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FTR #1130 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In addition to reviewing and highlighting cogent arguments that the SARS-Cov2 (Covid-19) virus may indeed have been made in a laboratory, the program examines significant aspects of the heretofore puzzling epidemiology of the virus. (We do NOT believe that the virus was synthesized by China, as “Team Trump” is charging.)
First, however, the broadcast sets forth information about the quest for a Covid-19 vaccine.
The makeup of Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program to develop a Covid-19 vaccine in record time is alarming. (No vaccine has ever been developed for human use in less than four years.)
“Operation Warp Speed”:
- Is headed by Moncef Slaoui, formerly the chairman of Moderna’s product development committee: ” . . . . Dr. Slaoui served on the board of Moderna, a biotechnology company that has an experimental coronavirus vaccine that just entered Phase 2 of clinical trials to determine if it is effective. As the chairman of the Moderna board’s product development committee, Dr. Slaoui might have been privy to the early indications of tests of whether the company’s approach appeared promising, now that it is being injected into human subjects. . . .”
- Is seen by Slaoui as promising by Slaoui, who may well be referencing tests on Moderna’s mRNA vaccine: “. . . . Dr. Slaoui, now a venture capitalist, said that he had ‘recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine, and these data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine’ — enough to inoculate much of the United States — ‘by the end of 2020.’ . . . .”
- Will be assisted by a four-star general: ” . . . . . . . . Mr. Slaoui will serve as the chief adviser on the effort, and Gen. Gustave F. Perna, a four-star general who is in charge the Army Matériel Command, will be the chief operating officer. . . .”
- Perna was recruited by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: ” . . . . General Perna, who runs the Army’s complex supply chain, said that he was asked by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to help run the manufacturing logistics related to the vaccine development. . . .”
Note that Moncef Slaoui holds 10 million dollars worth of Moderna stock, which has tripled in value since the Covid-19 outbreak began:” . . . . The former pharma executive tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the federal government’s hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine has more than $10 million in stock options in one of the companies receiving federal funding. . . . Described across four separate filings, Slaoui has 155,438 options in Moderna. The stake is worth $10,366,000 at Moderna’s current share price, $66.69 at the time of publication. Moderna shares have almost tripled in value during 2020. The $66.69 figure represents an increase of 184% from the $23.46 it was trading for on January 1. . . .” (The day the program was recorded, Moderna’s stock increased by 25% in value, and Slaoui announced he would sell his stock.)
In past posts and programs, we have noted the Moderna–one of the companies selected to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, has been substantially underwritten by the Pentagon (DARPA).
Key points of discussion in that regard:
- Moderna is using novel vaccine technology using the injection of genetic material to create antibodies. This technology has never been used on human beings. “. . . . The second pharmaceutical company that was selected by CEPI to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus is Moderna Inc., which will develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus of concern in collaboration with the U.S. NIH and which will be funded entirely by CEPI. The vaccine in question, as opposed to Inovio’s DNA vaccine, will be a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. Though different than a DNA vaccine, mRNA vaccines still use genetic material ‘to direct the body’s cells to produce intracellular, membrane or secreted proteins.’ Moderna’s mRNA treatments, including its mRNA vaccines, were largely developed using a $25 million grant from DARPA and it often touts is strategic alliance with DARPA in press releases. . . .”
- The technology has alarming possible negative side-effects. “. . . . Both DNA and mRNA vaccines involve the introduction of foreign and engineered genetic material into a person’s cells and past studies have found that such vaccines ‘possess significant unpredictability and a number of inherent harmful potential hazards’ and that ‘there is inadequate knowledge to define either the probability of unintended events or the consequences of genetic modifications.’ Nonetheless, the climate of fear surrounding the coronavirus outbreak could be enough for the public and private sector to develop and distribute such controversial treatments due to fear about the epidemic potential of the current outbreak. . . .”
- Looming large in the background of the Moderna vaccine technology is DARPA funding of “gene drive” technology. “. . . . Concerns about Pentagon experiments with biological weapons have garnered renewed media attention, particularly after it was revealed in 2017 that DARPA was the top funder of the controversial ‘gene drive’ technology, which has the power to permanently alter the genetics of entire populations while targeting others for extinction. At least two of DARPA’s studies using this controversial technology were classified and ‘focused on the potential military application of gene drive technology and use of gene drives in agriculture,’ according to media reports. . . . Co-director of the ETC Group Jim Thomas said that this technology may be used as a biological weapon: ‘Gene drives are a powerful and dangerous new technology and potential biological weapons could have disastrous impacts on peace, food security and the environment, especially if misused, The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.’ . . . . However, the therapies being developed by Inovio, Moderna and the University of Queensland are in alignment with DARPA’s objectives regarding gene editing and vaccine technology. For instance, in 2015, DARPA geneticist Col. Daniel Wattendorf described how the agency was investigating a ‘new method of vaccine production [that] would involve giving the body instructions for making certain antibodies. Because the body would be its own bioreactor, the vaccine could be produced much faster than traditional methods and the result would be a higher level of protection.’ . . . .”
As discussed in FTR #1124–among other programs–it is now possible to create ANY virus from scratch, using “mail-order” or “designer” genes. In FTR #282–recorded in May of 2001–we noted the terrible significance of the development of such “Designer Gene” technology.
A BBC story from 1999 highlights the fears of experts that the advent of such technology could enable the development of ethno-specific biological weapons: ” . . . . Advances in genetic knowledge could be misused to develop powerful biological weapons that could be tailored to strike at specific ethnic groups, the British Medical Association has warned. A BMA report Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity says that concerted international action is necessary to block the development of new, biological weapons. . . . The BMA report warns that legitimate research into microbiological agents and genetically targeted therapeutic agents could be difficult to distinguish from research geared towards developing more effective weapons. . . . Dr Vivienne Nathanson, BMA Head of Health Policy Research said: ‘The history of humanity is a history of war. Scientific advances quickly lead to developments in weapons technology. . . .‘Biotechnology and genetic knowledge are equally open to this type of malign use. . . .”
We highlight information presented in FTR #1129, for purposes of emphasizing the flimsy nature of the argument presented in a paper from Nature Medicine.
Many scientific and medical people dismissing the argument that the Covid-19 coronavirus may have been created in a laboratory may be acting out of the sincere desire to preclude a full-dress Cold War between the U.S. and China. The Trump administration has tirelessly flogged the “China did it and it came from a laboratory” meme. Many liberals who dismissed the obvious fact that President Kennedy was murdered by a cabal of powerful U.S. national security interests did so because of what Peter Dale Scott calls a “level one cover-up”–alleged Soviet and/or Castro Cuban manipulation of Lee Harvey Oswald, fabricated by the executioners themselves.
Two telling, thoughtful, substantive critiques of the Nature Medicine article shed light on the flimsy nature of its arguments.
It would not be unfair to characterize the article as “The Warren Report” of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Genetic Engineering
Like the Bible, it is open to serious scientific refutation: ” . . . . To put it simply, the authors are saying that SARS-CoV‑2 was not deliberately engineered because if it were, it would have been designed differently. 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. . . .”
Dr. Michael Antoniou notes that different genetic engineering processes than the one highlighted in the Nature Medicine paper can be used: ” . . . . There is another method by which an enhanced-infectivity virus can be engineered in the lab. A well-known alternative process that could have been used has the cumbersome name of “directed iterative evolutionary selection process”. In this case, it would involve using genetic engineering to generate a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which would then be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells. . . .”
The notion that the Nature Medicine authors had not heard of the above process is not credible: ” . . . . Such a directed iterative evolutionary selection process is a frequently used method in laboratory research. So there is little or no possibility that the Nature Medicine article authors haven’t heard of it – not least, as it is considered so scientifically important that its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. . . .”
Of more than passing significance is another article that finds serious fault with the Nature Medicine paper. ” . . . . Professor Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, says that a key argument used to deny that it could be a genetically engineered strain that escaped from a laboratory actually points to the exact opposite. In other words, it indicates that SARS-CoV‑2 could well be genetically engineered and that it could have escaped from a lab. . . . As Adam Lauring, an associate professor of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Michigan Medical School, has noted, Andersen’s paper argues that, ‘the SARS-CoV‑2 virus has some key differences in specific genes relative to previously identified coronaviruses – the ones a laboratory would be working with. This constellation of changes makes it unlikely that it is the result of a laboratory ‘escape’.‘But Professor Newman says that this is totally unconvincing because ‘The ‘key differences’ were in regions of the coronavirus spike protein that were the subject of genetic engineering experiments in labs around the world (mainly in the US and China) for two decades.’ . . .”
Professor Newman goes on to highlight other, serious flaws in the argument: ” . . . 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.’ Moreover, Newman added, “The second site that Andersen et al. assert arose by natural means, a target of enzyme cleavage not usually found in this class of viruses, was in fact introduced by genetic engineering in a similar coronavirus in a paper they do cite. This was done to explore mechanisms of pathogenicity. . . . .”
Worth noting, again, is the British Medical Association’s warning discussed in FTR #1129, as well as above: ” . . . .The BMA report warns that legitimate research into microbiological agents and genetically targeted therapeutic agents could be difficult to distinguish from research geared towards developing more effective weapons. . . .”
As the GMWatch authors conclude: ” . . . . Such ‘enhanced infectivity’ research is carried out on viruses all over the world (and not just in China) to investigate their behaviour and to develop vaccines and other therapies, as well as for ‘biodefence’ purposes. . . .”
Reports are now emerging of possible Covid-19 infection among athletes who participated at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 19.
We have speculated at some length about the possibility that infecting those very healthy, superbly-conditioned individuals might have been an excellent vehicle for spreading the virus around the world.
Further discussion of this can be found in FTR #‘s 1118 and 1122. We note that China has speculated about the Wuhan Military World Games being a vehicle for the U.S. to spread the infection.
We have noted that language is, past a point, inadequate to analyze and discuss some of the major considerations in the Covid-19 “op.” A bio-weapons would require a very small number of agents in order to be effectively disseminated. In addition, we note that–in the age of mind control–an operative can be dispensed to perform a function without their knowledge.
In addition to French athletes, contingents from Sweden, Spain and Italy appear to have become infected. The apparent infection of the French athletes pre-dates the first confirmed case in China by 20 days.
A fish merchant who worked near Charles De Gaulle Airport tested positive for the virus on December 27.
The apparently infected athletes participating in the Military World Games further complicates the puzzling epidemiology of the virus.
Doctors quoted in a New York Times piece underscore the anomalous epidemiology of the virus: ” . . . . In San Jose, tissue sampling from a woman who died on Feb. 6 revealed that she was probably the first known person in the U.S. whose death was linked to the coronavirus — a strong sign that the virus may have been circulating in that part of Northern California in January. But was it part of a large, previously unrecognized outbreak?
“Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, theorized that perhaps the woman, who worked for a company that had an office in Wuhan, was one of only a small number of people who contracted the virus at that time and that transmissions probably petered out for some reason. Otherwise, he said, the region would have seen a much bigger outbreak. . . .
“. . . . Dr. [Trevor] Bedford said he also believed this was the more likely scenario, noting that up to half of people with coronavirus infections have no symptoms. . . .
“. . . . There could have been a tiny number of isolated coronavirus cases among travelers to the United States in December, Dr. Bedford said. But it is pretty clear that none of them spread.
In part, scientists can tell that by looking at the genomic fingerprints of each case. But another clue is the rapid rate at which the virus spreads, Dr. Rutherford said. . . . Researchers are not seeing any chains that appear to go that far back. . . .”
Leading the Trump administration’s rhetorical and political charge against China is Mike Pompeo. Charging that the virus “escaped” from a lab in Wuhan and equivocating about whether that release was intentional, Koch brothers-protege Pompeo cited alleged duplicity on behalf of China’s communist party in connection with the virus. ” . . . . ‘I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,’ Pompeo said on ABC’s ‘This Week’ Sunday. ‘Do you think they intentionally released that virus, or it was an accident in the lab?’ Co-Anchor Martha Raddatz pressed. ‘I can’t answer your question about that,’ he said, ‘because the Chinese Communist Party has refused to cooperate with world health experts.’ . . .”
The Chinese medical and scientific establishment has worked closely with counterparts globally in an attempt to analyze and treat the virus.
The highly anomalous epidemiology, the lack of symptoms in half of infected patients, the wide variety of symptoms the virus causes and, lastly, the fact that this was a novel virus and resulting infection are all factors to be considered in evaluating the timeliness of the Chinese response.
Pompeo also asserts that the virus was not made in a laboratory.
Next, we highlight a misleading story in Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily Telegraph out of Sydney, Australia. The story alleges that the Five Eyes electronic intelligence network has corroborated the “it came from a Chinese lab” meme.
Of more than passing interest is the disclosure that the project on bat-borne coronaviruses conducted in the Wuhan laboratory was a joint U.S./Chinese project, and that Ralph Baric was a key American partner in the project.
This is the undertaking about which we have reported and discussed extensively in the past! ” . . . . One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with ‘Science Daily’ at the time: ‘This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.’ . . . .”
Baric was the selectee to reconstruct the SARS Cov2 virus from scratch. Note that the article below discusses the U.S. suspension of the “gain of function” experiments and 2017 resumption of same, somehow spinning this into the “China did it” disinformation.
The military has links to the Wuhan lab: ” . . . . Furthermore, DARPA and the Pentagon’s past history with bioweapons and their more recent experiments on genetic alteration and extinction technologies as well as bats and coronaviruses in proximity to China have been largely left out of the narrative, despite the information being publicly available. Also left out of the media narrative have been the direct ties of both the USAMRIID and DARPA-partnered Duke University to the city of Wuhan, including its Institute of Medical Virology. . . .”
A Guardian article sources UK intelligence assets claiming that the 15-page dossier didn’t come from a Five Eyes intelligence assessment. They assert that it was based on open-source materials and put forward by the US as “a tool for building a counter-narrative and applying pressure to China.”
We conclude with analysis of Trump’s deputy national security adviser.
Against the background of the Trump administration’s anti-China campaign rhetoric and attempts to pin the blame for Covid-19 on a “laboratory” leak and/or deliberate release, we note that the offensive is being pushed by The Donald’s deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger.
“. . . . Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who reported on SARS outbreaks as a journalist in China, pressed intelligence agencies in January to gather information that might support any origin theory linked to a lab. . . .”
Pottinger is the son of former Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger.
Pottinger, Senior was: Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Nixon and Ford; reported by Donald Freed and Fred Landis (in “Death in Washington”) to have foiled investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Orlando Letelier; the attorney for the Hashemi brothers in the October Surprise investigation; a close personal friend of George H.W. Bush (for whom CIA headquarters was named) and, last but certainly not least, Gloria Steinem’s lover for nine years.
Despite the fact that Steinem touted her CIA background as good journalistic credentials in both “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post” (both with long-standing CIA links themselves), Pottinger has defended her against charges that she worked for the CIA!!
Worth noting, as well, is the fact that the Letelier assassination was one of the murders conducted under Operation Condor, assisted by the CIA. Letelier was killed by a car bomb in Washington D.C., while J.Stanley Pottinger’s good friend George H.W. Bush was in charge of the CIA when Letelier was hit.
(We have covered Operation Condor in numerous programs, including AFA #19. One of the operational centers of Condor was the Chilean Nazi enclave Colonia Dignidad. In FTR #839, we set forth author Peter Levenda’s brave, frightening visit to “The Colony.” This should be digested by anyone interested in the history of which Pottinger, Sr., is a part.)
One wonders if Matthew may have followed J. Stanley into the CIA, if in fact Daddio is Agency, as Mr. Emory suspects.
In FTR #s 998, 999, 1000, we set forth what Mr. Emory calls “weaponized feminism.” Refashioning the doctrine of advancing the cause of women into a legal and political weapon for destroying targeted men, dominant manifestations of the #MeToo movement have served the cause of the far right.
Resembling–in its essence–the “libidinal McCarthyism” of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” many high-profile manifestations of #MeToo have been propelled by evidentiary material that ranges from dubious to ludicrous to non-existent.
We find it more than coincidental that Bernie Sanders supporter Tara Reade’s shape-shifting accusations against Joe Biden have surfaced decades after the alleged incident–coinciding with Biden’s challenging of Trump and with Pottinger, Jr. helping to direct the administration’s traffic.
1. The makeup of Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program to develop a Covid-19 vaccine in record time is alarming. (No vaccine has ever been developed for human use in less than four years.)
“Operation Warp Speed”:
- Is headed by Moncef Slaoui, formerly the chairman of Moderna’s product development committee: ” . . . . Dr. Slaoui served on the board of Moderna, a biotechnology company that has an experimental coronavirus vaccine that just entered Phase 2 of clinical trials to determine if it is effective. As the chairman of the Moderna board’s product development committee, Dr. Slaoui might have been privy to the early indications of tests of whether the company’s approach appeared promising, now that it is being injected into human subjects. . . .”
- Is seen by Slaoui as promising by Slaoui, who may well be referencing tests on Moderna’s mRNA vaccine: “. . . . Dr. Slaoui, now a venture capitalist, said that he had ‘recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine, and these data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine’ — enough to inoculate much of the United States — ‘by the end of 2020.’ . . . .”
- Will be assisted by a four-star general: ” . . . . . . . . Mr. Slaoui will serve as the chief adviser on the effort, and Gen. Gustave F. Perna, a four-star general who is in charge the Army Matériel Command, will be the chief operating officer. . . .”
- Perna was recruited by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: ” . . . . General Perna, who runs the Army’s complex supply chain, said that he was asked by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to help run the manufacturing logistics related to the vaccine development. . . .”
. . . .The new chief of what Mr. Trump calls Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, a former chairman of vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline, called Mr. Trump’s goal “very credible,” even though the fastest a new vaccine has been developed and distributed is four years and most have taken considerably longer.
Dr. Slaoui, now a venture capitalist, said that he had “recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine, and these data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine” — enough to inoculate much of the United States — “by the end of 2020.”
He did not identify which vaccine he was referring to, but until Friday, when he resigned to take on the new job with the White House, Dr. Slaoui served on the board of Moderna, a biotechnology company that has an experimental coronavirus vaccine that just entered Phase 2 of clinical trials to determine if it is effective.
As the chairman of the Moderna board’s product development committee, Dr. Slaoui might have been privy to the early indications of tests of whether the company’s approach appeared promising, now that it is being injected into human subjects. . . .
. . . . Mr. Slaoui will serve as the chief adviser on the effort, and Gen. Gustave F. Perna, a four-star general who is in charge the Army Matériel Command, will be the chief operating officer.
Mr. Slaoui said he discussed the job with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who had been searching for a so-called czar for therapeutics and vaccine development, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator.
General Perna, who runs the Army’s complex supply chain, said that he was asked by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to help run the manufacturing logistics related to the vaccine development. Beyond the vaccine itself, there are also substantial challenges in ensuring adequate capacity of the supplies needed to distribute and administer it, starting with the special glass in which vaccine doses are transported.
Mr. Slaoui and General Perna met for the first time on Wednesday, and they have been in frequent contact since then, the general said in a separate interview. They will have offices in the Department of Health and Human Services, where the secretary, Alex M. Azar II, helped develop Operation Warp Speed at the president’s request. . . .
2. Moncef Slaoui holds 10 million dollars worth of Moderna stock, which has tripled in value since the Covid-19 outbreak began:” . . . . The former pharma executive tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the federal government’s hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine has more than $10 million in stock options in one of the companies receiving federal funding. . . . Described across four separate filings, Slaoui has 155,438 options in Moderna. The stake is worth $10,366,000 at Moderna’s current share price, $66.69 at the time of publication. Moderna shares have almost tripled in value during 2020. The $66.69 figure represents an increase of 184% from the $23.46 it was trading for on January 1. . . .”
The former pharma executive tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the federal government’s hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine has more than $10 million in stock options in one of the companies receiving federal funding.
Dr Moncef Slaoui, a Belgian-American, was this week named Chief Scientist for Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” which aims to develop a working vaccine as fast as possible. . . .
. . . . In order to take up the position, Slaoui resigned his role on the board of directors for Moderna Inc., a biotech company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to the Associated Press, Slaoui’s White House role is unpaid. . . .
. . . . However, filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission show that Slaoui continues to hold valuable stock options in Moderna.
Described across four separate filings, Slaoui has 155,438 options in Moderna. The stake is worth $10,366,000 at Moderna’s current share price, $66.69 at the time of publication.
Moderna shares have almost tripled in value during 2020. The $66.69 figure represents an increase of 184% from the $23.46 it was trading for on January 1.
Part of this sharp increase was fueled by an injection of more than $400 million from the federal government to assist trials of a coronavirus vaccine. . . .
3. In past posts and programs, we have noted the Moderna–one of the companies selected to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, has been substantially underwritten by the Pentagon (DARPA).
Key points of discussion in that regard:
- Moderna is using novel vaccine technology using the injection of genetic material to create antibodies. This technology has never been used on human beings. “. . . . The second pharmaceutical company that was selected by CEPI to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus is Moderna Inc., which will develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus of concern in collaboration with the U.S. NIH and which will be funded entirely by CEPI. The vaccine in question, as opposed to Inovio’s DNA vaccine, will be a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. Though different than a DNA vaccine, mRNA vaccines still use genetic material ‘to direct the body’s cells to produce intracellular, membrane or secreted proteins.’ Moderna’s mRNA treatments, including its mRNA vaccines, were largely developed using a $25 million grant from DARPA and it often touts is strategic alliance with DARPA in press releases. . . .”
- The technology has alarming possible negative side-effects. “. . . . Both DNA and mRNA vaccines involve the introduction of foreign and engineered genetic material into a person’s cells and past studies have found that such vaccines ‘possess significant unpredictability and a number of inherent harmful potential hazards’ and that ‘there is inadequate knowledge to define either the probability of unintended events or the consequences of genetic modifications.’ Nonetheless, the climate of fear surrounding the coronavirus outbreak could be enough for the public and private sector to develop and distribute such controversial treatments due to fear about the epidemic potential of the current outbreak. . . .”
- Looming large in the background of the Moderna vaccine technology is DARPA funding of “gene drive” technology. “. . . . Concerns about Pentagon experiments with biological weapons have garnered renewed media attention, particularly after it was revealed in 2017 that DARPA was the top funder of the controversial ‘gene drive’ technology, which has the power to permanently alter the genetics of entire populations while targeting others for extinction. At least two of DARPA’s studies using this controversial technology were classified and ‘focused on the potential military application of gene drive technology and use of gene drives in agriculture,’ according to media reports. . . . Co-director of the ETC Group Jim Thomas said that this technology may be used as a biological weapon: ‘Gene drives are a powerful and dangerous new technology and potential biological weapons could have disastrous impacts on peace, food security and the environment, especially if misused, The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.’ . . . . However, the therapies being developed by Inovio, Moderna and the University of Queensland are in alignment with DARPA’s objectives regarding gene editing and vaccine technology. For instance, in 2015, DARPA geneticist Col. Daniel Wattendorf described how the agency was investigating a ‘new method of vaccine production [that] would involve giving the body instructions for making certain antibodies. Because the body would be its own bioreactor, the vaccine could be produced much faster than traditional methods and the result would be a higher level of protection.’ . . . .”
. . . . Concerns about Pentagon experiments with biological weapons have garnered renewed media attention, particularly after it was revealed in 2017 that DARPA was the top funder of the controversial ‘gene drive’ technology, which has the power to permanently alter the genetics of entire populations while targeting others for extinction. At least two of DARPA’s studies using this controversial technology were classified and ‘focused on the potential military application of gene drive technology and use of gene drives in agriculture,’ according to media reports. The revelation came after an organization called the ETC Group obtained over 1,000 emails on the military’s interest in the technology as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Co-director of the ETC Group Jim Thomas said that this technology may be used as a biological weapon: ‘Gene drives are a powerful and dangerous new technology and potential biological weapons could have disastrous impacts on peace, food security and the environment, especially if misused, The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.’ . . . .
. . . . The second pharmaceutical company that was selected by CEPI to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus is Moderna Inc., which will develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus of concern in collaboration with the U.S. NIH and which will be funded entirely by CEPI. The vaccine in question, as opposed to Inovio’s DNA vaccine, will be a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. Though different than a DNA vaccine, mRNA vaccines still use genetic material ‘to direct the body’s cells to produce intracellular, membrane or secreted proteins.’ Moderna’s mRNA treatments, including its mRNA vaccines, were largely developed using a $25 million grant from DARPA and it often touts is strategic alliance with DARPA in press releases. . . .
. . . . Both DNA and mRNA vaccines involve the introduction of foreign and engineered genetic material into a person’s cells and past studies have found that such vaccines ‘possess significant unpredictability and a number of inherent harmful potential hazards’ and that ‘there is inadequate knowledge to define either the probability of unintended events or the consequences of genetic modifications.’ Nonetheless, the climate of fear surrounding the coronavirus outbreak could be enough for the public and private sector to develop and distribute such controversial treatments due to fear about the epidemic potential of the current outbreak.
However, the therapies being developed by Inovio, Moderna and the University of Queensland are in alignment with DARPA’s objectives regarding gene editing and vaccine technology. For instance, in 2015, DARPA geneticist Col. Daniel Wattendorf described how the agency was investigating a ‘new method of vaccine production [that] would involve giving the body instructions for making certain antibodies. Because the body would be its own bioreactor, the vaccine could be produced much faster than traditional methods and the result would be a higher level of protection.’
According to media reports on Wattendorf’s statements at the time, the vaccine would be developed as follows:
‘Scientists would harvest viral antibodies from someone who has recovered from a disease such as flu or Ebola. After testing the antibodies’ ability to neutralize viruses in a petri dish, they would isolate the most effective one, determine the genes needed to make that antibody, and then encode many copies of those genes into a circular snippet of genetic material — either DNA or RNA, that the person’s body would then use as a cookbook to assemble the antibody.’
Though Wattendorf asserted that the effects of those vaccines wouldn’t be permanent, DARPA has since been promoting permanent gene modifications as a means of protecting U.S. troops from biological weapons and infectious disease. ‘Why is DARPA doing this? [To] protect a soldier on the battlefield from chemical weapons and biological weapons by controlling their genome — having the genome produce proteins that would automatically protect the soldier from the inside out,’ then-DARPA director Steve Walker (now with Lockheed Martin) said this past September of the project, known as ‘Safe Genes.’ . . .
. . . . Now, as fear regarding the current coronavirus outbreak begins to peak, companies with direct ties to DARPA have been tasked with developing its vaccine, the long-term human and environmental impacts of which are unknown and will remain unknown by the time the vaccine is expected to go to market . . . .
Furthermore, DARPA and the Pentagon’s past history with bioweapons and their more recent experiments on genetic alteration and extinction technologies as well as bats and coronaviruses in proximity to China have been largely left out of the narrative, despite the information being publicly available. Also left out of the media narrative have been the direct ties of both the USAMRIID and DARPA-partnered Duke University to the city of Wuhan, including its Institute of Medical Virology. . . .
4. As discussed in FTR #1124–among other programs–it is now possible to create ANY virus from scratch, using “mail-order” or “designer” genes. Sadly predictable journalistic bromides that the Covid-19 coronavirus could not have been/was not made in a laboratory fly in the face of bio-technology that has existed for 20 years.
In FTR #282–recorded in May of 2001–we noted the terrible significance of the development of such “Designer Gene” technology.
A BBC story from 1999 highlights the fears of experts that the advent of such technology could enable the development of ethno-specific biological weapons.
. . . . Advances in genetic knowledge could be misused to develop powerful biological weapons that could be tailored to strike at specific ethnic groups, the British Medical Association has warned. A BMA report Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity says that concerted international action is necessary to block the development of new, biological weapons. It warns the window of opportunity to do so is very narrow as technology is developing rapidly and becoming ever more accessible. ‘Recipes’ for developing biological agents are freely available on the Internet, the report warns. . . . The BMA report warns that legitimate research into microbiological agents and genetically targeted therapeutic agents could be difficult to distinguish from research geared towards developing more effective weapons. . . . Dr Vivienne Nathanson, BMA Head of Health Policy Research said: ‘The history of humanity is a history of war. Scientific advances quickly lead to developments in weapons technology. . . .‘Biotechnology and genetic knowledge are equally open to this type of malign use. Doctors and other scientists have an important role in prevention. They have a duty to persuade politicians and international agencies such as the UN to take this threat seriously and to take action to prevent the production of such weapons.’ . . .
5a. We highlight information presented in FTR #1129, for purposes of emphasizing the flimsy nature of the argument presented in a paper from Nature Medicine.
Many scientific and medical people dismissing the argument that the Covid-19 coronavirus may have been created in a laboratory may be acting out of the sincere desire to preclude a full-dress Cold War between the U.S. and China. The Trump administration has tirelessly flogged the “China did it and it came from a laboratory” meme. Many liberals who dismissed the obvious fact that President Kennedy was murdered by a cabal of powerful U.S. national security interests did so because of what Peter Dale Scott calls a “level one cover-up”–alleged Soviet and/or Castro Cuban manipulation of Lee Harvey Oswald, fabricated by the executioners themselves.
That notwithstanding, there is abundant evidence of a man-made origin of the virus. (We do NOT believe that the event was authored–deliberately or accidentally–by China. The Covid-19 outbreak occurred in the middle of a “Full-Court-Press” covert and overt regime-change operation against China by the U.S. and its allies, and we feel that those interests are the executive elements behind the pandemic.)
Two telling, thoughtful, substantive critiques of the Nature Medicine article shed light on the flimsy nature of its arguments.
It would not be unfair to characterize the article as “The Warren Report” of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Genetic Engineering
Like the Bible, it is open to serious scientific refutation: ” . . . . To put it simply, the authors are saying that SARS-CoV‑2 was not deliberately engineered because if it were, it would have been designed differently. 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. . . .”
Dr. Michael Antoniou notes that different genetic engineering processes than the one highlighted in the Nature Medicine paper can be used: ” . . . . There is another method by which an enhanced-infectivity virus can be engineered in the lab. A well-known alternative process that could have been used has the cumbersome name of “directed iterative evolutionary selection process”. In this case, it would involve using genetic engineering to generate a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which would then be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells. . . .”
The notion that the Nature Medicine authors had not heard of the above process is not credible: ” . . . . Such a directed iterative evolutionary selection process is a frequently used method in laboratory research. So there is little or no possibility that the Nature Medicine article authors haven’t heard of it – not least, as it is considered so scientifically important that its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. . . .”
“Was the COVID-19 virus genetically engineered?” by Claire Robinson; GMWatch; 04/22/2020.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic took off, speculation has been rife about its origins. The truth is that nobody knows for certain how the virus first took hold. But despite that uncertainty, suggestions that the virus may have been genetically engineered, or otherwise lab-generated, have been rejected as “conspiracy theories” incompatible with the evidence.
Yet the main evidence that is cited as ending all speculation about the role of genetic engineering and as proving the virus could only have been the product of natural evolution turns out to be surprisingly weak. Let’s take a look at it.
The authors of a recently published paper in the journal Nature Medicine argue that the SARS-CoV‑2 virus driving the pandemic arose through natural mutation and selection in animal (notably bats and pangolins) or human hosts, and not through laboratory manipulation and accidental release. And they say they have identified two key characteristics of the virus that prove this: the absence of a previously used virus backbone and the way in which the virus binds to human cells.
Not the “ideal” design for infectivity?
As you would expect of a virus that can cause a global pandemic, SARS-CoV‑2 is good at infecting human cells. It does this by binding with high affinity (that is, it binds strongly) to the cell surface membrane protein known as angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which enables it to enter human cells. But, basing their argument on a computer modelling system, the authors of the Nature Medicine paper argue that the interaction between the virus and the ACE2 receptor is “not ideal”.
They say that the receptor-binding domain (RBD) amino acid sequence of the SARS-CoV‑2 spike protein – the part of the spike protein that allows the virus to bind to the ACE2 protein on human cell surfaces – is different from those shown in the SARS-CoV family of viruses to be optimal for receptor binding.
They appear to argue, based on their and others‘ computer modelling data, that they have identified the “ideal” CoV spike protein RBD amino acid sequence for ACE2 receptor binding. They then seem to imply that if you were to genetically engineer SARS-CoV for optimal human ACE2 binding and infectivity, you would use the RBD amino acid sequence predicted by their computer modelling. But they point out that SARS-CoV‑2 does not have exactly the same computer program-predicted RBD amino acid sequence. Thus they conclude that it could not have been genetically engineered, stating: “This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV‑2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”
To put it simply, the authors are saying that SARS-CoV‑2 was not deliberately engineered because if it were, it would have been designed differently.
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.
Limits to computer modelling
Dr Antoniou said that the authors’ reasoning is not conclusive because it is based largely on computer modelling, which, he says, is “not definitive but only predictive. It cannot tell us whether any given virus would be optimized for infectivity in a real world scenario, such as in the human body. That’s because the environment of the human body will influence how the virus interacts with the receptor. You can’t model that accurately with computer modelling as there are simply too many variables to factor into the equation.”
Dr Antoniou added, “People can put too much faith in computer programs, but they are only a beginning. You then have to prove whether the computer program’s prediction is correct or not by direct experimentation in a living organism. This has not been done in the case of this hypothesis, so it remains unproven.”
It is even possible that SARS-CoV‑2 was optimized using a living organism model, resulting in a virus that is better at infecting humans than any computer model could predict.
More than one way to engineer a virus
The authors of the Nature Medicine article seem to assume that the only way to genetically engineer a virus is to take an already known virus and then engineer it to have the new properties you want. On this premise, they looked for evidence of an already known virus that could have been used in the engineering of SARS-CoV‑2.
And they failed to find that evidence. They stated, “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV‑2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.”
But Dr Antoniou told us that while the authors did indeed show that SARS-CoV‑2 was unlikely to have been built by deliberate genetic engineering from a previously used virus backbone, that’s not the only way of constructing a virus. There is another method by which an enhanced-infectivity virus can be engineered in the lab.
A well-known alternative
A well-known alternative process that could have been used has the cumbersome name of “directed iterative evolutionary selection process”. In this case, it would involve using genetic engineering to generate a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which would then be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells.
This selection can be done either with purified proteins or, better still, with a mixture of whole coronavirus (CoV) preparations and human cells in tissue culture. Alternatively, the SARS-CoV spike protein variants can be genetically engineered within what is known as a “phage display library”. A phage is a virus that infects bacteria and can be genetically engineered to express on its exterior coat the CoV spike protein with a large number of variants of the RBD. This preparation of phage, displaying on its surface a “library” of CoV spike protein variants, is then added to human cells under laboratory culture conditions in order to select for those that bind to the ACE2 receptor.
This process is repeated under more and more stringent binding conditions until CoV spike protein variants with a high binding affinity are isolated.
Once any of the above selection procedures for high affinity interaction of SARS-CoV spike protein with ACE2 has been completed, then whole infectious CoV with these properties can be manufactured.
Such a directed iterative evolutionary selection process is a frequently used method in laboratory research. So there is little or no possibility that the Nature Medicine article authors haven’t heard of it – not least, as it is considered so scientifically important that its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018.
Yet the possibility that this is the way that SARS-CoV‑2 arose is not addressed by the Nature Medicine article authors and so its use has not been disproven.
No proof SARS-CoV‑2 was not genetically engineered
In sum, the Nature Medicine article authors offer no evidence that the SARS-CoV‑2 virus could not have been genetically engineered. That’s not to say that it was, of course. We can’t know one way or the other on the basis of currently available information.
Dr Antoniou wrote a short letter to Nature Medicine to point out these omissions in the authors’ case. Nature Medicine has no method of submitting a simple letter to the editor, so Dr Antoniou had to submit it as a Matters Arising commentary, which the journal defines as presenting “challenges or clarifications” to an original published work.
Dr Antoniou’s comments were titled, “SARS-CoV‑2 could have been created through laboratory manipulation”. However, Nature Medicine refused to publish them on the grounds that “we do not feel that they advance or clarify understanding” of the original article. The journal offered no scientific argument to rebut his points.
In our view, those points do offer clarification to the original article, and what’s more, there is a strong public interest case for making them public. That’s why we reproduce Dr Antoniou’s letter below this article, with his permission.
Not genetic engineering – but human intervention
There is, incidentally, another possible way that SARS-CoV‑2 could have been developed in a laboratory, but in this case without using genetic engineering. This was pointed out by Nikolai Petrovsky, a researcher at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in South Australia. Petrovsky says that coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor. Over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don’t do anything noticeable.
“The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus,” Petrovsky said. “Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”
Dr Antoniou agrees that this method is possible – but he points out that waiting for nature to produce the desired mutations is a lot slower than using genetic engineering to generate a large number of random mutations that you can then select for the desired outcome by a directed iterative evolutionary procedure.
Because genetic engineering greatly speeds up the process, it is by far the most efficient way to generate novel pathogenic viruses in the lab. . . .
Conclusion
It is clear that there is no conclusive evidence either way at this point as to whether SARS-CoV‑2 arose by natural mutation and selection in animal and/or human hosts or was genetically engineered in a laboratory. And in this light, the question of where this virus came from should continue to be explored with an open mind.
*****
SARS-CoV‑2 could have been created through laboratory manipulation
Dr Michael Antoniou
Kristian Andersen and colleagues (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV‑2”, Nature Medicine, 26: 450–452, 2020) argue that their amino acid sequence comparisons and computational modelling definitively proves that SARS-CoV‑2 has arisen through natural mutation and selection in animal or human hosts, and not through laboratory manipulation and accidental release. However, although the authors may indeed be correct in how they perceive SARS-CoV‑2 to have arisen, the data they present does not exclude the possibility that this new coronavirus variant could have been created through an in vitro, directed iterative evolutionary selection process (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_evolution). Using this method, a very large library of randomly mutagenized coronavirus spike proteins could be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells. The power of such directed evolution to select for optimal enzymatic and protein-protein interactions was acknowledged by the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 (see https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2018/summary/).
5b. Of more than passing significance is another article that finds serious fault with the Nature Medicine paper. ” . . . . Professor Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, says that a key argument used to deny that it could be a genetically engineered strain that escaped from a laboratory actually points to the exact opposite. In other words, it indicates that SARS-CoV‑2 could well be genetically engineered and that it could have escaped from a lab. . . . As Adam Lauring, an associate professor of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Michigan Medical School, has noted, Andersen’s paper argues that, ‘the SARS-CoV‑2 virus has some key differences in specific genes relative to previously identified coronaviruses – the ones a laboratory would be working with. This constellation of changes makes it unlikely that it is the result of a laboratory ‘escape’.‘But Professor Newman says that this is totally unconvincing because ‘The ‘key differences’ were in regions of the coronavirus spike protein that were the subject of genetic engineering experiments in labs around the world (mainly in the US and China) for two decades.’ . . .”
Professor Newman goes on to highlight other, serious flaws in the argument: ” . . . 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.’ Moreover, Newman added, “The second site that Andersen et al. assert arose by natural means, a target of enzyme cleavage not usually found in this class of viruses, was in fact introduced by genetic engineering in a similar coronavirus in a paper they do cite. This was done to explore mechanisms of pathogenicity. . . . .”
Worth noting, again, is the British Medical Association’s warning discussed in FTR #1129,as well as above: ” . . . .The BMA report warns that legitimate research into microbiological agents and genetically targeted therapeutic agents could be difficult to distinguish from research geared towards developing more effective weapons. . . .”
As the GMWatch authors conclude: ” . . . . Such ‘enhanced infectivity’ research is carried out on viruses all over the world (and not just in China) to investigate their behaviour and to develop vaccines and other therapies, as well as for ‘biodefence’ purposes. . . .”
Another expert on biotechnology has attacked the evidence being used to quash suggestions that SARS-CoV‑2, the virus strain that causes COVID-19, might have been genetically engineered. Professor Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, says that a key argument used to deny that it could be a genetically engineered strain that escaped from a laboratory actually points to the exact opposite. In other words, it indicates that SARS-CoV‑2 could well be genetically engineered and that it could have escaped from a lab.
The evidence that is being cited as proving that SARS-CoV‑2 is “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” is a paper published by the immunologist Kristian Andersen and colleagues in Nature Medicine. As Adam Lauring, an associate professor of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Michigan Medical School, has noted, Andersen’s paper argues that, “the SARS-CoV‑2 virus has some key differences in specific genes relative to previously identified coronaviruses – the ones a laboratory would be working with. This constellation of changes makes it unlikely that it is the result of a laboratory ‘escape’.”
But Professor Newman says that this is totally unconvincing because “The ‘key differences’ were in regions of the coronavirus spike protein that were the subject of genetic engineering experiments in labs around the world (mainly in the US and China) for two decades.”
So not only does Newman think that the virus could have escaped from a lab, he also thinks that it could have originated in a virus stock that had undergone genetic engineering at some point.
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.”
Moreover, Newman added, “The second site that Andersen et al. assert arose by natural means, a target of enzyme cleavage not usually found in this class of viruses, was in fact introduced by genetic engineering in a similar coronavirus in a paper they do cite. This was done to explore mechanisms of pathogenicity.”
Newman said that he does not believe that these changes were deliberately introduced to increase the pathogenicity of any single strain, but that SARS-CoV‑2 may have had genetically engineered components in its history before being inadvertently introduced into the human population.
Newman is not the only scientist that has spoken out about the possibility of a genetically engineered element to the virus. We recently published an article in which the molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou also cast doubt on assertions that the virus was not genetically engineered. Dr Antoniou set out a method by which the virus could have been genetically manipulated and selected for increased infectivity in the laboratory.
Neither Dr Antoniou, nor Prof Newman, nor we ourselves make any suggestion that, in the event that genetic engineering was involved, the intention was to create a bioweapon. Such “enhanced infectivity” research is carried out on viruses all over the world (and not just in China) to investigate their behaviour and to develop vaccines and other therapies, as well as for “biodefence” purposes. . . .
7a. Reports are now emerging of possible Covid-19 infection among athletes who participated at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 19.
We have speculated at some length about the possibility that infecting those very healthy, superbly-conditioned individuals might have been an excellent vehicle for spreading the virus around the world.
Further discussion of this can be found in FTR #‘s 1118 and 1122. We note that China has speculated about the Wuhan Military World Games being a vehicle for the U.S. to spread the infection.
We have noted that language is, past a point, inadequate to analyze and discuss some of the major considerations in the Covid-19 “op.” A bio-weapons would require a very small number of agents in order to be effectively disseminated. In addition, we note that–in the age of mind control–an operative can be dispensed to perform a function without their knowledge.
French athletes believe they caught coronavirus at the World Military Games in Wuhan in October, 20 days before the first recorded case in China.
It comes after it was revealed that Frenchman Amirouche Hammar, 43, had been infected with COVID-19 outside Paris as early as December.
The hospital where Hammar was treated for chest pains has since re-tested samples and found the fishmonger was positive for the virus on December 27. It is not known where he caught the virus, although his wife works close to Charles de Gaulle airport.
A number of French athletes who were at the World Military Games from October 18 to 27 have since described coming down with severe flu-like symptoms while at the event.
Elodie Clouvel, a world champion modern pentathlete, was asked on March 25 whether she was anxious about spending the summer in Japan for the Olympics. She told Loire 7: ‘No because I think that with Velentin (Belaud, her partner, also a pentathlete) we have already had the coronavirus, well the COVID-19.’
The 31-year-old went on: ‘We were in Wuhan for the World Military Games at the end of October. And afterwards, we all fell ill. Valentin missed three days of training. Me, I was sick too. [...] I had things I had never had before. We weren’t particularly worried because no one was talking about it yet.’
She added: ‘A lot of athletes at the World Military Games were very ill. We were recently in touch with a military doctor who told us: “I think you had it because a lot of people from this delegation were ill.“ ‘ . . . .
. . . . French media report that sick athletes were also noted in some other delegations, including the Swedish delegation, with people returning to Sweden with strong fevers.
Around 100 people from the Swedish Armed Forces attended the World Military Games in Wuhan and stayed in the city for two weeks.
Several competitors fell ill and were screened for the virus, although none were reported to have tested positive. . . .
7b. The incubation period when infected people are asymptomatic is anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks. So it would be very interesting to know when exactly those athletes displayed symptoms during the games. Was it at the very beginning near October 17 or near the end at October 28? And when did those athletes arrive in Wuhan?
Also keep in mind that there have been multiple studies now suggesting that more infectious strains may have emerged in Wuhan. In addition to the Cambridge team’s finding of a “B Type” strain that emerged in Wuhan in December that appeared to be better adapted at spreading among Asian populations, there was the earlier study by a Chinese team that found the earlier ‘S‑type’ strain getting rapidly overtaken by a new ‘L‑type’ strain that popped up in Wuhan in December.
If more infectious strains emerged in Wuhan in December and dominated the spread of the virus around the world, while less infectious strains started the pandemic it becomes more plausible that the initial outbreak didn’t start in Wuhan. Other early cases in other countries (see below) as well as infected athletes at the Military World Games suggest that it could have started damn near anywhere.
SPANISH athletes returned from the World Military Games in Wuhan in October having displayed coronavirus symptoms.
According to the Ministry of Defence none of the suspected victims had been tested.
The Spanish team was made up of about 170 people.
According to Ministry sources who spoke to El Mundo, two athletes displayed flu-like symptoms during the Games between October 17–28 and two others displayed them upon their return to Spain.
One of these athletes told El Mundo: “The authorities just took it as a sore throat or flu infection and they treated us as if we were already cured, it was very bad.” . . .
7c. Italian athletes also appear to have been sickened, and in considerable numbers. The literal translations provided make it appear that the athletes were already infected when they got to Wuhan. That may well be a problem in translation.
Note that fender Matteo Taliariol opined that “many other delegations” got ill as well.
“Athletes: ‘Sick in Wuhan Back in October’” by Football Italia Staff; Football Italia; 5/7/2020.
Some athletes who were at the Military World Games in Wuhan back in October 2019 claim ‘everyone was sick’ with symptoms reminiscent of COVID-19, two months before the first confirmed case.
The novel coronavirus was first reported in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, with an investigation from early January.
It then spread to Europe with the first confirmed cases in Italy on February 20.
However, there are some suggestions from athletes who took part in the Military World Games that the virus was present as early as October 2019.
That tournament took place in Wuhan from October 17–27, 2019.
“We all got sick, six out of six in our apartment, and we also heard from many other delegations who got ill too,” Olympic gold medallist fencer Matteo Tagliariol told La Repubblica.
“The medics there had almost run out of supplies, Valerio Aspromonte stayed in bed almost the whole time. I had a fever and cough for three weeks and antibiotics did nothing. Then it spread to my son and my girlfriend.
“I am not a doctor, but the symptoms looked like those of COVID-19. I was struggling to breathe and fortunately it went after three weeks.” . . . .
7d. More about the Italian delegation:
Some athletes who were at the Military World Games in Wuhan back in October 2019 claim ‘everyone was sick’ with symptoms reminiscent of COVID-19, two months before the first confirmed case.
The novel coronavirus was first reported in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, with an investigation from early January.
It then spread to Europe with the first confirmed cases in Italy on February 20.
However, there are some suggestions from athletes who took part in the Military World Games that the virus was present as early as October 2019.
That tournament took place in Wuhan from October 17–27, 2019.
“We all got sick, six out of six in our apartment, and we also heard from many other delegations who got ill too,” Olympic gold medallist fencer Matteo Tagliariol told La Repubblica.
“The medics there had almost run out of supplies, Valerio Aspromonte stayed in bed almost the whole time. I had a fever and cough for three weeks and antibiotics did nothing. Then it spread to my son and my girlfriend.
“I am not a doctor, but the symptoms looked like those of COVID-19. I was struggling to breathe and fortunately it went after three weeks.” . . . .
Fencing Olympic champion Matteo Tagliariol already suspects the military world games held in Wuhan, China last October, as a hotspot of the corona pandemic. “When we arrived in Wuhan, we were all sick. All six people in my apartment were sick, including many athletes from other delegations,” the 37-year-old Italian told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
The Military World Games were held in Wuhan from October 18–27, 2019. The first case of infection was officially reported in China in December. However, there is speculation that the coronavirus has already spread.
“I had a severe cough, many other athletes had a fever,” said Tagliariol, who won gold in epee fencing in Beijing in 2008. The worst awaited him when he returned to Italy.
“I had a very high fever and could not breathe. Antibiotics did not help either. I was sick and very weak for three weeks. Then my two-year-old son Leo fell ill. He coughed for three weeks. My partner also got sick, but in When I started talking about the virus, I thought: I was infected. I recognized the symptoms of COVID 19. I am an athlete, I was very bad for my standards, “said Tagliariol.
Almost 10,000 athletes from more than 140 countries had participated in the Military World Games in Wuhan, from Germany there were 243 athletes. More than 230,000 volunteers were involved in the competitions. . . .
8a. Doctors quoted in a New York Times piece underscore the anomalous epidemiology of the virus:
. . . . In San Jose, tissue sampling from a woman who died on Feb. 6 revealed that she was probably the first known person in the U.S. whose death was linked to the coronavirus — a strong sign that the virus may have been circulating in that part of Northern California in January.
But was it part of a large, previously unrecognized outbreak?
Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, theorized that perhaps the woman, who worked for a company that had an office in Wuhan, was one of only a small number of people who contracted the virus at that time and that transmissions probably petered out for some reason. Otherwise, he said, the region would have seen a much bigger outbreak. . . .
. . . . Dr. [Trevor] Bedford said he also believed this was the more likely scenario, noting that up to half of people with coronavirus infections have no symptoms.
There could have been a tiny number of isolated coronavirus cases among travelers to the United States in December, Dr. Bedford said. But it is pretty clear that none of them spread.
In part, scientists can tell that by looking at the genomic fingerprints of each case. But another clue is the rapid rate at which the virus spreads, Dr. Rutherford said.
It appears that early in the outbreak, one infection was spreading to about four other people, on average, with an incubation period for new infections of about four days. So a case seeded in December would rapidly quadruple through new generations, most likely growing exponentially to millions of cases from a single unbroken chain of transmission by the end of February. Researchers are not seeing any chains that appear to go that far back.
Modelers looking back at the growth of outbreaks elsewhere have reached similar conclusions. One estimated that New York’s outbreak could have begun with perhaps 10 infected people who contracted the virus sometime between the end of January to the middle of February, when the first cases of community transmission were identified and hospitals began seeing more cases. . . .
8b. The anomalous epidemiology of the virus becomes all the more significant in that we are told that New York was the epicenter of infection in the United States.
“American Outbreak Caught Fire in New York” by Benedict Carey and James Glanz; The New York Times; 5/08/2020; pp. A1-A9 [Western Edition].
8c. Leading the Trump administration’s rhetorical and political charge against China is Mike Pompeo. Charging that the virus “escaped” from a lab in Wuhan and equivocating about whether that release was intentional, Koch brothers-protege Pompeo cited alleged duplicity on behalf of China’s communist party in connection with the virus. ” . . . . ‘I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,’ Pompeo said on ABC’s ‘This Week’ Sunday. ‘Do you think they intentionally released that virus, or it was an accident in the lab?’ Co-Anchor Martha Raddatz pressed. ‘I can’t answer your question about that,’ he said, ‘because the Chinese Communist Party has refused to cooperate with world health experts.’ . . .”
The Chinese medical and scientific establishment has worked closely with counterparts globally in an attempt to analyze and treat the virus.
The highly anomalous epidemiology, the lack of symptoms in half of infected patients, the wide variety of symptoms the virus causes and, lastly, the fact that this was a novel virus and resulting infection are all factors to be considered in evaluating the timeliness of the Chinese response.
Pompeo also assert that the virus was not made in a laboratory.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there are “enormous” signs that the novel coronavirus outbreak originated a biomedical laboratory in Wuhan, China — the city where cases first exploded.
“I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.
“Do you think they intentionally released that virus, or it was an accident in the lab?” Co-Anchor Martha Raddatz pressed.
“I can’t answer your question about that,” he said, “because the Chinese Communist Party has refused to cooperate with world health experts.”
NEW: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tells @MarthaRaddatz China “did all that it could to make sure the world didn’t learn in a timely fashion” about COVID-19.“It was a classic communist disinformation effort,” he adds and they will be held “accountable.” https://t.co/EKV20Fhx2H pic.twitter.com/YrQRGkeYNk— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 3, 2020
The White House last week ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to look into whether China concealed information early on about the novel coronavirus, two administration officials told ABC News last week.
Pompeo on Sunday agreed the virus was not manmade.
A recent press release from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that said, “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” . . . .
. . . . Several public health and epidemiological experts have told ABC News it is “vastly more likely” that the first infection — what’s called “zoonotic spillover” — occurred in the wild, given the “huge barriers between people and viruses in the laboratory setting,” according to Dr. Christine Johnson, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Predict project and a professor at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. . . .
8d. A misleading story in Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily Telegraph out of Sydney, Australia, alleged that the Five Eyes electronic intelligence network has corroborated the “it came from a Chinese lab” meme.
Of more than passing interest is the disclosure that the project on bat-borne coronaviruses conducted in the Wuhan laboratory was a joint U.S./Chinese project, and that Ralph Baric was a key American partner in the project.
This is the undertaking about which we have reported and discussed extensively in the past! ” . . . . One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with ‘Science Daily’ at the time: ‘This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.’ . . . .”
Baric was the selectee to reconstruct the SARS Cov2 virus from scratch. Note that the article below discusses the U.S. suspension of the “gain of function” experiments and 2017 resumption of same, somehow spinning this into the “China did it” disinformation.
China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion.
The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.
It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.
It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure, and is now the subject of a probe into the origins of COVID-19.
As intelligence agencies investigate whether the virus inadvertently leaked from a Wuhan laboratory, the team and its research led by scientist Shi Zhengli feature in the dossier prepared by Western governments that points to several studies they conducted as areas of concern.
It cites their work discovering samples of coronavirus from a cave in the Yunnan province with striking genetic similarity to COVID-19, along with their research synthesising a bat-derived coronavirus that could not be treated. . . .
. . . . It notes a 2013 study conducted by a team of researchers, including Dr Shi, who collected a sample of horseshoe bat faeces from a cave in Yunnan province, China, which was later found to contain a virus 96.2 per cent identical to SARS-CoV‑2, the virus that caused COVID-19.
The research dossier also references work done by the team to synthesise SARS-like coronaviruses, to analyse whether they could be transmissible from bats to mammals. This means they were altering parts of the virus to test whether it was transmissible to different species.
Their November 2015 study, done in conjunction with the University of North Carolina, concluded that the SARS-like virus could jump directly from bats to humans and there was no treatment that could help.
The study acknowledges the incredible danger of the work they were conducting.
“The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens,” they wrote. . . .
. . . . One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with Science Daily at the time: “This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.” . . . .
. . . . Dr Shi’s protégé, Peng Zhou — now the head of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunity Project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — spent three years at the bio-containment facility Australian Animal Health Laboratory between 2011 and 2014. He was sent by China to complete his doctorate at the CSIRO from 2009–2010. . . .
. . . . The US withdrew funding from controversial experiments that make pathogens more potent or likely to spread dangerous viruses in October 2014, concerned it could lead to a global pandemic.
The pause on funding for 21 “gain of function” studies was then lifted in December 2017. . . .
8e. A Guardian article sources UK intelligence assets claiming that the 15-page dossier didn’t come from a Five Eyes intelligence assessment. They assert that it was based on open-source materials and put forward by the US as “a tool for building a counter-narrative and applying pressure to China.”
There is no current evidence to suggest that coronavirus leaked from a Chinese research laboratory, intelligence sources have told the Guardian, contradicting recent White House claims that there is growing proof this is how the pandemic began.
The sources also insisted that a “15-page dossier” highlighted by the Australian Daily Telegraph which accused China of a deadly cover up was not culled from intelligence from the Five Eyes network, an alliance between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. . . .
. . . . American scientists who have worked with the Wuhan Institute add its safety standards are comparable to Western equivalents – and the prevailing theory is that the virus was passed onto humans via one of the country’s live animal markets.
Australia’s Daily Telegraph – a Sydney tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch – has been focusing on the Wuhan lab for several days, culminating in a weekend report which cited a 15-page dossier compiled, it said, by “concerned Western governments” amid an investigation by British and other members of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies.
Intelligence sources in Australia were quick to say they believed it was based on open source, public domain material. One told the Guardian they believed the information that appeared in the News Corp title was most likely to have originally come from the US: “My instinct is that it was a tool for building a counter-narrative and applying pressure to China. So it’s the intent behind it that’s most important. So possibly open source leads with a classification slapped on it.”
9. In Miscellaneous Archive Show M4, we examined Gloria Steinem’s CIA background and people and institutions in her milieu suggestive of the possibility that her Agency links are not solely in the past. (A transcript of the broadcast is available on this website as well.)
Against the background of the Trump administration’s anti-China campaign rhetoric and attempts to pin the blame for Covid-19 on a “laboratory” leak and/or deliberate release, we note that the offensive is being pushed by The Donald’s deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger.
“. . . . Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who reported on SARS outbreaks as a journalist in China, pressed intelligence agencies in January to gather information that might support any origin theory linked to a lab. . . .”
Pottinger is the son of former Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger.
Pottinger, Senior was: Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Nixon and Ford; reported by Donald Freed and Fred Landis (in “Death in Washington”) to have foiled investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Orlando Letelier; the attorney for the Hashemi brothers in the October Surprise investigation; a close personal friend of George H.W. Bush (for whom CIA headquarters was named) and, last but certainly not least, Gloria Steinem’s lover for nine years.
Despite the fact that Steinem touted her CIA background as good journalistic credentials in both “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post” (both with long-standing CIA links themselves), Pottinger has defended her against charges that she worked for the CIA!!
Worth noting, as well, is the fact that the Letelier assassination was one of the murders conducted under Operation Condor, assisted by the CIA. Letelier was killed by a car bomb in Washington D.C., while J.Stanley Pottinger’s good friend George H.W. Bush was in charge of the CIA when Letelier was hit.
(We have covered Operation Condor in numerous programs, including AFA #19. One of the operational centers of Condor was the Chilean Nazi enclave Colonia Dignidad. In FTR #839, we set forth author Peter Levenda’s brave, frightening visit to “The Colony.” This should be digested by anyone interested in the history of which Pottinger, Sr., is a part.)
One wonders if Matthew may have followed J. Stanley into the CIA, if in fact Daddio is Agency, as Mr. Emory suspects.
In FTR #s 998, 999, 1000, we set forth what Mr. Emory calls “weaponized feminism.” Refashioning the doctrine of advancing the cause of women into a legal and political weapon for destroying targeted men, dominant manifestations of the #MeToo movement have served the cause of the far right.
Resembling–in its essence–the “libidinal McCarthyism” of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” many high-profile manifestations of #MeToo have been propelled by evidentiary material that ranges from dubious to ludicrous to non-existent.
We find it more than coincidental that Bernie Sanders supporter Tara Reade’s shape-shifting accusations against Joe Biden have surfaced decades after the alleged incident–coinciding with Biden’s challenging of Trump and with Pottinger, Jr. helping to direct the administration’s traffic.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former C.I.A. director and the administration’s most vocal hard-liner on China, has taken the lead in pushing American intelligence agencies for more information, according to current and former officials.
Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who reported on SARS outbreaks as a journalist in China, pressed intelligence agencies in January to gather information that might support any origin theory linked to a lab. . . .
. . . . Any American intelligence report blaming a Chinese institution and officials for the outbreak could significantly harm relations with China for years to come. And Trump administration officials could use it to try to prod other nations to publicly hold China accountable for coronavirus deaths even when the pandemic’s exact origins cannot be determined.
Mr. Trump made clear on Thursday evening of his interest in intelligence supporting the theory the virus emerged accidentally from a Wuhan lab. In response to a question from a reporter, the president said he had seen intelligence that supported the idea but quickly backtracked, adding that he “was not allowed” to share the intelligence and that his administration was examining multiple theories about the origin of the virus. . . .
Martin Borman, Nazi in Exile
Here’s a set of articles that’s another example of how even the mildest good-ish news related to a COVID-19 treatment can trigger a rally across the entire stock market:
The stock market rally triggered on Monday by a preliminary COVID-19 vaccine trial report by Moderna, a company working on RNA-based vaccines for COVID-19, fizzled in the last hour of trading on Tuesday after questions about that Moderna report were raised by STAT news. A broad market rally and broad market drop based on a preliminary report and subsequent questions about that report. It’s the latest example of how the companies working on some sort of therapy for COVID have the power to essentially move markets with even highly questionable preliminary results as long as it can be spun as a net positive, as was the case with Gilead’s remdesivir trials that also moved markets multiple times despite its good-ish-at-best clinical trial results.
So first, here’s a MarketWatch piece about that Moderna stock roller coaster ride that makes a rather interesting point about the timing of this Moderna announcement: On Tuesday, Moderna disclosed that its Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel and Chief Financial Officer Lorence Kim both sold stock recently. On the Friday before Moderna’s trial result announcement on Monday, Bancel sold 11,046 shares at a weighted average price of $65.56 for about $724,200, as part of a predetermined trading plan adopted Dec. 28, 2018. Kim also sold 20,000 shares at a weighted average price of $65.53 on Friday for about $1.31 million which was also part of a predetermined plan. But here’s what’s interesting: on Monday, Kim exercised options to buy 241,000 shares at a weighted average price of $12.45 for about $3.00 million, also as part of a predetermined plan. At the same time, he sold 241,000 shares at a weighted average price of $82.12 for about $19.79 million. So Kim bought and sold 241,000 shared simultaneously on Monday for a net profit of $16.79 million. As the article notes, by doing this simultaneously buying/selling trade on Monday in instead of Friday Kim made an additional $4 million thanks to Moderna’s stock surging from ~$65/share on Friday to over $82/share on Monday. A surge in share price that wouldn’t have happened had Moderna not issued these highly preliminary results that were so preliminary and questionable that Moderna’s stock close at $71/share at the end of the day on Tuesday.
Oh, and there was another coincidental announcement on Monday: Moderna announced it’s issuing $1.34 billion in new stock. New stock that’s a lot more expensive thanks to that preliminary clinical trial result. Or at least was a lot more expensive for a brief time on Monday and Tuesday before concerns about the meaningfulness of that report dragged the stock back down.
But a call to issue more stock can happen at any point and doing so after a surge in share price like that made sense. It’s the buy/sell trade Lorence Kim on Monday that’s more interesting in terms of the timing because the exercising of the stock options that let him buy 241,000 shares at $12.45 was predetermined. So that announcement of the preliminary trial results was extremely convenient for Kim precisely because it only bumped up Moderna’s stock price in a huge way for about a 24 hour period before questions were raised about the meaningfulness of the announcement and the stock price dropped. Was this all just a coincidence that Moderna’s Monday announcement based on highly preliminary data just happened to coincide with the CFO making an extra large profit on his simultaneous buying/selling scheme? Who knows but the timing sure is interesting:
“Shares of Moderna closed at a record high of $80.00 on Monday after the company released a slice of positive interim clinical data from the first phase of its COVID-19 vaccine trial. That night it announced it would sell $1.34 billion in stock to help fund manufacturing costs associated with the experimental COVID-19 vaccine. The stock took a nose dive on Tuesday, closing at $71.67, likely due in some degree to a Stat News story that questioned a lack of clinical clarity in the data it provided to investors.”
Well, a record high is certainly a good time to issue more stock. The question is whether or not that record high was ground in real positive results from the company or just spin and record high hopes. And while that surge was significant, it pales in comparison to the overall surge of over 270% this year despite the company not actually having any approve products:
And then there’s the very interesting coicidence of the timing of this, which Moderna’s CFO making an extra $4 million thanks to the fact that his predetermined exercise of stock options to purchase of 241,000 shares at $12.45 and then sell 241,000 shares at market prices just happened to coincide with Monday’s surge:
And now here’s Tuesday’s report in STAT News that raised questions about those result and managed to result on a broad market drop in the final hour or trading on Tuesday. As the article notes, there isn’t just one red flag. There’s a lot. For starters, the preliminary results were based on the finding that eight of the 45 people who got the vaccine developed neutralizing antibodies. So what about the other 37 people? We have no idea because Moderna won’t say. Also, Moderna won’t tell us the ages of those eight people which is a pretty important piece of information.
But that’s still good news that eight people developed antibodies, right? Maybe. It was very good news that Moderna specified that they were neutralizing antibodies, which are the type of antibody needed for immunity. Here’s the problem: Moderna didn’t actually give the levels of antibodies in those eight patients and instead simply stated that those eight people developed levels of antibodies on par with recovered COVID-19 patients. But as we’ve seen, studies have found that the levels of antibodies in recovered patients vary wildly, with some patients have no antibodies at all while others are left with very high levels. So how are we to interpret Moderna’s vague statement? We have no idea, but he fact that Moderna refuses to release that data doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
In addition, we’re told that those eight people had their antibody levels measured two weeks after receiving the vaccine. And as experts point out, that tells us nothing about the durability of these antibodies. You can have antibodies that last a fleetingly short time or antibodies that last a lifetime. For a vaccine to meaningfully work the antibodies it triggers need to last at least a year. In other words, it’s entirely possible this vaccine does indeed produce antibodies and yet is largely worthless as a vaccine.
So when will we get more meaningful data? Moderna says that will be forthcoming when it issues a more formal report on its clinical trial that’s jointly issued with the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Yes, this clinical trial is being conducted in partnership with the NIAID, which raises the obvious question: so what does the NIAID have to say about these preliminary results? Nothing. It refuses to comment.
Those are the questions raised by this STAT News piece and simply raising these questions helped bring about a sudden broad pullback in the financial markets late Tuesday:
“But was there good reason for so much enthusiasm? Several vaccine experts asked by STAT concluded that, based on the information made available by the Cambridge, Mass.-based company, there’s really no way to know how impressive — or not — the vaccine may be.”
It’s a pretty big problem when a company issues preliminary results that are impossible to realistically interpret. Then again, if the purpose of the press release was simply to juice Moderna’s stocks (and maybe trigger a broader rally), you don’t need results that can be realistically interpreted. Unrealistic overly positive interpretations will do just fine. But as we saw, that unrealistic market-moving interpretation may not last very long once people start asking questions about find they can’t actually get the answers.
Even the figures released by the company lacked the information required to interpret them. But it’s the fact that 45 people started the trial and these preliminary results were based solely on eight of them — with no mention of the other 37 people — that makes these results extra difficult to interpret. Plus, Moderna won’t tell us if the ages of those eight people which is pretty important for a vaccine that for a disease that primarily impacts the elderly:
Then there’s the fact that we have no idea how meaningful these antibody findings are without known the levels detected. All they said was that the antibody levels were on a par with or greater than those seen in people who have recovered from Covid-19. It’s a useless statement given that the known range of antibody levels in recovered patients ranges from high to nothing. Plus, this data is from two weeks after the vaccine was delivered, which tells us absolutely nothing about their durability:
But perhaps the biggest red flag here is what we’ve heard from the NIAID, which is nothing. That’s not typical of the NIAID, as the hyping of remdesivir has made clear:
So why did we hear nothing from the NIAID? Well, one obvious possibility is that the NIAID doesn’t agree with Moderna’s positive spin in these very preliminary results. But another possibility is simply that the NIAID had no idea Moderna was about to do this and was caught by surprise with Monday’s announcement. As we saw in the previous article, Monday was a very fortuitous day for Moderna to make that announcement, at least for the company’s CFO (and any other employees who may have had similar pre-planned stock option schemes). Did Moderna surprise the NIAID too? We don’t know and will probably never know but, again, the timing of this all sure is interesting.
Finally, here’s a piece in FiercePharma about the charges of conflict of interest against the figure just tapped by President Trump to lead “Operation Warp Speed”, a federal program with the goal of putting out a COVID vaccine by the end of 2020 that Trump announced on Friday. And, yes, that head of Operation Warp Speed just happens to be Moderna board member Moncef Slaoui. Slaoui resigned from Moderna’s board with this appointment but he didn’t entirely divorce himself from the company: It turns out he kept 155,000 Moderna shares that were were about $10 million on Friday. This prompted Senator Elizabeth Warren to call Slaoui out for this obvious conflict of interest and Slaoui announced he’s planning on selling.
Now, related to that Monday announcement by Moderna, it turns out Slaoui actually hinted at those results on Friday during the “Operation Warp Speed” announcement ceremony at the White House. Slaoui told reporters that he was “confident” in that goal after viewing early data from an undisclosed program. It’s hard to imagine that wasn’t a reference to Moderna’s early results. Video of Slaoui making that statement was later tweeted out by the White House. So that’s an important context for Moderna’s Monday announcement that moved markets based on seemingly flimsy data: the Trump White House was clearly very interested in those preliminary results too:
“Following Moncef Slaoui’s Friday appointment as a co-leader of the Warp Speed program, he’s set to sell about 155,000 shares in Moderna, according to press reports. They were worth an estimated $10 million Friday, but after Monday’s stock run-up on positive early data, they’re now valued at about $12.4 million.”
It’s glimpse into the mindset of the people at the head of Operation Warp Speed: Slaoui didn’t bother to divest until he was called out for holding onto Moderna stock and then when he was called out by Senator Warren for this obvious and massive conflict of interest he tweets out that “is no conflict of interest, and there never has been”:
And then there’s that interesting comment for Slaoui during the Operation Warp Speed ceremony where he expressed confidence that the goal of achieving a vaccine by the end of the year was achievable after viewing some sort of mystery preliminary data. Then on Monday Moderna makes its big announcement:
So was the Trump White House pushing Moderna to make that preliminary announcement as part of a hype-building exercise for Operation Warp Speed? It would be a very Trumpian thing to do so it’s not hard to imagine.
But we also have ask about another highly Trumpian act: so did any Trump administration insiders happen to make any fortuitous investments in Moderna early on Monday? Perhaps with foreknowledge of Moderna’s announcement? Maybe not direct insiders but friends of friends or something? We have no idea at this point but it’s such a Trumpian move it’s almost hard to imagine something like that didn’t happen. This is the president who declared the emoluments clause doesn’t apply to him, after all. It’s not like we have any reason to assume there’s a moral obstacle within White House circles to COVID response insider-trading. It’s more a question of whether or not they have reason to believe they would be caught doing it.
And that points to a general question about the federal COVID response: if there was insider trading going on would we learn about it? What if it’s not direct insider trading but like friends of friends? Let’s say Jared Kushner learns about an upcoming announcement by Moderna or Gilead and hands that information over to a friend. Is there any realistic possibility we would learn about that? If not, we should probably assume it’s happening. This is a pirate administration, after all.
Finally, it’s worth noting something about the nature of the RNA-based vaccines Moderna is working on and these highly ambitious vaccine timelines: unlike most other vaccine development, the RNA-based approach is actually remarkable simple and doesn’t result in permanently altering someone’s genome. It’s part of what’s so exciting about the technology if it turns out to be safe and effective. The notoriously difficult development of vaccines would be made dramatically simpler and cheaper. That’s why Moderna’s own timeline for the vaccine development shows the company had a candidate vaccine on January 13, two days after the initial release of the SARS-CoV‑2 genetic sequence. It’s a straightforward process. The truly hard part here is proving this new technology is safe for use in humans and effective and convincing the broader public that RNA-based vaccines are safe and something they would be willing to put in their bodies. Getting government and public approval for Moderna’s products is the big challenge, not the underlying technology. The technology is relatively easy and well established. Granted, making a vaccine for COVID might be challenging but that could have more to do with the characteristics of virus than challenges in the underlying technology. And yet here we are, with human clinical trials for a COVID vaccine underway and high hopes of using this RNA vaccine technology on the entire world, with much of the public clamoring for any vaccine even if it’s a new RNA vaccine, at least if Moderna ends up being the first company to bring a vaccine to the market and there are no other options. In other words, the pandemic is effectively doing Moderna’s hard work for it. It’s one of the more extreme examples of privatizing profit while socializing costs.
@Pterrafractyl–
Looks like the market got (ahem) a shot in the arm from Moderna’s announcement.
“Now, this won’t hurt a bit!”
Keep up the great work,
Dave
Now that it’s looking like Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccine is on track to being the first available vaccine for COVID-19 (assuming it works), the question of what Moderna is planning on charging for the vaccine is going to be an increasingly important issue. Unlike drugs like remdesivir — which has costs estimates of potentially thousands of dollars per treatment in part due to the difficulty of manufacturing it and the resulting limited supply — part of the appeal of mRNA vaccines is that, from a technical standpoint, they are relatively simple and cheap to produce and it can be rapidly done at scale. That’s ideal from the standpoint of a vaccine for a disease like COVID because if there’s any hope of stomping the disease out for good you need to vaccinate basically everyone on the planet as fast as possible. But that’s just the technical side of things. If people can’t afford the vaccine they aren’t going to get it whether its technically available or not and we have no idea of the relative simplicity of manufacturing mRNA vaccines is going to translate into lower costs.
So what do we know yet about Moderna’s pricing plans? Well, so far we know that Moderna hasn’t decided on a price. That’s what Moderna’s CEO stated during a conference call on Monday when Moderna released those vaguely positive very preliminary results of the vaccine clinical trial. Ominously, Moderna said it’s thinking about what Covid-19 illness costs the health-care system. That sure sounds like the company is engaged in some sort of internal rationale for charging a lot per dose (because, hey, at least it’s cheaper than letting people get sick and go into intensive care, right?).
But financial analysts and investors aren’t shy about discussing what they have in mind in the following Barron’s article. The expected price range varied significantly between analysts. On the low end, Morgan Stanley analysts suggested over the weekend that pricing could start at $5–10/dose and rise to a range of $13–30/dose in future years for preventative doses. On the high end, BMO Capital Markets analyst George Farmer thinks Moderna could start with $125/dose and raise it to $200/dose over time. At least in the US. Farmer notes that since most national health care systems are government-run they won’t pay nearly that much. Farmer further guesstimates that sales in the developed world will amount to half or two-thirds the dollar levels of the U.S. and poorer nations will only be able to around 5% of the total sales. So the US consumers are expected to spend about as much on the vaccine as the rest of the world combined. It points to one of the interesting potential impacts the global hunt for a vaccine could have on the healthcare debate in the US: the American public just might get a big lesson in US healthcare consumers pay vastly more than people elsewhere for the exact same medicine.
But projected overall sales for Moderna also depend heavily on another assumption: how long does the vaccine confer immunity. If, for example, the vaccine only needs to be taken every few years, that’s around 100 million Americans alone. At a $30 to $130 price range that would be $3 billion to $13 billion annually from the US alone. But, of course, having a vaccine that confers immunity for three years is kind of a near best case scenario at this point (with the best case scenario being lifelong immunity). But we still have no idea how long the vaccine confers immunity or if the SARS-CoV‑2 virus is the kind of virus that you can even develop immunity to at all. In other words, that BMO estimate of $3 billion to $13 billion annual in COVID vaccine sales is highly optimistic from a medical standpoint and therefore highly pessimistic from sales standpoint. If these vaccines need to be taken annually that BMP estimate would jump to $9 billion to $39 billion annual sales estimate. And what if the vaccine only confers like 6 months of immunity. People will still take it, right? Just twice a year. How about just three months of immunity? Will people take a seasonable vaccine shot? Probably. That’s where we are. If it’s a choice between four vaccine shots a year or keeping things shutdown it’s hard to imagine the vast majority of people won’t got with the vaccine. We still have no idea what kind of situation we’re looking at in terms of the basical viability of any vaccine because we still understand so little about this virus. And a near-worst-case scenario where a vaccine is viable, but only barely and doesn’t last very long, just might be the best case scenario for Moderna and other vaccine manufacturers:
“On a Monday conference call, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the Cambridge, Mass., company had not yet decided on a price , in the event that their mRNA-1273 vaccine proves effective in the Phase 2 and 3 trials it will run this year. He said that Moderna was thinking about what Covid-19 illness costs the health-care system.”
What is Moderna planning on charging? It sure sounds like they’re planning on charging as much as they think they can get away with and they just haven’t figure out what that is yet. But the analysts are happy to speculate. Will it be Morgan Stanley’s initial $5–10 range that rises to $13–30 or will it be closer to BMO’s range of $125–200? We’ll find out, assuming the vaccine ends up working. And should that happen, the US public just might find out how much more its paying per vaccine than the rest of the world because that’s how America’s healthcare system works. Americans systematically pay WAY more than everyone else for medicine:
Note that Georg Farmer’s price target for the value of Moderna’s stock up to $112/share is over 70% higher than the $65/share the stock was at on Friday before Monday’s surge. That’s how rapidly the perceived value of Moderna is growing.
But price range is just one part of estimating the total potential revenues. There’s also the question of how often the vaccine will be required. Is this a once-in-a-lifetime vaccine? Once a decade? Every few years? Annually? Every six months? We have no idea what kind of scenario we’re looking at. But the worse it is from a medical standpoint the better it is for Moderna’s shareholders as long as some sort of vaccine at least kind of works for, say, a few months. There’s going to be some minimum duration below which a vaccine won’t be worth taking and the closer it ends up being to that minimum duration the better it is for investors:
It’s also worth keeping in mind one of the other dynamics at work here: Moderna and other vaccine manufacturers will make the most money in the long run if this disease is never fully stomped out and new forms come back year after year forever. And the most effective way to stomp it out is to ensure the vaccine is available to virtually everyone within a single season so the virus simply can’t find new hosts. So if, for whatever reason, the vaccine is made available to almost everyone, but not everyone, and the outbreak continues to spread in some pockets of the world keeping the virus alive that’s kind of a best case scenario for the vaccine manufacturers. Almost stomp it out, but not quite. Year after year. That’s part of why the pricing and availability of the vaccine is the kind of debate that needs to be taking place now at a global level.
Next, here’s just a quick reminder that this vaccine isn’t being developed by Moderna alone. It’s being created in partnership with the National Institutes of Health and just this April received $483 million in funding from Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to begin the process of scaling up the manufacturing of the vaccine. Yep, almost half a billion dollars came from the federal government to help speed this up. Is that going to be factored into the price of the vaccine?
The idea for the funding was that the vaccine was showing so much promise that Moderna should just begin the process now of mass manufacturing it so the doses are available once it finally gets approval instead of waiting for it to go through the clinical trials. Keep in mind Moderna just released information on its first eight vaccine human test subjects on Monday so data on human trials clearly weren’t available when this decision was made a month ago. Presumably there was some positive results in animal trials they could point to. Either way, it’s a reminder that, like Gilead’s remdesivir, Moderna’s vaccine was clearly tapped from the very beginning to be fast-tracked and supported with large federal grants despite this technology not yet being established as safe in humans. Now, paying to have Moderna develop those doses in parallels with the safety trials seems like a reasonable gamble to make given the circumstance. If the technology pans out as hoped it really could be exactly what we need. But on the other hand, we don’t really hear about this kind of robust federal support for other potential vaccines or drug therapies. It’s just the favored treatments of Gilead’s remdesivir and Moderna’s vaccine. In other words, the problem isn’t the fast-tracking of Moderna’s vaccine or Gilead’s remdesivir. The problem is the apparently exclusive fast-tracking of these medicines to the exclusion of everything else. A problem that becomes a lot harder to ignore when we hear about the tens of billions of dollars Moderna could end up making year after year on this single vaccine alone:
““Instead of waiting for the data and then scaling up with manufacturing process ... we can make as many doses as we can. We are doing both in parallel,” he said. The company plans to hire up to 150 people to support the effort.”
It’s quite a show of confidence: $483 million from BARDA to mass produce an unproven vaccine in parallel with the clinical trials. Let’s hope those clinical trials show zero safety risks because after a commitment like this from the federal government it’s going to be very tempting to find any excuse to use the vaccine even if questions remain about its safety.
And note the share price surge that came with that announcement: a 15% surge from ~$40/share to $46.85/share on thew news of the grant:
Compare that to the over $80/share it hit on Monday following the preliminary clinical trial results. And then there’s the target price of $112 by BMO financial analyst Georg Farmer based on the guestimate that Moderna could be making tens of billions of dollars everyone year on this vaccine. It’s a sign of just how wildly profitable this company might be to investors. But those wild profits can only be realized as long as the vaccine is widely, but not entirely, available to the whole world.
Here’s a pair of articles related to Moderna’s hunt for a COVID vaccine with some pretty ominous implications about the potential safety of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology and potentially any COVID vaccine: First here’s a STAT News article about Moderna from 2016 about the story of Moderna’s corporate culture of secrecy and a reputation for being a tough employer that had been driving away a number of its top researchers and managers. It also describes the various struggles the company has had in its quest to bring an mRNA therapy to market and that’s the part of the article that could have pretty ominous implications for the safety of Moderna’s mRNA vaccines. Because it turns out producing vaccines were far from the first choice for Moderna. The first choice is therapies for diseases that required repeated mRNA doses for years. Vaccines are, ideally, just a single dose and therefore much less profitable. It’s one of those “the money is in the treatment, not the cure” situations.
But Moderna was refocusing on vaccines nonetheless at the time of that 2016 article. Why? Precisely because vaccines potentially only require a single dose to work. So why would Moderna want to pivot to a product that only one dose instead of repeated doses? Because that would reduce the potentially safety issues with their technology because there won’t be repeated doses. As the article describes, one of the major challenges with mRNA technology is figuring out how to deliver the mRNA into cells without causing side-effects. It’s the major remaining technical challenge for this technology and its a challenge that led to much bigger pharmaceutical rivals basically giving up on their own mRNA therapy technology. But with vaccines that can ostensibly deliver their therapeutic benefits with a single dose if there is a safety issue with their technology at least it hopefully wouldn’t be a huge issue. That’s why Moderna was switching its focus to vaccines in 2016:
“It’s highly risky. Big pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects. But if Moderna can get it to work, the process could be used to treat scores of diseases, including cancers and rare diseases that can be death sentences for children.”
Yep, it’s risky technology. Risky from an investment standpoint because it’s so risky from a health and safety standpoint. That’s why hopes are so high for Moderna’s investors: if the company really can manage to develop the technology required to get the mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects that really will be a significant innovation. Most of the rest of the technology required to develop this technology already exists...getting the mRNA into the cells without side effects is the last big technical hurdle.
So how much progress has Moderna made on this front? That’s unclear, thanks in part to a culture of secrecy at the company where the results of its itnernal work is rarely published. What is clear is that a number of high-level departures of the company’s top scientists had been taking place which raised the question: are they leaving because of abusive unreasonable management or because there’s a problem with the science?
And those concerns about the science only grew when we learned that Moderna was shifting its focus to vaccines, a market that the company was decidedly NOT interested in early on. The big money is in using mRNA for protein therapies that people need over and over. But vaccine have one big benefit: they don’t need to be taken over and over, at least not in theory, so any safety issues associated with the delivery of the mRNA will hopefully be minimized:
Finally, note who some of Moderna’s investors and partners are: pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca, Alexion, and Merck (which made a $200 million investment in Moderna in 2016 and another $125 million investment in 2018). After reading about how the pharmaceutical giants had given up on mRNA technologies after being unable to overcome the safety issues you have to wonder if Moderna is being treated by the larger industry as a means of basically experimenting with brining this technology out to the public while minimizing the potential consequences if it turns out to be harmful:
So was a look at Moderna’s technology in 2016, when the strategy to shift to vaccines over safety concerns was still relatively new for the company. Has there been any significant updates since then? Well, the company did publish a study on human clinical trials of two influenza vaccines that appear to show no significant side effects and elicit an immune response. It could be worse. But don’t forget that the company was allowed to literally run the animal trials in parallel with human trials back in March, so if there’s a different problem with the COVID vaccine that didn’t arise with the influenza vaccines that may have been revealed in animal trials we may not know in time.
More generally, if repeated dosing is a potential safety issue, what does that mean if this is a vaccine that needs to be taken annually? Or maybe more than once a year if the antibodies don’t last? Don’t forget that the big hope for Moderna investors is that the SARS-CoV‑2 virus never really goes away but instead keeps mutating and creating a permanent annual global COVID vaccine market. It’s all a big reason why any proclamations that the vaccine is “safe enough for a single dose” really needs to come with an explanation of just how unsafe this mRNA delivery technology really is because we could easily end up having to take a lot more than one dose. It’s also a reminder that even if Moderna or one of the other companies working on an mRNA Covid vaccine succeeds, that’s not a reason for the world to stop searching for non-mRNA vaccine options. In other words, the solution to COVID-19 isn’t just a vaccine. The soluation is a vaccine that’s proven to be safe beyond just a single dose.
But as the following article from Nature Reviews Immunology from a month ago ominously warns us, there’s another major safety issue with the SARS-CoV‑2 vaccine: It was observed with the original SARS outbreak that if someone develops antibodies but not at a high enough level to neutralize the infection that can actually make the infection more severe. This process is known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This appears to be due to an interaction between the virus, pre-existing anti-bodies and immune cells. Specifically, researchers have found that when an immune cell (like a macrophage) consumes a a virus with antibodies attached the immune cell will cause an increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines and a decrease in anti-inflammatory cytokines. It’s the ramping up of the inflammation that causes the damage associated with ADE. But this only happens when the neutralizing antibody levels are below some threshold.
It’s also worth noting that T cells, which SARS-CoV‑2 appears to be able to attack and kill, are the immune cells that don’t normally expresse Fc Receptors. So this phenomena probably doesn’t involve them.
So if SARS-CoV‑2 behaves similar to the original SARS, we could be looking at a situation where subsequent reinfections with SARS-CoV‑2 are actually worse if the previous infections resulted in antibodies but not at a high enough concentration. Similarly, if a vaccine induced an immune response that isn’t high enough it could actually make the eventual infections even worse. This has been demonstrated in Mice with SARS vaccines. As the authors also note, there’s some evidence aged animals might have a harder time generating the required levels of antibodies after vaccination. So it’s possible to have a vaccine that protects the young and actually makes the elderly more vulnerable:
“The quality and quantity of the antibody response dictates functional outcomes. High-affinity antibodies can elicit neutralization by recognizing specific viral epitopes (Fig.1a). Neutralizing antibodies are defined in vitro by their ability to block viral entry, fusion or egress. In vivo, neutralizing antibodies can function without additional mediators, although the Fc region is required for neutralization of influenza virus2. In the case of SARS-CoV, viral docking on ACE2 on host cells is blocked when neutralizing antibodies, for example, recognize the receptor-binding domain (RBD) on the spike (S) protein3. S protein-mediated viral fusion can be blocked by neutralizing antibodies targeting the heptad repeat 2 (HR2) domain3. In addition, neutralizing antibodies can interact with other immune components, including complement, phagocytes and natural killer cells. These effector responses can aid in pathogen clearance, with engagement of phagocytes shown to enhance antibody-mediated clearance of SARS-CoV4. However, in rare cases, pathogen-specific antibodies can promote pathology, resulting in a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).”
The quality and quantity of the antibody response dictates functional outcomes. That needs to become like a mantra for the vaccine hunt. Because if the vaccine is eliciting a low quality response it might not just not be helpful. It could actually cause harm by promoting an overly powerful inflammatory response in the form of ADE. That’s what they found with SARS so there’s no reason to assume that won’t be the case with SARS-CoV‑2:
ADE is induced when the stoichiometry is below the threshold for neutralization. That’s another statement worthy of a mantra. These vaccines really do need to be ‘good enough’ to work to avoid disaster. But there’s no guarantee that a vaccine that induces a high enough neutralizing antibody threshold for neutralization in younger people will do the same in the elderly or those with compromised immune systems. That’s also what they found with studies of a SARS vaccine in mice. The aged mice couldn’t create the neutralizing antibodies from a double-inactivated SARS-CoV vaccine (so a vaccine made from inactivated viruses). But when they tried it with a alum-adjuvanted double-inactivated SARS-CoV vaccine in aged mice they did see an immune response but it was the type of response that increased the type of immune response associated with increased lung damage:
It’s worth recalling that the preliminary results from the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine of 8 patients showing adequate levels of neutralizing antibodies was on patiens aged 18–55. So those results tell us nothing about how elderly immune systems will respond.
Finally, note the recommendations of the authors: Instead of relying on vaccines, monoclonal antibodies would be a much safer approach because at least then there can be precise control over which types of antibodies are being used to fight the virus. Because it’s not just the level of the antibody but the target of the antibody (which part of the virus it targets) that appears to determine whether or not ADE is induced. So instead of eliciting an immune response and hoping that the body produces the right antibodies at the right levels, we just manufacture large number of monoclonal antibodies to give directly to patients:
So that’s another thing to keep in eye on: will the race for the discovery and mass production of a vaccine include a parallel race for the discovery and mass production of monoclonal antibodies? We’ll see. We’ll also see what happens if this virus becomes a regular annual virus like the flu and we just keep getting reexposed to the virus year after year. How will this potential for ADE play into that scenario?
Also note that Moderna’s phase I clinical trial does include people over the age of 70. We haven’t seen results on that group yet though. We only got the results for eight patients in the youngest group. So at this point we can’t rule out the possibility that the Moderna vaccine will work on the young and harm the elderly. Because this whole nightmare pandemic wasn’t eugenic enough apparently.
Good evening Dave. The download for FTR 1130 is not the full show. It cuts off immediately after you say Tara Reade’s name at the 57:27 mark. All your work is much appreciated. John
@John Martin–
Unfortunately, that is the way it is–this was a live recording, and the file cut off because I had technical problems at the start of the program.
Please reference the written description to get the gist of the closing remarks about Tara Reade.
I hope to do a program about this unfortunate woman and the massive problems with her story and her lack of credibility on many issues going back many years.
Two articles on her in “The Nation” and “Politico” cover much of what is available.
Best,
Dave
There was a recent piece in GMWatch that points out a 2017 published coronavirus research paper that’s notable for both who authored it, who supported those authors, and the techniques they used in the paper: The paper was published in 2017 by a group of scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), including China’s top bat coronavirus researcher Shi Zhengli. In terms of the theory that the SARS-CoV‑2 virus escaped from the WIV, it’s Shi Zhengli’s research into bat coronaviruses that considered the likeliest culprit. But the paper’s authors weren’t just based in China. The co-authors included Peter Daszak of the US-based EcoHealth Alliance and funding was provided in part by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and USAID.
The specific topic of the paper is also quite notable: which mutations allow bat coronaviruses to bind to the human ACE2 receptor. So it was gain-of-function research about the kind of function that SARS-CoV‑2 clearly gained. Recall the recent study by Professor Nikolai Petrovsky that used computer models to simulate the binding capacity of different coronaviruses to human ACE2 receptors that predicted SARS-CoV‑2 is better at binding to human ACE2 receptors than any of the other animal coronaviruses they tested included bat and pangolin coronaviruses. Importantly, the gain-of-fuction research involved the kinds of techniques that wouldn’t leave behind signs of human intervention.
As the following GMWatch article reminds us, this wasn’t the only gain-of-function research involving bat coronaviruses and US researchers and Dr. Shi Zhengli’s lab. There was also that 2015 paper on the gain-of-function research using a chimeric virus bat coronavirus done in collaboration with Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. So this 2017 paper wasn’t some sort of unique collaboration. It reflected the status of international collaboration on this type of gain-of-function research between Chinese and Western researchers that was well established by the time of that 2017 publication and fully endorsed by US government agencies. An international collaboration underscored by the fact that the WIV is a BSL‑4 lab built under the supervision of the international community and staffed with scientists frequently trained in the West.
The article points out another more recent publication from Dr. Shi Zhengli’s lab from May of 2020 that investigates the relative binding strengths of the original SARS virus and different bat coronaviruses to bat and human ACE2 receptors. It doesn’t sounds like it involved actually creating new chimeric viruses but just studying existing viruses. Notably, as as the following GMWatch piece points out, the research was carried out under safety conditions that could be considered overly lax. The paper states the research was carried out in a BSL‑2 environment. And while viruses like SARS-CoV (the original SARS) don’t require a BSL‑4 environment to safely work under, they do required BSL‑3 as Ebright points out. Then again, since they are literally publishing these seemingly overlay lax conditions in their publication they presumably felt it was secure enough so it would be interesting to hear additional viewpoints on what kind of unnecessary risks were being taken by this research. Either way, since this is China’s premier viral coronavirus research group publishing in this paper that they’re using BSL‑2 settings for research that should have at least BSL‑3, and this is the same group that has a long track record of collaboration with international researchers, we can be pretty confident that if there’s a pattern of research of this nature being carried out under debatly lax conditions it’s not a secret. In general, it’s hard to imagine that the Chinese researchers who are the primary suspects as the group that leaked the SARS-CoV‑2 virus from a lab would publish these paper stating overly lax security measures were used unless they were under the impression that they were indeed taking adequate precautions.
More generally, within the global military biological warfare community, how was the kind of gain-of-function research described in that 2017 paper perceived when it was being carried out inside China but with the cooperation of the US? Yes, it has clear public health and defensive benefits to understand on how viruses can jump from animal to human or become more virulent. But this has always also been obvious dual use research with offensive potential. There’s no separating the two. So what kind of impact did that 2017 paper have when it was publicly revealed that gain-of-function research on human ACE2 receptor binding of bat coronavirus using techniques that wouldn’t leave signs of human intervention was being carried out jointly between the US and China? Especially since, as the article notes, there really is a history of the SARS virus escaping from Chinese BSL‑3 research labs. So when it was publicly disclosed in this 2017 publication that you had US-sponsored Chinese “gain-of-function” research on what allows bat coronaviruses to infect human that would have undoubtedly made a few people realize that a major opportunity exists for releasing a man-made bat coronavirus and ensuring China got the blame. And since it was US-financed research the temptation to create a lab-release incident could have been even greater for third parties. It’s one of the more remarkable contexts of the current COVID-19 pandemic and the campaign being waged by the Trump administration to blame it on a leak from a Chinese lab: the current campaign to blame China for a leak from the lab is probably something someone has been thinking about waging at least since that 2017 paper:
“Ebright flagged up a scientific paper published in 2017 by WIV scientists, including Shi Zhengli, the virologist leading the research into bat coronaviruses, working in collaboration with Peter Daszak of the US-based EcoHealth Alliance. Funding was shared between Chinese and US institutions, the latter including the US National Institutes of Health and USAID. The researchers report having conducted virus infectivity experiments where genetic material is combined from different varieties of SARS-related coronaviruses to form novel “chimeric” versions. This formed part of their research into what mutations were needed to allow certain bat coronaviruses to bind to the human ACE2 receptor – a key step in the human infectivity of SARS-CoV‑2.”
A 2017 paper involving the building of chimeric viruses to infect humans conducted by Chinese researchers in conjunction with the US-based EcoHealth Alliance and with funding by US government institutes. And the experiments were using techniques to create the viruses that leave no signatures of human manipulation. That had to turn heads within the global biological warfare community at the time. Especially since it was preceded by that 2015 collaboration between the same Chinese researchers and Ralph Baric’s lab in the North Carolina that that similarly involved chimeric bat coronaviruses:
And then there’s the observation by Professor Richard Ebright of a May 2020 publication (pre-publication, actually) by Dr. Shi Zhengli’s lab that was arguably carried out under BSL‑2 conditions when it should have used at least BSL‑3. Is this accurate that BSL‑3 was required for the research they describe? If so, having the same Chinese research team currently blamed from releasing the virus issue a publication that plainly admits to using overly lax security measures is one of the most bizarre twists in all of this so it will be very interesting to learn if this latest publication really was done under improperly lax conditions or not:
So the whole world was informed back in 2017 that this kind of dangerous research involving the creation of bat coronaviruses to infect humans was being carried out in China but funded in part by the US. Flash forward a couple of years and we have some sort of nightmare virus that initially seemed to pop up nearby the WIV and the Trump administration aggressively pushing the idea that it escaped from that lab.
It’s a situation made all the more remarkable by the fact that, as the following 2017 Nature describes, the WIV was China’s first BSL‑4 certified lab and only achieved that certification in 2017 with the help of the West. The first of a planned 5 to 7 new BSL‑4 facilities that will be built inside China by 2025. The WIV was also set up as one of the World Health Organization’s “Reference Labs” linked to similar labs around the world. So the WIV as a BSL‑4 lab was really part of this broader international project to create a global network of labs studying infectious diseases. As such, the WIV’s BSL‑4 certification was hailed inside China as putting a Chinese lab into the global elite network of labs capable of carrying out the most dangerous kinds of research. So China has only recently even achieved the technical ability to safely carry out the most dangerous types of research on infectious diseases and this was achieved as part of an international effort to welcome China into the community of elite infectious disease research and just the first of many planned BSL‑4 facilities in China:
“A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level‑4 (BSL‑4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns. ”
The WIV was just the first of a planned set of new BSL‑4 labs inside China. A planned expansion that mirrors the explosion of BSL‑4 facilities in North American and Europe since the early 2000s and will make the WIV one of the WHO’s “reference labs” linked to that growing international network. That’s part of the context of the research carried about by Dr. Shi Zhengli’s lab: it was one part of a much broader international collaboration.
And note how many of the WIV’s staff were trained at a BSL‑4 lab in Lyon in France. Recall how key members of Dr. Shi Zhengli’s team were also trained in Australia. So this BSL‑4 lab in Wuhan really was an international effort, ostensibly with the goal of allowing China to join international emerging virus monitoring and research:
Finally, note warning from Richard Ebright in 2017: while the stated purpose of this kind of research is for defensive reasons and to the benefit of public health, these are still inherently dual use facilities and with the excess capacity for viral research that’s going to come from all of these planned new BSL‑4 facilities the potential for using that excess capacity for offensive bioweapon research only grows. And it’s a critique he doesn’t limit to China. He includes the excess capacity of US and European BSL‑4 facilities:
So that’s all part of what’s so fascinating about the growing war of words between China and the West on the origins of this virus: with the Trump administration leading the way the West is doubling and tripling down on the idea that virus came from a Chinese lab that was set up with Western help and conducting Western-backed “gain-of-function” research. It points towards one of the likelier outcomes from the current blame game: the ending of these kinds of international collaborations. At least international collaborations with China. There will no doubt still be lots of “gain-of-function” research taking place but it’s probably not going to be research were you have Chinese researchers funded by Western governments where everyone shares the findings. It raises the grim question of whether or not the collapse of international collaborations on this type of research will result in even more intense biowarfare research or less. It’s one of the many horrible paradoxes associated with this topic: does more international openness about research that could be used to create doomsday viruses incentivize or disincentivize secret research on the creation of doomsday viruses? This kind of research is going to happen one way or another so is it better to have everyone do it jointly or in secret? That’s one of the questions that’s going to be implicitly asked by this blame-it-on-China campaign because we really could see a major drop in international emerging disease collaborations as a result of this.
But as Professor Ebright suggests, we really need to be creating a world where this research doesn’t happen at all because there’s no way to ensure all of this ‘defensive’ research doesn’t get used offensively. And yet, based on how the world works today if a nation isn’t prepared for war it’s potentially doomed. Still, if nations do continue preparing for war humanity is doomed in the end anyway as our capacity to destroy ourselves keeps growing. It’s just a matter of time. Maybe it will be super viruses. Perhaps super nukes. Maybe anti-matter nukes some day, who knows. Or just polluting everything and destroying as the global military industrial complex continues to explode while the biosphere uncontrollably until eco-collapse snuffs us out, maybe leaving a few doomsday bunkers operating for a while. Humanity is basically committing suicide at this point in history and a big part of that suicidal impulse is derived from an inability to even recognize, let alone come to terms with, these fundamental existential paradoxes about the vital need to prepare for war and the utter doom that creates. It’s a form of ‘MAD’ness that underscores how anyone not on team ‘Let’s figure out how we can build a post-War future ASAP’ is part of the problem. And yet there is no sign at all that we are coming any closer to addressing that fundamental paradox.
And that points towards a possible positive outcome from all of this: the inherent madness of Mutually Assured Destruction in the nuclear age clearly wasn’t enough to force humanity to grapple with the basic paradox that individual nationals might be doomed if they don’t prepare for war and yet we’re all doomed if we do keep preparing for war. Doomed if we do and doomed if we don’t. Nuclear MADness should have made that clear but humanity just decided to deal with it by ignoring it. Civilization doesn’t even appear to be all that alarmed about a nuclear holocaust anymore despite more nations possessing these weapons than ever and despite the inevitability that such technology is going to get cheaper and more accessible and eventually fall into the hands of terrorists groups at some point in the future. These kinds of nuclear doomsday scenarios are inevitable if we continue down this path and yet hardly anyone cares. So what about the threat of a viral holocaust? Is the world ready to start seriously pondering the MADness of biological warfare research too? SARS-CoV‑2 is just like a light appetizer compared to what could be coming. Imagine super-Ebola. How hard will it be to create super-Ebola with all of the knowledge we’re collectively acquiring about how viruses work?
And unlike nuclear weapons research, there’s actually a reason to carry out the kind of dual use research on virus with both offensive and defensive applications. That’s the whole premise behind these international collaborations on virology research: it’s needed to help address future natural pandemics. So while humanity could survive just fine if we all agreed to stop nuclear weapons technology research, there is a real public health need to understand viruses. And once we get that knowledge, it can be abused. And abused remarkably easily compared to nuclear technology.
We really are in another MADness situation. This time it’s with viruses but the underlying dynamic is similar: we’re doomed if we do and we’re doomed if we don’t. So how do we create a world where individual nations aren’t doomed if they aren’t perpetually preparing for war and yet all of this inherently ‘dual use’ technology is still allowed to be developed and exists? Can humanity achieve some sort post-war status where dual use technology is readily available for war-like uses but isn’t actually used? If war is ‘politics by other means’, are we able to develop a shared political culture that precludes war? Is that even possible? We have no idea at this point but we won’t find out until we start asking ourselves if a post-war global political culture can even exist. So perhaps global response to the current pandemic should include us collectively taking the time to ask ourselves if we can possibly imagine existing without perpetually preparing to destroy each other. There’s never really a bad time to ask that question. Heck, any viable future civilization would probably have that question — and the need to keep asking and answering it affirmatively — as one of its basic foundations. Still, now seems like an extra good time to ask if we can possibly stop trying to destroy each other.
@Pterrafractyl–
Excellent work!
I think it should be mentioned in this context that the closure of USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick in early August of 2019 for safety violations warrants closer scrutiny.
It has disappeared down the memory hole.
USAMRIID has partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology “since the mid-1980’s”: http://wbm.whu.edu.cn/English/Departments/Departments/Institute_of_Medical_Virology.htm
Also worth mentioning is that USAID is a frequent cut-out for U.S. intelligence.
Note, also, that Whitney Webb noted the DARPA links to the Wuhan lab complex in her paper.
The Covid-19 outbreak was not the only “bio-event” to bedevil China recently:
https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-1118-update-on-the-coronavirus-outbreak/?preview_id=74094&preview_nonce=0b0a9fe931&preview=true
” . . . . Just for information
In the past two years (during the trade war) China has suffered several pandemics:
February 15, 2018: H7N4 bird flu. Sickened at least 1,600 people in China and killed more than 600. Many chickens killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu. Many chickens killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu. Same strain as Russia, from Georgia. Millions of pigs killed. China needs to purchase US pork products.
May 24, 2019: massive infestation of armyworms in 14 province-level regions in China, which destroy most food crops. Quickly spread to more than 8,500 hectares of China’s grain production. They produce astonishing numbers of eggs. China needs to purchase US agricultural products – corn, soybeans.
December, 2019: Coronavirus appearance puts China’s economy on hold.
January, 2020:China is hit by a “highly pathogenic” strain of bird flu in Hunan province. Many chickens died, many others killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
The standard adage is that bad luck happens in threes, not sixes.”
Fundamental, as well, to the discussion and altogether absent from the scientific and medical analysis is the POLITICAL context–overt trade war being waged by the U.S., destabilization efforts funded by the National Endowment for Democracy in Hong Kong and the Uighur community in China; and allegations of cyber-espionage by a U.S. Cyber Command that fails to mention that CIA cyber weapons have the engineered capability of simulating Chinese offensive cyber weaponry.
We should also recall the presence of Ukrainian Nazis in Hong Kong–Azov Battalion elements and Pravy Sektor. They, in turn, were operating on behalf of EU-funded NGOs.
Somehow, Azov Battalion and Pravy Sektor just don’t sound like a “pro-Democracy” movement.
This is fundamental to the overall analysis and is NOT factored into account.
Keep up the great work,
Dave
Here’s a set of articles all related to different aspects of the ongoing mysteries over the origins of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus, why the pandemic appears to be so much more severe in certain areas compared to the rest of the world (Wuhan, Italy, New York City, Iran, etc), and the question of whether or not the virus was first introduced to Wuhan by infected military athletes during the Military World Games:
First, here’s an interesting piece from a few days ago about some pretty remarkable claims by two top Italian doctors about the strength of the virus: According to Dr. Alberto Zangrillo, the head of intensive care at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan in Lombardy (which happens to be the epicenter of Italy’s outbreak), the viral loads found in patients over the last couple of weeks were “absolutely infinitesimal” compared to patients two months ago. This was the finding in a study Dr. Zangrillo was conducting that should be published soon. Zangrillo concluded that the virus really has somehow weakened.
Note that Zangrillo was Silvio Berlusconi’s personal doctor so that’s a bit of a red flag but he’s since he’s basing these claims on a study that should be published it’s going to be difficult for him to just make up stuff.
And Zangrillo isn’t the only Italian doctor who has observed what appears to be a significant attenuation of the severity of COVID cases. Matteo Bassetti, the director of the infectious diseases clinic of the San Martino hospital in Genoa, also asserted this week that the virus “may now be different: the firepower it had two months ago is not the same firepower it has today.”
These observations led to a strong backlash from other experts who point out that there are other explanations for the drop in observed viral loads — like more testing resulting in more moderate cases getting measured — and warning that this isn’t the right time for speculation that could lead people to be less cautious, especially with Italy now lifting the lockdown. And while it’s true that there are other explanations for the observed drops in viral load it’s worth recalling that small study out of China that tested 11 different strains of SARS-CoV‑2 and found a ~270-fold difference in the viral loads in infected human cell cultures and the strains with the highest viral loads had the mutations found in the strains infecting Europe. So there has already been at least one study that found there really are different strains with dramatic difference in viral loads and that Europe was hit by the nastier strains early on.
Also recall that we’ve seen quite a few different studies at this point where researchers speculated that there were different strains of the virus floating around. For example, there was the earlier study out of China that found two different strains in Wuhan (the ‘S‑Type’ and ‘L‑type’ strains) and speculated that the L‑Type strain, which emerged some time in December in Wuhan and came to dominate the new cases in the city, was somehow more effective at spread. That speculation of different strains of the virus led to calls from some virologists for the paper to be retracted. Then there was the study from a team at Cambridge University that found three strains (Type A, B, and C) that led to the team to conclude that Type B — which emerged in Wuhan in December and spread to Europe and roughly corresponds to the ‘L‑type’ strain in the previous study — was somehow better adapted for Asian immune systems (because the Type B strain didn’t mutate as much as it spread throughout Asia compared to Europe). This team estimated the emergence of the outbreak and concluded that it probably happened some time between September 13 and December 7, 2019, and right in the middle of that date range was the Military World Games in Wuhan in the last week of October. Then there was the more recent study out of Los Alamos Labs that found a newer “G‑clade” strain that emerged in either Wuhan or Germany in late January that appeared to sweep Europe and New York City dominate the new cases whenever it moved into an area.
So we have a growing number of studies that found certain strains were dominating new cases, although there’s still been an ongoing debate within the expert community as to whether or not this represents new viral strains that actually have different properties or if we’re seeing the results of “founder effects” and other random luck events that play a role in how pandemics play out. That makes these claims by two leading Italian doctors, one of whom just conducted at test at the epicenter of Italy’s pandemic, that the viral loads have dropped so much over the past two months dramatically that the virus seems almost like a different virus just the latest examples of experts concluding that there really are strains with different levels of virulence circulating. And the backlash against their findings is part of that same debate over whether or not these different strains really do have different viral properties.
But in what appears to be a first, these Italian doctors also appear to be observing that the more deadly strain isn’t as prevalent as before which is certainly great news. But whether or not there’s different strains floating around with different levels of virulence (maybe they can spread more easily or generate higher viral loads or infect the upper respiratory tract more effects, etc), it’s still a mystery as to why we’ve seen such an intense outbreak in certain places like New York City, Milan, or Wuhan compared to other areas that got hit by the same strains and whether or not other factors were playing a role in the intensity of Italy’s initial pandemic:
“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out on patients a month or two ago,” he told RAI television Sunday, citing a study from Massimo Clementi, director of the Microbiology and Virology Laboratory at the San Raffaele hospital, that is reportedly due to be published shortly.
The viral loads in Italy are plummeting for some reason or another. That’s what Dr. Zangrillo found in his study that’s due to be published soon so it’s going to be interesting to see the details of that study. And Dr. Zangrillo isn’t the only Italian doctor making this observation:
So are the new Italian cases of a different viral strain than the earlier ones? We’ll see. But if it turns out these newer cases don’t have any obvious differences from the earlier strains (like mutations that cause an amino acid change in the viral proteins) that’s going to continue to raise the question of what changed and whether or not there was another factor at work in certain locales that was somehow making the virus more deadly.
So it’s worth noting one possibility that might explain why certain areas have been hit so much harder than other despite presumably being hit by the same strains. It’s a possibility that was raised as a warning over the development of a vaccine and also relates to the possibility that there were earlier strains of this virus already circulating among some military athletes who attended the Military World Games in Wuhan: the phenomena known as antibody-dependent enhancement that can make an infection more severe if you already have antibodies circulating in your body because it somehow causes the immune system to over-respond. We already know this was happening during the earlier SARS epidemic so it’s not a stretch of the imagination to suspect infections with SARS-CoV‑2 could have a similar property which is why this is potentially such a big danger for vaccine development. So as the following article published back March in the journal Microbes and Infection asks, are any earlier coronavirus outbreaks contributing to the severity of COVID-19 cases?:
“One of the most perplexing questions regarding the current COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic is the discrepancy between the severity of cases observed in the Hubei province of China and those occurring elsewhere in the world. One possible answer is antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of SARS-CoV‑2 due to prior exposure to other coronaviruses. ADE modulates the immune response and can elicit sustained inflammation, lymphopenia, and/or cytokine storm, one or all of which have been documented in severe cases and deaths. ADE also requires prior exposure to similar antigenic epitopes, presumably circulating in local viruses, making it a possible explanation for the observed geographic limitation of severe cases and deaths.”
It’s a simple idea: if a city was previously exposed to a coronavirus that is similar enough to SARS-CoV‑2 that the antibodies for that previous infection can interact with the SARS-CoV‑2 virus that could be enough to induce the kind of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) that creates severe cases. Did New York City or Milan happen to have some sort of quiet coronavirus outbreak last year that wasn’t recognized? Perhaps an earlier, milder form of SARS-CoV‑2? Perhaps a different, but closely related strain? It’s a possibility worth considering, especially since it sounds like the “priming” virus could be as mild as a coronavirus like 229E that causes symptoms similar to the common cold:
Did New York City and Milan and Wuhan (and maybe Tehran) all get previously exposed to some sort of mild coronavirus recently enough that the populations there still had antibodies when SARS-CoV‑2 arrived? It’s a question that we could potentially answer if widespread antibody testing was already taking place early on in the most severely hit regions.
Also note, from a biowarfare perspective, how enticing this kind of ‘feature’ could be if you want to cause a pandemic that hit certain regions extra hard because the ‘priming’ wouldn’t necessarily have to involve an easily communicable virus that could spread around the world. Don’t forget that SARS-CoV‑2 can potentially be spread in feces and infect the gut and therefore can potentially be spread through food. Now imagine a “priming” coronavirus designed to be spread through food but not respiration allowing you to target specific cities or countries with a “priming” virus. Or perhaps the virus could be spread on the surfaces of subways and other public transit infrastructure. In other words, a Pacov‑1/Pacov‑2 scenario, but instead of the deadly effects taking place when you’re infected by both viruses simultaneously you get the deadly effects if you’re first targeted by the first mild virus that isn’t very communicable to build up the antibodies before everyone gets exposed the second highly infectious virus .
Something to keep in mind with this scenario is that whether or not we’re looking at an intentionally created ADE scenario or a naturally occurring one the exposure to the “priming” virus would likely have to be relatively soon before the exposure to SARS-CoV‑2 because otherwise the antibody levels could drop below the level where ADE takes place (or drop to zero). So do we have any reason to believe there was a similar, but less severe coronavirus floating around in 2019? Well, that’s part of what makes the fact that military athletes appeared to be infected with a COVID-like ailment at the Military World Games in Wuhan so interesting because it suggests there could be all sorts of cities where people were getting prior exposure to the earlier, milder strain of the virus or perhaps a different ‘priming’ strain. So it would be interesting to see if the cities with the athletes who reported getting sick also tended to have more severe COVID-19 outbreaks. We already know some Italian athletes were among those who reported COVID-like symptoms. Did Milan have a quiet outbreak before the rest of the world that was “priming” the population there for the more deadly outbreak a few months later?
Along those lines, here’s another article from a few weeks ago about more athletes from the Military World Games reporting they got sick. Now we have German volleyball player Jacqueline Bock telling us that she got sick along with a number of her teammates. According to Bock, “After a few days, some athletes from my team got ill...I got sick in the last two days.” Keep in mind that, given the incubation period of this virus (up to two weeks), if you get sick only a few days into your trip to Wuhan there’s a high likelihood that you were already infected before that trip:
“Among dozens of other competitors contacted by the MoS, some said they had been told not to comment. Oliver Gorges, a triathlete from Luxembourg, said he became ill with flu-like symptoms and is now to undergo an antibody test this week to discover if he had contracted the coronavirus.”
At least some of these contact athletes were getting orders of “no comment”. That’s interesting. Also note how Swedish pentathlete Melina Westerberg admits that several of her compatriots got sick during the games but tested negative for the virus. It’s kind of a nonsense answer since there presumably wasn’t a test for SARS-CoV‑2 at the time they would have been sick. Maybe she meant they all got antibody tests but even in that case we still don’t know how long people maintain antibodies for this infection after exposure.
But it’s the details from Jacqueline Bock that are the most interesting because the timeline strongly hints that at least some of her teammates were infected before they arrived in Wuhan. If people were getting sick on her team after a few days there’s no reason to assume they caught the virus in Wuhan. Sure, it’s possible but it’s also very possible they already had the virus based on what we know about it:
So we have more and more sick athletes who had something COVID-like in October and we know from the early SARS epidemic that ADE “priming” from similar virus is something that might take place with this family of viruses. Might that explain, at least in part, why the virus seemed so much more deadly in some cities vs others?
@Pterrafractyl–
With regard to the ADE “priming”–it strongly suggests the possibility of cross-vectoring.
Other studies have raised the possibility of blood type impacting the severity if infection, among other factors.
One flaw in the article about the ADE factor concerns the fact that there ARE very severe cases in relatively young and healthy people in other areas. Not just old folks are people with other medical conditions. The rumination about blood type variability is just one of the possible considerations being explored.
The more I read, the more it becomes apparent that the scientific and medical authorities are baffled.
The symptomatology, the epidemiology and the manifestation of the variability in infectivity have basically stumped an impressive array of “authorities.”
There is widespread disagreement about the capabilities of various emerging strains.
In short, it could not be more obvious that this is no ordinary virus.
Notice, though that they are not dealing with the possibility of the Shincheonji cult being a deliberate vector, the possibility of the Military World Games participants having been vectored and the research into just these kind of viruses being done by DARPA:
BTW–I have no idea what a “stealth virus” is in biology or medicine. I know what it is in the computer world.
I wonder if some of the various types of “novel” bat-borne coronaviruses may have been employed in a cross-vectoring scenario.
Of course, there are a number of types of coronaviruses.
It is (ahem) symptomatic of our political culture that this DARPA research, the full-court press against China, the shutting down of USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick in August of 2019 simply get no consideration.
I was more than a little interested that the studies discussed in “GMWatch” were funded, in part, by organizations frequently used by U.S. intelligence and/or Pentagon.
Yet there was no discussion of that in the article, nor did any of the commenters even touch on that. That USAMRIID has long had a relationship with WIV was not mentioned either.
“Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Reccent DARPA Experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak” by Whitney Webb; The Last American Vagabond; 1/30/2020.
1. “. . . . the U.S. Air Force published a document entitled ‘Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens,’ which contains the following passage: ‘The JASON group, composed of academic scientists, served as technical advisers to the U. S. government. Their study generated six broad classes of genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society. These include but are not limited to binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases (emphasis added).’ . . .”
2. ” . . . . the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), began spending millions on such research in 2018 and some of those Pentagon-funded studies were conducted at known U.S. military bioweapons labs bordering China and resulted in the discovery of dozens of new coronavirus strains as recently as last April. Furthermore, the ties of the Pentagon’s main biodefense lab to a virology institute in Wuhan, China — where the current outbreak is believed to have begun — have been unreported in English language media thus far. . . . For instance, DARPA spent $10 million on one project in 2018 ‘to unravel the complex causes of bat-borne viruses that have recently made the jump to humans, causing concern among global health officials.” Another research project backed by both DARPA and NIH saw researchers at Colorado State University examine the coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in bats and camels ‘to understand the role of these hosts in transmitting disease to humans.’ . . . For instance, one study conducted in Southern China in 2018 resulted in the discovery of 89 new ‘novel bat coronavirus’ strains that use the same receptor as the coronavirus known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). That study was jointly funded by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Science and Technology, USAID — an organization long alleged to be a front for U.S. intelligence, and the U.S. National Institute of Health — which has collaborated with both the CIA and the Pentagon on infectious disease and bioweapons research.. . . .”
Also to be considered is the series of pandemics affecting China: See the “Global Research” article in FTR #1118.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-coronavirus-shocking-update/5705196
. . . . Just for information
In the past two years (during the trade war) China has suffered several pandemics:
• February 15, 2018: H7N4 bird flu. Sickened at least 1,600 people in China and killed more than 600. Many chickens killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
• June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu. Many chickens killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
• August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu. Same strain as Russia, from Georgia. Millions of pigs killed. China needs to purchase US pork products.
• May 24, 2019: massive infestation of armyworms in 14 province-level regions in China, which destroy most food crops. Quickly spread to more than 8,500 hectares of China’s grain production. They produce astonishing numbers of eggs. China needs to purchase US agricultural products – corn, soybeans.
• December, 2019: Coronavirus appearance puts China’s economy on hold.
• January, 2020:China is hit by a “highly pathogenic” strain of bird flu in Hunan province. Many chickens died, many others killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
The standard adage is that bad luck happens in threes, not sixes.
Best,
Dave
One of the interesting things to watch as the international search for the origins of the coronavirus plays out is the steady trickle of research that keeps pushing back of the envelope of the best guesses on the start of the outbreak in Wuhan. What started as a pandemic that appears to erupt suddenly in December from a wet market in Wuhan has been steadily pushed back to the early December, then mid-November, and now at least as early as the Wuhan Military World Games in the last week of October.
There’s now a new study out of Harvard that appears to push it back to perhaps August, although the conclusions are extremely speculative and based on unvalidated very indirect techniques to arrive at that conclusion. The authors looked at data like satellite imagery of the parking lots of major hospitals in the Wuhan area over the past two years and discovered a significant uptick in cars at the Wuhan hospitals starting at some point in October through December when compared to the same period in 2018.
In addition, the authors looked at the search engine terms used on the Baidu.com search engine during this same period over the past two years and found a distinct uptick in searches for both “cough” and “diarrhea” starting in August of 2019. And while an uptick in “cough” was roughly to be expected at that point, the uptick in “diarrhea” searches was was significantly higher than the levels seen throughout 2018. And since COVID-19, unlike influenza, is known to cause gastrointestinal issues the authors speculate that the increased levels of searches for “diarrhea” point towards an outbreak in COVID-19 already getting underway.
As we’ll see, there are a number of scientists who were quick to dismiss the study’s findings as perhaps interesting but far from conclusive. There’s a myriad of reasons you could have an increase in hospital traffic or searches for “diarrhea” from one year to the next. And while none of them mention it, there’s one very big and very obvious possible reason for an uptick in “diarrhea” searches starting around August of 2019 in Wuhan: international travel associated with getting ready for the World Military Games. We’ve had reports now from a number of military athletes who got sick during or after the games in late October. But for an event that size (it’s only once every four years like the Olympics), it seems highly likely that there was an increase international travel to Wuhan for months leading up to the actual event. And it’s hard to imagine a better reason for a sudden uptick in the search terms for “diarrhea” than people from all around the world suddenly traveling to a city for a big international sports competition. Over 10,000 athletes from over 100 countries’ militaries competed in these games. How much extra international travel did that bring to the region in the months leading up the games?
But as we’re going to see, a big part of what makes this new study interesting is that its unorthodox techniques happen to be the same kind of techniques used by US intelligence agencies to look for early signs of disease outbreaks. And it turns out that National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a part of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), used these same techniques to detect in real-time the outbreak of some sort of disease in Wuhan and were issuing high-level warnings to the White House about the potential for a catastrophic pandemic in November.
As we’ll see, these warnings about the emerging pandemic were apparently widely circulated in the US intelligence community made it all the way up to Trump’s Presidential Daily Briefings in early January. Now, this is a fascinating finding for a number of reasons, but it’s worth noting that it was April 8th when ABC News first reported these NCMI finding, which was based on anonymous sources and denied by the Pentagon. And within about a week of that report the Trump administration’s story on the origins of the virus had shifted from suggesting the virus originated at the Wuhan wet market to charging that it may have been released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The timing of that shifting narrative from the Trump administration after the Pentagon denied that ABC report about the NCMI analysis is interesting because the wet market origin hypothesis was heavily predicated on the early notion that the disease likely started at the market because so many of the initial cluster of cases with the novel virus initially identified in Wuhan in December were people with ties to the market. In other words, the ‘wet market origin’ theory was somewhat compelling if you didn’t know about an earlier outbreak but US intelligence was clearly detecting some sort of earlier outbreak that was possibly manifesting as an increase in traffic at Wuhan’s hospitals months earlier. And based on this published Harvard report this increase in hospital traffic was detectable as far back as October.
And if US intelligence was picking up on these heavier-than-expected hospital traffic in Wuhan it seems likely there were other governments with similar satellite capabilities. So at this point we have to ask: how many governments of the world had hints of some sort of disease outbreak in Wuhan in October or November or 2019? And there’s another obvious question related to this type of analysis using satellite images of hospital traffic to infer disease outbreaks: so how many other hospitals in China or around the world were under this similar kind of satellite observation and were hospitals in other countries also experiencing unusually high hospital traffic. At this point we have no idea because the newly released Harvard research only looks at Wuhan’s hospitals. But that satellite data should be available for hospitals elsewhere allowing for similar analyses. For example, the US’s flu season was already reportedly quite heavy by early December. How might US hospital traffic in the fall of 2019 compare to previous years? Although the US flu season was also above average in 2017 and 2018 so it would probably have to be longer retrospective analysis, but if that kind of satellite data is available it should be possible to do these kinds of analyses all around the world. So it’s going to be interesting to see if we ever eventually see a comparison of hospital traffic in Wuhan compared to elsewhere in the world last fall to see if Wuhan’s hospital traffic spike stood out or was seen around the world:
““Something was happening in October,” said Brownstein, the chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and director of the medical center’s Computational Epidemiology Lab. “Clearly, there was some level of social disruption taking place well before what was previously identified as the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic.””
So there was clearly some sort of spike in hospital traffic starting by at least October 2019 relative to the same period in 2018. That’s what they found based on nearly 350 images captures by private satellites. And at some of Wuhan’s hospitals the traffic spikes started in mid-September. As former acting Homeland Security Undersecretary John Cohen put it, the new research suggests that COVID-19 was likely brought to the US by travelers from Wuhan long before it was detected. Of course, the further back the apparent emergence of this pandemic the more difficult it is to determine where it ultimately originated. Especially with travelers for all over the world descending on Wuhan for the Military World Games in October. It’s another example of why this type of retrospective analysis would have to be applied to hospitals all over the world, not just Wuhan:
Then there’s part of their research that relied on search engine terms to infer whether or not an outbreak was taking place. While searches for “cough” roughly correspond to what would be expected from seasonal influenza, the searches for “diarrhea” was spiking as early as late summer (it appears to be around August if you look at the figure 2 in their study). And that raises the obvious question: was the spike in “diarrhea” searches coinciding with a spike in international travelers to Wuhan as people from around the world began preparations for the Military World Games? A related question is what language were the “diarrhea” searches done in? Because Baidu.com, the Chinese search engine they used for their analysis, allows for non-Chinese-character searches and it’s not like there’s necessarily going to be the whole range of international search engines available to travelers in Wuhan. So tourists in China would have probably been forced to use Chinese search engine like Baidu.com. Were these “diarrhea” searches tourists or locals? It’s unclear from the paper because they don’t clarify the languages used for the “cough” or “diarrhea” search terms:
But perhaps the most intriguing part of this study isn’t the study itself. It’s the fact that they were apparently using techniques that are similar to those used by the CIA and DIA. And in particular, this was the same technique used by the NCMI when it arrived at its own conclusion that a pandemic was breaking out in Wuhan in late November, according to source:
At the same time, we have to keep in mind that this form of analysis can easily be misinterpreted because there’s a wide variety of possibilities that could explain this spike in hospital traffic or internet searches:
So here’s a quick Reuters piece that includes more words of caution from other researchers about the risks of this type of analysis. As some pointed out, it would have been interesting to see some control groups of hospitals in other regions of China. It underscores the fact that we could be conducting this type of analysis anywhere in the world where the satellite data exists so it’s going to be interesting to see if that ever happens:
““It would have been interesting — and possibly much more convincing — to have seen control analyses of other Chinese cities outside of the Hubei region,” he said.”
Will we see hospital traffic analyses from around the world at some point? If not, that’s kind of odd if you think about. There’s a global hunt for the origins of the virus going on, after all. So hopefully we’ll see those analyses at some point because that could be quite interesting.
And note the worlds of caution from Dr. Eric Topol who points out that the genetic data points towards the pandemic starting in humans some time in the fall, so after August:
Keep in mind that the genetic evidence is based on collected viral samples that have been genetically sequenced and that’s going to be biased by the fact that the virus was first officially detected in Wuhan in December and the pandemic in Europe and the US east coast appears to have been dominated by those strains that emerged out of Wuhan. And since the strains of the virus that were first detected in December in Wuhan appear to be more efficient at spreading and overtaking older strains that may have been circulating in an area, it’s very possible we’re systematically not collecting genetic evidence that would indicate an earlier outbreak.
That said, the warnings from these scientists about the lack of specificity in the satellite image-based analysis is important to keep in mind whether or not there are issues with the collection of genetic evidence. There really are a wide variety of non-COVID possible causes for the hospital surges in Wuhan in October and the spike in “diarrhea” searches starting in August. For example, as the following AP piece from December 6, 2019, describes, the US was experiencing the early flu season in 15 years with a growing outbreak across a number of southern states stretching from George to Texas. The early outbreak started in Louisiana in October and symptoms have included diarrhea and vomiting. So who knows...whatever was hitting Wuhan in October may have been hitting Louisiana in October too:
“Gross is pessimistic. “I, personally, am preparing for the worst,” she said.”
LOL. Yeah, Dr. Gross was clearly pessimistic, but she presumably wasn’t pessimistic enough!
And look how Louisiana started seeing large number of flu-like illnesses in October and the Children’s Hospital New Orleans they already had more flu cases as of early December than they saw all of last winter. And last winter was also known to be a pretty nasty flu season. Plus, these illnesses were causing diarrhea and vomiting. So what was going on with Louisiana’s “flu-like illnesses” last fall? That seems like a pretty huge mystery worth exploring. Keep in mind that kids are the least likely to develop COVID-19 so it would be very interesting to see some stats on the flu-like illnesses in a non-Children’s hospital in the New Orleans area:
Also note that the Southern US states have been among the worst at actually testing people early on as this pandemic unfolded. So if there was an earlier outbreak in those states of an early strain of SARS-CoV‑2 there’s a good chance the genetic evidence of those early strains is going to be wiped out by the more dominant strains that appear to have emerged in Wuhan, then Europe, and then New York City and the rest of the US.
Ok, finally, here’s that ABC News report from early April that mentions how the NCMI, part of the DIA, had already conducted this same kind of satellite imagery analysis of the Wuhan hospitals — as well as wire and computer intercepts — and was circulating warnings of a cataclysmic event as of late November. It’s a report strongly denied by the Pentagon, although those strong denials tend to use ‘non-denial denial’ language:
““Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. “It was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.”
A cataclysmic event. You have to wonder if that assessment was based primarily on the satellite data or if it was the wire/computer intercept data hinting at a cataclysm. Because it’s hard to imagine that spike in hospital traffic alone would amount to warnings about potential cataclysms...unless, of course, there was already some sort of awareness of the dangerous nature of this virus. But if there was indeed some sort of prior awareness of unprecedented nature of this virus it clearly didn’t impact the US government’s response despite these warnings being extensively shared across the federal government:
And note the language from one of the sources in this article that hints at the alarm over this emerging pandemic starting earlier than late November:
And while the Pentagon is formally denying this report, note the language used by Defense Secretary Mark Esper when directly asked about this: phrases like “I can’t recall” and “I’m not aware of that”. Those are classic non-denial denial phrases:
So that’s going to be another key area of inquiry in terms of determining when this pandemic started and where it started: what did the intelligence agencies around the tasked with watching for these kinds of events know about emergency disease outbreaks in 2019 and when did they know it? Also, where did they detect it and why were they searching for it in the first place? Was this early outbreak of something just detected in Wuhan? Were people specifically looking at Wuhan’s public health status for a reason or was that a typical area of analysis that’s routinely done?
It’s that broader context that makes this new Harvard study based on satellite imagery and internet searches so interesting: whether or not the study’s results are valid themselves, the fact that study sort of replicated what US intelligence had already done in real-time last fall is a a reminder that if we want to ask these kinds of complex retrospective questions about what happened last year there’s a good chance the global network of intelligence agencies hold a lot of these answers. The fact that the Pentagon totally denied the existence of that NCMI report is a reminder that we probably aren’t going to get ready access to those answers.
There a new report in the American Prospect about the mystery of the sick military athletes at the Military World Games in Wuhan. The report investigate the question of whether or not there were outbreaks of COVID cases at the US military bases where the athletes who competed in Wuhan returned. According to the article, when the Wuhan games ended US athletes returned to at least 219 home bases in 25 states. We don’t have data on infections in US bases in the fall of 2019 because testing wasn’t done. But the Pentagon did release military infection information on March 31st and as of that date infections occurred at a minimum of 63 of those facilities, representing a strong correlation between COVID-19 cases at U.S. military facilities and these home bases of members of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan. We aren’t shown the details of the investigation in the following article — details like a comparison of infection rates at bases that housed the athletes vs those that didn’t — so that going to be something to keep an eye on.
There’s another interesting observation in the article related to the early outbreak of COVID in Washington State: the U.S. team used chartered flights to and from the games via Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. So that pushes the window for the likeliest first infections in Washington State at least as far back as the beginning of November (when the team would have returned from Wuhan) and maybe mid-October (when the team would have flown to Wuhan). As the retrospective analyses continue to try to find the earliest signs of the outbreak it will be interesting to see if there are any suspected COVID cases in the Seattle area that can be traced back to the last half of October.
So it sounds like someone has started asking that basic question of whether or not there were detectable outbreaks of COVID-like infections around the home bases of those military athletes and the early answer is, yes, there’s evidence of those early outbreaks:
“Contrary to the Pentagon’s insistence, however, an investigation of COVID-19 cases in the military from official and public source materials shows that a strong correlation exists in COVID-19 cases reported at U.S. military facilities that are home bases of members of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan.”
A strong correlation exists in COVID-19 cases reported at U.S. military facilities that are home bases of members of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan. That’s how they’re describing their findings, where as of March 31 there were infections at 63 of the 219 military facilities where team members returned after the games. Also keep in mind that, as of March 31, there probably wasn’t really widely available accurate test kits for use in the military so there was probably some degree of under-counting from that. But a much bigger factor is simply that that the military is overwhelmingly populated with people the most unlikely to exhibit symptoms if they are infected — young healthy people — and since testing in March was likely limited to people exhibiting flu-like symptoms the overwhelming number of positive cases on military bases probably weren’t caught because there would have been no reason to test those asymptomatic cases. Also keep in mind that if there have been infections at these bases since October (or earlier), the people who did get symptomatically ill may have already gotten ill and had it assumed to be the regular flu months back in November and December before the pandemic was officially discovered. In other words, the acknowledged outbreak of infections on 63 of those 219 military facilities was probably an undercount, especially since the Pentagon has reiterated how it has felt no need to subsequently test those athletes for SARS-CoV‑2 exposure when this pandemic was first discovered in Wuhan, despite the fact that Wuhan was the epicenter and these athletes had spent weeks there just two months before it was discovered:
Even more remarkable is that no military anywhere in the world that had a team competing at those games has acknowledged screening their athletes for signs of previous infections after the pandemic was first declared in Wuhan in late December. How is it that over a hundred military teams were in Wuhan just two months before this and no military decided to engage in emergency testing?
Related to that is the observation that the US team chartered flights to and from Wuhan via Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and Washington State is by all accounts one of the sites of the earliest outbreaks. Similar flights must have been chartered for military teams around the world. It seems like those cities were the flights were chartered would be obviously locations to examine for signs of early outbreaks but that doesn’t appear to be happening anywhere:
Finally, regarding the recent research release from Harvard and Boston University indicating that the outbreak could have started in Wuhan as early as August, recall that this was the satellite imagery analysis that was highly speculative and US intelligence had conducted similar analyses and didn’t find it convincing. The stronger evidence suggested heavier hospital traffic starting in October, with internet search terms for ‘diarrhea’ in Wuhan starting to rise in August which led the researchers to suggest this was an early sign of COVID-19. Also recall that hospitals in Louisiana were actually reporting an unusually heavy and early flu season with ‘diarrhea’-like symptoms in October too, so it wasn’t just hospitals in Wuhan that had an unusual flu season last fall:
Yes, new data continues to emerge that COVID-19 infections were present in Wuhan in mid- or early November 2019, but as this whole investigation into outbreaks on military bases makes clear, the question of whether or not COVID-19 infections were present elsewhere in the world in October or November has basically not been asked yet by almost anyone. And yet based on a growing pile of evidence almost every military on the planet possibly had infected athletes at least by November. Why did no military on the planet screen their Wuhan athletes when this outbreak was first announced? The world knew by late December that something funky was taking place in Wuhan. And when that became clear to the world that something was breaking out in Wuhan it seems like it should have been pretty obvious that people who spent weeks in Wuhan two months beforehand should be screened. But that never happened according to the statements by virtually every military. How is that possible? So when we retrospectively go back and ask the basic questions of who knew what when as this outbreak was playing out, the fact that every military in the world apparently played dumb about their athletes and continues to play dumb is going to be a big complication in answering that question.
@Pterrafractyl–
Notice how NOBODY talks about this: https://spitfirelist.com/news/disturbing-article-about-darpa-and-bat-borne-coronaviruses/
Just like nobody is talking about the Thai MD’s successful use of a drug cocktail to treat the disease. Too many $$‘s at stake here, I suspect.
The number of possible vectors into and/or out of Wuhan is considerable: Were athletes vectored at, or prior to the games, so that they could then spread the virus wherever they went?
The USAID/USAMRIID/NIH links to WIV suggests another possible vector (remember that biological warfare requires a VERY small number of operational personnel.)
Was the November conference at WIV another possible vector?
The Shincheonji Korean Cult (with operational and doctrinal overlap with the Unification Church) was the apparent vehicle for the initial spread of the virus in South Korea. The cult also had a branch in Wuhan.
Recall that the U.S. Ambassador, Harry B. Harris, Jr. was the former Chief of Naval Operations in the Pacific and a former commandant of Guantanamo. The possibility of Harris being ONI and/or CIA is considerable.
Again, had this occurred in a vacuum, well, who knows?
But it did not, not by a long shot. It occurred in the middle of multiple intelligence ops against China, six other pandemics, as well as a trade war, cyber and journalistic conflicts, not to mention a “Yellow Journalism Peril” exemplified by “The New York Times” that is every bit the equal of the cacophony of anti-Russia propaganda to which we are being treated almost daily.
Oh, well, at least we have Gilead Sciences riding to the rescue with remdesivir.
Oh, wait.
Keep up the great work,
Dave
@Pterrafractyl–
Also: at the risk of seeming to be blowing my own horn, I noted months ago in several programs that vectoring military athletes at the Wuhan World Games would be a superb way of spreading the virus around the world.
Best,
Dave
Here’s a set of stories about both the successes and challenges Australia has had in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic:
First, recall one of the under-studied aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic that makes Australia an outlier compared to the rest of the world: Australia’s initial outbreak appeared to be almost entirely of the older “Type A” strain of the virus. This was highlighted in the research published back in April by the Forster lab at Cambridge University that carried out phylogenetic analysis of the viral genetic sequences collected around the world at that point and found that there were three general strains: the original Type A strain, and then Type B which emerged in Wuhan in December and rapidly became the dominant strain that infected Europe and then the US east coast. Australia, however, was the one country that was overwhelmingly infected with Type A strains. And since the Type B strain was seemingly so much more successful at infecting people than the older Type A strain, that raised the question of whether or not it was actually more virulent than Type A.
That was the picture that was emerging back in April. It’s August now and a lot more data has come in from around the world and what we’re finding is that the mortality rate in Australia for severe cases of COVID-19 has been basically the best in the world. As we’ll see from a report from mid-July, by that point there had been a total of 214 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia’s Intensive Care Units (ICUs) since the start of the pandemic. That’s it. Just 214 in total. But even more astounding his that of the 118 patients placed on mechanical ventilators, 78 percent of them have survived. No other country even approaches that ventilator patient survival rate The overall mortality rate for Austrlia’s ICU patients is around 15 percent, compared to 40 percent in the UK, 44 percent in China, and up to 70 percent in the US.
So there’s something unusual about how this pandemic is playing out in Australia which raises the obvious question of whether or not the country’s relatively high survival rates are due to the fact that its basically unique in the world for having been exclusively impacted by the older Type A strain.
Officially, Australia is telling itself that the low mortality rate is due to the high quality of medical resources made available for each patient due, in part, to the fact that Australia has done a better job of controlling the spread of the virus than most countries (which, again, raises the question of whether or not success in controlling the spread is due in part to the strain). But as we’ll see in the third excerpt below, even Germany, which has been hailed for its low mortality rates and abundant medical supplies, hasn’t been able to achieve Australia’s ICU mortality rates. 78 percent of Australia’s patients placed on ventilators survived, as of mid-July. Germany, on the other hand saw 72 percent of his its patients aged 18–59 on ventilators survive while only 28 percent of German ventilator patients over 80 have survived. Overall, the German mortality rate for patients on ventilators was around 50 percent. So Australia has had a globally remarkable level of success in treating the sickest patients that even Germany can’t approach.
Now here’s the part that doesn’t bode well for Australia but could be grimly instructive: the country is implementing a new set of major lockdowns following a new wave of cases. And it’s thought those cases originated from quarantined international travelers who were staying at hotels but didn’t abide the quarantine rules. And that suggests that this new wave of cases probably isn’t the older Type A strain and more likely the seemingly more infectious Type B strain. So Australia’s new outbreak is likely Type B, which means we’re unfortunately going to get a grim test of whether or not Australia’s remarkable mortality rates thus far is due primarily to remarkable health care or if the country got lucky with initial strain:
“Australia had prided itself on rapidly containing the initial COVID-19 outbreak but a second wave which began in Victoria last month has forced Melbourne back into lockdown and sparked outbreaks in other areas including Sydney.”
The virus seemed to be almost eliminated until this new outbreak. That implies almost all of the new cases are going to be from this new outbreak. And if those happen to be Type B cases we’re going to get our first look at how well a country that’s well-prepared for this virus can handle a Type B outbreak. If Australia can’t do it at this point given then extreme lockdown measures it’s implement it’s going to raise the question of what kind of measures would be required to actually contain the spread. And a big part of what’s going to make this such a grim experiment is that it’s going to be a big test as to whether or not Australia can maintain its remarkable low mortality rate or if it joins the rest of the world where going on a ventilator is nearly a death sentence:
“The overall ICU mortality rate of 15 per cent compares to 40 per cent in Britain, 44 per cent in China, where COVID-19 originated, and up to 70 per cent in the US, where nearly 140,000 people have died from the disease.”
A 15 percent ICU mortality rate compared to 40 percent in the UK and 70 percent in the US. Even more remarkable is the 78 percent survival rates for patients on ventilators. Nowhere else in the world has rates like that:
Now compare that 78 percent ventilator survival rate to that of Germany, the European country with a comparably under-strained medical system that has led Europe in terms of survival rates: According to a recent article in the Lancet, Germany’s ventilator survival rates were at 72 percent for patients ages 18–59 (117 of 422) but only 28 percent for ages 80 and older (280 of 388 patients) and around 50 percent overall:
“...In-hospital mortality was 22% overall (2229 of 10 021), with wide variation between patients without ventilation (1323 [16%] of 8294) and with ventilation (906 [53%] of 1727; 65 [45%] of 145 for non-invasive ventilation only, 70 [50%] of 141 for non-invasive ventilation failure, and 696 [53%] of 1318 for invasive mechanical ventilation). In-hospital mortality in ventilated patients requiring dialysis was 73% (342 of 469). In-hospital mortality for patients with ventilation by age ranged from 28% (117 of 422) in patients aged 18–59 years to 72% (280 of 388) in patients aged 80 years or older.”
Even Germany, with its remarkable medical resources and minimal strain on its healthcare system, couldn’t even come close to Australia’s 78 percent ventilator patient survival rates. Why is that? We don’t know at this point, but with Australia facing what could be its first Type B outbreak right now we could end up with an answer. An answer that would unfortunately come in the form of a much higher mortality rate than Australia has experienced thus far.
Bit by bit, as more studies have been conducted asking when and where the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic emerged from, the more that date gets pushed back. At first we thought it was December 2019. Then we learn that the first recorded cases in China emerged in November. Then there were all of the cases of sick military athletes who attended to the Military World Games in Wuhan in the last week of October 2019 that raised the prospect of the virus arriving in Wuhan from elsewhere.
There was also that study by a private satellite image analysis company that looked at satellite imagery of hospital parking lots around Wuhan hospitals and detected some sort of unseasonal increased hospital traffic in Wuhan as early as October 2019. And while that study was largely dismissed as highly speculative and not at all conclusive, it raised the point that hospitals around the world were experiencing unusually heavy cases of flu-like illnesses in the fall of 2019, including hospitals in places like Louisiana.
So, overall, there has not only been evidence of the coronavirus circulating in Wuhan earlier than thought but also evidence of it already circulating around the world long before December 2019. And that brings us to the following very interesting new study of or Italy. Researchers found that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 already had coronavirus neutralizing antibodies before February of 2020. And in four cases, they found antibodies in blood draw in the first week of October 2019, which means they must have been infected by September of 2019.
The fact that they found neutralizing antibodies that targeted SARS-CoV‑2, and not just T‑cells that could recognize the virus, is potentially very significant. Recall how there’s growing evidence that some people may have already had at least a partial immunity to the coronavirus based on exposure to common cold coronaviruses. But evidence also indicates that this cross-immunity between common cold coronaviruses and SARS-CoV‑2 is conveyed by the T‑cells, not antibodies, in part because T‑cells tend to last much longer than antibodies. So when these Italian researchers found antibodies that neutralize SARS-CoV‑2 in blood samples taken from the first week of October 2019 that’s compelling evidence that this immune response really was triggered by the SARS-CoV‑2 virus and not some coronavirus cousin:
“It showed that four cases dated back to the first week of October were also positive for antibodies neutralizing the virus, meaning they had got infected in September, Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, told Reuters.”
Was Italy experiencing the Coronavirus in September of 2019? It would be consistent with the Italian military athletes who reported COVID-like symptoms at the World Military Games in Wuhan in late October 2019. And if the virus was capable of circulating undetected in Italy until the full blown outbreak in February of 2020, we have to ask how much earlier was it circulating than September? The studies asking that question probably have yet to actually be done:
And similar to what Louisiana also reported in the last quarter of 2019, there were high-than-usual numbers of cases of severe pneumonia in parts of Italy in the last quarter of 2019:
So, at this point, these four Italian volunteers who had SARS-CoV‑2 neutralizing antibodies appear to be earliest cases of SARS-CoV‑2 infections on record anywhere in the world. September 2019 in Italy. That’s our current ‘Patient Zero-ish’. We have this evidence of infections in Italy in early October 2019 combined with the Italian military athletes who reported COVID-like symptoms during their trip to Wuhan in late October.
Perhaps more importantly, with this study we also have a template for retrospectively asking the question of whether or not people in a region had already been exposed to the virus long before the official outbreak. A template that can be used anywhere. As long as a hospital has blood samples still available we can ask these kinds of questions. Which means this is the kind of question that likely could be asked by hospitals all around the world. Could be asked, but likely not yet asked in most places, if ever.
It raises the general question of where else in the world have studies like this been set up yet. Are other teams around the world taking this kind of retrospective look back into old blood samples? And how far back are they going? It seems like a high-priority question that should be asked everywhere and yet we haven’t really seen other reports of retrospective examinations of pre-pandemic blood samples for evidence of immunity. This study has largely been it, despite this being a pretty obvious type of question to ask when chasing the origins of this pandemic. It’s all an example of why one of the big remaining questions about the origin of the SAR-CoV‑2 virus includes the basic question of which basic questions — like the basic question of how when and where can we find SARS-CoV‑2 antibodies in old blood samples — are even being asked in the first place.
Here’s a story about one of the biggest initial commercial winners from the COVID-19 pandemic that potentially ties into the broader story of Operation Warp the role and influence Peter Thiel has played in formulating, and profiting from, the US’s SARS-CoV‑2 response:
It turns out one of the companies first chosen to deliver rapid COVID-19 tests, Los Angeles-based Curative, may have been delivering highly erroneous results this whole time, with a propensity for both false positives and false negatives. It also turns out that Curative’s founder, Fred Turner, was one of the recipients of a ‘Thiel Fellowship’ — the ‘scholarship’ program where Thiel pays college students $100,000 to drop out of college and create a start-up company instead. Recall how one of the early Trump picks to head the FDA, Jim O’Neill, also happened to be a co-founder of one of Thiel’s investment companies and a co-founder of Thiel’s Fellowship program (O’Neill went on to play a key role in staffing the Trump administration). In addition to his Thiel Fellowship, Turner also had a slot in the Y Combinator start-up accelerator. Keep in mind that Y Combinator only quietly cut its ties to Peter Thiel in late 2017, ostensibly over Thiel’s overtly close ties to the Trump administration at that point. So given the profound role Thiel played in formulating the federal COVID-19 response, and given Turner’s obvious commercial ties to Thiel — Turner’s success or failure is a reflection of the Thiel Fellowship, after all — we should probably be asking what, if any, role did Thiel’s network of investors play in Curative suddenly becoming the go-to company for COVID-19 testing despite the obvious quality control issues:
“One year into the pandemic, much of the world has moved on from testing and turned its focus to vaccine supply, including Curative, which is distributing vaccines as it looks to reinvent itself. But the story of how a tiny start-up with an unconventional diagnostic mushroomed into a billion-dollar testing juggernaut illuminates just how unprepared L.A. County, California and the nation were for what was coming. It’s a story rooted in a debilitated public sector that in response to an overwhelming catastrophe opted to relax regulations and place its faith in companies large and small that were ready and able to profit from a once-in-a-century pandemic.”
Yes, it’s the story of a tiny start-up that was able to capitalize on the relaxes regulations from a once-in-a-century pandemic to build a billion-dollar test juggernaut. A tiny start-up company backed by some of the most powerful and politically connected investors in the world. Curative was administering 10% of all COVID-19 tests in the US at one point...despite FDA misgivings from the very beginning. Did Turner’s history with Thiel play a role here?
Also note that, while it was Curatives move down to Los Angeles that appeared to facilitate getting its first big public contract with the city, keep in mind that Peter Thiel made a big deal a few years ago about moving from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles because he felt LA would be more welcoming to people with his politics. It raises the question of what kind of behind-the-scenes lobbying of the Los Angeles government by Thiel that’s been taking place. In other words, what role did the Curative’s ties to Thiel, and Thiel’s profound influence over the federal COVID-19 response, play in the LA government’s decision to back a ‘local’ company like Curative with a big contract:
And note the potentially huge implications to Curative’s quality control issues: False positives in a nursing home are a potential death sentence because healthy patients will be moved to the areas for sick infectious patients. These quality control issues really were life-and-death issues for vulnerable demographics. The FDA had concerns about the quality of the tests from the very beginning, the company kept promoting the use of its tests beyond what the FDA advised, and a predictable disaster predictably unfolded:
How many nursing home patients got sent to the sick ward over bogus Curative false positives? We’ll probably never really know, but it surely happened, and potentially on a massive scale of the company really was administering 10% of COVID-19 tests in the US at its peak. At this point it remains to be seen how much of a retrospective investigation is going to happen into the Trump administration’s COVID-19 decisions. But if that investigation should ever take place, this story is reminder that any investigation into the US’s COVID-19 response will, to some extent, be an investigation into the undue influence of Peter Thiel on the US government at all levels. It’s a long overdue investigation.