost of repressed memories still haunt the quest for justice.
Pell is brave and intelligent and powerful, and he had to be cut down:
The irony is that a man calling for climate change to be decided on evidence was jailed and demonized for years, based on no evidence, bar the word of one.
Cardinal George Pell in The Australian, October 2011
I first became interested in the question in the 1990s when studying the anti-human claims of the “deep greens”. Mine is not an appeal to the authority of any religious truth in the face of contrary scientific evidence. Neither is it even remotely tinged by a postmodernist hostility to rationality.
My appeal is to reason and evidence, and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues.
…
The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm.
I fear, too, that many politicians have never investigated the primary evidence.
Much is opaque to non-specialists, but persistent inquiry and study can produce useful clarifications, similar to the nine errors identified by the British High Court in Al Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth.
The complacent appeal to scientific consensus is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science or philosophy.
It is not generally realised that in 2001 at least, one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report’s workinggroups agreed: “In climate research and modelling, we are dealing with a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Claims of atmospheric warming often appear to conflict and depend upon the period of time under consideration.
► The earth has cooled during the past 10,000 years since the Holocene climate optimum.
► The earth has cooled since 1000 years ago, not yet achieving the temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period.
► The earth has warmed since 400 years ago after the Little Ice Age three centuries ago.
► The earth warmed between 1979 and 1998 and has cooled slightly since 2001.
The following facts are additional reasons for scepticism.
► In many places, most of the 11,700 years since the end of the last ice age were warmer than the present by up to 2C.
► Between 1695 and 1730, the temperature in England rose by 2.2C. That rapid warming, unparalleled since, occurred long before the Industrial Revolution.
► From 1976 to 2001, “the global warming rate was 0.16C per decade”, as it was from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940.
My suspicions have been deepened through the years by the climate movement’s totalitarian approach to opposing views. Those secure in their explanations do not need to be abusive.
The term “climate change denier”, however expedient as an insult or propaganda weapon, with its deliberate overtones of comparison with Holocaust denial, is not a useful description of any significant participant in the discussion.
The real crime here is what Victorian politicians did to the justice system.
Miranda Devine: The onus of proof has been turned on its head in Victoria
His false conviction raises urgent questions about the jury system, for so long the bedrock of our criminal justice. But that system was perverted by politicians pursuing ideological outcomes, who created legislation in Victoria that altered the balance of justice, so that defendants in sex trials now have to prove their innocence, turning the onus of proof on its head.
The US can no longer even make vitamin C or aspirin any more, or 80% of their antibiotics. Something like 90% of the starting chemicals for essential US medicines are made in Chinese factories. And there aren’t many alternatives — fully 70% of competing products from India start with chemicals from China too. And now Chinese companies are shifting up into generic drugs as well.
The West, asleep, let the takeover happen. Western companies were driven out of business trying to compete with Chinese companies which were are subsidized by the CCP. But we were happy to take the cheaper drugs. That was, until we discovered what huge leverage we have given China. It’s a
As Gibson points out — personnel of the US Navy in the South China Sea are thus “dependent on their adversary for their medicine.”
Azithromycin (the antibiotic in the favourite Coronavirus treatment trio) is made in China. So is propofol which is used with ventilators.
Last year, China accounted for 95 percent of U.S. imports of ibuprofen, 91 percent of U.S. imports of hydrocortisone, 70 percent of U.S. imports of acetaminophen, 40 to 45 percent of U.S. imports of penicillin and 40 percent of U.S. imports of heparin, according to Commerce Department data. In all, 80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China.
A Chinese Professor candidly explains the trade imbalances:
China’s cartels fueled by government subsidies undercut U.S. and other companies, driving them out of business. Western firms aren’t competing against Chinese companies. They are competing against the Chinese government.
China is moving up the value chain and makes 10 percent of the generic drugs in the U.S.
India has a very large generic drug industry, it depends on China for 70 percent of the chemical starting materials to make drugs…
There’s a pattern here of faulty goods:
Rocket Fuel in Generic Drugs
This testimony triggered a spellbinding account by a commissioner, a retired Army colonel with a distinguished record of military service. He talked about his three different blood pressure medicines whose key ingredients were made in China and contained rocket fuel. If he was getting contaminated drugs, active duty military people were probably getting them too, he opined.
The retired Army colonel was one of millions of Americans whose blood pressure medicines were contaminated with carcinogens. In July 2018, the FDA announced the first of many recalls. While many manufacturers recalled their products, the most troubling was the manufacturer in China whose active ingredient contained more than 200 times the acceptable limit of the rocket fuel carcinogen, per pill. Even worse, the company knew its product did not meet U.S. standards but sold it anyway.
Make no mistake, the United States faces an existential threat posed by China’s control over the global supply of the ingredients and chemical materials to manufacture critical drugs. In the hands of an adversary, medicines can be weaponized. They can be made with lethal contaminants or sold without any real medicine in them, rendering them ineffective.
Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical (ZHP), producer of the contaminated valsartan, disclosed in a 2018 annual report that it had received $44.4 million (312 million yuan) in government subsidies. Over the first half of this year, it had received an additional 92 million yuan in state funding.
Doctors need to check those supplies are what they think they are:
A number of hospitals are having to test certain medicines because physicians see that there’s just something not working,” stated Gibson.
The 1.2 million Chinese antibody tests that the Slovak government bought from local middlemen for 15 million euros ($16 million) are inaccurate and unable to detect Covid-19 in its early stages, according to Prime Minister Igor Matovic, who only took office last month. “We have a ton and no use for them,” he said. They should “just be thrown straight into the Danube.”
On Saturday, the Dutch health ministry announced it had recalled 600,000 face masks. The equipment had arrived from a Chinese manufacturer on 21 March, and had already been distributed to front-line medical teams.
Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit and that their filters did not work as intended, even though they had a quality certificate….
Spain’s government encountered similar problems with testing kits ordered from a Chinese company.
It announced it had bought hundreds of thousands of tests to combat the virus, but revealed in the following days that nearly 60,000 could not accurately determine if a patient had the virus.
“Nobody [in politics] did anything about it,” lamented Gibson. “This has been going on for almost 20 years. In fact, no one wanted to even expose it. That’s why it took so long to figure this out and to put it out there, to reveal our dependence. It’s really quite remarkable. The American public’s been thrown under the bus.”
Mansour asked why American politicians allowed domestic manufacturing of medicines and medical supplies to be outsourced to China.
Gibson replied, “There was country-of-origin legislation introduced in Congress around 2008 that would require companies to state on their packages where their product is made, and it was killed immediately. So I asked someone in the industry, someone who worked there for more than 30 years, ‘So, what’s going on here?’ and this person said, ‘Well, the industry thought it probably wouldn’t be good for business if their customers knew where their medicines were coming from.’”
Gibson continued, “Our military is dependent on China. So the young men and women in the South China Sea on those aircraft carriers, they’re dependent on their adversary for their medicine.
We know if the squid in the supermarket was caught in New Zealand and packed in China, but we don’t know where the drugs in the asthma puffer our children use were produced.
“These medicines are then imported into Australia after journeying around the world.”
The report says it is a “significant problem” that there is no public information on the origin of the critical ingredients because drug companies consider such information to be proprietary. It is difficult, therefore, to even assess the resilience of Australia’s medicine supply chain.
“A single treatment able to effect ∼5000-fold reduction in virus at 48h in cell culture.”
–Caly et al 2020
It’s another day in freaky chemistry — researchers at Monash University found that one of the main components of sheep drench is also very good at reducing Coronavirus, at least in test tubes. Ivermectin’s an unsung hero of the world of biochemistry, called a “Wonder Drug” and a “Blockbuster” because it works against roundworms, lungworms, mites, lice, scabies and hornflies, as well as cattle-ticks. Most importantly, it kills the worm that causes River Blindness, saving the vision of thousands in sub-saharan Africa, and places like Ecuador.
That’s doesn’t mean it will work in vivo — and it may be a month before human trials begin so we can find out.
Possibly, in a few months you might be able to kill off Coronavirus and deworm yourself at the same time.
Though the human experiment is already probably happening in countries where it is being used already and coronavirus is circulating. Surely we can track those cases?
And at least in Australia, unlike Chloroquine — which we don’t have much of — with 70 million sheep I can’t see us running out of sheep dip. (If indeed Ivermectin turns out to be useful against coronavirus). They won’t run out in New Zealand either where there are 6 sheep for every person.
How long will it be before some unfortunate sod drinks sheep drench like the man who drank fish tank cleaner.
Researchers at Monash University found Ivermectin can kills COVID-19 cells
The anti-parasite drug killed off the cells within two days and is widely available
An anti-parasitic head lice drug available around the world has been found to kill COVID-19 in the lab within 48 hours.
A Monash University-led study has shown a single dose of the drug Ivermectin could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture.
‘We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA (effectively removed all genetic material of the virus) by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours there was a really significant reduction in it,’ Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute’s Dr Kylie Wagstaff said on Friday.
…Merck has donated well over 2.5 billion Mectizan® tablets for Onchocerciasis treatment, with in excess of 700 million treatments authorised. Currently, some 80–90 million people are taking the drug annually through MDA in Africa, Latin America and Yemen. A further 300 million total treatments have been approved for lymphatic filariasis, with around 90 million treatments being administered annually (Fig. (Fig.8 ).8 ).
The drug was discovered in 1975 derived from a microbe in Japanese soil. By 2011 some $4 billion dollars worth of Ivermectin have been donated to the third world.
It is used humans, even in children:
Ivermectin, while paralyzing body-wall and pharyngeal muscle in nematodes has no such impact in mammals, as it cannot cross the blood-brain barrier into the mammalian Central Nervous System, where GABA receptors are located.
It can be taken orally to kill head lice. It just means a lot of safety testing has been done already.
Why antiviral and antiparasitic?
When Ivvermectin binds to “Imp B” the viral protein can’t get across the BPC into the nucleus.
There is no obvious reason why these should be connected, but apparently Ivermectin is useful against other viruses too, including HIV, Dengue, West Nile, and influenza. (As an nice spin off from covid-19 we might find ways to cure the flu.)
RNA viruses seem to need to use a molecule called “importin” to get themselves into the nucleus of the cell, and Ivermectin blocks that.
Ivermectin has since been confirmed to inhibit IN nuclear importand HIV-1 replication5. Other actions of ivermectin have been reported7, but ivermectin has been shown to inhibit nuclear import of host (eg.8,9) and viral proteins, including simian virus SV40 large tumour antigen (T-ag) and dengue virus (DENV) non-structural protein 55, 6. Importantly, it has been demonstrated to limit infection by RNA viruses such as DENV 1-44, West Nile Virus10, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV)3 and influenza2, with this broad spectrum activity believed to be due to the reliance by many different RNA viruses on IMPα/β1 during infection11,12
But to show how fickle these things can be, even though it made it to phase III clinical trials against Dengue in Thailand, and it reduced the viral count in vivo, it still didn’t produce a clinical benefit.
So keep a sober mind that reducing viral loads in test tubes may not translate into saving lives in the ICU ward.
But even if Ivermectin is not the answer — something else will be, and hammering this virus is helping us buy the time to find what that is. We will figure this out and it may be sooner than people think.
There’s never been a time like this, with modern biotech, a trillion dollar life-and-death-carrot, and labs focused on this all around the world.
UPDATE: Norm der Ploom April 6, 2020 at 10:58 am points out that Ivermectin is a sheep anthelmintec which is a drench not a dip. Drenches are administered orally to kill internal parasites whilst sheep are dipped in other chemicals to kill external parasites.
Plain Jane uses Ivermectin and other treatments and has details on which is used and where in agriculture. It is not used as an oral sheep drench any more, but is for horses, and is poured on the backs of cattle. She hopes no one drinks this. See April 6, 2020 at 8:26 am
h/t Steve McIntyre @ClimateAudit, via Willie S, Another Ian, Bill in Oz, El Gordo, OriginalSteve
For months there have been rumors that Coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. The only P4 (high security lab) in China happens to be in Wuhan, near the fish markets and people there happen to be working on synthetic coronaviruses with S proteins that happen to infect ACE2 receptors in humans. But if Mother Nature wanted to generate her own viruses, it’s hard to beat wet markets in high density Chinese hubs. And there were papers too saying the gene analysis, etc, fitted 96% with the bat-pangolin-human story.
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