In Spain, after a long battle, a quarter of a million people have tested positive to coronavirus and 27,000 have died.
But Spanish authorities have now done the largest antibody test I am aware of, and it was at least somewhat randomized. As many as 70,000 people have been blood tested and it was discovered that 5% had antibodies to Coronavirus. That would mean there were about 2.3 million cases of Covid-WuFlu across all of Spain, which is ten times as many cases as officially counted. But it also means 95% of Spaniards are at risk of catching it, and without a lockdown the virus would still spread very quickly. The death rate works out to be about 1.1% of total infections. But there were excess deaths in Spain — above and beyond the normal, and above the known Covid Cases — so that suggests the real death rate is more like 1.3%. Not fun.
That’s possibly why Spain is heading towards zero cases. The combination of infectiousness and the fairly significant death rate means Coronavirus is a hard virus to live with. Even a low level of running virus could fire up in a couple of weeks to 5,000 cases a day.
One third were asymptomatic. Good for them. Another number worth knowing.
One out of every three people who tested positive for antibodies was asymptomatic and did not realize they had contracted the virus.
43% lost their sense of smell.
Only 5% of Spaniards have been infected with the coronavirus, according to the preliminary results of a study by the Carlos III public health institute, which took blood samples from nearly 70,000 participants.
The Spanish overall figure of 5% is in line with studies in other European countries that showed a prevalence of 4% to 5%, far below the rate that would provide the population with so-called herd immunity, and which experts place at 60% at the very least.
If the percentage of infected people who eventually die is around 1.1%, as the study suggests, the cost in human lives of herd immunity would be between 200,000 and 300,000, making the method unacceptable.
“Five percent is the equivalent of 2,350,000 cases. If there were around 27,100 deaths, that means that the fatality rate is between 1 and 1.2%,” explains Jesús Molina Cabrillana, an epidemiologist at the Spanish Society of Preventive Medicine, Public Health and Hygiene (Sempsph).
That is in the higher range of the best available estimates from other countries, which talk about 0.5% to 1% of deaths among people who were infected with the coronavirus, known as the infection fatality rate or IFR. In Spain, if we add another 5,900 suspicious but untested cases to the total number of infections, the fatality rate grows to 1.3%.
It’s good that 36,000 households were selected at random, but since 70,000 tests were done this means probably whole households were tested. So it is possible that the study overrepresents families and young people demographically. It may also overrepresent infections since household members are more likely to spread an infection. On the other hand, the test won’t pick up active new infections, so it will underestimate the infections as well. There is a lag of a week before some of the antibodies form. In the wash, this might be as good as it gets as an estimate.
In Spain, herd immunity might cost 200-300,000 lives.
Think about how pointless this JCU appeal is — even if they were to win the legal war, they lose the scientific, academic and educational one — they prove that they are not the kind of institute taxpayers should be funding.
Peter Ridd was JCU’s best asset until they sacked him. He helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish by a JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, who had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden, and yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots. Other JCU researchers claimed that “acidification” would make reef fish act strangely. But, Peter Ridd warned a lot of research could not be replicated, and so it was with the odd fish. In January a new paper tried to repeat eight JCU experiments and every one of them failed. Reef fish will be fine, but JCU’s reputation may never recover.
JCU management have learnt nothing. Since losing the case JCU has changed its employment contracts, not to give their academics the unequivocal right to speak freely, but to make sure they can’t. Enough is enough — all universities need to guarantee free speech in employment contracts or no more government funds.
Every JCU employee’s work is tainted by this. Even the honest ones. We will never know what any JCU researchers really believe, or which results were filed in the bin, no matter what they say, because we know employees of JCU have to hide unfashionable opinions. Staff admitted they were too afraid to use their uni emails. So much for academic freedom. Their quality assurance is terminally flawed. This makes the entire institution useless as a research body, and with standards so low, also useless for teaching. The government could fix this entire embarrassing debacle in five minutes. They just need to withhold JCU funding til the uni gets new management, investigates potential fraud, stops wasting funds in legal battles, and demonstrate that they support free speech — rehire Ridd, sack the VC Sandra Harding AO who earnt was paid $975,000 in 2018, and enshrine free speech in employment contracts.
It may be possible to view the lawsuit via videolink but submissions must be in before that date (so it may be too late now unless they accept submissions for tomorrow’s viewing. The relevant information is at Peter’s GoFundMe page.
It’s easy to stop JCU from behaving like this. Where is Scott Morrison?
When will conservative leaders learn that government funded institutions vote left and the more you pay them, the worse their bias gets?
Education Minister Dan Tehan or PM Scott Morrison could fix this in five minutes. All they have to do is tell JCU they’ll get no more grant money until the institute guarantees free speech and shows accountability for the people who flagrantly wasted over half a million dollars.
JCU grant money is better spent elsewhere. All the research they produce is now tainted and effectively worthless– no matter what any Professor says, everyone knows they are not free to criticize other staff, or procedures, or point out flaws. They’re scared to use their email addresses. We’ll never know what any JCU researcher is holding back.
JCU is the text-book example of what happens when government funding strangles science. The people in charge of JCU’s “science” department — deciding what “the consensus will be” are the administrators, not the academics.
This is not a one off. JCU has a pattern of evicting, blackbanning, and ousting people who disagree with the bureaucrats pet fashions (vale, Bob Carter!). In this culture, more funding means more strangling. So just stop.
Peter Ridd has two GoFundMe accounts. Both have raised their targets and are closed, but have updates there anyone can read.
In 2017 in its last month of operation, the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant was still operating reliably 24 hours a day at around $30/MWhr and producing 1360MW of electricity. Despite its age, it could peak at 86% of its original rated output.
So naturally Victoria wants to build more wind power, and blow up old reliable coal.
Every single week in January, when electricity demand peaks in Australia, there were days when one old coal plant could have provided more electricity than all 57 new wind farms on the National Electricity Market could.
How much did it cost to build 57 not-there-when-you-need-it wind farms?
The output of all the wind farms in Australia still isn’t enough to reliably produce more than one 50 year old coal plant.
In its lifetime Hazelwood made $15 billion dollars worth of electricity (or 520TWH). It paid for itself many times over.
A new study came out last night in the Lancet which is being used to call for the end of doctors using Choloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid patients without them being enrolled in a clinical trial. Some of the claims about “no chance of any benefit” seem a bit premature given the limits of this kind of study:
Superficially, it looks large and comprehensive but there are three obvious problems with it —
1. It ignores zinc entirely. There is not even a mention of the essential mineral, despite Chloroquine being a well known zinc ionophone (something that pumps a mineral across a cell membrane) and intracellular zinc being identified as a useful anti-viral.
2. It’s not randomized. If doctors are prescribing these drugs to sicker patients or patients with a certain (unknown) genetic risk factor that selection bias (there we go again) could neutralize the entire result. We just don’t know.
3. These were sick people. The total mortality in this whole group was almost 12%. This trial tells us nothing about using these drugs as preventative measures in mild or moderate cases. It doesn’t tell us whether people had symptoms for a week before getting to hospital — and presumably if people saw a doctor early on, used HCQ and zinc, and then didn’t go to hospital at all (because they recovered) then they won’t be counted at all.
So this trial successfully filters and removes the success stories (whatever they are) from early HCQ treatment.
They obtained data from 671 hospitals in many countries and control for obvious factors, and a stack of co-morbidities and demographics. Two thirds of the patients are from the US. They only include patients that are diagnosed, and start one or the other chloroquine type drug within 48 hours of diagnosis (but that may be quite some time after they first got sick). The groups are split into HCQ, or CQ, paired with or without Azithromycin (Az). But both the antimalarial and the antibiotic are known to affect something called the QT interval. Obviously patients who have long QT’s or heart arrhythmia would be at higher risk. Docs would know.
We note that HCQ is not a big money-spinner for large pharmaceutical companies, being an old cheap out-of-patent drug, and that some of these authors do work sometimes with Big Pharma:
Authors Declaration of interests
MRM reports personal fees from Abbott, Medtronic, Janssen, Mesoblast, Portola, Bayer, Baim Institute for Clinical Research, NupulseCV, FineHeart, Leviticus, Roivant, and Triple Gene. SSD is the founder of Surgisphere Corporation. FR has been paid for time spent as a committee member for clinical trials, advisory boards, other forms of consulting, and lectures or presentations; these payments were made directly to the University of Zurich and no personal payments were received in relation to these trials or other activities. ANP declares no competing interests.
Acknowledgments
The development and maintenance of the Surgical Outcomes Collaborative database was funded by Surgisphere Corporation (Chicago, IL, USA)
Doctors seem unimpressed
If comments under the Medpage version of this story are any gauge, it suggests many doctors in the US are unmoved by this study, or are even cynically disillusioned.
Vincent Tedone MD
This article is like rowing a boat with a pool cue.
HCQ + Zn use is indicated only in early cases or as a prophylactic.
Big Pharma influence is all over this.
Robert Dunn
Why they continue to promote these studies which have nothing to do with the proper use of HCQ in helping Covid-19 patients in incredible.
Until they do a study which addresses the use of HCQ in the early/mid stage of the infection, PRIOR to hospitalization, these studies do nothing to clear the air or the virus.
There simply is way too much evidence of doctor/patient treatments that have had dramatic cures of the progression of the disease to have gone this far in time without a definitive and trustworthy analysis of the proper use of HCQ in fighting Covid-19.
Iggy Dalrymple
Hydroxychloroquine has 2 major defects:
1- Trump touted it.
2- HCQ is off patent.
Retrospective studies are ideal for agenda driven “researchers” because they allow cherry-picking the data.
Samuel Rivera
Another garbage, politically motivated study that does not answer the question we physicians want to know. Is HCQ alone or in combination treatment effective prophylaxis or early treatment for COVID 19? All these “analyses” of very sick folks LATE IN THE COVID game are clearly biased against HCQ from the start based on what we know are the mechanisms by which HCQ might help. The attempt to sabotage science is the most disgusting thing I have witnessed in my entire medical career and I am saddened that even physicians have taken sides. By the way, when they talk about more arrhythmias, I want to know exactly what they are talking about- is it more PAC’s, PVC’s. What I really want to know is the incidence of sustained VT or V-fib and whether these arrythmias had any clinical impact at all. The degree of biased interpretation is also very sad!
Obviously, we still need good studies on these drugs to be sure of anything. If Hydroxycholoroquine is useful in a preventative way, we should already see that effect in countries and groups who use it regularly — like Lupus patients or people with Rheumatoid arthritis or who live in malaria-zones. It seems strange there isn’t more information on that available, but perhaps some readers here have seen some?
But most of all, we need to depoliticize medical research somehow…
Last November at lunchtime 64% of the entire generation of South Australia was coming from across thousands of small generators that the Grid Managers had no control of, and that clouds could wipe out. This is the junk conglomerate infrastructure that billions of dollars in forced subsidies have created.
The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) has no control over the vagaries of two-thirds of the electricity generation. Audrey Zibelmen has described it as “”It’s almost like driving without your headlights.” She wants new panels to get “smart inverters” which means they can be dumb servants — controlled by the AEMO, just in case there is an emergency — lest the state suffer another System Black. They also want old panels to get the new style inverters when the next replacement is due.
Who could have seen that coming (only anyone with an engineering degree).
Poor solar home owners are feeling pretty miffed. They didn’t realize their panels were never economic, a burden on the grid, and they’ve been riding on the backs of fellow Australians for years. And after reading this ABC story (below), they still won’t know. So it’s a complete surprise to them that the green electrons they produce are expensive and unwanted, and so useless — worse than useless — the Energy Market Operator wants to have the power to turn them off at their peak time of day.
Craig Kelly M.P. has a much better plan. He thinks if China can cancel our barley because of alleged subsidies that don’t exist, we ought to axe the subsidies that do exist for the Chinese solar panels and save that $1.7billion dollars a year which hapless Australian electricity consumers are forced to cover installation costs of.
Thanasis Avramis has been an advocate of solar panels since he had them installed in 2008. “In the last 12 years we’ve probably earned about $9,000 worth of feed-in tariff. That’s been a very substantial reduction in the cost of our electricity,” Mr Avramis told 7.30.
Thanasis is not happy and blames the regulator and the network. He says it would make “Australian families pay for the mistakes of others”. Which would be not much different to his solar panels where Australian families pay for him to get cheaper electricity.
Since 2010, the number of panels across the nation has grown from 100,000 to 2.2 million.
But the proliferation is at times leading to grid instability, prompting the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to call for the switch-off measure.
AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman said it would only be used in emergencies
When we have way too much solar there’s so little load we can’t even manage to keep the balance with the generators, and in that context there’s always a risk that the system could fail and will go black.”
ABC advertising writers (called journalists) manage to find a quasi industry spokesman to say exactly what the ABC staff want to hear — including his own big conspiracy theory:
Energy analyst Bruce Mountain said solar helped keep prices down.
He is worried that once the ability to switch off solar systems is added, there could be pressure to externally control them more regularly.
“The threat lies not with the market operator, but the control mechanisms that they establish may well be taken advantage of by other forces who want to throttle back rooftop solar to look after their own commercial interests,” he told 7.30.
Bruce Mountain is director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre (VEPC). He is in a sense, a de facto employee of The Victorian Government, an entity that benefits from renewables propaganda.
All those new “smart inverters” — add them to the bill for solar power.
Handy questions journalists could’ve asked
Is there any country around the world which has a high penetration of intermittent renewables and cheap electricity? Name them…
Australian electricity wholesale costs were around $30 per MWh for years on the national grid, then we added 2 million solar panels. Shouldn’t the prices have gone down?
The bickering in Australia over borders is a prelude to the world
Australian states are fighting about borders. The WA premier swatting down the NSW calls to open with two words “Ruby Princess” — the disastrous failure to allow a cruise ship of coronavirus cases to spread from Sydney to every state of Australia.
The border debate is bizarre. From a pure medical point of view there is zero, no, nothing, none, not one reason to open borders between states when one of those states has a highly infectious, deadly new virus present in the community. There is only risk.
The decision about opening borders is all economic. Is it worth it? The problem is that none of the economists know what the cost is, so we end up with Medical Swamp Experts, who don’t know the answer either, making economic judgements and calling it “medical advice”.
Which borders to open? Within the hard borders is real freedom from both the virus and Big Government.
Virus free states are Golden Zones of freedom
The view from within a Golden Zone is very different. In a state with no virus (as far as we can tell) — the costs of letting in just one new case of virus are potentially astronomical. One undetected case could spread for weeks, causing the mass closure of hospitals, aged care centres, and so much economic damage with uncertainty and a second wave of lockdowns.
The calls from states with uncontrolled infections like NSW to open the borders are purely selfish. The precious state of freedom-from-the-Wuflu is too valuable to risk. For those few state leaders which have cleared the virus the situation suddenly looks very different. The only thing that stands between freedom and pandemonium is the state border. More borders means more freedom. West Australians can’t fly out on holiday and they can’t invite family from the East to visit. But 99% of the freedom of their everyday lives are within grasp.
Freedom from the virus means freedom from Big Government
WA is a microcosm of the world. If many other states clear this virus they will not want travel from the US and the UK (etc). The giants of The Western World have powerful orbital pulls but so does the Golden Zone. The future depends on how many nations end up in each cluster: Virus 1 or Virus 0. The Western World balances on the cusp. If states (European nations) open up too soon, and keep the virus circulating, their risk analysis is different. Twenty or thirty nations are close to the Golden Zone or headed there.
As long as the virus spreads, even at a low level, there is an ever-present need for the claws of Big-Government. Call me ambitious, but there is no true freedom while an untreatable mysterious virus runs free. I want real freedom, not to have governments needing tracking, or calling for mandatory vaccination, constant testing, potential re-lockdowns.
Those who oppose the shackles of Big Government might want to start with science, not politics, and get rid of this virus. It’s possible, especially in summer.
How much is your freedom from Big Government, as well as disease, worth?
Mr McGowan said the WA border would remain closed for months to come and questioned whether NSW was in any position to be handing out advice.
“It’s odd, New South Wales is saying don’t catch public transport in Sydney, they’re restricting the number of people who can go to a restaurant or cafe far more than Western Australia is, yet they’re saying ‘why can’t New South Wales people fly to Western Australia,” he said.
“Their message is totally inconsistent.”
Mr McGowan said as long as the eastern states had high rates of community transmission of COVID-19, they would remain closed off from WA.
“New South Wales had the Ruby Princess — I mean, seriously? And they are trying to give us advice on our borders, seriously?” he said.
Watch the Medical Swamp Experts disagree:
Professor Kelly said there was never national advice issued that states should close their borders, but he respected their decision to do so “to protect their own population”.
“From a medical point of view, I can’t see why the borders are still closed but as I said that’s for the states and territories to decide when that time is right for them,” he said.
But Mr McGowan maintained the WA Chief Health Officer and director general of the state’s Health Department had both advised it was an appropriate measure [to keep borders closed] for Western Australia.
The medical advice should be identical. Curiously, the bias to open comes from those who answer to states-with-virus. The bias to close comes from those in States-with-freedom (no virus). Perhaps the Medical Expert Swamps are providing what their paymasters want to hear. That said, one side is also right.
Borders within borders in WA
…
Inside the vast million square kilometer state of Western Australia there were nine sub-regions which have draconian fines of up to $50,000 for people who breach them. Some of these regions have now been released or amalgamated into four regions. But the vast North West is still closed (controversially) from the main population in Perth. These regions have no virus, so keeping them shut seems unjustifiable. But bear in mind the North-West has the billion-dollar mining operations, and critical gas supplies and high-risk Indigenous communities. It is both the engine of the economy (even measured on a national scale) and also the most impossible health risk. Some of these communities are 3,000 kilometers away from an Intensive Care bed. The expense of quarantined transport and treatment is shocking. Hopefully, with more days of zero virus in Perth (it stands at six days now), the North West will open in time for their main holiday tourist traffic.
Borders have worked so well for Australia and most of the world. One of the biggest enduring mysteries is why the two Giants of the West — the UK and USA — have so willingly given up the best and cheapest tool to beat a threat that may turn out to an accidentally leaked Chinese lab virus.
The British government is finally putting a two week quarantine on arrivals, after about 12 million people arrived in February and March, and nearly 100,000 came through in April. Nearly every country on Earth closed their borders except the US, UK and Sweden and parts of Africa and a few ‘istans’. This closure is so late, by the time it takes effect other countries are planning to open.
The secretive Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies has refused to detail to parliament its reasoning for introducing border closures now. Britain has recorded 34,000 deaths but infections have peaked.
This is how not to do quarantine:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson signalled the border closures earlier this month.
The warning allowed farmers time to fly in seasonal crop pickers from eastern Europe and gave pharmaceutical companies time to bolster stock levels, with many having factories on the continent.
It’s important to give travelers lots of warning so that infected fruit pickers can fly germs in without that pesky two week isolation. As for flying in “stock levels”, the rest of the world manages to bring in freight without it being accompanied by one hundred thousand people.
The reason for the trillion dollar mistake?
Appearing before the House of Commons science and technology committee, John Aston, who is the chief scientific adviser at the Home Office, said if tougher restrictions had been introduced at the border when the virus emerged, the peak might have been delayed.
The peak might have been delayed? Do they mean that the number of Covid cases would have stayed higher longer if they stopped flying in sick people? Like hoping to get rid of feral rabbits faster by flying in more of them?
Or was some expert accidentally aiming to infect the entire Kingdom, in which case, more sick people coming in to seed extra victims was just the ticket. Get it done already! If everyone was going to get sick anyhow, then slowing arrivals would have no net effect other than to “delay the peak.”
The first explanation makes no sense in any universe and the second is what you’d do if you were still using the 1918 flu plan and aiming for Herd Immunity.
So while 60 million people stayed home to slow the spread of disease the Home Office was working to speed it up.
The problem wasn’t the Imperial College model at all, it was the Experts mental model. They’d either been infected by the CCP’s “it’s the flu” messaging, and couldn’t reboot, or perhaps (probably) it was the end result of decades of degenerate postmodern academic existence which spent too long training students to believe the Experts and tear down statues of Cecil Rhodes.
“An estimate was made about what the effect of putting further restrictions on the border would be,” Professor Aston said.
“It would delay the epidemic by a small amount of time and therefore it was deemed that wasn’t a sensible thing to do.”
So a new disease turns up, the aim (at a cost of billions each week in lockdown) is to save lives, and the UK Swamp’s Medical Advice was effectively not about health but an economic one. The nation will be richer, the health experts said, if we lock up all the houses, but keep the borders open.
Are Boris and Trump being sabotaged by the Swamp or is this just in-competence?
When will Boris and Trump wake up and Sack the Swamp?
We know everything about Chinese Communist official figures can be adjusted. So we watch what they do, not what they say.
In February, 80% of the entire economy of China was shut down and non-productive. Electricity use was down, coal use was low, container ships sat in ports, and satellite tracking of aerosols showed the air over China was cleaner than it has been, probably for a century. Locking down the nation must have been wildly expensive, and yet the Chinese still behave as if this is a plague and it’s worth doing everything humanly possible to avoid.
They said it was preventable and treatable, only infected the old, and was like the flu. What do they know that they are not saying?
CCP autocrats are known for organ harvesting not for compassion, so we could assume that culling off a few old folk would be deemed “useful” in a nation with older demographics.
They are incompetent, communist management, but they are not stupid. This reaction speaks volumes about how seriously the CCP views Covid-19:
They’ve found 34 new cases and they’re locking down 100 million people
Some 108 million people in China’s northeast region are being plunged back under lockdown conditions as a new and growing cluster of infections causes a backslide in the nation’s return to normal.
In an abrupt reversal of the re-opening taking place across the nation, cities in Jilin province have cut off trains and buses, shut schools and quarantined tens of thousands of people. The strict measures have dismayed many residents who had thought the worst of the nation’s epidemic was over.
People cannot even buy panadol (tylenol) at chemists so they can hide their fever:
… delivery services have been mostly halted and anti-fever medication is banned at drugstores to prevent people from hiding their symptoms. The tension has spread to nearby areas, even if no cases have been reported officially in those places yet.
“Everyone is jittery,” said Wang Yuemei, a pharmaceutical factory worker in neighboring Tonghua
In total since the beginning to the pandemic Jilin province has had only 127 cases. (Officially, anyhow.) This new outbreak may have been seeded from people returning across the border from Russia.
In other news this week China found 11 new cases in Wuhan and decided to test 11 million people.
The Chinese city of Wuhan will test all 11 million residents for coronavirus after a small cluster of cases emerged over the weekend, according to state media.
Six new cases of coronavirus have now been confirmed in the city and a report from a state run media outlet The Paperhas claimed authorities will now test all of the city’s 11 million residents within 10 days.
The report refers to the plan as a “10 day battle”, with each district responsible for testing its local residents.
Tasmania’s premier is looking at opening up travel between WA, SA, NT, and possibly New Zealand.
If the selective borders do open, it won’t be popular with the two biggest states which still have outbreaks. (Queensland has only had four new cases in the last week, but NSW has 23 and Victoria 50+. Indignant commenters at The Australian talked of High Court Challenges using s117. BUt I can’t see anyone rushing to fund those.
Some Australians craving a long-promised Tasmanian getaway may have to wait longer than others, with the holiday isle’s Premier considering a selective border relaxation favouring states most on top of COVID-19.
Options included restoring direct flights to cities in jurisdictions that had the virus under control, such as Adelaide and Perth, or even New Zealand. This would avoid the need for tourists to travel via Sydney or Melbourne, cities still experiencing multiple new daily coronavirus cases.
A few days ago three Baltic States opened borders with each other.
Analysis: In responding to the Covid-19 crisis, the Government appears to have completely forgotten about the climate crisis.
In announcing the 2020 Budget, which creates a $50 billion Covid-19 recovery and relief fund and pumps billions into health, infrastructure and wage subsidy extensions, Jacinda Ardern said.
The climate is hardly mentioned in the Budget – the word itself is used just four times in the entire document and not at all in Ardern’s speech to Parliament.
The claims that the current pandemic Coronavirus is natural all rely on it being 96% closely related to a natural bat virus known as the RaTG13 virus. But new analysis suggests this “natural” virus only exists as a fake creation on a Chinese computer.
The implications of this type of work will affect global politics. The anger towards the Chinese CCP mismanagement, dishonesty, and the coverup will unite the world against the global bad-citizen player. It also drives a pike through the casual globalist academic programs, and the role of people like Anthony Fauci, chief advisor to Trump, head of the Expert Swamp in the US. Why was he sending money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Why did the West help train and supply this lab?
h/t ramblingidiot, Choroin, Selwyn, El Gordo, Rob Dinn, Mike Mitchell
The virus that SARS-CoV-2 is supposed to have evolved from looks unmistakably artificial — in sections it contains far too many “mutations” that matter but hardly any of the normal noise of silent mutations which always occur naturally alongside the mutations which change the end product. Like someone cut and pasted multiple photos together with different background noise. Other sections of the code which ought to mutate quickly are suspiciously identical and unchanged, and didn’t mutate at all. (In the wild there is little selective pressure on something called “E Proteins” and they vary a lot in other coronaviruses. They are already mutating fast in the pandemic but somehow were “frozen” in time in RaTG13.)
Dr. Shi Zhengli is known as the Bat Woman of Wuhan Virology. We’ve already heard how her lab was central to research on Coronaviruses and how she and others were ordered to destroy all copies of the laboratory viruses on Jan 2nd this year in what appears to be a mass cover up.
A string of papers were released in February claiming the Wuhan Virus was “96% related” to a known Bat Coronavirus and was therefore natural (see Zhao et al 2020, Shan-Lu Liu, 2020, Andersen et al 2020). Two of these papers appeared in Nature. But what we didn’t know was that the RNA sequence for the original bat Coronavirus that the new pandemic evolved from, which was called RaTG13, was only registered on Jan 27th this year, despite it supposedly being discovered in 2013. The first Nature paper appeared only 6 days later. So much for Peer Review…
No one has a sample of that virus, no one else has sequenced it, and it, as Steven Mosher says may only exist “in a string of letters on her computer”.
NerdHasPower describes how easy it is to create a “natural bat virus” that matches the Wuhan virus:
Can the sequence of such a virus be fabricated? It cannot be any easier. It takes a person less than a day to TYPE such a sequence (less than 30,000 letters) in a word file. And it would be a thousand times easier if you already have a template that is about 96% identical to the one you are trying to create. Once the typing is finished, one can upload the sequence onto the public database. Contrary to general conception, such database does not really have a way to validate the authenticity or correctness of the uploaded sequence. It relies completely upon the scientists themselves – upon their honesty and consciences. Once uploaded and released, such sequence data becomes public and can be used legitimately in scientific analysis and publications.
NerdHasPower, with several helpers, shows there are sections which are missing the silent mutations which would normally occur in a virus due to natural mutation. Think of these as the noise that should be there, but isn’t. The lack of this background noise shows the mutations were “designed” by the hand of man (or woman, in this case) with an aim in mind.
He points out that scientists like Zhengli would not sit on a hot new natural bat virus like RaTG13 for six or seven long years without publishing it. The first thing they would do is analyze it for sequences that show whether it would bind to human ACE2 receptors like SARS did — making it a potential human threat. It’s exactly the kind of discovery researchers are hunting for, the kind that make that researcher a highly cited, author.
As an expert as Shi is, she only needed to take one peek at the sequence of RaTG13’s RBD and immediately realize: this virus closely resembles SARS in its RBD and has a clear potential of infecting humans. If Shi’s public statement is true and she indeed intends to discover bat coronaviruses with a potential to cross-over to humans, how could she possibly overlook this extremely interesting finding of RaTG13? If this RaTG13 was discovered SEVEN years ago in 2013, why did Shi not publish this astonishing finding earlier and yet let the “less-attractive” viruses take the stage? Why did she decide to publish such a sequence only when the current outbreak took place and people started questioning the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus?
None of these makes sense. These facts only add to the suspicion – Zhengli Shi either was directly involved in the creation of this virus/bioweapon, or helped cover it up, or both.
Steven Mosher has done a masterful job of explaining the whole story of the master code cracking done by NerdHasPower, who published in Chinese and English and who says only he is “A Nobody Scientist”. Presumably honest Chinese scientists need to be nobodies.
To reinforce the “Wet Market” cover story, namely, that this new pathogen had come from nature and not from her lab, something had to be done. And it had to be done quickly, since by then the China Coronavirus had spread to the rest of the world. Anger against China for its lack of transparency about the origins and characteristics of the virus was growing.
The similarity between the two coronaviruses—including their common ability to infect humans–would greatly reinforce [Dr Shi Zhengli’s] story that the SARS-CoV-2 had jumped from a bat to a human, perhaps through some intermediate species at the Wuhan wet market.
So, all Dr. Shi had to do was sit down before her computer keyboard, open a word file, and begin to fabricate the SARS-CoV-2 analogue that she would claim to have found in nature seven years before. All she had to do was type in the genetic sequence of her own creation, SARS-CoV-2, changing a few nucleotides now and again to mimic the “random mutations” that regularly occur in nature.
She could easily have completed the “data entry” part of her task in a day, since all she was doing was entering in a string of letters alternating between the four nucleotides, A, U, G, and C. And coronaviruses contain less than 30,000 different nucleotides.
Dr. Shi registered her new virus on January 27th, 2020, with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the customary repository for such information. She called it RaTG-13, Ra for Rhinolophus affinis, the Latin name of the Intermediate Horseshoe Bat, and 13 for 2013, the year she supposedly “discovered” it.
A lot of people have been taken in by Dr. Shi’s clever “discovery,” which is looking more and more like a forgery. No one else has independently verified its existence. No other lab has a sample of it, and no one else has ever sequenced it. And of course, they likely never will, because more and more evidence suggests that it exists only in a string of letters on her computer.
The case of the missing silent mutations
NerdHasPower has shown that the changes that supposedly occurred by natural mutation from the wild RaTG13 virus to the SARS-Cov-2 virus have a very unnatural pattern.
The code for RNA is a string of four letters A, T, C and G. Each Coronavirus is a string of these letters 29,000 bases long. It is the same code as all life on Earth (or it wouldn’t be able to be used inside our cells). The string is read as three letter codons (Eg: ATG, or ATC). Each three letter codon is translated into one particular amino acid, but there is redundancy built in to the code. So often one letter of each codon can mutate but still code for the same amino acid. This protects the code, so that most mutations won’t change the end product. They are “silent” mutations which don’t change the end product – they are the spelling error that can’t be heard — like reading Cat and Kat. (Synonymous mutants don’t change the meaning)
Steven Mosher:
In nature, the ratio of synonymous to non-synonymous is approximately 5:1.
Here’s where Dr. Shi got into trouble. When typing in the genomic sequence of her “discovery” she made way too many non-synonymous changes at the beginning. Then, one-third of the way through the sequence, she apparently realized her error. After that, she made way too few non-synonymous changes. So while the entire genome has the expected 5:1 ratio, there are stretches where the ratio is closer to 2:1, and other long stretches where it is as high as 44:1.
Nature’s mutations are random. Dr. Shi’s “mutations” are not. Dr. Lawrence Sellin has calculated that the odds that her “mutations” occurred naturally in just one area—the critical spike protein–at almost ten million to one.
Thank the Expert Swamp for help creating this virus
Dr Anthony Fauci sent $US to do this work in China.
Steven Mosher on Fauci’s role:
…here is one thing about Dr. Shi’s research that we do know with absolute, ironclad certainty: The U.S. was helping to fund it. From 2013 onwards, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, run by the now-famous Dr. Anthony Fauci, gave $7.4 million for research involving gain-of-function work and collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, $600,000 of which went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Much of the rest went to other labs in China.
If Dr. Fauci was as familiar with the Chinese Communist Party as he is with viruses, he would not have sent the Wuhan Institute of Virology one thin dime. He would have known that the PRC has a long-running program to develop bioweapons. He would have concluded that China’s only BSL-4 high containment lab was the obvious place to carry out at least some of this research. And he definitely did know that the “Gain-of-Function” research he was funding had the potential to create “Pathogens of Pandemic Potential” that might not be used for peaceful ends.
The E protein of β coronaviruses is a structural protein that is tolerant of mutations as evidenced both in SARS and in bat coronaviruses. However, on the amino acid level, E protein of the Wuhan coronavirus identified at the beginning of the outbreak is 100% identical to those of the suspected templates, ZC45 and ZXC21 (Figure 4). What is striking is that, after a short two-months spread of the virus in humans, the E protein is already mutating. Sequence data obtained within the month of April indicate that mutations have occurred to four different locations (Figure 4). Note that the E protein makes very limited interactions with host proteins and thus is not under evolutionary pressure to adapt to a new host. Not only can the E protein tolerate mutations but also its mutational rate is held constant across different coronavirus species. The fact that the E protein of the Wuhan coronaviruses is already mutating in the short period of human-to-human transmission is consistent with its evolutionary feature. In stark contrast, while ZC45/ZXC21 and the Wuhan coronavirus are more distant evolutionarily, the E proteins within them are 100% identical. In no way this could be a result of natural evolution.
Those who know genetics will get a lot out the collective investigation going on at NerdHasPower.
Five million people live on Hokkaido, north of Japan. They went into a lockdown early on Feb 28th. By March 19th Hokkaido looked like a success and was showing the world how to manage Coronavirus (they started early, and used masks). But then they reopened too soon, when there were still a few cases around and within a month had to lockdown again.
UPDATE: From readers in Japan (or who know people there) we hear that this is voluntary self-isolation, the government can declare “A State of Emergency” but the people are asked to comply, not forced. The Japanese government cannot order the population to “lock” down. Presumably “restrictions” are therefore “recommendations”.
The restrictions were released just before a three day holiday weekend and the border with the rest of Japan was not closed, which meant workers and students returned quickly and brought infections in. Three weeks later on April 14th Hokkaido closed down again.
The lag is diabolical. Most of the cases in Hokkaido were reported after the second State of Emergency was declared.
h/t David E.
…
As long as the borders are open, the lockdown cannot succeed until the whole country is cleared.
As long as there are cases circulating, a second wave is likely.
Iranian leaders worked to spread the virus: they were slow to close religious institutions, and quick to claim they’d be immune, right up until the day the leaders started catching the virus themselves. They declared quarantine was stone age, and shipped their masks off to China, but like everywhere, when things got bad, they started quarantine.
The peak came and went and things were headed in the right direction so Iran started releasing restrictions from April 11th. By May 2nd, less than a thousand new cases a day were being recorded. But five days later cases had doubled. Now they are back to where they were when they started releasing restrictions.
Just in time to catch the second wave, Iran reopened Mosques on May 4th in about one third of the country. Expect these numbers to rise. But also expect that these are not too accurate. No point in doing p tests on the slope. We hope for Iranians sake, this peak is lower.
A county in southwestern Iran has been placed under lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Tasnim news agency reported, also quoting the provincial governor as saying there had been a sharp rise in new cases across the province.
Gholamreza Shariati, governor of Khuzestan province that borders Iraq and includes the county of Abadan, said people had not been observing social distancing rules.
Meanwhile the Iranian rial has lost much of its value and will be replaced with a new currency, called the toman which will be worth 10,000 rials. Inflation is a sign the Iranian economy has been subject to a currency virus.
In Northern Italy, people are talking about how some people have not recovered even two months later. Patients with mild infections can recover, feel fine, and test negative, but then slide into debilitating fatigue, with strange aches and pains, bouts of diarrhea, and burning eyes. Some of them even test positive again.
And these were not the serious ICU cases which are paralyzed and ventilated. The head doctor of a hospital in Lombardy said “the discomfort often seems to last even longer for people with lighter symptoms. “
Debilitating symptoms can last long after a person’s body has gotten rid of the coronavirus, a reality Italians are now confronting.
Jason Horowitz, New York Times
The stubbornness of the virus and the length of the convalescence have become topics of conversation in northern Italy where some of the longest-suffering Italians are finding themselves in physical and financial uncertainty, unable to shake sickness and fatigue and get back to work.
But even some of the infected who have avoided pneumonia describe a maddeningly persistent and unpredictable illness, with unexpected symptoms. Bones feel broken. The senses dull. Stomachs are constantly upset. There are good days and then bad days without apparent rhyme nor reason.
Edmondo Cirielli, a member of Parliament, got sick on March 7th, he suffered debilitating fatigue, sore throat, diarrhea and intense pain at the base of his neck that made it impossible to concentrate. It was up and down for a month,” he said.
Then things got stranger. After 40 days of feeling lousy, he tested negative for the virus, but his eyes still burned and bouts of diarrhea continued, he said.
At the end of the month, he finally felt better, but another test result came back positive, forcing him to spend weeks more in isolation…
There is so much we don’t know about this virus. We don’t know the long term sequelae, or the productivity cost (how many people does this apply too, and how long will it be before these people return to work?). It’s possible the virus may reduce lung capacity (which is associated with higher mortality). It could affect kidney health, or cause heart muscle scarring. If this virus were to shorten life spans by five or ten years, we won’t even know that for twenty years. And if asymptomatic cases can suffer silent effects like microclots, they could still suffer some longer term damage –even though they might not realize they ever had Coronavirus. And if they wait years to do an antibody test, it may be too late to find out (if natural immunity does not last), so they may never know.
It will be difficult to even do those long term studies if we do not start now.
Many report waves of symptoms over a period of weeks – from heart palpitations to headaches, shortness of breath and fatigue.
In a survey of group members, 89% of the 465 respondents said they had symptoms that fluctuated in intensity and frequency; 23% had tested positive for coronavirus, taking on average just over nine days to be tested from the onset to symptoms; 28% tested negative and were, on average, tested after about 15 days; and just 3.5% were admitted to hospital, although 38% visited an emergency department.
The Slack group survey found two-thirds of respondents had a pre-existing medical condition, mainly seasonal allergies or asthma.
But Dr James Gill … said data from the Sars outbreak revealed that almost a third of those who had had that particular coronavirus still had a reduced tolerance to exercise many months later, despite having normal lung function. While Gill stressed that Covid-19 was a different disease, he said it could be that a similar proportion of about a fifth or a third of those with Covid-19 had lengthy recovery time .
Prof David Heymann said concern was starting to mount that the virus might trigger some form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. “We don’t know”.
Of the 712 cases on the Diamond Princess, three months later, 48 are still listed on worldometer as “active cases” and 4 are listed as still in a serious or critical condition. Does anyone know if these numbers are correct?
REFERENCES
High expression of ACE2 receptor of 2019-nCoV on the epithelial cells of oral mucosa, Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41368-020-0074-x
Pedone, et al (2012) Association of Reduced Total Lung Capacity With Mortality and Use of Health Services,April 2012Volume 141, Issue 4, Pages 1025–1030 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.1378/chest.11-0899
Things worth knowing about Coronavirus:
Quarantines work: 12 days after lockdowns, quarantines and isolation, Coronavirus slows. This is text book microbiology.
The stroke virus? Covid causes hundreds of microclots throughout the lungs (and everywhere else)
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How times change. Last November Jacinda Ardern 
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