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FTR #1127 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
NB: This description contains material not included in the original broadcast.
Introduction: This program examines one of the multi-layered effects of the Covid-19 “bio-psy-op.” We stress that the demarcation of these layers is for cognitive purposes–to enhance understanding. The layers are part of a unified whole.
In this broadcast, we focus on the eugenic effects of the virus. We have covered eugenics in many broadcasts over the decades. A few of those: FTR #‘s 1075, 1029, 908, 909, 32, 1013. FTR #1013 is of particular importance, as Trump has used the Covid-19 outbreak to halt immigration into the U.S.
Before delving into the eugenics manifestations of the Covid-19 outbreak, we highlight some of the recent developments in the pandemic:
- A recent report, based on random testing, indicated that up to one fifth of New Yorkers may have been infected by the virus. If accurate, this is an important piece of information, indicating that, from an epidemiological standpoint, the virus did NOT originate in China.
- We strongly suspect that New York was deliberately vectored by fascist elements associated with the Trump administration at one level, and the Underground Reich at another. This methodology would not be unprecedented: “. . . . In the summer of 1965, Special Operations men walked into three New York City subway stations and tossed lightbulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis, a benign bacteria, onto the tracks. The subway trains pushed the germs through the entire system and theoretically killed over a million passengers. . . .”
- We note increased finger-pointing at, scapegoating of, China for the pandemic, on the part of Britain, Germany and France, in addition to Trump and elements of the intelligence community: ” . . . .Washington is simultaneously spreading deliberate rumors that the virus could have originated in a Chinese laboratory. Whereas, scientists vehemently refute the allegations, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas declared, he ‘does not want to exclude’ that the WHO will have to deal with these issues. On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Beijing to show ‘transparency’ on the issue. . . . At the same time deliberate rumors are being spread in the United States that the Covid-19 virus could have originated in a Chinese laboratory — possibly in bioweapons lab. The US government indicated that it does not rule out this possibility; US intelligence services are currently investigating the issue. . . Leading British and French politicians have expressed similar views. British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab has repeatedly declared that China will be held responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. French President Emmanuel Macron has now joined the campaign. Regarding the pandemic’s alleged origin, he declared, ‘there are clearly things that have happened’ in China ‘that we don’t know about.’ . . . . ”
We also note a disturbing aspect of the symptoms of a cross-vectored, genetically-engineered virus that is the precipitating event for the Nazi takover in the US in Serpent’s Walk: ” . . . . Pacov‑1 produces only a mild, flu-like infection that disappears within a day or two. Public health authorities would overlook it, never consider it a serious epidemic, and even if they did they’d have to look carefully to isolate it. Once a victim is over the ‘flu,’ Pacov‑1 becomes dormant and almost undetectable. A month or two later, you send in the second stage: Pacov‑2 is also a virus, just as contagious as the first, and just as harmless by itself. It reacts with Pacov‑1 to produce a powerful coagulant. . . . you die within three minutes. . . .”
- The coagulating pathology produced by Pacov‑1 and Pacov‑2 in Serpent’s Walk is unnervingly similar to one of the many symptoms of Covid-19 infection: ” . . . . Doctors in hot spots across the globe have begun to report an unexpected prevalence of blood clotting among COVID cases, in what could pose a perfect storm of potentially fatal risk factors. . . . . . . It’s growing so common with severe COVID cases, doctors are recognizing it as a new pattern of clotting called COVID-19-associated coagulopathy, or CAC, which is notably associated with high inflammatory markers in the blood, like D‑dimer and fibrinogen. . . . ‘In the beginning of the outbreak, we started only giving them medicine to prevent clots. We saw that it wasn’t enough,’ Dr. Cristina Abad, an anesthesiologist at Hospital Clínicos San Carlos in Madrid, told ABC News. ‘They started having pulmonary embolisms, so we started [full] anticoagulation on everyone.’ . . .”
Eugenics, in its practice, might best be described as a pseudo-scientific doctrine attributing features of racial, ethnic and socio-economic prejudice to empirical scientific fact. ” . . . Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population,[4][5] typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior, and promoting those judged to be superior. . . . Many countries enacted[49] various eugenics policies, including: genetic screenings, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and sequestering the mentally ill), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, ultimately culminating in genocide. . . .”
Discussion of the eugenic aspects of the Covid-19 phenomenon include:
- De facto rationing of health care during the pandemic in such a way as to potentially lethally discriminate against those with disabilities.
- Infection and death rates disproportionately high among populations enduring the economic and physiological affliction deriving from prejudice and social darwinistic doctrine: African-Americans, people who work in low-paying jobs that require close human contact and living in conditions that do not permit social distancing.
- The economically degrading effect of GOP fiscal policy with regard to public transportation during the pandemic.
- New York City has been stigmatized during the pandemic, as has New York State. With large Jewish, African-American and Latino populations, a tradition of liberal politics, generous municipal union contracts, a free city university program, New York has long been viewed as “Jew York City” by fascist elements. Governors, as well as Trump himself, have proposed quarantining New York City and New Jersey. This further underscores the above speculation concerning the rate of infection in New York City. ” . . . . As President Trump put it in his short-lived bid to ‘QUARANTINE’ New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, ‘Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it’s a hot spot’ — the implication being that if New Yorkers could only be kept where they are, with checkpoints and guards if need be, Covid-19 could be stopped from spreading elsewhere in the country. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida set up checkpoints to stop cars with New York or Louisiana license plates, so that state troopers can warn drivers to self-quarantine or face 60 days in jail — even as he hesitated to put any social distancing in place or close the beaches for spring break. Instead of admitting the danger of community spread in Florida, the governor framed the problem as one of outsiders bringing germs in. Governors in Maryland and other states warned anyone arriving from the New York City area to isolate themselves. On Twitter, Covid-19 has taken on a new sobriquet: the ‘Cuomovirus.’ . . .”
The broadcast concludes with an overview of New York Times headlines, illustrating various aspects of the socio-economic fallout of the Covid-19 outbreak, victimizing lower income people, reducing income and earning ability, educational opportunity, adversely affecting access to food and auguring catastrophe for Third World populations:
- “Colleges Running Out of Cash Worry Students Will Vanish, Too” by Anemona Hartocollis; The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. A1-A-15 [Western Edition].
- “Outbreak Strains States’ Finances” by Mary Williams Walsh; The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. B1-B6 [Western Edition].
- ” ‘This Is Going to Kill Small-Town America’ ” by David Gelles: The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. B1-B5 [Western Edition].
- The New York Times [Western Edition] headline for 4/16/2020 said it all, as far as the fortunes of retail outlets. “Sales at U.S. Stores Hit ‘Catastrophic’ Depths” by Sapna Maheshwari and Ben Casselman; The New York Times; 4/16/2020.
- “Evidence of Virus Effect on Economy Grows More Ominous” [AP]; The New York Times; 4/15/2020.
- “135 Million Face Starvation. That Could Double” by Abdi Latif Dahir; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. A1-A6; [Western Edition].
- “This Pandemic Is Bringing Another” by Nicholas Kristof; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A23 [Op-ed–Western Edition].
- “Covid-19 Threatens Global Safety Net” Editorial; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A22 [Western Edition].
- “How Government ‘Failed the Elderly’ ” Letter to the Editor; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A22 [Western Edition].
- “A Limit on Trump’s Immigration Power” by Jennifer M. Chacon and Erwin Chermerinsky; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A23 [op-ed–Western Edition].
- ” ‘The Food Supply Chain Is Breaking.’ Tyson Foods Warns of Meat Shortage as Plants Close Due to Covid-19” by Sanya Mansoor [Time] Yahoo News; 4/26/2020.
As noted in the program, the eugenic aspects of the pandemic and effects on the economically and socially disadvantaged inside and outside of the U.S. are inextricable with the weal-concentrating aspects of the pandemic. This will be the focus of our next program:
- “Banks Steered Richest Clients To Federal Aid” by Emily Flitter and Stacy Cowley; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. A1-A14 [Western Edition].
- “Millions In Relief For Backer Of Resorts” by Jeanna Smialek, Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. B1-B5 [Western Edition].
Critical observations by Wolfgang Schauble, the German/EU “Austerity Czar” who wrought so much suffering following the 2008 economic collapse has clearly enunciated the functional and philosophical essence of “corporatist” and eugenic doctrine.
This, too, is reflected in the Trumpian “LIBERATE MICHIGAN etc.”
Some background on Schauble’s outlook: ” . . . . Hardly a German government representative is more notorious than Wolfgang Schäuble — worldwide. During the international financial crisis, when Schäuble was Germany’s Minister of Finance, his EU counterparts trembled: Schäuble wanted to force them to adapt harsh austerity measures. Because the foreseeable social consequences would cost lives, Schäuble’s tactics seemed to scare Europe with ‘traumatic effects’ and gave it a lesson in German economic ethics: Teutonic brutality and at all costs. ‘Terrifying,’ was the assessment the US Treasury Secretary made following his conversation with Schäuble. Paris and Madrid were also apprehensive; Athens called Schäuble an ‘arsonist,’ on a rampage through Europe. Schäuble has since climbed higher on the government ladder. Schäuble now ranks second, after the President, in the Federal Republic of Germany’s protocolary system. . . . .”
After the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, he has redoubled his “Teutonic brutality:” ” . . . . In the midst of the Corona crisis, Schäuble initiated an interview, considered to be an unofficial guideline for the German state’s life and death decisions. Its tenor deserves attention, even beyond Germany’s borders.
“Should people have to die, because they are deprived of state resources, essential for the economic cycle, such as currently during the Corona crisis? Does the protection of human life have absolute priority in state policy? In the interview, Schäuble has elaborated in 2020 on what he had already made clear in 2012, during the international financial crisis: ‘If I hear that everything else must take a back seat to the preservation of life, I must say that this, in such unequivocalness, is not right.’ Protection of human life does not have an ‘absolute priority in our Basic Law.’ Death is coming sooner or later anyway. ‘We are all going to die.’ (April 26, 2020)
“Schäuble’s statements are exemplary and are of ‘national significance’ declared the German Ethics Council. The council is government financed and prioritizes ‘economic rights.’ They should ‘not be unconditionally subordinated’ to the protection of human life. There is a sort of rivalry of values. If the value of life would have priority, ‘freedom’ would suffer, according to the unanimous judgment of the ethics department of the German Economic Institute (IW). From the standpoint of German constitutional law, according to a former judge on the constitutional court, ‘the state’s efficiency’ would encounter its limits, if life were given top priority, where ‘everything else must lag arbitrarily far behind.’
“In fact, the government’s obligation to the constitution’s highest value — the protection of life — must be relativized, just as Schäuble is doing, confirm the majority of Germany’s government leaders. Prominent voices from the parliamentary opposition parties are also in agreement that the protection of human life, as the primary legitimized duty of the state is a ‘question of assessment.’ From this the FDP draws the conclusion: ‘therefore, please reopen the businesses.’ ‘Enable production.’ In harmony with Germany’s export economy lobbyists and the President of the Bundestag, the chair of the Greens is also one of the relativizers. He finds himself in an alleged ‘dilemma,’ when he thinks of the protection of life during the Corona crisis, while a fellow Green municipal politician speaks in plain operational terms; ‘Let me tell you quite bluntly: We may be saving people in Germany, who, because of their age or serious previous medical conditions, may, be dead anyway in a half a year.’ . . . .”
1a. A recent disclosure that up to one-fifth of people in New York City have been infected suggests that the virus did not originate in China.
One of every five New York City residents tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, according to preliminary results described by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday that suggested that the virus had spread far more widely than known.
If the pattern holds, the results from random testing of 3,000 people raised the tantalizing prospect that many New Yorkers — as many as 2.7 million, the governor said — who never knew they had been infected had already encountered the virus, and survived. Mr. Cuomo also said that such wide infection might mean that the death rate was far lower than believed. . . .
1b. We conclude with discussion of the supervision of Ft. Detrick personnel by Dr. Kurt Blome, the Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich and another individual incorporated into the U.S. biological warfare establishment.
We have discussed Blome in, among other programs, FTR # 1012 and AFA #39.
Both Blome and Traub reported directly to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler during World War II.
Note the 1966 tests on the New York City subway system.
. . . . Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division ran ‘vulnerability tests’ in which operatives walked around Washington, D.C., and San Francisco with suitcases holding Serratia marcescens—a bacteria recommended to Fort Detrick by Traub’s nominal supervisor, Nazi germ czar and Nuremberg defendant Dr. Kurt Blome. Tiny perforations allowed the germs’ release so they could trace the flow of the germs through airports and bus terminals. Shortly thereafter, eleven elderly men and women checked into hospitals with never-before-seen Serratia marcescens infections. One patient died. Decades later when the germ tests were disclosed, the Army denied responsibility. . . . In the summer of 1965, Special Operations men walked into three New York City subway stations and tossed lightbulbs filled Bacillus subtilis, a benign bacteria, onto the tracks. The subway trains pushed the germs through the entire system and theoretically killed over a million passengers. . . .
1c. In FTR #1126, we examined the Trump administration and GOP’s exploitation of the Covid-19 outbreak as a campaign tactic and right-wing hints that the virus escaped from a Chinese biological warfare laboratory.
Now, Germany, France and Britain are joining with the Trump administration and the GOP in hinting that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese biological warfare laboratory.
American media voices from (predictably) Fox News to (also predictably) The New York Times are orgiastically disseminating the fresh fertilizer, acting in conjunction with intelligence officers.
Note that the linked story about Fox News describes statements by right-wing journalists, acting in concert with elements of the intelligence community, intimating that officials of the Democratic Party are in bed with Chinese intelligence.
This reeks of McCarthyism and may well hand Trump victory in the fall and, eventually, lead to war.
In fact, there is a high-security biological research facility in Wuhan at which Chinese scientists, along with American peers, have been studying coronaviruses–a source of intermittent disease transmission in China. This facility involves joint research funded, in part, by the Pentagon.
Suggestions that the virus could have originated in a Chinese bioweapons lab are curiously blind to events in the United States. In early August of 2019, shortly before the recorded start of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at that facility was closed down by the CDC due to multiple safety violations. “All research at a Fort Detrick laboratory that handles high-level disease-causing material, such as Ebola, is on hold indefinitely after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the organization failed to meet biosafety standards. . . . The CDC sent a cease and desist order in July. After USAMRIID received the order from the CDC, its registration with the Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees disease-causing material use and possession, was suspended. That suspension effectively halted all biological select agents and toxin research at USAMRIID . . . .”
As the German Foreign Policy article notes, the tone of both American and German rhetoric concerning Covid-19 is reminiscent of the deliberate disinformation that led to the American invasion of Iraq in 2002.
. . . . Last weekend, US President Donald Trump warned the People’s Republic that it should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the spread of the pandemic. Washington is simultaneously spreading deliberate rumors that the virus could have originated in a Chinese laboratory. Whereas, scientists vehemently refute the allegations, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas declared, he ‘does not want to exclude’ that the WHO will have to deal with these issues. On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Beijing to show ‘transparency’ on the issue. . . .
. . . . At the same time deliberate rumors are being spread in the United States that the Covid-19 virus could have originated in a Chinese laboratory — possibly in bioweapons lab. The US government indicated that it does not rule out this possibility; US intelligence services are currently investigating the issue. Particularly given the lie about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, such an allegation must be perceived as a threat to lend legitimacy to new aggressions. . . .
. . . . Already last week, German media organs have increasingly been calling China the “culprit” behind the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Under the headline “what China already owes us,” Germany’s Springer press even called for “reparations.” (german-foreign-policy.com reported.[5]) Leading British and French politicians have expressed similar views. British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab has repeatedly declared that China will be held responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. French President Emmanuel Macron has now joined the campaign. Regarding the pandemic’s alleged origin, he declared, “there are clearly things that have happened” in China “that we don’t know about.”[6] It is not clear how Macron can know something exists that he does not know about. It is however clear that he seeks to implicate Beijing. . . .
“The Suspicion Campaign;” German Foreign Policy; 4/21/2020.
The German government is joining the US campaign of allegations against China regarding the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Last weekend, US President Donald Trump warned the People’s Republic that it should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the spread of the pandemic. Washington is simultaneously spreading deliberate rumors that the virus could have originated in a Chinese laboratory. Whereas, scientists vehemently refute the allegations, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas declared, he “does not want to exclude” that the WHO will have to deal with these issues. On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Beijing to show “transparency” on the issue. Senior German military officials have recently been demanding that the EU adopt “a joint political-strategic response” to China’s growing strength, because in the Corona crisis, Beijing is gaining considerable influence. According to a recent poll, more than half of the Italian population sees China as a “friend,” while nearly half see Germany as an “enemy.”
Deliberate Rumors
The German government is joining the Trump administration’s new campaign against China, albeit attenuated. On the weekend, President Trump claimed that the virus “could have been stopped in China” and warned that the People’s Republic “should face consequences” if it was “knowingly responsible” for the spread.[1] At the same time deliberate rumors are being spread in the United States that the Covid-19 virus could have originated in a Chinese laboratory — possibly in bioweapons lab. The US government indicated that it does not rule out this possibility; US intelligence services are currently investigating the issue. Particularly given the lie about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, such an allegation must be perceived as a threat to lend legitimacy to new aggressions. There is no proof that the virus originated in a laboratory. Scientific studies clearly conclude that it was transmitted from wild animals to humans.[2]
Open to Suspicion
Berlin is open to entirely unfounded suspicions. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is quoted saying he “doesn’t want to exclude” that “the WHO will have to deal with these issues.”[3] The Minister of Development Gerd Müller declared that the People’s Republic must display “complete openness” — “particularly regarding the origin of the virus.”[4] Already last week, German media organs have increasingly been calling China the “culprit” behind the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Under the headline “what China already owes us,” Germany’s Springer press even called for “reparations.” (german-foreign-policy.com reported.[5]) Leading British and French politicians have expressed similar views. British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab has repeatedly declared that China will be held responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. French President Emmanuel Macron has now joined the campaign. Regarding the pandemic’s alleged origin, he declared, “there are clearly things that have happened” in China “that we don’t know about.”[6] It is not clear how Macron can know something exists that he does not know about. It is however clear that he seeks to implicate Beijing.
“A Devastating Impression”
Insight into the German-European involvement in the Trump administration’s new campaign against China is provided by German military officials’ recent statements. A new working paper by the Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS), for example, examines the Covid-19 pandemic’s potential global political ramifications. The author, Ret. Brig.Gen. Armin Staigis, BAKS Vice-President (2013 — 2015) today’s Chair of BAKS “Association of Friends” points out that the USA, “up to now the EU’s most important partner” is “eroding in the global context.” China, on the other hand, is emerging more and more “on the world stage.” “With its economic power, it is reaching the European continent and is thus ... also becoming a political rival.”[7] The EU should “not become a pawn” in the hands of states like Russia (“revanchists”), the USA (“off course egocentrics”) or China (“hungry up-starts”). The EU “still has to formulate a joint political strategic answer” particularly to the People’s Republic’s growing strength. This is all the more important in light of the political development in the Corona crisis: “There is a public perception that China is providing faster and more helpful support in Europe than the EU and its member states among themselves.” This, however, is a “devastating impression.”
Race between the Global Economic Powers
Late last week, General Staff Officer Col. Matthias Rogg, a member of the board of the German Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies (GIDS), a Bundeswehr think tank (founded in 2018) made a similar observation. Rogg assumes that in the course of the Corona crisis, China will significantly enhance its international influence. “That pertains to the economic development in countries, for example in the Middle East or even in Africa, which are not visibly affected by the epidemic, but will surely also be seriously affected by Corona, either directly or indirectly.”[8] There, the People’s Republic of China will be able to secure new influence “through financial, and material assistance.” It should “not be forgotten” that it is completely uncertain “how the USA will economically evolve from this crisis.” “That means that in the race between the global economic powers, one can assume that China ... will have a head start and wind up among the winners of the crisis.” That is grave — after all, with China, which, for example, has “offered immediate assistance” to Italy, we are “de facto dealing with a country from a rival system.”
Enemy Number One
A current survey made in Italy shows the problems German power strategists are confronting. The Italian survey suggests that the suspicion campaign against China is also aimed at affecting Europe. In mid-March it had indicated that around two-thirds of the Italians felt EU membership was disadvantageous to their country. Only four percent felt that the Union was providing sufficient support to Italy during the Corona crisis.[9] Now, since China’s most recent Covid-19 assistance delivery, 52 percent of the Italian population see China as a “friend” of Italy; 32 percent consider Russia, who is also providing assistance, a “friend,” and only 17 percent place the United States in this category. Among the countries in the survey considered an “enemy” of Italy, first place, with an impressive 45 percent, went to Germany.[10]
[1] Trump droht China mit “Konsequenzen”. tagesschau.de 19.04.2020.
[2] Vgl. etwa: Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV‑2. Nature Medicine 26 (2020). S. 450–452.
[3] Nils Metzger: Neue Argumente für Labor-Theorie? zdf.de 17.04.2020.
[4] Darum nimmt die Kritik an Pekings Umgang mit der Coronavirus-Krise zu. tagesspiegel.de 20.04.2020.
[5] See also Battle of Narratives.
[6] Victor Mallet, Roula Khalaf: FT Interview: Emmanuel Macron says it is time to think the unthinkable. ft.com 16.04.2020.
[7] Armin Staigis: Ernstfall Europa — Jetzt! Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik: Arbeitspapier 2/20. Berlin, April 2020.
[8] “China dürfte am Ende zu den Krisengewinnern gehören”. cicero.de 17.04.2020.
[9] See also Germany First (II).
[10] Massimilia
2a. This post is a preview of an upcoming show in the “Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now” series. As Mr. Emory has stressed, the presentation of these programs in conceptually separate packages is for purposes of cognitive grasp. The consummately brilliant, consummately evil “bio-psy-op” is an example of six or seven dimensional chess. It operates on a number of different, overlapping levels simultaneously.
Note that the Nazi takeover in Serpent’s Walk occurs after the country is attacked with genetically-engineered biological warfare weapons. Although the nature of the infection is different, the overall paradigm is identical. “Pacov” might be understood in a contemporary context as standing for “Pandemic CoronaVirus.”
In Serpent’s Walk–which we have discussed for decades–the SS go underground (which they did), buy into the opinion-forming media (which they did) and, infiltrate the military (which they have done), and, after a terrorist attack by genetically-engineered viruses decimates large parts of the United States, martial law is declared and the Nazis take over. NB: we do not know if “cross-vectoring” is occurring with the Covid-19 virus, however that is something to be contemplated and researched.
. . . . “Yes. Well. ‘Pacov’ stands for ‘Pandemic Communicable Virus,’ one of the uglier results of military experimentation with recombinant DNA. Do you know what that is?” . . .
. . . . “Very well, let me tell you in layman’s terms.” Mulder extended a hand to shush Wrench, who had started to speak. “Pacov consists of two separate re-workings of two DNA chains of existing viruses. It’s a piggy-back weapon, a two-stage operation. You send in the first stage. The vectors . . . agents of transmission . . . for Pacov‑1 are extensive. It travels through the air, the water, or directly from person-to-person and is highly contagious. It spreads for hundreds of miles, if conditions are optimal. Pacov‑1 produces only a mild, flu-like infection that disappears within a day or two. Public health authorities would overlook it, never consider it a serious epidemic, and even if they did they’d have to look carefully to isolate it. Once a victim is over the ‘flu,’ Pacov‑1 becomes dormant and almost undetectable. A month or two later, you send in the second stage: Pacov‑2 is also a virus, just as contagious as the first, and just as harmless by itself. It reacts with Pacov‑1 to produce a powerful coagulant. . . . you die within three minutes. No warning, no vaccine, no cure. Those not exposed to both stages remain unharmed. . . . Pacov‑2 goes inert, like Pacov‑1 within a week or two. Then you get your victim’s country, all his property, in undamaged condition. . . . and a lot of corpses to bury.” . . . .
2b. We note that, although a “coagulant” is not causing the phenomenon, blood clots are indeed one of the many symptoms of the Covid-19: ” . . . . Doctors in hot spots across the globe have begun to report an unexpected prevalence of blood clotting among COVID cases, in what could pose a perfect storm of potentially fatal risk factors. . . . . . . It’s growing so common with severe COVID cases, doctors are recognizing it as a new pattern of clotting called COVID-19-associated coagulopathy, or CAC, which is notably associated with high inflammatory markers in the blood, like D‑dimer and fibrinogen. . . . ‘In the beginning of the outbreak, we started only giving them medicine to prevent clots. We saw that it wasn’t enough,’ Dr. Cristina Abad, an anesthesiologist at Hospital Clínicos San Carlos in Madrid, told ABC News. ‘They started having pulmonary embolisms, so we started [full] anticoagulation on everyone.’ . . .”
As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages a world still grappling with vast uncertainty over the virus, a new and unnerving pattern has emerged in some patients.
Though novel coronavirus symptoms thus far have presented chiefly within the respiratory system, the infection is swiftly showing to be an all-out, system-wide assault that reaches far past the lungs. Doctors in hot spots across the globe have begun to report an unexpected prevalence of blood clotting among COVID cases, in what could pose a perfect storm of potentially fatal risk factors.
In New Orleans, a man in his 30s was admitted to the hospital a week into treatment for the flu, severely sick. Developing shortness of breath, chest pain and an abnormally rapid heart rate — he was tested for coronavirus — doctors realized those symptoms also are typical of a pulmonary embolism: a potentially deadly blood clot that can move from the legs to the lungs and damage the heart.
The man’s blood work already showed heart damage, though he had no known underlying medical conditions, no recent travel, no recent surgeries. His chest scans, shown first to ABC News, revealed a massive clot. Termed a “saddle embolus” because it hooks over branches of both pulmonary arteries, it was severely stressing the right side of the heart, unable to push blood against the clot already in its strained state.
“Thankfully, we were able to find this and treat this early, otherwise it probably would have killed him,” Dr. Siyab Panhwar, a cardiovascular consult for the patient, told ABC News. . . .
. . . It’s growing so common with severe COVID cases, doctors are recognizing it as a new pattern of clotting called COVID-19-associated coagulopathy, or CAC, which is notably associated with high inflammatory markers in the blood, like D‑dimer and fibrinogen. . . .
. . . . In Spain, among the hardest-hit nations, clotting cases have become so prevalent in novel coronavirus patients that doctors have begun routinely treating individuals with therapeutic doses of anticoagulation medication.
“In the beginning of the outbreak, we started only giving them medicine to prevent clots. We saw that it wasn’t enough,” Dr. Cristina Abad, an anesthesiologist at Hospital Clínicos San Carlos in Madrid, told ABC News. “They started having pulmonary embolisms, so we started [full] anticoagulation on everyone.” . . .
3. The Bio-Psy-Op is manifesting eugenics application–a bio-psy-op T4 program, if you will.
. . . . People with disabilities and chronic health conditions are some of the most vulnerable groups during the coronavirus crisis, though often overlooked in the national debate, according to advocates. The virus has infected more than 69,000 Americans and led to nearly more than 1,000 U.S. deaths, according to a site run by Johns Hopkins University.
On Wednesday, 27 U.S. representatives and five senators sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr, urging them to issue guidance to state agencies to protect people with disabilities from being discriminated against during the outbreak. U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R‑NJ, led the effort. . . .
. . . . One of the concerns is whether people with disabilities will be sidelined for healthcare as medical equipment such as ventilators and hospital beds become increasingly scarce, said Ari Ne’eman, visiting scholar at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
A number of states, including Utah, Tennessee and Alabama, have emergency contingency plans that direct hospitals not to provide medical equipment, such as ventilators, to people with certain intellectual and cognitive disabilities, should that equipment become scarce, he said. . . .
4. The “Useless Bread Gobblers” are losing out.
How do doctors and hospitals decide who gets potentially lifesaving treatment and who doesn’t?
A lot of thought has been given to just such a predicament, well before critical shortages from the coronavirus pandemic.
“It would be irresponsible at this point not to get ready to make tragic decisions about who lives and who dies,” said Dr. Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado.
Facing this dilemma recently — who gets a ventilator or a hospital bed — Italian doctors sought ethical counsel and were told to consider an approach that draws on utilitarian principles.
In layman’s terms, a utilitarianism approach would maximize overall health by directing care toward those most likely to benefit the most from it. If you had only one ventilator, it would go to someone more likely to survive instead of someone deemed unlikely to do so. . . .
5. It is, on the one hand unsurprising that African Americans are contracting and dying of coronavirus at a higher rate and, on the other, completely in keeping with the Far Right agenda of Trump, Bannon et al.
The coronavirus entered Milwaukee from a white, affluent suburb. Then it took root in the city’s black community and erupted.
As public health officials watched cases rise in March, too many in the community shrugged off warnings. Rumors and conspiracy theories proliferated on social media, pushing the bogus idea that black people are somehow immune to the disease. And much of the initial focus was on international travel, so those who knew no one returning from Asia or Europe were quick to dismiss the risk.
Then, when the shelter-in-place order came, there was a natural pushback among those who recalled other painful government restrictions — including segregation and mass incarceration — on where black people could walk and gather.
“We’re like, ‘We have to wake people up,’” said Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik.
As the disease spread at a higher rate in the black community, it made an even deeper cut. Environmental, economic and political factors have compounded for generations, putting black people at higher risk of chronic conditions that leave lungs weak and immune systems vulnerable: asthma, heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. In Milwaukee, simply being black means your life expectancy is 14 years shorter, on average, than someone white.
As of Friday morning, African Americans made up almost half of Milwaukee County’s 945 cases and 81% of its 27 deaths in a county whose population is 26% black. Milwaukee is one of the few places in the United States that is tracking the racial breakdown of people who have been infected by the novel coronavirus, offering a glimpse at the disproportionate destruction it is inflicting on black communities nationwide.
In Michigan, where the state’s population is 14% black, African Americans made up 35% of cases and 40% of deaths as of Friday morning. Detroit, where a majority of residents are black, has emerged as a hot spot with a high death toll. As has New Orleans. Louisiana has not published case breakdowns by race, but 40% of the state’s deaths have happened in Orleans Parish, where the majority of residents are black.
Illinois and North Carolina are two of the few areas publishing statistics on COVID-19 cases by race, and their data shows a disproportionate number of African Americans were infected.
“It will be unimaginable pretty soon,” said Dr. Celia J. Maxwell, an infectious disease physician and associate dean at Howard University College of Medicine, a school and hospital in Washington dedicated to the education and care of the black community. “And anything that comes around is going to be worse in our patients. Period. Many of our patients have so many problems, but this is kind of like the nail in the coffin.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks virulent outbreaks and typically releases detailed data that includes information about the age, race and location of the people affected. For the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC has released location and age data, but it has been silent on race. The CDC did not respond to ProPublica’s request for race data related to the coronavirus or answer questions about whether they were collecting it at all.
Experts say that the nation’s unwillingness to publicly track the virus by race could obscure a crucial underlying reality: It’s quite likely that a disproportionate number of those who die of coronavirus will be black.
The reasons for this are the same reasons that African Americans have disproportionately high rates of maternal death, low levels of access to medical care and higher rates of asthma, said Dr. Camara Jones, a family physician, epidemiologist and visiting fellow at Harvard University.
“COVID is just unmasking the deep disinvestment in our communities, the historical injustices and the impact of residential segregation,” said Jones, who spent 13 years at the CDC, focused on identifying, measuring and addressing racial bias within the medical system. “This is the time to name racism as the cause of all of those things. The overrepresentation of people of color in poverty and white people in wealth is not just a happenstance. … It’s because we’re not valued.”
Five congressional Democrats wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose department encompasses the CDC, last week demanding the federal government collect and release the breakdown of coronavirus cases by race and ethnicity.
Without demographic data, the members of Congress wrote, health officials and lawmakers won’t be able to address inequities in health outcomes and testing that may emerge: “We urge you not to delay collecting this vital information, and to take any additional necessary steps to ensure that all Americans have the access they need to COVID-19 testing and treatment.”
Milwaukee, one of the few places already tracking coronavirus cases and deaths by race, provides an early indication of what would surface nationally if the federal government actually did this, or locally if other cities and states took its lead.
Milwaukee, both the city and county, passed resolutions last summer that were seen as important steps in addressing decades of race-based inequality.
“We declared racism as a public health issue,” said Kowalik, the city’s health commissioner. “It frames not only how we do our work but how transparent we are about how things are going. It impacts how we manage an outbreak.”
Milwaukee is trying to be purposeful in how it communicates information about the best way to slow the pandemic. It is addressing economic and logistical roadblocks that stand in the way of safety. And it’s being transparent about who is infected, who is dying and how the virus spread in the first place.
Kowalik described watching the virus spread into the city, without enough information, because of limited testing, to be able to take early action to contain it.
At the beginning of March, Wisconsin had one case. State public health officials still considered the risk from the coronavirus “low.” Testing criteria was extremely strict, as it was in many places across the country: You had to have symptoms and have traveled to China, Iran, South Korea or Italy within 14 days or have had contact with someone who had a confirmed case of COVID-19.
So, she said, she waited, wondering: “When are we going to be able to test for this to see if it is in our community?”
About two weeks later, Milwaukee had its first case.
The city’s patient zero had been in contact with a person from a neighboring, predominately white and affluent suburb who had tested positive. Given how much commuting occurs in and out of Milwaukee, with some making a 180-mile round trip to Chicago, Kowalik said she knew it would only be a matter of time before the virus spread into the city.
A day later came the city’s second case, someone who contracted the virus while in Atlanta. Kowalik said she started questioning the rigidness of the testing guidelines. Why didn’t they include domestic travel?
By the fourth case, she said, “we determined community spread. … It happened so quickly.”
Within the span of a week, Milwaukee went from having one case to nearly 40. Most of the sick people were middle-aged, African American men. By week two, the city had over 350 cases. And now, there are more than 945 cases countywide, with the bulk in the city of Milwaukee, where the population is 39% black. People of all ages have contracted the virus and about half are African American.
The county’s online dashboard of coronavirus cases keeps up-to-date information on the racial breakdown of those who have tested positive. As of Thursday morning, 19 people had died of illness related to COVID-19 in Milwaukee County. All but four were black, according to the county medical examiner’s office. Records show that at least 11 of the deceased had diabetes, eight had hypertension and 15 had a mixture of chronic health conditions that included heart and lung disease.
Because of discrimination and generational income inequality, black households in the county earned only 50% as much as white ones in 2018, according to census statistics. Black people are far less likely to own homes than white people in Milwaukee and far more likely to rent, putting black renters at the mercy of landlords who can kick them out if they can’t pay during an economic crisis, at the same time as people are being told to stay home. And when it comes to health insurance, black people are more likely to be uninsured than their white counterparts.
African Americans have gravitated to jobs in sectors viewed as reliable paths to the middle class — health care, transportation, government, food supply — which are now deemed “essential,” rendering them unable to stay home. In places like New York City, the virus’ epicenter, black people are among the only ones still riding the subway.
“And let’s be clear, this is not because people want to live in those conditions,” said Gordon Francis Goodwin, who works for Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a national racial equity organization that worked with Milwaukee on its health and equity framework. “This is a matter of taking a look at how our history kept people from actually being fully included.”
Fred Royal, head of the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP, knows three people who have died from the virus, including 69-year-old Lenard Wells, a former Milwaukee police lieutenant and a mentor to others in the black community. Royal’s 38-year-old cousin died from the virus last week in Atlanta. His body was returned home Tuesday.
Royal is hearing that people aren’t necessarily being hospitalized but are being sent home instead and “told to self-medicate.”
“What is alarming about that,” he said, “is that a number of those individuals were sent home with symptoms and died before the confirmation of their test came back.”
Health Commissioner Kowalik said that there have been delays of up to two weeks in getting results back from some private labs, but nearly all of those who died have done so at hospitals or while in hospice. Still, Kowalik said she understood why some members in the black community distrusted the care they might receive in a hospital.
In January, a 25-year-old day care teacher named Tashonna Ward died after staff at Froedtert Hospital failed to check her vital signs. Federal officials examined 20 patient records and found seven patients, including Ward, didn’t receive proper care. The report didn’t reveal the race of those whose records it examined at the hospital, which predominantly serves black patients. Froedtert Hospital declined to speak to issues raised in the report, according to a February article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and it had not submitted any corrective actions to federal officials.
“What black folks are accustomed to in Milwaukee and anywhere in the country, really, is pain not being acknowledged and constant inequities that happen in health care delivery,” Kowalik said.
The health commissioner herself, a black woman who grew up in Milwaukee, said she’s all too familiar with the city’s enduring struggles with segregation and racism. Her mother is black and her father Polish, and she remembers the stories they shared about trying to buy a house as a young interracial couple in Sherman Park, a neighborhood once off-limits to blacks.
“My father couldn’t get a mortgage for the house. He had to go to the bank without my mom,” Kowalik said.
It is the same neighborhood where fury and frustration sparked protests that, at times, roiled into riots in 2016 when a Milwaukee police officer fatally shot Sylville Smith, a 23-year-old black man.
And it is the same neighborhood that has a concentration of poor health outcomes when you overlay a heat map of conditions, be it lead poisoning, infant mortality — and now, she said, COVID-19.
Knowing which communities are most impacted allows public health officials to tailor their messaging to overcome the distrust of black residents.
“We’ve been told so much misinformation over the years about the condition of our community,” Royal, of the NAACP, said. “I believe a lot of people don’t trust what the government says.”
Kowalik has met — virtually — with trusted and influential community leaders to discuss outreach efforts to ensure everyone is on the same page about the importance of staying home and keeping 6 feet away from others if they must go out.
Police and inspectors are responding to complaints received about “noncompliant” businesses forcing staff to come to work or not practicing social distancing in the workplace. Violators could face fines.
“Who are we getting these complaints from?” she asked. “Many people of color.”
Residents have been urged to call 211 if they need help with anything from finding something to eat or a place to stay. And the state has set up two voluntary isolation facilities for people with COVID-19 symptoms whose living situations are untenable, including a Super 8 motel in Milwaukee.
Despite the work being done in Milwaukee, experts like Linda Sprague Martinez, a community health researcher at Boston University’s School of Social Work, worry that the government is not paying close enough attention to race, and as the disease spreads, will do too little to blunt its toll.
“When COVID-19 passes and we see the losses … it will be deeply tied to the story of post-World War II policies that left communities marginalized,” Sprague said. “Its impact is going to be tied to our history and legacy of racial inequities. It’s going to be tied to the fact that we live in two very different worlds.”
6. The outbreak is financially handicapping mass transit, further straining the mean of low-income people.
Low-income Americans have borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic. They may also get left behind in the recovery.
Steep declines in ridership during the crisis have pushed public transit systems across the U.S. into deep financial distress. Though Congress included allocations for transit in the CARES Act, cities said it won’t be nearly enough. Even major systems in large metro areas like New York City and Washington, D.C., have serious concerns about long-term survival without more sustained support.
Failure of transit systems would be a disaster for the large proportion of low income households that depend on buses and trains to get to work and elsewhere – not only in urban areas, but in rural ones too.
I’m currently in the middle of a two-year study of transport inequality in the U.S. One of my early findings is that about 20 percent of the poorest households don’t own a vehicle. That would make them entirely reliant on public transportation, compared with 6 percent for all households. . . .
7. Charles Blow amplifies the message in the Politico article above.
“Social Distancing Is A Privilege” by Charles Blow; The New York Times; 4/5/2020.
People like to say that the coronavirus is no respecter of race, class or country, that the disease Covid-19 is mindless and will infect anybody it can.
In theory, that is true. But, in practice, in the real world, this virus behaves like others, screeching like a heat-seeking missile toward the most vulnerable in society. And this happens not because it prefers them, but because they are more exposed, more fragile and more ill.
What the vulnerable portion of society looks like varies from country to country, but in America, that vulnerability is highly intersected with race and poverty.
Early evidence from cities and states already shows that black people are disproportionately affected by the virus in devastating ways. As ProPublica reported, in Milwaukee County, Wis., as of Friday morning, 81 percent of the deaths were black people. Black people make up only 26 percent of that county.
As for Chicago, WBEZ reported Sunday that “70 percent of Covid-19 deaths are black,” and pointed out about surrounding Cook County, “While black residents make up only 23 percent of the population in the county, they account for 58 percent of the Covid-19 deaths.”
The Detroit News reported last week, “At least 40 percent of those killed by the novel coronavirus in Michigan so far are black, a percentage that far exceeds the proportion of African-Americans in the Detroit region and state.”
If this pattern holds true across other states and cities, this virus could have a catastrophic impact on black people in this country.
And yet, we are still not seeing an abundance of news coverage or national governmental response that center on these racial disparities. Many states haven’t even released race-specific data on cases and deaths. The federal government hasn’t either.
Partly for this reason, we are left with deceptive and deadly misinformation. The perception that this is a jet-setters’ disease, or a spring breakers’ disease, or a “Chinese virus” as President Trump likes to say, must be laid to rest. The idea that this virus is an equal-opportunity killer must itself be killed.
And, we must dispense with the callous message that the best defense we have against the disease is something that each of us can control: We can all just stay home and keep social distance.
As a report last month by the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, “less than one in five black workers and roughly one in six Hispanic workers are able to work from home.”
As the report pointed out, “Only 9.2 percent of workers in the lowest quartile of the wage distribution can telework, compared with 61.5 percent of workers in the highest quartile.”
If you touch people for a living, in elder care or child care, if you cut or fix their hair, if you clean their spaces or cook their food, if you drive their cars or build their houses, you can’t do that from home.
Staying at home is a privilege. Social distancing is a privilege.
The people who can’t must make terrible choices: Stay home and risk starvation or go to work and risk contagion.
And, this isn’t just happening here, it is happening with poor people around the world, from New Delhi to Mexico City.
8a. New York City has long been a focal point of right-wing/fascist hatred. With large non-white populations, a large Jewish population, a strong liberal political tradition and the epicenter of the financial industry (viewed by Nazis and their ilk as “Jewish”), New York would be a target for vectoring by Underground Reich elements.
The right has been calling the virus as the “Cuomovirus.”
“Scapegoating New York Means Ignoring Its Desperate Need” by Kim Phillips-Fein; The New York Times; 4/5/2020.
The anxious notes have been arriving in my inbox from people all over the country: “Watching reports and wanted to check in.”
I know why they are concerned. New York City has emerged as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. For those of us in the city — even if we are staying in our apartments almost all day, pressing elevator buttons with our elbows or gloved hands when returning from a once-a-week journey to the grocery store — we are well aware that we are living at the heart of the storm.
Almost as alarming as the health data, though, is the suggestion circulating in some political corners that New York and New Yorkers are to blame for spreading for the coronavirus, as though the city helped to create a health threat now endangering the good people of the South and Midwest. Once it was the “Chinese virus”; now it also belongs to New York.
As President Trump put it in his short-lived bid to “QUARANTINE” New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, “Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it’s a hot spot” — the implication being that if New Yorkers could only be kept where they are, with checkpoints and guards if need be, Covid-19 could be stopped from spreading elsewhere in the country.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida set up checkpoints to stop cars with New York or Louisiana license plates, so that state troopers can warn drivers to self-quarantine or face 60 days in jail — even as he hesitated to put any social distancing in place or close the beaches for spring break. Instead of admitting the danger of community spread in Florida, the governor framed the problem as one of outsiders bringing germs in. Governors in Maryland and other states warned anyone arriving from the New York City area to isolate themselves.
On Twitter, Covid-19 has taken on a new sobriquet: the “Cuomovirus.”
There’s a long history of scapegoating New York City for problems that have their roots far beyond the Hudson. In the 1970s, the Ford administration blamed New York’s liberal politics, generous social safety net and strong public sector unions for the fiscal crisis that almost brought the city to bankruptcy — even though that crisis arose when the country as a whole was mired in recession, at a moment when federal policies encouraged suburban flight and the departure of factories from cities like New York.
Despite the national context for the city’s difficulties, President Gerald Ford warned that there could be no federal aid for the country’s largest metropolis because it had brought its problems on itself. As his press secretary Ron Nessen put it: “This is not a natural disaster or an act of God. It is a self-inflicted act by the people who have been running New York for a long time.”
Underlying Ford’s punitive attitude was a deeper conservative critique of the city. Its history of leftist politics, its tuition-free city university and its network of public hospitals (several of which were closed in the fiscal crisis) all made New York suspect, as did its reputation as a center for the gay rights movement and feminism.
The vision of New York as morally suspect, a city of sexual promiscuity and libertine mores, also helped shape the federal response to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. The Reagan administration failed so dismally in addressing the health crisis, not even mentioning it publicly for years after it had emerged, as it raged in part because AIDS was viewed as a disease of the cities, especially of gay men and IV drug users, not as a problem of the heartland.
But while some aspects of New York’s situation in the 1970s and beyond were unique, the larger problems the city faced were those confronting the entire country. And the AIDS epidemic, too, spread throughout the nation. Blaming New York was a way to let the federal government off the hook.
Today, the scapegoating of the city could have consequences even more profound than during the 1970s. It could mean the city not getting the federal money it needs or a sufficient supply of ventilators and masks and enough support for health care workers.
What is more, the suggestion that New York is uniquely susceptible can support the dangerous illusion that allowed the coronavirus to gain traction here in the first place: that we are able to cordon ourselves off from one another, that one region of the country — or the world — can be separated from the rest. Acting on this fantasy would be the real danger to states like Florida, Vermont and Tennessee.
At the same time, painting a picture of the entire city as equally at risk may make it harder to address the likelihood that the coronavirus will probably have the most devastating impact on working-class and poor people — who are less likely to have good access to health care, whose underlying health may be worse to begin with and for whom the economic penalties of social distancing are more profound.
The dense urban spaces of New York City are empty now — the libraries and public schools closed, the playgrounds and streets notably quiet. But the social solidarity that they nurture still has the capacity to offer lessons that might help the rest of the country.
I’ve seen this even in my own apartment building, where people have mobilized in support of the most at-risk residents — all from a distance of six feet. High school students are offering virtual tutoring to homebound elementary school kids, younger tenants are picking up groceries for elderly people for whom a trip to the store might be more dangerous, the most organized among us are keeping phone lists so that tenants can call one another if any of us get sick and need help.
And as is happening in places around the world, every night at 7 people come to the windows and the balconies of my apartment complex to cheer for the heroism and dedication of the city’s health care workers — the E.M.T.s, ambulance drivers, physician assistants, janitors, cooks, orderlies, doctors and nurses. As we chant and clap, we can see one another from the windows and across the courtyard, and even in this moment of devastation, the collective life of our city offers sustenance and hope.
8b. Critical observations by Wolfgang Schauble, the German/EU “Austerity Czar” who wrought so much suffering following the 2008 economic collapse has clearly enunciated the functional and philosophical essence of “corporatist” and eugenic doctrine.
This, too, is reflected in the Trumpian “LIBERATE MICHIGAN etc.”
“Germany Threatens” by Rudiger Minow; German Foreign Policy; 5/01/2020.
Hardly a German government representative is more notorious than Wolfgang Schäuble — worldwide. During the international financial crisis, when Schäuble was Germany’s Minister of Finance, his EU counterparts trembled: Schäuble wanted to force them to adapt harsh austerity measures. Because the foreseeable social consequences would cost lives, Schäuble’s tactics seemed to scare Europe with “traumatic effects” and gave it a lesson in German economic ethics: Teutonic brutality and at all costs. “Terrifying,” was the assessment the US Treasury Secretary made following his conversation with Schäuble. Paris and Madrid were also apprehensive; Athens called Schäuble an “arsonist,” on a rampage through Europe. Schäuble has since climbed higher on the government ladder. Schäuble now ranks second, after the President, in the Federal Republic of Germany’s protocolary system. Whatever he says carries weight. And he uses this position. In the midst of the Corona crisis, Schäuble initiated an interview, considered to be an unofficial guideline for the German state’s life and death decisions. Its tenor deserves attention, even beyond Germany’s borders.
Death Is Coming Anyway
Should people have to die, because they are deprived of state resources, essential for the economic cycle, such as currently during the Corona crisis? Does the protection of human life have absolute priority in state policy? In the interview, Schäuble has elaborated in 2020 on what he had already made clear in 2012, during the international financial crisis: “If I hear that everything else must take a back seat to the preservation of life, I must say that this, in such unequivocalness, is not right.” Protection of human life does not have an “absolute priority in our Basic Law.” Death is coming sooner or later anyway. “We are all going to die.” (April 26, 2020)
Rivalry of Values
Schäuble’s statements are exemplary and are of “national significance” declared the German Ethics Council. The council is government financed and prioritizes “economic rights.” They should “not be unconditionally subordinated” to the protection of human life. There is a sort of rivalry of values. If the value of life would have priority, “freedom” would suffer, according to the unanimous judgment of the ethics department of the German Economic Institute (IW). From the standpoint of German constitutional law, according to a former judge on the constitutional court, “the state’s efficiency” would encounter its limits, if life were given top priority, where “everything else must lag arbitrarily far behind.”
Enable Production
In fact, the government’s obligation to the constitution’s highest value — the protection of life — must be relativized, just as Schäuble is doing, confirm the majority of Germany’s government leaders. Prominent voices from the parliamentary opposition parties are also in agreement that the protection of human life, as the primary legitimized duty of the state is a “question of assessment.” From this the FDP draws the conclusion: “therefore, please reopen the businesses.” “Enable production.” In harmony with Germany’s export economy lobbyists and the President of the Bundestag, the chair of the Greens is also one of the relativizers. He finds himself in an alleged “dilemma,” when he thinks of the protection of life during the Corona crisis, while a fellow Green municipal politician speaks in plain operational terms; “Let me tell you quite bluntly: We may be saving people in Germany, who, because of their age or serious previous medical conditions, may, be dead anyway in a half a year.”
Neglect
Deliberately blunt or rationalizing inhibited, decisive groupings within German political and economic policy are displaying clear signs of an ethical deterioration, wherein the preservation of economic activity is being counterpoised to the preservation of human life — offensively, by seeking to depict life as a rivaling commodity of existence. However, practical economic activity is no rival to maintaining human life, it transforms nature into the practical material that sustains and satisfies life — as long as economic activity supports life. However, a “dilemma” arises, when concrete individual lives must be sacrificed, because the practical resources of economic activity are unavailable, although the state’s primacy for making, first and foremost, provisions for human life was reasonable but neglected. The greater the neglect, the greater are the “questions of assessment.”
Escapism
In the current crisis, it is obvious that the practical resources that economic activity could have produced for the preservation of human life, were not or insufficiently available before death could no longer be avoided. By not providing even the simplest means of protection, the officials have shifted responsibility for life and death “questions of assessment” to the hospitals. This escapism has cost additional lives or overwhelmed the lives of many nurses and doctors.
Barbarians
Protective means that are now being supplied are subjected to usurious trade; survival machines for intensive-care medicine are inciting stock market speculators, betting on company shares of the manufacturers, increasing their wealth. The poor are dying in rest homes and the suburbs. As long as the state allows this situation to continue, the preservation of human life and preservation of the economic activity are indeed in opposition to one another — however not as the advocates of value rivalry are intending. A state that relinquishes the preservation of human life, to that of economic freedom has either given up its existence or become barbarian.
Failure
It is not solely a German peculiarity to not draw boundaries between civilization and biology in the event of state failure. The ideology of failure adores the dull stench of predator dens, where the stronger animals feed on the weaker. There, archaic instinct makes the preservation of life superfluous. The predator archaic and its economic ideal — social Darwinism — determine phases of German history, wherein the state can no longer control its economic potency; it must be catapulted beyond its borders or collapse. Then it will be doubtful, whether everything else will recede, if the preservation of life prohibits everything else, namely death. Then a threat can be heard from Germany.
Upheaval
However, if with death, the highest obligation for the state, the protection of human life, falls, then the state’s right to the monopoly on the use of force to protect human life against any other claim, falls as well. If the monopoly on the use of force falls, the state falls into its condition that relativized human life and forces to elevate human life again to its permanent right.
9. “Colleges Running Out of Cash Worry Students Will Vanish, Too” by Anemona Hartocollis; The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. A1-A-15 [Western Edition].
10. “Outbreak Strains States’ Finances” by Mary Williams Walsh; The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. B1-B6 [Western Edition].
11. ” ‘This Is Going to Kill Small-Town America’ ” by David Gelles: The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. B1-B5 [Western Edition].
12. The New York Times [Western Edition] headline for 4/16/2020 said it all, as far as the fortunes of retail outlets.
. . . . Total sales, which include retail purchases in stores and online as well as money spent at bars and restaurants, fell 8.7 percent from the previous month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. The decline was by far the largest in the nearly three decades the government has tracked the data.
Even that bleak figure doesn’t capture the full impact of the sudden economic freeze on the retail industry. Most states didn’t shut down nonessential businesses until late March or early April, meaning data for the current month could be worse still. . . .
13. “Evidence of Virus Effect on Economy Grows More Ominous” [AP]; The New York Times; 4/15/2020.
14. “135 Million Face Starvation. That Could Double” by Abdi Latif Dahir; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. A1-A6; [Western Edition].
15. “This Pandemic Is Bringing Another” by Nicholas Kristof; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A23 [Op-ed–Western Edition].
16. “Covid-19 Threatens Global Safety Net” Editorial; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A22 [Western Edition].
17. “How Government ‘Failed the Elderly’ ” Letter to the Editor; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A22 [Western Edition].
Re “Death Toll Spikes at Nursing Homes as Defenses Crack’ (front page, April 18).
18a. “A Limit on Trump’s Immigration Power” by Jennifer M. Chacon and Erwin Chermerinsky; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A23 [op-ed–Western Edition].
Tyson Foods, one of the U.S.’s biggest meat processors, didn’t mince words in a full page New York Times spread that ran Sunday, in which they warned, “the food supply chain is breaking.”
“As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,” John Tyson, Chairman of the Board of Tyson Foods, wrote in a letter published as an advertisement. “As a result, there will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed.” . . .
19. “Banks Steered Richest Clients To Federal Aid” by Emily Flitter and Stacy Cowley; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. A1-A14 [Western Edition].
20. “Millions In Relief For Backer Of Resorts” by Jeanna Smialek, Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. B1-B5 [Western Edition].
Excellent Program.
Your articles hit the bullseye.....You are good at that Dave,
It is very unfortunate that most people do not know the true enemy and blame the wrong parties as the public works against everything.
I suppose that is why the Bad Guys are winning.
The world cultures are controlled by the enemy and people are brainwashed and running scared.
Here’s a pair of articles that potentially relate to the intriguing possibility that the Trump administration could be intentionally trying to encourage the spread of the virus for the purpose of obscuring phylogenetic traces of earlier outbreaks of the virus in the US that would undermine the narrative of how the virus emerged in China and only later infected the US. The first excerpt is about President Trump’s surprise announcement that he’ll be giving the West Point commencement speech in June, which happens to be the perfect move if encouraging the spread of newer viral strains to obscure older yet-to-be-officially-discovered viral strains was goal.
The second article about new research out of China that found for the first time a difference in the level of infectivity between different strains of the virus. A 270-fold difference in viral levels between the weakest and strongest tested strains. And it appears that Europe was primarily hit by the more virulent strain which later traveled from Europe to New York City. The outbreak on US West Coast, on the other hand, was primarily of the weaker strain. This finding could account in part for the differences in the severity of the outbreak between the US East Coast and West Coast. And, of course, the finding also suggest that any West Point cadets that get infected after traveling to New York for the ceremony in June are going to infected with the more virulent strains before returning home to spread it around:
First, recall the story about research done by a team at Cambridge University that used phylogenetic analysis — constructing family trees of the virus based on comparisons of their genomic sequences and then making inferences about the timing of the geographical spread of the virus — found three distinct strains of the virus: Type A, Type B, and Type C. Basically, they looked at all of the viral strains available in the GISAID database of viral sequences taken from COVID-19 patients, looked at the mutations in the sequence, and logically constructed family trees of the virus based on those mutations using the simple logic that if virus a has mutations 1,2,3, and 4, it must have emerged from a virus that already had mutations 1, 2, and 3 (where the ‘original’ virus didn’t have any of those mutations). Using that simple approach they can infer how the virus evolved and spread around the world.
And while most of the mutations in the virus’s genetic sequences don’t actually change the amino acid composition of the viral proteins (something that could dramatically change the function of the virus), there were two amino acid changes they identified. That’s what defined the Type A, B, and C strains: Type B stains all have a genetic mutation that results in an an amino acid mutation and Type C has an additional amino acid change from Type B (so Type C has two amino acid differences from Type A). Type A is the ‘original’ strain that initially caused the outbreak in China. Type B popped up in Wuhan, quickly becoming the dominant strain there suggesting that Type B may be better at outcompeting Type A. And Type C emerged from Type B in Singapore. Europe was primarily hit by Types B and C. And the only countries with significant infections of Type A outside of China are the US and Australia, with the US West Coast cases being dominated by Type A strains while New York City and the East Coast are primarily Type B strains.
Next, recall how the Cambridge team estimated the date range for the emergence of Type A in China can came up with a range of September 13 — December 7, which has the last week of October right in the middle. It was that last week in October that we had the Military World Games in Wuhan, leading to counter accusations by the Chinese government that the virus was introduced to China by the US military at those games, although technically any military attending those games could be a possible source of the virus under that scenario. Or really any independent group with access to the virus. All you’d have to do is infect some soldiers.
Next, recall the possible implications if there were indeed infected soldiers at the Military World Games: if those soldiers brought the virus back to their military bases or home countries in late October/early November and the virus started spreading locally, that would raise the possibility that there are strains of Type A floating around that DON’T have the same mutations that were acquired by Type A in Wuhan before jumping to the US in late 2019. In other words, strains that don’t ‘fit’ into any of the existing family trees of the virus.
Remember, we are told that the virus emerged in Wuhan as the original Type A and then spread around for a while acquiring new mutations (so a bunch of Type A subtypes were emerging) until the Type B strain evolved in Wuhan — which has an amino acid difference from Type A and therefore might be functionally different — and the pandemic suddenly exploded as Type B soon become the dominant strain in Wuhan. At some point while this was happening the first Type A strain made its way to the US from China ans started spreading along the US West Coast. And when that Type A strain first arrived it should have had any mutations that had previously been acquired in Wuhan and therefore all of the other cases of Type A in the US should have those same early-Wuhan mutations if we assume that is the origin of the US cases of Type A.
But if the US actually got Type A earlier from infected soldiers (or perhaps an escaped virus from Fort Detrick), there could be phylogenetic family trees of Type A subtypes in the US that don’t have those early Wuhan mutations. They would, instead, have whatever mutations were randomly acquired as the Type A strain spread around the military base a local community. And if these alternative Type A familes of related subtypes were sequenced and submitted to a sequence database like GISAID they would stick out like a sore thumb to analysts and raise major questions about when and how the virus arrived in the US (or Australia or any other country that may have had an earlier infection). So if a government was heavily invested in the current prevailing narrative — that the virus erupted in China in late 2019 and only spread around the world starting in December — that government would need to avoid the discovery of any alternative Type A phylogenetic trees that challenge that narrative.
Finally, recall that since the Type B strain appeared to completely overtake Type A when it emerged in Wuhan that suggests Type B might be able to outcompete Type A when they are both spreading in the same location and therefore one of the most effective ways to avoid the discovery of alternative Type A phylogenetic trees would simply be to do an inadequate job of controlling the pandemic so it continues to spread thus allow the dominant Type B strains to move into the areas where any alternative Type A phylogenetic strains might be floating around and become the dominant strain most likely to be sequenced. That’s part of the context of the GOP/Koch/Mercer/militia Tea Party-style campaign to clamor for reopening states: the states that are reopening as a consequence of those protests are the states that have had the fewest cases discovered and therefore are the most undersampled states when it comes to the viral sequences floating around in them. So if states reopen too soon the Type B strain from the East Coast is bound to sweep in and dominate new cases after the inevitable ‘second wave’ of new cases.
That’s all the context for following story. A story about a recent decision by President Trump that threatens to spread that Type B strain not only all over the US but in particular all across the US military, the institution most likely to be harboring alternative Type A phylogenetic strains that could have been circulating undetected for who knows how long in that relatively young and healthy demographic: Trump just made a surprise announcement that he’s going to be giving the commencement address for the graduating West Point class on June 13th. Just 6 weeks away. In New York City. The heart of the Type B pandemic in the US
President Trump’s announcement reportedly caught Army officials completely off guard, who now have to scramble to develop plans for calling the ~1,000 graduating cadets who have already scattered across the country back to New York City for the ceremony before going back home and hopefully not spreading the virus. It really was like the perfect move if spreading Type B across the military and US was a goal. These young cadets are the most likely to be asymptomatic spreaders who can spread it to all sorts of other young healthy people capable of asymptomatic spread. Even if 999 of the cadets successful go through this without catching the disease and spreading it around, a single case getting through the miltary’s COVID surveillance regime could be enough to set off a new wave in the military. A new Type B wave in the military that could overtake any older Type A strains that people may not want discovered:
“That was news to everyone, including officials at West Point, according to three people involved with or briefed on the event. The academy had been looking at the option of a delayed presidential commencement in June, but had yet to complete any plans. With Mr. Trump’s pre-emptive statement, they are now summoning 1,000 cadets scattered across the country to return to campus in New York, the state that is the center of the outbreak.”
What a grand surprise from the president: a surprise order to call 1,000 cadets scattered across the country to the center of the outbreak for a big ceremony on June 13th at the West Point campus that’s only about 50 miles North of New York City. And then they’ll all rescatter back across the country to share any new infections. And if you’re expecting to see a bunch of cadets socially distanced with face masks, note how Trump said he didn’t like the look of other socially distanced military graduation ceremonies and hoped the “look” would be “nice and tight”:
And, again, New York isn’t just the center of the outbreak in the US. It’s the center of the Type B strain outbreak in the US meaning when those students rescatter back across the US they’re going to be rescattering Type B strains. Which is exactly what one would want to happen if they wanted to obscure non-China-origin Type A phylogenetic strains that could be silently spreading in the parts of the US.
Now, here’s an article about new research that relates to this ‘let Type B sweep over older Type A’ scenario. It also just more generally relates to our understanding of the nature of this disease in crucial ways: A research team led by Professor Li Lanjuan at Zhejiang University just developed a test to compare the infectivity of different strains of the virus. Dr. Li was the person who first called for the lockdown of Wuhan so this is someone who has been at the forefront of understanding this virus from the beginning.
The team randomly sampled 11 strains found within China, infected live cells with the virus, and measured the level of virus at different time points. They found a significant difference in viral levels, with a ~270-fold difference between the ‘strongest’ and ‘weakest’ of the 11 tested strains. They also found quite a few previously undiscovered mutations which suggests there’s a significant undersampling of viral sequences right now.
Crucially, they found that the ‘stronger’ strains that produced higher viral loads were the strains that went on to predominantly infect Europe and then the East Coast of the US and that this may account for the different mortality rates observed between the US East Coast and West Coast. Recall how Dr. Forster’s found that the Type B and Type C strains went on to dominate the European and US East Coast infections. Also recall how the Type A and Type B strains appears to correspond to ‘S‑Type’ and ‘L‑Type’ strains identified by an earlier team out of China. That team observed that the ‘L‑Type’ strain emerged in Wuhan from the earlier ‘S‑Type’ type and then went on to almost entirely dominate the new cases in the city, leading the team to speculate that the L‑Type strain really was somehow more virulent. This prompted other virologist to attack the team’s findings for suggesting that there might be a functional difference between the S and L‑types because there were other possible explanations for why the L‑Type suddenly came to dominate new cases. Well, based on this latest research it sure sounds like the L‑type (Type B) strain really is more virulent than the S‑type (Type A) strain. So by calling back those 1000 cadets to attend Trump’s West Point ceremony in June there isn’t just going to be a spread of the virus across the US and inside the military. It’s going to be the spread of the deadlier strains of the virus:
“They also confirmed for the first time with laboratory evidence that certain mutations could create strains deadlier than others.”
It’s the first validation that there really are different strains with different levels of mortality. A 270-fold difference in observed viral levels between the strongest and weakest strains. And this dramatic difference was discovered from just a tiny sample of 11 randomly selected strains, hinting at potentially more significant differences between strains that have yet to be discovered:
And not only could these findings help explain differences in regional mortality (e.g. why the pandemic was so much worse on US East Coast than West Coast), but it could also have implications for the development of a vaccine. One of the disturbing aspects of this virus from the beginning has been the relatively low mutation rates, especially for mutations that make a functional difference in the virus, because that reflected how the virus was already so incredibly well-evolved for spreading between humans. But the one benefit of that near-optimized evolutionary status was the prospects of easier vaccine development that wouldn’t have to worry as much about a changing virus neutralizing the vaccine. This study is a hint that we still might run into complications from a changing virus when developing a vaccine despite the virus already being so remarkably efficient at spreading:
Bit by bit, the picture that’s emerging really is increasingly looking like the virus really has gotten deadlier as the pandemic evolved. But not deadlier due to an enhanced ability to infect human cells. The virus is already incredibly good at that. Instead, it’s looking like the deadlier strains are are somehow better at making viral copies after infection and a great way to infect more people is to make more copies of the virus. This is an important point regarding the scenario of just allowing Type B cases to sweep over areas that could have older alternative Type A strains because it adds further evidence that Type B really is better at outcompeting Type A when they’re in the same location. So if indeed there really is an agenda of allowing more aggressive strains from Europe to sweep over regions of the US where older alternative Type A strains could be floating around this latest research suggests that agenda has a good chance of working. Working by spreading an extra deadly version of the virus around.
In light of the widespread and seemingly blind ongoing acceptance of the ‘expert’ conclusion that there is strong evidence that the SARS-CoV‑2 virus wasn’t man-made, here’s a pair of interviews with other experts who are thankfully supplying sane rebuttals to that absurd conclusion. Both interviews address that letter to Nature published on March 17 by Kristian G. Anderson, et al., where they made a surprisingly shoddy case for why the virus couldn’t have been man-made. A letter which was suddenly and widely touted as some sort of definitive answer to the question:
First, here’s an interview of Professor Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, did with GMWatch, a UK based non-profit focused on genetically modified foods. Professor Newman is a strong critic of the biotechnology industry being applied to agriculture. The second interview is with Dr Michael Antoniou, another long-time critic of GMO technology. So we have two long-standing GMO critics who have a a lot of experience publicly calling BS on misguided consensus views now calling BS on that widespread blind embrace of that Nature letter.
So how does Newman rebut that Nature letter? Well, for starters, he addresses the key argument in the Nature letter about the SARS-CoV‑2 virus’s Receptor Binding Domain (RBD). That was the argument that because the sequence for the RBD didn’t exactly match the “optimized” RBD that simulations used by some experts predict would be the optimal design for maximum binding to the ACE2 receptor therefore the virus was very likely not man-made. This is a silly argument for a number of reasons, including the obvious fact that someone designing a virus might want it to look like a designed virus and might not need it to have the maximum theoretical receptor binding capacity and the fact that techniques for undirected evolution that could finding previously unknown sequences with enhanced binding are well established techniques. But as Newman points outs, while the particular RBD simulations referred to by those authors may have arrived at a different RBD sequence than what we find in SARS-CoV‑2, the RBD of SARS has been closely studied by labs around the world for decades. How many different “optimized” sequences for that RBD have been found in those years? Who knows, and that’s the point: not only is it absurd to assume that an engineered virus would have to have the exact optimized RBD sequence they calculated in their simulation but it’s absurd to assume there’s only one “optimized” RBD sequence that’s been developed in a lab.
Newman then addresses the second key argument in the Nature paper about the furin cleavage site found on the S‑protein that makes it extremely easy for the virus to get activated after binding with an ACE2 receptor. Recall how the authors appeared to argue that while a polybasic cleavage site like the one found in SARS-CoV‑2 hasn’t been observed in other bat or pangolin coronaviruses — and it’s assumed that the virus came from bats or pangolins — it’s possible the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally, especially if there were a number of repeated animal-to-human transmission events over time that gave the virus repeated opportunities to evolve such a site. It’s also possible that there are bat or pangolin coronaviruses that do have furin cleavage sites and haven’t been discovered yet. And while both of those points are technically true, professor Newman points out that adding a furin cleavage site to coronviruses to investigate how that impacts the virus’s pathogenicity is actually something that has been done in published experiments. Beyond that, they actually cite one of those papers in the Nature letter and refer to those experiments. So if we are predicating our determination of whether or not this virus was man-made based on whether or not the virus has features that have been previously created in the lab as they proposed for the enhanced ACE2 binding of the SARS-CoV‑2 RBD sequence, this furin cleavage site would indeed be a feature that was previously created in a lab. And yet somehow that just got ignored by the authors despite them citing and mentioning experiments were furin cleavage sites were added to coronaviruses to study them. It’s quite odd.
In the interview with Dr Michael Antoniou, Antoniou makes the crucial point that when it comes to assessing whether or not a virus may have been man-made there’s no need at all to find past research demonstrating the unique optimized features found in your novel virus because techniques for randomly evolving optimized features are well established. The creators for one such technique won the Nobel prize in 2018. Antoniou also notes that he wrote a letter to Nature Medicine rebutting the March 17 letter but it was rejected on the grounds that “we do not feel that they advance or clarify understanding” of the original article without offering a scientific argument to rebut his points.
So while a broad and highly erroneous consensus appears to have emerged that the virus couldn’t possibly have been man-made, at least that consensus is being challenged. Challenged and then widely ignored which is why they’re appearing niche outlets like GMWatch. In other words, the goods news is that these challenges are happening. The bad news is that the news is still ignoring them:
“In an email interview with GMWatch, Newman, who is editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Theory and co-author (with Tina Stevens) of the book Biotech Juggernaut, amplified this speculation by noting, “The Nature Medicine paper points to variations in two sites of the spike protein of the new coronavirus that the authors claim must have arisen by natural selection in the wild. However, genetic engineering of one of these sites, the ACE2 receptor binding domain, has been proposed since 2005 in order to help generate vaccines against these viruses (see this paper). It is puzzling that the authors of the Nature Medicine commentary did not cite this paper, which appeared in the prominent journal Science.””
Yep, as far back as 2005 we had papers proposing modifications to the RBD or SARS in order to enhance the binding of the virus. How many theoretical designs of human coronavirus RBDs have been developed in the following 15 years? And yet the fact that the SARS-CoV‑2 RBD doesn’t match a particular simulated optimized RBD gets cited as evidence that the virus evolved naturally. And the same is true with the furin cleavage site: the addition of a furin cleavage site to human coronaviruses has long been proposed and they actually cite a paper that did exactly that. And yet somehow these past experiments just kind of get dismissed in their final analysis to give way to conclusion that it must have been natural:
And now here’s the interview of Dr Michael Antoniou, where he makes the crucial point when it comes to comparing the observed sequences of viruses to previous lab experiments and analyses to assess whether or not a virus may have been made in a lab: it makes no sense to expect the features of an engineered virus to match previously engineered viral features because techniques the “optimized” sequences developed by computer simulations haven’t been validated in live systems and there are techniques for randomly developing optimized viral features in cell cultures and model organism. Directed iterative evolutionary selection process is an example of one of these techniques: So if someone uses human cell cultures experiments, for example, to develop a virus optimized for infecting humans there’s no reason to assume the optimized viral features that emerge from those experiments would match the simulated theoretical optimized features:
“However, the London-based molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou commented that this line of reasoning fails to take into account that there are a number of laboratory-based systems that can select for high affinity RBD variants that are able to take into account the complex environment of a living organism. This complex environment may impact the efficiency with which the SARS-CoV spike protein can find the ACE2 receptor and bind to it. An RBD selected via these more realistic real-world experimental systems would be just as “ideal”, or even more so, for human ACE2 binding than any RBD that a computer model could predict. And crucially, it would likely be different in amino acid sequence. So the fact that SARS-CoV‑2 doesn’t have the same RBD amino acid sequence as the one that the computer program predicted in no way rules out the possibility that it was genetically engineered.”
Yep, there’s absolutely no shortage of techniques that can develop an “optimized” viral feature without solely relying on computer simulations. Computer simulations that aren’t event necessarily truly optimized. We have no idea until the theoretical sequences are tested. So if someone uses one of the many techniques for randomly generating an optimized viral feature using live animals or cell culture there should be no expectation that what emerges from those experiments exactly matches what’s predicted by the simulations:
And one of those techniques for developing optimized (or, if not optimized at least improved) viral features, directed iterative evolutionary selection process, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. It’s a technique that can work with human cell cultures. You don’t need a bunch of live humans to conduct these experiments. You just need a bunch of human cells:
There’s are even slower, undirected techniques for randomly allowing evolution in cell cultures to come up with previously unknown viral features. As Nikolai Petrovsky, a researcher at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in South Australia, recently pointed out, just letting coronaviruses propagate in human cell cultures would eventually come up with new viruses that no longer resemble the original virus. It might take a long time for the desired end result, but because “there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention”:
And yet, for whatever reason, when Dr Antoniou attempted to point this out in his letter to Nature Medicine he was rejected due to not adding any clarity to the situation. Why exactly bringing up these valid critiques don’t add clarity remains unclear. We’ll see if the critiques by scientists like Newman and Antoniou are ever given their proper airing. But since they are critiques that are rooted in the recognition that it’s unfortunately shockingly easy to create novel viruses with previously unknown ‘optimized’ features we can tragically be pretty confident that SARS-CoV‑2 won’t be the last novel mystery virus of this ‘nature’. Hopefully future critics have a more receptive audience...a more receptive audience that hasn’t already been wiped out by a fascist doomsday virus.
@Pterrafractyl–
Good work! Something to be borne in mind when assessing Newman’s and Antoniou’s critique is that devastatingly important Whitney Webb article:
https://spitfirelist.com/news/disturbing-article-about-darpa-and-bat-borne-coronaviruses/
DARPA has state-of-the-art super computers, twined with Artificial Intelligence.
When applied to the scenarios described by Newman and Antononiou, it would be VERY easy to devise such organisms.
And they were DEFINITELY studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
Best,
Dave
Oh look: a rule change to federal nursing home infection control regulations that the Trump administration proposed last year — before the COVID-19 outbreak — is still under consideration. The proposed change happens to gut the federal regulations for infection control, of course. So the Trump administration is actively considering the gutting of federal nursing home infection control regulations. In the middle of a viral pandemic distinguished by it hyper-infectiousness. Yep.
The rule change was proposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a ‘usual suspect’ agency for the Trump administration’s attacks on the safety-net. The proposal would change the amount of time an infection preventionist must devote to a nursing home. Currently, an infection preventionist has to be working at least part-time at a home. The new rule would be for the preventionist spend to “sufficient time” at the facility, which is an undefined term that lets the nursing home decide how much time should be spent. So if a nursing home decides that it doesn’t need to dedicate as money resources to infection prevention as the current rules mandate that will be up to them.
The rule change doesn’t require congressional approval so CMS can unilaterally make this change on its own. And while the change hasn’t been finalized yet, CMS defended the rule again just last week. So the CMS proposed a rule change last year that would have been dangerous to seniors even without a global hyper-infectious pandemic, then a historically hyper-infectious pandemic that hits the elderly the hardest breaks out and CMS is sticking with its rule change. So in case it wasn’t already abundantly clear from the all of the prior moves to restrict Medicare and Medicaid coverage that Trump’s CMS is looking for excuses to kill off the vulnerable here’s your latest example:
“A rule proposed last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) would modify the amount of time an infection preventionist must devote to a facility from at least part-time to “sufficient time,” an undefined term that lets the facility decide how much time should be spent. The regulation has not been finalized, but CMS last week defended its proposal, saying it aims to reduce regulatory burden and strengthen infection control.”
CMS doubled-down just last week. That sure sounds like the agency is seriously intent on making that rule change. So now each nursing home operator will get to decide for itself how much an infection preventionists needs to spend at the home. “Part-time” is no longer the minimum:
And note the ominous warning from industry lobbyist who is backing this rule change: The American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, which represents 14,000 long-term-care facilities, warns that if more infection control oversight is imposed during this pandemic it might put nursing homes at risk of closing. Think about that statement. The industry lobbying group is basically saying that the cost of increasing infection controls during this pandemic might be too much for nursing homes to financial handle. In other words, many nursing home operators are based on a business model that precludes effective infection control. That’s effectively what this industry lobbying group has admitted which sure sounds like a powerful reason to increase oversight of the industry:
As the lobbying group suggests, when we get through this, the entire US will no doubt need to have a serious discussion and reckoning about its infection control practices in health care settings and throughout society. A reckoning that should probably take place before we get through this and belatedly discovery that large numbers of nursing home deaths could have been prevented with more rigorous infection controls.
So as we can see, Trump’s CMS is taking indeed steps to deal with the pandemic. Specifically, steps to ensure carnage in nursing homes across the US but especially the nursing homes operating on the tightest budgets. That’s where we should expect maximal carnage. As the industry lobby is openly warning us, some nursing homes simply aren’t going to be able to stay open if they need to deal with the costs of “more oversight”. Are the nursing homes that can’t deal with the costs of “more oversight” going to able and willing to deal with the costs of greater infection controls on their own after that oversight is lifted? We’ll find out. Presumably in the form of even more nursing home mass deaths.
In other news, the state of Connecticut just released a new report on the COVID deaths in the state in the last week of April. Guess where 90 percent of the deaths took place:
“Between April 22 and April 29, the state’s death total rose from 1,544 to 2,089, or 545 new deaths, according to data released by the state Department of Public Health. In that same seven-day period nursing home deaths rose from 768 to 1,249, meaning 481 among the 545 new deaths — about 88% — were nursing home patients.”
So Connecticut’s death count rose by around 1/3rd in the last week of April and 88% of those new deaths were in nursing homes. Keep in mind that this would be the same week the CMS doubled-down on is proposed relaxation of the infection control rule change.
And it’s not just Connecticut that’s finding the bulk of new deaths in nursing homes. That’s been the case across the North East US:
And note what Connecticut doing in response to this nursing home pandemic: calling in the Connecticut National Guard and federal CDC to help state public health official inspect all of the states 215 nursing homes to ensure the are following proper infection control procedures:
So that gives us a glimpse of how states are probably going to be dealing with growing nursing home pandemic after the CMS relaxes that rule and the pandemic gets even worse: call in the national guard and CDC to conduct those infection control inspections instead.
In related news, President Trump’s poll numbers appear to be suffering with senior voters, a core part of his voting base, in response to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Image that.
Here’s a set of articles about a decision by the US military that we really have to hope is rooted in an abundance of caution and not an abundance of evidence. Because if there’s an abundance of evidence behind this decision by the military that’s really bad news for more than just the military:
A Department of Defense memo just published by the Military Times indicates that new US military recruits are going to be screen for COVID-19 cases and if they have a history of COVID-19 they will be permanently banned from military service:
““During the medical history interview or examination, a history of COVID-19, confirmed by either a laboratory test or a clinician diagnosis, is permanently disqualifying ...” the memo reads.”
A permanent disqualification for joining the military. That’s the current guideline for anyone with a history of COVID-19. Why such an extreme response to a disease that appears to be largely a mild infection for the vast majority of young adults? Especially if infection can confer immunity? Well, there still remain a number of open questions about the long-term health consequences of an infection. Open questions like whether or not people can even get immunity. Or if there’s permanent lung damage:
Now, it’s important to point out that COVID-19 is the name for the disease caused by the SARS-CoV‑2 virus so it’s possible for someone to be infected by the virus and not manifest COVID-19. In other words, if a candidate recruit has has the SARS-CoV‑2 antibodies, but not an actual COVID-19 case history, they will still be eligible for recruitment. That’s what the Pentagon appeared to confirm to Talking Points Memo in the following piece: someone needs to have been hospitalized with COVID-19 for the ban to apply. The Pentagon also confirmed that this is just an “interim” policy and a permanent policy is under development. So, again, we really have to hope this move is being made out of an abundance of caution due to a lack of information on the long-term effects of the disease and not due to them military gathering evidence that the disease really is permanently damaging otherwise young and healthy people in large enough numbers to justify make kind of blanket ban:
“A Pentagon spokeswoman told TPM that, per the regulations, “anybody that has been hospitalized with COVID-19 will be medically disqualified and would need a service waiver to join the military.””
Hospitalization appears to be required for the ban to apply. Which makes sense if you’re going to do a COVID ban because almost all young adults is going to get exposed to the virus eventually and most of them have very mild symptoms that don’t require hospitalization. Hopefully this rule isn’t inadvertently going to end up encouraging aspiring recruits to not go to the hospital if they get sick with COVID-like symptoms this summer. And, again, hopefully this rules isn’t based on internal medical data the military has collected on the long-term consequences of COVID-19 on the relatively young and healthy.
Finally, here’s a Vox article that compiles what it known so far about the possible long-term consequences of COVID-19 cases. Unfortunately, based on the data we have so far, it sounds like the Pentagon’s decision to impose a life-time ban on people hospitalized for COVID-19 might make sense for an institution like the military because there are a lot of reports of relatively young people who get sick and are potentially dealing with life-long consequences. A shockingly broad array of life-long consequences:
“Because Covid-19 is a new disease, there are no studies about its long-term trajectory for those with more severe symptoms; even the earliest patients to recover in China were only infected a few months ago. But doctors say the novel coronavirus can attach to human cells in many parts of the body and penetrate many major organs, including the heart, kidneys, brain, and even blood vessels.”
As the evidence keeps coming in with one unexpected symptom after another one finding is becoming increasingly clear: This virus attacks the whole body. It’s a finding unfortunately reflected in the remarkable diversity of symptoms experienced by patients even after leaving the hospital. And that includes “ground-class” signs of scarring in the lungs of asymptomatic patients:
There’s the range of cardiopulmonary complications like blood clotting that, in turn, can inflict permanent damage on the body:
Then there’s the possible neurocognitive damage. We don’t know yet what that damage might be, but symptoms like decreased attention, concentration, memory, or nerve damage are a real possibility. And for the severely ill who have to endure the kind of traumatic experience like being hooked up to ventilator for days for weeks on end, there’s the real possibility of additional long-term cognitive impairment and PTSD:
Hormone levels can also be affected, which could have a range of complications including fertility issues. But it’s also possible the virus directly attack testicles, which happen to have a high number of ACE2 receptors. So there’s a range of ways this virus could impact fertility that we already know of which is a particularly troubling finding given the racial disparities of how this disease is being felt. Causing fertility issues in young males is the kind of ‘feature’ that would make the spread of this virus even more tempting for white nationalists. And we already know in the US it’s disproportionately poor minorities catching the disease since that group tends of have employment where working from home isn’t an option. How will a white nationalist administration like the Trump administration respond if it learns this disease is disproportionately hitting minorities and causing fertility issues? Because that’s the kind of viral ‘feature’ someone like, say, Steve Bannon, would be dreaming of spreading across the US if it could be done in a way that systematically targets young minorities:
So as that Vox article makes clear, the Pentagon doesn’t necessarily need to be sitting on internal data on the medical consequences for recovered COVID patients because the publicly available data is already so ominous.
In other news, here’s an update on President Trump’s inexplicable decision to give the commencement speech for this year’s graduating West Point class — a decision that’s going to force 1,000 graduating seniors to travel back to New York to the campus just 50 miles North of New York City: there is no update so we can only assume it’s still scheduled for June. It’s the kind of situation where the lack of new news should really be news.
President Trump did it again: He said something that makes is seem like he’s trying to ensure SARS-CoV‑2 virus is allowed to spread undetected as much as possible as rapidly. Specifically, Trump called coronavirus testing “overrated” and suggested that testing isn’t actually useful because people can get infected after they test negative. And while it’s possible Trump is newly enamored with the “herd immunity” strategy of just letting the virus spread as rapidly as possible in the hopes that everyone gains immunity, keep in mind that if there were indeed earlier undiscovered (or undisclosed) outbreaks of this coronavirus in the US in 2019 this strategy of encouraging the spread without testing could be an effective way to obscure those earlier outbreaks from being retrospectively discovered through phylogenetic analysis of viral sequences. Especially if newer strains of the virus have a demonstrated capacity to become the dominant strain when they move into an area and effectively replace older strains that may have been bubbling under the surface.
So with that in mind, here’s another study recently came out about the emergence of different strains of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus. This one is from a lab Los Alamos National Laboratory. Like many of the previous studies tracking the emergence and spread of different strains this study was also based on phylogenetic analysis of viral sequences found in the GISAID consortium. The team found that a particular mutation on the ‘spike-protien’ that arose in late January rapidly came to dominate the pandemic in Europe and then the US East Coast pandemic and issued a warning that could have big ominous implications for any “herd immunity” strategies.
Part of what makes this study interesting is they found that this new strain would rapidly replace the strains that were already in an area when it moved it according to their analysis. The authors say they repeatedly saw this happening in their analysis. Recall how, back in early March, a team out of China observed how mutant strain — they ‘L‑type’ strain — emerged in Wuhan in late December and rapidly become the dominant strain in the Wuhan epidemic. Then there was the study out of Cambridge that identified three distinct strains (Type A, B, and C), with China being primarily hit by Type A at first. But then Type B strain emerged in Wuhan in December and rapidly became the dominant strain there while spreading to Europe and eventually the US East Coast. The Type B strain appears to be the same as the ‘L‑type’ strain from the earlier study based on the mutations the researchers used to define them.
This latest study out of Los Alamos appears to have arrived at a similar conclusion about a new strain emerging that overtakes the previous strains in an area. Except in this case the new strain they identified emerged in late January. The authors suggest that it either arose in Europe (specifically Germany) or Wuhan in late January and rapidly jumped to Europe. So it sounds like the last few months of the pandemic in the US and Europe have been heavily dominated by a new strain that was first identified in late January in Wuhan and Germany.
Keep in mind that Germany’s first official case was January 27. So this new strain was in Germany right around the same time the country discover its first case. At the same time, with the new evidence pointing towards military athletes from France, Spain, and Italy experiencing COVID-like symptoms at the Military World Games in Wuhan in late October, the question of when the original strain of the virus first hit Europe is completely up in the air at this point.
Now, as with those previous two studies of this virus based on phylogenetic analysis, this paper has provoked a strong backlash from parts of the virology community because the authors speculated that the this new strain might actually be somehow more infectious based on its apparent ability to become the dominant strain of the virus in an area. Specifically, the key mutation that the authors used to define this new strain, D614G, causes an amino acid change in the virus that converts an Aspartic Acid amino acid (D) to a Glycine (G), which is potentially a significant change since Aspartic Acid is chemically quite different from Glycine. And it’s potentially even more significant because this mutation is in the “spike” protein of the virus which is the part of the virus that binds to cells.
But it also might be a completely inconsequential mutation and the ability of the viruses with that D614G mutation to overtake the local strains could be due to random founder effects. Maybe. We don’t yet know. But we do know that this mutation might functionally change the virus and make it more infectious which would partially explain how it rapidly became the dominant strain in Europe and the US East Coast. And if that’s the case, that also means any earlier strains of this virus that may have been floating around Europe or the US in 2019 are almost certainly going to be overtaken by this new strain, thus obscuring the ability to retrospectively identify those earlier outbreaks through phylogenetic analyses of identified cases.
But speculation that the new strain is actually more infectious wasn’t solely based on inference by watching the spread of the strain. The study also included data from a team at a hospital that was treating COVID patients who compared the patients that had the old and new strains. The doctors found that patients with the new mutation had higher viral loads but there was no difference in hospitalization rates. That’s a difficult pair of findings to interpret but it’s worth recalling the recent study that measured the amounts of the virus created by different strains of the virus in cultured human cells and found a wide range of viral load with a 270-fold difference between the slowest and fastest strains. So if those findings in that hospital are confirmed then we might be dealing with different strains that cause very different levels of viral load. And while similar hospitalization rates for different strains with different viral loads seems counterintuitive, keep in mind that if that’s actually the case and the new strain isn’t more deadly than the older strain that would make this new strain an effective means of obscuring the presence of older strains (by inhibiting our ability to conduct retrospective phylogenetic analyses) without ultimately killing more people.
It’s also important to keep in mind that even if we learn that this virus is mutating in ways that create real functional differences in the virus, that’s not an argument against the virus being made in a lab or having undergone some sort of previous ‘gain-of-function’ experiments or direct manual engineering. Part of what’s been surprising virologists this whole time as we’ve learned about its structure and function is how it seems like have so many ‘features’ that make it exceptionally good at infecting humans. Features found in the spike protein like the strong propensity to bind to ACE2 inhibitors, the cannonical furin cleavage site, or the ability of the virus to infect T‑cells through some alternative method of entering the cell are all the kinds of features that didn’t arise from a single mutation. All of these ‘features’ could have arisen naturally over time but the fact that we see of them all in a novel virus that we’re told just recently jumped to humans is the remarkable coincidence that points towards a man-made origin. New mutations that arise that might make the virus even more infectious don’t somehow discount the remarkable number of features in this virus from the very beginning of the outbreak that has repeatedly stunned experienced virologist.
Now here’s a part of the study that is truly chilling if the authors turn out to be correct: the fact that this mutation took place on the “spike” protein suggests a mechanism through which the virus could reinfect people after they recover and mutate in ways that requires new versions of a coronavirus vaccine each year, much like influenza. And if that’s the case and this virus has the ability mutate in ways that thwart vaccines this is basically a permanent virus. Will “herd immunity” work on a virus that can reinfect people and defies vaccines? We just might find out:
“The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report’s authors said they felt an “urgent need for an early warning” so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain.”
Yep, it’s not just a random mutation. It’s a spike protein mutation. That’s a bad place for a mutation on this virus. And in this case, the mutant strain was found to become the prevalent strain in some nations within weeks. They report seeing this pattern over and over:
And it’s those repeated observations that this strain overtook the older strain in country after country combined with the fact that the mutation is in the spike protein that led the researchers to speculate that the mutation really did somehow make this new strain more infectious. And if that’s true, it’s the kind of finding that serves as an ominous warning that vaccines really might not be as effective as we hope for because it’s the spike protein that vaccines are going to target. In addition, mutations in the spike protein might explain why some people appear to get reinfected. Is herd immunity possible for a virus that can reinfect people?
Adding to the ominousness is the fact that the study included a comparison of patients with the older and new strains and the patients with the new strain appear to have a higher viral load. And yet they weren’t hospitalized at the same rate. It’s the kind of counterintuitive finding that, if accurate, underscores how little we understand about this virus at this point:
Ok, now let’s quickly look at an excerpt from the actual paper itself where they go into more detail on where they observed the first samples of the new “G” form of the virus. The earliest European sample was found in Germany on 1/28/2020. There were four samples found in China: one Zhejiang on 1/24/2020, two from Shanghai on 1/28/2020 and 2/6/2020, and one from Wuhan on 2/7/2020. Keep in mind that we are limited to the sampled data so while sample in Zhejiang was found 4 days earlier than the one in Germany we have no idea which of those infections actually came first:
“...Given that these early Chinese sequences were also highly related to the German sequence throughout their genomes, it is possible that the G614 may have originated either in China or in Europe as it was present in both places in late January.”
That’s the best guess we have at this point in terms of where this strain originated: it could have been China or Europe because it appeared to suddenly be present in both places in the last week of January. But regardless of where this new strain emerged, the observed fact is that it appears to overtake the local strains when it moves into an area would make allowing the spread of this virus quite tempting of there was a desire to obscure an earlier outbreak by allowing the newer strain to move into locations where older strains may have been quietly floating around and making it likely that the newer strain is what gets sampled, sequenced, and uploaded to the GISAID database. Especially if the sampling takes place belatedly because the President is undercutting the utility of testing and pushing for the premature reopening of the economy no matter what.
Now, regarding the warnings about the complications on developing vaccines, how big of a complication might it be? One scenario is something like influenza, where a new version of the vaccine needs to be developed each year in the hope of anticipating what the new global strain will look like. But as the following article points out, there’s a far more dire possibility and it’s not at all unimaginable because it’s a scenario we’ve seen before: Maybe we’ll never develop a vaccine, like what happened with HIV:
“But there is another, worst-case possibility: that no vaccine is ever developed. In this outcome, the public’s hopes are repeatedly raised and then dashed, as various proposed solutions fall before the final hurdle.”
Are we in store for decades of annual COVID outbreaks? The answer appears to be a definitive ‘maybe’. We have no idea at this point in part because our experience on these matters is so mixed. But if that worst-case scenario pans out, we could be looking at decades where hyper-vigilance is the only option other than just letting the pandemic run rampant and systematically kill off the vulnerable each year. An ever present virus ready to kill off the elderly and immunologically vulnerable. Refugees crammed into camps would be particularly vulnerable:
And that’s assuming that the virus behaves like influenza. Let’s hope it’s only that and you only get infected with one strain at a time. What if it’s like HIV, where once you get infected new strains can start emerging in your own body? Now, as of now it doesn’t look like the virus can just go dormant in the body like HIV (although there have been fears that it can) which would encourage the development of new strains in the body, but we’re still learning about it. And if this becomes a permanent global pandemic that’s going to give the virus a lot of opportunities to develop new ‘features’ like that:
But if HIV isn’t the best analogy for what to expect if this virus does end up being resistant to vaccine, perhaps a better example is the measles. A hyperinfectious disease that would routinely kill millions a year until we developed a vaccine. Even with “herd immunity”, measles still killed millions:
And that points us to another kind of worst-case scenario we could be looking at: even if the efforts to combat the virus and it spreads around so much that we reach a “herd immunity” level of immunity for the population, that herd immunity doesn’t last because the virus is never entirely stamped out and keeps mutating and we still experience large-scale death in the most vulnerable populations each year.
It’s also important to keep in mind that if this virus does end up becoming a permanent global pandemic, there’s an alternative to societal hyper-vigilence: Just let the old and vulnerable die off each year. Create a kind of A kind of “Logan’s Run” eugenics culture, where it’s just accepted that if you are old and ‘weak’ you can and perhaps should be killed off by the virus. It’s an idea that’s generally unthinkable for society at large these days but for the far right that’s like a dream scenario. So how long will it be before societies just start collectively saying “F#ck it! Let the weak die!” How many years of repeated shutdown will it take before that becomes the attitudinal norm? Hopefully we won’t have to ultimately discover that answer because a vaccine will be developed or herd immunity will kick in. But if this really is the ‘new normal’ we’re looking at for the foreseeable future we probably shouldn’t be surprised if that ‘new normal’ includes a new moral paradigm for how we value the lives of the sick and elderly. A new moral paradigm that isn’t all that new in some circles.
Now that the Trump administration announced “Operation Warp Speed” — a crash program to develop a COVID-19 vaccine — at the same time the president announces that America is reopening “vaccine or no vaccine”, here’s a New York Times Opinion piece from a month ago that gives a quick high-level overview of different long-term vaccine scenarios that we can expect to play out.
Unfortunately, some of the warnings in the piece about the long-term challenges facing COVID vaccines are now a lot more topical following that recent study out of Los Alamos that found a dominant new “G” strain of SARS-CoV‑2 that popped up in Europe (likely Germany) or China in late January and rapidly came to become the dominant strain infecting Europe and the US, rapidly replacing the older “D” strain wherever they came in contact. Recall how the Los Alamos researcher warned that their findings could have ominous implications for the development of a vaccine. Why? Because the key mutation in the viral RNA they identified resulted in an amino acid mutation in the virus’s spike-protein, the crucial part of the virus where the active functional sites that facilitate the infection of cells is located.
So why is a mutation in the spike protein that appears to make the virus more infectious such an ominous finding? Well, as the following piece points out, if there’s going to be a single vaccine that works in the long-run it’s going to have to target the virus’s spike protein so if the virus’s spike protein has the ability to mutate while still retaining its capacity to infect cells there won’t be a single vaccine that can tackle the virus. In some viruses, like measles, the parts of the virus where the crucial interactions with the cells take place are can’t sustain any mutations without losing their functionality. It’s an evolutionarily brittle virus in that sense. As a consequence, the same measles vaccine that was developed in the 1950s still works today. Influenza doesn’t have that vulnerability and can still function with a variety of mutations to its active sites. So if the discovery of viable mutations in the spike protein means the virus’s protein-machinery has a variety of viable options that suggests we’re looking at a permanent annual pandemic that never goes away. It also suggests vaccines might confer partial immunity at best.
Now, regarding the ongoing question of when and where this virus originated and the virus’s propensity to acquire functional mutations, it’s also worth recounting an interesting observation from that earlier study out of Cambridge where they found the Type A, B, and C strains, with Types B and C going on to dominate the infections in Europe and then the US East Coast. Part of what provoked some backlash to that study within the virology community was the suggestion by the researchers that their observations that the Type B strains didn’t mutated very much as it spread across Asia compared to the mutation it was accruing in the European population suggested that the initial mutations that defined the Type B strain had made the virus more adapted to East Asian immune systems but the virus had to continue to adopt to European immune systems.
So let’s assume those researchers were correct and the initial Type B strain reflected some sort of adaptation in the virus that made it better suited to combat Asian population immune systems and continued to acquire new mutations to help it deal with the immune system differences found in Europe. If that’s the case, we have to ask if the new “G” mutation found by the Los Alamos team that seemed to pop up in Europe and China simultaneously in late January represents one of those mutations that helped the Type B strain spread more easily in European populations. The Cambridge team found the Type B strain dominated the European and US East Coast infections and the Los Alamos team found the “G” strain also came to dominate the European and US East Cost infections. So the “G” strain appears to be one of the branches of the earlier “Type B” strain that appears to have popped up some time in December.
Here’s what potentially quite interesting about that collection of facts and inferences in relation to the question of when and where this virus was first released: We apparently saw the virus mutate an Asian-specific strain within about a month of two of the known outbreak in Wuhan. Then that new strain jumps to Europe and a new European-specific strain pops up a few weeks late. What does that timeframe tell us about how long this virus has been circulating among humans? One obvious interpretation is that the virus really has only recently started circulating quite recently and the relatively rapid accumulation of what appear to be mutations that help deal with population-specific immune systems is a reflection of that recent exposure.
If that’s the case and the virus really has only recently been exposed to humans — and this is all based on inference and speculation at this point — it would have quite interesting implications respect to the growing questions about whether or not military athletes from France, Spain, and Italy were infected with the coronavirus at the Military World Games in Wuhan in late October 2019. Because one of the big questions raised from those reports of sick athletes is whether or not that meant the virus was circulating in Europe (or on military bases stationed somewhere) or elsewhere even earlier last year. But if that was the case and it really was European athletes who brought the virus to Wuhan in October, there’s the question of whether or not we should then expect the original strain in Wuhan to have already acquired those European immune-specific mutations when it first showed up. In other words, the original “Type A” strain should have already had the mutations the Cambridge team observed the Type B strain acquired as it progressed through the European populations if we assume those European military athletes picked up the virus from undetected earlier European outbreaks. So if the military athletes were the source of this virus that would point toward them have been infected with a very new strain that had just recently started spreading in humans. It’s a scenario that would be consistent with the idea of those athletes getting unwittingly used as vectors for an initial viral release (something that could have been pulled off from a wide variety of actors).
But again, we have to acknowledge that we have no idea at this point if these mutations really are making the virus more infectious somehow or making it better at infecting specific populations. That’s largely based on speculation and inference at this point and it’s possible the pattern of new strains overtaking old ones is a consequence of a “Founder effect” where randomness is the dominant factor. Although recall how the Los Alamos study did actually include a comparison of the viral loads in hospital patients that had the “G” or “D” strains and found those with the new “G” strain had higher viral loads. So it’s not entirely based on just speculation and inference. There is some evidence that the newer strain really is somehow more infectious. But what is very clear at this point is that these mutations on the spike protein are going to be crucial areas of study. If we’re lucky, and a single vaccine is capable of stopping this thing for good there’s going to be a flurry of studying of that spike protein and then hopefully one day we can largely forget it. But if we’re unlikely and this ends up being like the annual flu — but super-flu — there’s going to be a lot more focus on the spike protein mutations for decades to come because the annual race for the vaccine is going to depend on it:
“Vaccines work by prompting the body to develop antibodies, which neutralize the virus by binding to it in a very specific way. Scientists are watching to see if mutations will affect this interaction. If they don’t, then there is hope that a vaccine won’t need constant updating.”
Watching and waiting to see which mutations do what. That’s the horrible waiting game we’re forced to play. A waiting game that will determine whether or not this is a one-off pandemic or part of the ‘New Normal’. And as they point out, if this ends up being an influenza-type scenario where there’s a new vaccine required each year, that vaccine is only going to be conferring partial immunity (and that’s assuming the vaccine developers do a good job guessing the upcoming strain). So it would be an annual vaccine race that can only partially be ‘won’ in the end anyway at best:
And note the warning that relates to hopes that “herd immunity” will be achieved if we just allow the virus to spread rapidly across the populace: The virus doesn’t really have the same kind of selective pressures on it right now that it will eventually have because the virus is new and human immune systems weren’t ready for it. But that’s going to change if we ever hit a “herd immunity” status, at which point virus’s ability to spread will be challenged enough that we would expect new strains to emerge by necessity if that’s an option for the virus. So while we should be concerned that these early mutations reflect the virus’s ability to evolve to different immune systems, that’s a concern that should also grow the closer we get to herd immunity if herd immunity is the ultimate solution to this:
Finally, note how it’s the spike protein that’s going to be the target of vaccine development because that’s where the antibodies are going to target. That’s why the Los Alamos team issued their dire warning about the new “G” strain seeming to have a greater level of infectiousness. The “G” mutation was on the spike protein:
Also note that the D‑to‑G mutation is the D614G which means it’s a mutation at the 614th amino acid in the spike protein. That happens to be location inside the spike protein’s Receptor Binding Domain (RBD). Specifically between the Receptor Binding Motif (RBM) that is crucial for binding to the ACE2 receptor and the furin cleavage site that activates the virus. And that RBM area is going to be the key target of the vaccine-generated antibodies so this mutation was pretty damn close to the vaccine target spot. That’s why it was such an ominous finding.
As we can see, we already have an alarming discovery of a mutation that suggests this virus could be a key feature of our ‘New Normal’. A New Normal that’s going to a new race for a new vaccine year after year (assuming a partially working vaccine is even possible). Get ready for COVID-20, COVID-21, up to COVID-[we’ll see]! And this alarming mutation might also be the sign that this virus has been struggling, successfully, to deal with different Asian and European immune systems. A struggle that the virus seemed to overcome so rapidly that it suggests this virus really did just get exposed to human populations quite recently because otherwise it would have already acquired these mutations. And yet the real struggle has barely begun for the virus because we haven’t yet reached herd immunity. It’s still easy times for the virus. The hard part for the virus comes later and that’s when we’re going to find out how vicious this thing can really get. So we are already learning that this virus appears to have options when it comes to infecting cells and the more options it has the more vicious it gets. The kind of viral options that could inherently make both vaccination and herd immunity a very limited options for humanity.
That’s the bad news. But there’s still the good news: this virus is so demonstrably good at infecting people it really doesn’t have that much need to acquire more features than it already has. So this thing might be with us for a long time to come but at least it might not get much worse because it’s also ready so bad. It will just be consistently awful for the foreseeable future, which technically could be worse.
This next article shows how the Libertarian think tanks (and the moneyed interest behind them) use maps which break the US into “laggard anti-growth” states and “momentum pro-growth” states. The former have minimum wages, pro-union laws and state income tax; the latter are free of such regulations. They plan on using the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to compel “anti-growth” states to adopt ever lower tax rates in order to attract investment and create jobs. Currently sates are competing against each other for life-saving ventilators and PPE. The atmosphere is one of competitive federalism, where states are reconfigured as economic units bidding in a marketplace.
This model will foment disunity in states where the policies are inconsistent with libertarian “ideals” (money’s investment policies) because those states will be punished by lack of investment if they don’t toe the line and the citizens will be dissatisfied.
How the libertarian right plans to profit from the pandemic
Quinn Slobodian
Disaster capitalists dream of disassembling nation states for post-viral exploitation
The Guardian U.K.
Mon 1 Jun 2020 04.00 EDT Last modified on Mon 1 Jun 2020 08.07 EDT
When coronavirus crept across the world in early February, talk of how different nations were dealing with the virus came to resemble the Olympics for state capacity. Which country had the authority, the supplies and the expertise to “crush the curve”? A balance sheet of national progress marked out a bleak race to the horizon, enumerated in case numbers and death figures.
Although the focus over recent months has remained on leaders in crisis mode and the central agencies delivering forecasts and quarantine measures, local authorities have also played a prominent role during the pandemic. Chinese mayors, US governors and Indian chief ministers have coordinated local responses, taking responsibility for populations and even locking horns with national politicians.
Most people would read the pandemic as a sign that populations and nation states should band together, and for the people “at the head of the rope” to pull even harder, to use the metaphor favoured by the French president, Emmanuel Macron. But there are others who see matters quite differently. They spy opportunity in the crisis, and wager that we might be able to ride the wave of the pandemic into a new tomorrow, where the virus shatters the global map – and undermines the power of democratic nation states.
The US is ground zero for this type of thinking. Across the country, regions have broken up into “compacts”, with states competing against each other for life-saving ventilators and PPE. The atmosphere is one of competitive federalism, where states are reconfigured as economic units bidding in a marketplace. Washington’s state governor, Jay Inslee, accused Trump of “fomenting domestic rebellion” for his calls to “liberate” individual states; governor Gavin Newsom termed California a “nation-state.” One Maryland governor confessed to keeping Covid-19 tests in an undisclosed location under armed guard, in part to prevent their seizure by central state authorities.
Although North America’s economy is gradually reopening, the virus is still rampaging through its population. What will economic recovery look like in the midst of a pandemic? The president’s economic advisers have some ideas. In an analysis released at the end of April, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, two of Trump’s closest economic confidants and authors of the book on “Trumponomics”, predicted that “blue” Democratic states would be slower than “red” states to recover, because of what they saw as their pre-existing excess of regulations and taxes.
Their analysis divided the US map into “laggard anti-growth” states and “momentum pro-growth” states. The former have minimum wages, pro-union laws and state income tax; the latter are free of such regulations. In the established mode of disaster capitalism, Laffer and Moore’s analysis appears to see the pandemic as a way to compel “anti-growth” states to adopt ever lower tax rates in order to attract mobile capital and labour. It suggests those who resist will not be bailed out by redistribution from the central government, but left to languish in a deserved economic depression. The effect is reminiscent of social Darwinism, applied as a philosophy of government.
The most articulate cheerleader for this kind of post-pandemic libertarianism is Balaji Srinivasan, the electrical engineer and former general partner at Silicon Valley venture capital fund Andreesen Horowitz. Since the pandemic began, Srinivasan has foretold a redivision of the world map into “green zones” that have controlled and contained the virus and “red zones”, which have not.
“We are entering this fractal environment,” Srinivasan recently told a virtual summit organised by the Startup Societies Foundation, “in which the virus breaks centralised states”. The virus does not stop at the border, so nor will this process of fragmentation. As regions seal themselves off to prevent contagion, “you can drill down to the state, or even the town or county level”, Srinivasan observed, noting that any state without the virus under control will “face defection” in an intensified contest for talent and capital. After the pandemic has passed, “nations are going to turn into effectively vendors and entrepreneurs and relatively mobile people will be applicants”, he predicted.
It’s easy to imagine how a particular breed of investor could see this pandemic as an opportunity that will accelerate existing trends. The loose attachments that investors feel towards this or that nation will grow even looser as capital becomes more mobile, and a sorting process will separate the productive few nations from the malingering many. States that don’t fall in line with the demands of this investor class will be starved by the voluntary expatriation of the wealthy, with their assets and abilities in tow.
If you assume this is merely a pessimistic vision, you’d be wrong. In fact it accords with a long-cultivated ideology that Srinivasan shares with a group of like-minded venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, who subscribe to variations of the radical libertarian philosophy known as “anarcho-capitalism”. The idea at its root is that a wealthy class of investors and entrepreneurs should be free to exit nation states and form new communities whose members can choose which rules (and tax laws) they’re governed by – as if those rules were products on a store shelf.
For like-minded libertarians, the colour-coded zones used in public health to control the virus are the blueprint for a new political economy. Since Srinivasan began discussing the framework, colour-coded zones have been rolled out to control the virus in Malaysia, Indonesia, Northern Italy and France; the strategy was also considered as a model for biocontainment in the White House in early April. As of early May, India has divided its 1.3 billion people into a patchwork of green, yellow and red zones, with different freedoms and restrictions based on each.
The red-green zone schema has already informed the strategies of global investors. In April, Henley & Partners, the global citizenship broker, released its annual ranking of national passports for mobile investors, and predicted that coronavirus would spark a dramatic shift in global mobility. Its chief source forecast that “as the curtain lifts, people will seek to move from poorly governed and ill-prepared ‘red zones’ to ‘green zones’, or places with better medical care.” In early May, it reported a 42% increase in applications for new nationalities, compared with the previous year.
Nobody can tell what the world will look like after the pandemic. But what we can be sure of is that some investors appear to be already placing their bets on a vision of the future where the wealthy are freed from tax constraints. As nations are divided into different zones according to their respective stages of viral and economic recovery, the well-off could follow Elon Musk’s recent threat to relocate from California to Texas, voting with their feet for locations that elude redistributive taxation. In our post-pandemic future, the flight to safety, away from contagious “red zones”, could be a flight from the nation state as we know it.
Quinn Slobodian is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, US
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/01/coronavirus-libertarian-right-profit-coronavirus-pandemic?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other