Covid19 News from Planet Waves — April 2020 entries

Yuan, a microbiology and biotechnology expert who trained in France, Denmark and the United States, also noted that a man-made coronavirus resembling the one ripping across the globe is beyond the scope of human intelligence.

The Chinese government has long denied that the lab was to blame and almost immediately pointed to a wet market in the city of Wuhan as the virus source. But there have been several questions raised about that theory since the illness has killed more than 156,000 people worldwide.

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Rutgers scientist warned of lab accidents in 2004 and has many times since | Added April 18

Not that lab accidents were invented in the 21st century, though they were warned about. Now famous for such cautions and for his efforts to bolster lab safety, Richard Ebright gave an interview to The New York Times in 2004. Here is a sample of the article.

“The government and many security experts say one crucial step is to build more high-security laboratories, where scientists can explore the threats posed not only by deadly natural germs, but also by designer pathogens — genetically modified superbugs that could outdo natural viruses and bacteria in their killing power. To this end, the Bush administration has earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to erect such laboratories in Boston; Galveston, Tex.; and Frederick, Md., among other places, increasing eightfold the overall space devoted to the high-technology buildings. ”

“Dr. Ebright, on the other hand, views the plans as a recipe for catastrophe. The laboratories, called biosafety level 4, or BSL-4, are costly, unnecessary and dangerous, he says.”

“In addition, he says, the laboratories could leak. They could put deadly pathogens into irresponsible hands and they will divert money from other worthy endeavors like public health and the frontiers of biology. Moreover, their many hundreds of new employees would become a pool of deadly expertise that could turn malevolent, unleashing lethal germs on an unsuspecting public.”

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Scientists developing a supposedly ‘non-invasive’ DNA-based vaccine | Added April 18

This report comes from Futurism:

A team of scientists is working on an experimental vaccine that hijacks your DNA to build up resistance to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

It’s still a work in progress, but the idea is to insert genetic material into a patient’s body that commissions their cellular machinery to churn out little virus-like particles, explained lead researcher and University of Waterloo pharmaceutical expert Roderick Slavcev.

“The concept of a DNA-based vaccine is that the genetic cargo has to be delivered to cells first after which the gene is expressed and can generate the proteins of interest,” Slavcev told Futurism, “in this case the proteins making up a viral shell called a virus-like particle.”

Slavcev and his team are trying to figure out how to engineer those virus-like particles to end up looking almost exactly like a harmless version of the coronavirus. If they sort out that remaining challenge, then the recipient’s immune system can go into overdrive and build up a resistance to the real coronavirus.

“When complete, our DNA-based vaccine will be administered non-invasively as a nasal spray that delivers nanomedicine engineered to immunize and decrease COVID-19 infections,” Slavcev said in a press release on the vaccine project, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed or accepted into an academic journal.

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Doctor who discovered HIV claims that the coronavirus is man made | Added April 18

Here’s part of an April 16 piece from Gilmore Health:

Contrary to the narrative that is being pushed by the mainstream that the COVID 19 virus was the result of a natural mutation and that it was transmitted to humans from bats via pangolins, Dr Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 disagrees and is saying that the virus was man made.

Professor Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claims that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Chinese researchers are said to have used coronaviruses in their work to develop an AIDS vaccine. HIV RNA fragments are believed to have been found in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

We knew that the Chinese version of how the coronavirus emerged was increasingly under attack, but here’s a thesis that tells a completely different story about the Covid-19 pandemic, which is already responsible for more than 110,000 deaths worldwide. According to Professor Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for “discovering” HIV as the cause of the AIDS epidemic together with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that was manipulated and accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in the last quarter of 2019. According to Professor Montagnier, this laboratory, known for its work on coronaviruses, tried to use one of these viruses as a vector for HIV in the search for an AIDS vaccine!

“With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine for the daily podcast at Pourquoi Docteur, adding that others have already explored this avenue: Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus, … the HIV virus (AIDS virus), but they were forced to withdraw their findings as the pressure from the mainstream was too great.

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Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say | April 17

“By the first week of June, we project that the number of new cases will be close to zero if current social distancing policies are maintained.” That model predicted two weeks ago that the number of new daily cases would peak around now, as seems to be the case.

This article is from STATnews, a medical industry publication that has proven to be reliable. Jumping right into the middle of the article, about the current statistical model:

“It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

“That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, home to several of the researchers who created the model,

The chief reason the IHME projections worry some experts, Etzioni said, is that “the fact that they overshot” — initially projecting up to 240,000 U.S. deaths, compared with fewer than 70,000 now — “will be used to suggest that the government response prevented an even greater catastrophe, when in fact the predictions were shaky in the first place.”

According to a critique by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine, the IHME projections are based “on a statistical model with no epidemiologic basis.”

“Statistical model” refers to putting U.S. data onto the graph of other countries’ Covid-19 deaths over time under the assumption that the U.S. epidemic will mimic that in those countries. But countries’ countermeasures differ significantly. As the epidemic curve in the U.S. changes due to countermeasures that were weaker or later than, say, China’s, the IHME modelers adjust the curve to match the new reality.

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Please check out this piece from Mother Jones, which shows the extent of food lines across the United States.

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U.S. government getting raw deal on ventilators | Added April 17

In at least two separate instances the Trump administration has found itself making deals with a company to produce ventilators, followed by the company being called into question. Business Insider details how the administration awarded a $55 million contract to a company that filed for bankruptcy last year and has no employees. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the company has no experience making medical supplies or equipment; they’re a self described “tactical training company for the US military and other government agencies.”

In another deal, a congressional subcommittee is looking into possible price gouging now that the U.S. government is having to pay quadruple the price for ventilators than was initially negotiated. ProPublica reports that Royal Philips N.V. received millions in tax dollars to develop an affordable ventilator back in 2014 for the Strategic National Stockpile.

“As ProPublica previously reported, Philips never produced any of those devices for the stockpile. Instead, as the coronavirus spread, the company manufactured commercial versions of the ventilator at its factory outside Pittsburgh and sold them for far higher prices overseas. Then, rather than pushing the company to accelerate the delivery of the ventilators developed for the stockpile, HHS this month agreed to buy 43,000 of the commercial version at a price of $15,000 per ventilator.

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Leaked State Department memo warned against halting of WHO funding | Added April 17

Not everyone in the Trump Administration was on board with the President’s decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization. ProPublica in an April 15 piece reported on a draft of a state department memo that warned against such action.

The memo was written by members of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. As such, the memo included information on how the United States’ funding of the WHO impacts the ability of countries in the Middle East to handle the pandemic. And, how such a move of refusing to fund the organization could “cede ground” to China and hamper the global response to the pandemic.

As for why it may have been written:

“One U.S. official with knowledge of the State Department memo said it was likely written so that Pompeo could justify waiving parts of Trump’s order, allowing U.S. funding to the WHO to continue. The emphasis on how the halt in funding could bolster China was likely meant to appeal to anti-China hawks in the administration, this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.”

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China’s influence on the WHO and international public health | Added April 17

Here is an April 2 piece from Foreign Policy that analyzes China’s efforts to position itself as a “public health superpower” with the help of the WHO. Excerpted below:

“After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on, which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on international health bodies.”

“Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a ‘public health emergency of international concern,’ denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.”

“While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not recognized by WHO or other bodies.”

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Republican-affiliated groups organized Michigan protests | Added April 17

The Guardian is reporting that rightwing fringe groups pulled together Wednesday’s protests in Michigan. Republican-connected not-for-profits created the event to to cause gridlock in the city, and for a time blocked the entrance to a local hospital.

It was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, which Michigan state corporate filings show has also operated under the name of Michigan Trump Republicans. It was also heavily promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group linked to Trump cabinet member Betsy DeVos.

But the protest also attracted far right protest groups who have been present at pro-Trump and gun rights rallies in Michigan throughout the Trump presidency.

Placards identified the Michigan Proud Boys as participants in the vehicle convoy. Near the state house, local radio interviewed a man who identified himself as “Phil Odinson.”

In fact the man is Phil Robinson, the prime mover in a group called the Michigan Liberty Militia, whose Facebook page features pictures of firearms, warnings of civil war, celebrations of Norse paganism, and memes ultimately sourced from white nationalist groups like Patriot Front.

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China once again denies virus lab release theory; Huanan wet market theory still dead | Added April 17

Nobody has claimed credit or taken responsibility for releasing the novel coronavirus that has shut down much of the world’s economy and sent 22 million Americans to the unemployment lines.

While there is no evidence that it came from the Huanan fish and wildlife market, BBC is reporting that there is currently also no evidence that any research institute in Wuhan was the source of SARS-CoV-2. This is one of many denials of what at minimum seems to be a potential source. The Wuhan Virology Institute is located close to the market.

On Thursday, China foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian addressed the matter at a news conference, telling journalists the World Health Organization’s officials “have said multiple times there is no evidence the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory.”

(Not all researchers agree. See video and interview below: Czech molecular biologist describes ‘messy genes’ in SARS CoV-2, says they are evidence of tampering.)

President Donald Trump, who has been coming under fire over his administration’s response to the pandemic, said the US government is investigating the lab theory. China has repeatedly been accused of lacking transparency in the early stages of the outbreak, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what they know.

ALSO: China says WHO has said no evidence coronavirus was made in a lab | Added April 17

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Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian’s Presser | Added April 16

See full interview

RIA Novosti: Fox News reported citing multiple sources that the novel coronavirus was leaked from a lab. I wonder what is China’s comment on this publication?

Zhao Lijian: China’s position with regard to the origin and transmission routes of the novel coronavirus is clear. It is a matter of science on which we should only rely on the findings of scientists and medical experts.

I’d like to remind you that the WHO has repeatedly stated that there is no evidence showing the virus was made in a lab. Many renowned medical specialists in the world have also debunked the “lab leakage” theory as not science-based at all.

Infectious diseases are common enemies to human beings. The international community can only defeat them with concerted efforts. China will continue to stand in solidarity and render mutual assistance with other countries to jointly overcome the pandemic.

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From Kentucky to Utah, protests over stay-at-home orders across the US | Added April 16

Stir-crazy yet? Recently, protesters have left their homes and spoken out against stay-at-home orders, across the U.S. On April 16, CNN reported:

“Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina and Utah — states led by both Republican and Democratic governors — have all seen protests in recent days as people grow more concerned about the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.”

In Michigan, some, but not all, protesters stayed in their cars and crowded the streets in what was dubbed “Operation Gridlock.” In Ohio, a crowd gathered outside the statehouse. And, in St. Paul Minnesota some protesters meet outside the governor’s mansion.

The general concern for most of the protests seem to be a concern for small businesses, and the general “economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.” Protester Tom Hughey in Michigan is quoted as saying, “I realize how important this virus is, but now we’re getting to the point where we’re shutting too much stuff down.”

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Celia Farber explains why the polymerase chain reaction test is meaningless as a diagnostic tool for Covid-19 | Added April 16

This article is by Celia Farber, one of the fiercely independent writers of the AIDS-era (she wrote in Spin). As with HIV, different countries have different standards. For HIV, one be positive in Canada (“have it”), and negative in Australia (“not have it”). At the same time.

Before I go on: this article is long and it might seem meandering, though it’s relevant, important stuff to know. We are blessed with one of the few writers who actually covered AIDS helping us figure out what is happening now with a similar situation (and the same test being used).

Polymerase chain reaction, the PCR process, is a replicating machine that keeps manufacturing (multiplies, or copies), well, I guess pretty much anything, but in this case a genetic marker for a virus until a level is reached in the device.

It makes new copies in cycles, doubling the number each time. The test can be turned off at any cycle in the sequence, and different states and countries have different cutoffs for how many cycles constitutes a valid test (just like for HIV).

This translates to how one sample can be negative, positive and indeterminate, all at the same time — depending on what standards you use. You might say, oh, well, what is the reference standard? That’s the problem — there isn’t one. The PCR test gives a measurement but no basis for the meaning of that number. In labtalk, this is the “gold standard” issue of the PCR test as it’s used, not as it was designed. It was designed to have a references for the isolated purified known pathogen, viral load outcomes and so on — and none of that exists.

Therefore, to “have the virus” (after allegedly flunking the test) does not necessarily mean evidence of infection or of disease — and this is per those CDC and FDA documents I’ve referenced in a recent post. To make a valid diagnosis, one must study the symptoms and do contact tracing.

Hence the term “case” is arbitrary and in a sense, a local term. In New York, everyone who tests “positive” is a case, whereas in other places, there are other definitions.

Celia’s article contains extensive interviews from the 1990s with Kary Mullis, who invented and set up the protocols for the polymerase chain reaction.

And then she has this:

“In one paper,” Crowe says, “I found 37 cycles. If you didn’t get enough fluorescence by 37 cycles, you are considered negative. In another, paper, the cutoff was 36. Thirty-seven to 40 were considered “indeterminate.” And if you got in that range, then you did more testing. I’ve only seen two papers that described what the limit was. So, it’s quite possible that different hospitals, different States, Canada versus the US, Italy versus France are all using different cutoff sensitivity standards of the Covid test. So, if you cut off at 20, everybody would be negative. If you cut off a 50, you might have everybody positive.”

Hey Celia — I’ve missed you.

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Robert Kennedy Jr. takes on CNN’s vaccine advocacy | Added April 16

RFK Jr., John Kennedy’s nephew, has challenged Sanjay Gupta and CNN on their ongoing advocacy of vaccines, and their misinformation campaigns. Kennedy is excellent at showing how the government’s own data contradicts the government’s position. This letter is eye-opening, and it may challenge your views on the wisdom of mass, compulsory vaccination. From the letter:

Another study published in 2011 in the Journal of Virology confirmed that annual influenza vaccination indeed hampers the development of a robust cell-mediated immunity. Annual vaccination for influenza, the authors concluded, “may render young children who have not previously been infected with an influenza virus more susceptible to infection with a pandemic influenza virus of a novel subtype.”

A 2018 CDC study found there was an increase of acute respiratory infections caused by non-influenza respiratory pathogens following influenza vaccination compared to unvaccinated children during the same period. The authors recommended that potential mechanisms for this association warrant further investigation.

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The inventor tells the story of PCR | April 16

We have been hearing a lot about the polymerase chain reaction test these days — currently the only test being used for the novel coronavirus. It’s a genetic amplification test. It was invented by a man who won the Nobel Prize for doing so, at the height of the AIDS pandemic. We’ve retrieved his book, and reprinted the chapter on his invention of the PCR method for readability. Kary died last year. He’s one those people I would have been happy to meet, or spend an afternoon with.

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David Katz NYT opinion piece: “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” | Added April 16

This March 20 New York Times opinion piece by David L. Katz makes the argument for surgical precision in dealing with the Coronavirus. in order to, as he put it, to “[minimize] resources and unintended consequences alike.”

Katz is the president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center. When he wrote this piece in March, he noted that by using shutdowns to “[slow] the spread of coronavirus from torrent to trickle,” the virus would continue to persist, and the question would remain of when is it safe to return to life as normal; “When does the society-wide disruption end?”

The heart of his proposed, “surgically precise” method was to “preferentially [protect] the medically frail and those over age 60, and in particular those over 70 and 80, from exposure.” Meanwhile, the rest of society could develop natural herd immunity to the virus and not pass it on those most vulnerable.

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FEMA and the CDC’s plan to reopen the United States | Added April 16

Here are a few excerpts from this April 14 Washington Post piece, quoted directly:

A team of government officials — led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — has created a public health strategy to combat the novel coronavirus and reopen parts of the country.

Other agencies and White House officials have drafted similar planning documents, a White House aide said. The version obtained by The Post appears to be an early draft by FEMA and contains granular instructions for a phased reopening of institutions such as schools, child-care facilities, summer camps, parks, faith-based organizations and restaurants.

The plan lays out three phases: Preparing the nation to reopen with a national communication campaign and community readiness assessment until May 1. Then, the effort through May 15 would involve ramping up manufacturing of testing kits and personal protective equipment and increasing emergency funding. Then staged reopenings would begin, depending on local conditions. The plan does not give dates for reopenings but specified “not before May 1.”

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If you stay inside don’t drink, if you go outside don’t breathe | Added April 16

In an April 16 report from The Post Millennial, it’s said that the World Health Organization has kindly pointed out that alcohol can be rather bad for you, especially when you’re stuck at home in the midst of a health crisis. They have asked that governments around the world limit citizens’ access to alcohol due to the negative health complications that can arise.

The article cites the WHO’s European website as saying “Alcohol compromises the body’s immune system and increases the risk of adverse health outcomes.” Not something you’d particularly want in the midst of a pandemic.

A few of other highlights:

“The WHO also set out to clear up the ‘dangerous myth that consuming high-strength alcohol can kill’ the coronavirus, publishing a fact sheet to disprove it.”

and

“…in the United States, people are buying in bulk. Alcohol sales have gone up 22 percent for the week ending March 28 when compared to the same week a year ago. There has also been an increase of Americans drinking at home.”

As if potentially poisoning ourselves at home wasn’t enough, the Trump administration has gone full steam ahead with deregulating industrial soot emissions. This is according to an April 14 New York Times report, and an April 16 piece that further explored the ongoing push for deregulation. Here is a quote from the second piece:

“Over the past few weeks as the nation struggled with the coronavirus, the administration has also rushed to loosen curbs on automobile tailpipe emissions, opted not to strengthen a regulation on industrial soot emissions and moved to drop the threat of punishment to companies that kill birds ‘incidentally.'”

 

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Testing woes continue as Trump pushes to reopen the country | Added April 16

Despite mismanagement in supplying tests, the questionable efficacy of the tests, and a general lack of federal support, President Trump is optimistic that some states could reopen before May 1, according to this New York Times report from April 15.

“As President Trump pushes to reopen the economy, most of the country is not conducting nearly enough testing to track the path and penetration of the coronavirus in a way that would allow Americans to safely return to work, public health officials and political leaders say.”

“From the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, lapses by the federal government have compromised efforts to detect the pathogen in patients and communities. A diagnostic test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proved to be flawed. The F.D.A. failed to speed approval for commercial labs to make tests widely available.”

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Lab escape story goes mainstream | April 16

I was looking for my Sally Brompton horoscope Wednesday night when I found this article in the New York Post: “U.S. Officials looking into whether coronavirus escaped from a lab in China.” [Note, as of 2:24 am NY time, CNN is carrying the story too.]

The lab is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded by the United States. As the name implies, it’s located in Wuhan, the same place the novel coronavirus allegedly broke out.

There will be people who read this and say, yeah, right. It will sound like someone else for Trump to blame. Or you might say it’s a tabloid, this is the NY Post, not the Washington Post, don’t trust it.

Yet the Washington Post (you know, Woodward and Bernstein) had something similar over the weekend — a piece on diplomatic warnings associated with safety problems at the U.S. funded facility going back years.

If you’ve been following this here blog, you’ve seen this story develop over the past six weeks. It’s plausible (lab accidents happen, and we live in The Age of the Royal Fuckup) and there is no barrier to it being true that must be solved hypothetically.

Two Competing Stories, and One is Proven False

From an existential standpoint, here’s the issue. The “wet market” story — the tale of the alleged bat virus that somehow gets into human biology at a fish market — falls apart when you check the facts. The Lancet has reported that the earliest patients had no contact with the market or anyone associated with it. This logically implies that the truth must be something else; some other method of outbreak. How did the first patient get it?

CCN on Jan. 27 published an article contrasting two theories, one of which is the market theory and the other is the potential lab escape. These are the two competing narratives.

At that point in late January, CCN still has the notion that came from bat soup, or maybe some other form of bat snack, which is not a thing in China. The story morphed to the “bats were scavenging at the market, not being sold as food” version of what they were doing there; and then their blood or whatever got into another animal which got into a human (direct transmission is said to be unlikely).

Or, in the alternate, CCN suggested, the virus got out of the lab where they study those very kinds of viruses. This story has been making the rounds. It has legs, it has a life, and though it’s taken a little time to gather momentum, here we are. Beware of one thing however: with an incident like this, we must ask whether the bottle fell, or was pushed. One could be a cover for the other. If it came from the lab, we have to know how it came from the lab.

Here’s a Fox timeline of China’s coronavirus coverup.

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Czech molecular biologist describes ‘messy genes’ in SARS CoV-2, says they are evidence of tampering | Added April 15

We are carefully tracking all of the genesis-related materials we come across — that is, information related to the origins of the virus that is causing us to all stay indoors, away from work, and school, and one another. Below is a sample of an interview with Dr. S, Pekova. Read the full interview here. Note, governments have labs where they make lethal viruses, and the lab in Wuhan was funded by a grant from the United States.

The laboratory in Wuhan conducts research of deadly virus such as SARS which is very closely related to SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19). You have said that SARS CoV-2 has certain genetic sequences that are not natural. Do you stand firm on your claim?

Dr. Pekova: Yes, I stand behind my claim. RNA viruses mutate and their genome is unstable. They have high rates of mutations, and they are not very accurate in replication.

The virus RNA usually mutates in areas that are responsible for protein production used as building blocks for “the body” of the virus. This part fulfils certain functions of the virus, such as cell penetration and interacting with the infected cell.

Then there is the regulatory area of the virus genome, it can be seen as the command centre that governs virus replication.

This part of SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) genome appears unusually messy, as if it was severely altered.

I have a hard time believing that such intensive restructuring, insertions and deletions of the virus RNA code, would happen in nature and that the virus would survive such severe restructuring.

The regulatory portion of the virus genome usually has a low mutation rate. SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) has an atypical degree of mutation, which is usually done by genetic modification.

When I worked in research, cloning viral mutation was my daily work, and we used to clone different gene variations on cultured media.

For example, we have seen a harmless gene turn into a lymphoma-inducing gene. A mutation can turn something that is benign into something very damaging. We have tools in genetic engineering that are capable of such modifications.

Genetic modification can be used, for example, to create so-called “designer babies” which was done by a Chinese scientist who created two embryos that were genetically modified. He was later fined and went to prison.

I can imagine there are other scientists who have done the same thing, they will just never admit to it. This all depends on the ethics of the scientist and I am not sure if ethics is a sufficient guarantee.

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Advice and Consent: Trump threatens to dump congress | Added April 15

What better way to celebrate Income Tax Day than for the president to threaten to dismiss both chambers of Congress.

From The Hill: President Trump on Wednesday threatened to use his executive power to force both chambers of Congress to adjourn if the Senate did not confirm his nominees for vacancies across the administration.

The president, during a coronavirus briefing in the Rose Garden, offered a lengthy diatribe against what he described as congressional obstruction and argued confirming his nominees was more urgent than ever amid the pandemic.

“The Senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so I can make recess appointments,” Trump said. “We have a tremendous number of people that have to come into government. And now more so than ever before because of the virus and the problem.”

Lawmakers in both chambers are not expected to return to the Capitol until May 4 but both the House and Senate have been conducting pro forma sessions in the meantime. That means the Senate is technically in session and Trump may not make recess appointments.

“The current practice of leaving town while conducting phony pro forma sessions is a dereliction of duty that the American people can not afford during this crisis,” he said. “It is a scam, what they do. It’s a scam. And everybody knows it and it’s been that way for a long time.”

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution grants Trump the power to “on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.”

That means that in order for the president to step in and dismiss both, the GOP-controlled Senate would have to adjourn while the Democrat-held House objected. Senate Democrats also have procedural tools to prevent the Senate from adjourning.

The National Constitution Center noted that “no President has ever exercised” the authority.

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Cuomo signs order requiring New Yorkers to wear masks in public, at risk of being fined | Added April 15

According to an April 15th report from NY Daily News, Governor Cuomo signed an executive order on Wednesday that will require New Yorkers to mask up when they go out in public spaces where one “cannot maintain social distancing.” Violators could be fined.

If you’re in the New York area and don’t have an official mask, then not to worry, “bandanas, scarves and other makeshift face coverings are acceptable under the new executive order.”

Enforcement of the executive order is not due for another three days and Cuomo reassured that penalties will only be issued, essentially, if there is “flagrant noncompliance.”

In light of the delay before the order goes into effect, the article reported further on Cuomo’s clarification as to how enforcement will be carried out. He was quoted as saying “Local government should start to enforce it and they should come up and say…’Where’s your mask, buddy?’ in a nice, New York kind of way.” The article stated that he “also compared the risk for a face mask fine to how people can be penalized for ‘jaywalking erratically.'”

So, if you happen to live in New York, remember to wear a mask, buddy. And no smiling with your eyes!

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Chinese laboratories ordered to suppress information about virus in December | Added April 15

On top of the safety issues with Wuhan’s virology labs, this March 1st report from The Times details how Chinese labs were ordered to destroy proof of the virus back in December, to keep the news of it from spreading:

Chinese Laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.

A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China dd not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.

The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.

Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the Chinese internet.

In addition, this March 17 piece from National Review similarly points out how regional health officials in Wuhan deliberately did not inform a health team from Beijing during a January 8 visit that local medical staff had already been infected by patients, in an attempt to keep its contagiousness under wraps.

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State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses | Added April 15

We are closely following all matters related to the Wuhan virology institute.

This was just published in the Washington Post on April 14:

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

The Chinese researchers at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

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Here some new studies about Covid-19 | Added April 15

• Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis concludes in a new study that the risk of death from Covid19 for people under 65 years of age, even in global “hotspots,” is equivalent to the risk of a fatal car accident for daily commuters driving between 9 and 400 miles.
• In a serological pilot study, German virologist Hendrick Streeck comes to the interim result that the lethality of Covid19 is at 0.37% and the mortality (based on the total population) at 0.06%. These values are about ten times lower than those of the WHO and about five times lower than those of Johns Hopkins University.
• A Danish study with 1500 blood donors found that the lethality of Covid19 is only 1.6 per thousand, i.e. more than 20 times lower than originally assumed by the WHO and thus in the range of a strong (pandemic) influenza. At the same time Denmark has decided to reopen schools and kindergartens next week.
• A serological study in the US state of Colorado comes to the preliminary conclusion that the lethality of Covid19 has been overestimated by a factor of 5 to a factor of 20 and is likely to be in the range between normal and pandemic influenza.
• A study conducted by the Medical University of Vienna concluded that the age and risk profile of Covid19 deaths is similar to normal mortality.
• A study in the Journal of Medical Virology concludes that the internationally used coronavirus test is unreliable: In addition to the already known problem of false positive results, there is also a „potentially high“ rate of false negative results, i.e. the test does not respond even in symptomatic individuals, while in other patients it does respond once and then again not. This makes it more difficult to exclude other flu-like illnesses.
• A Swiss biophysicist has for the first time evaluated and graphically displayed the rate of positive tests in the US, France, Germany and Switzerland. The result shows that the positive rate in these countries is increasing rather slowly and not exponentially.

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Obesity is seen as single largest risk factor for critical illness in New York study | Added April 15

A study of 4,013 patients admitted to hospitals in New York City has concluded that the highest risk of death is for people who are obese. Age and comorbidities (that is, other illnesses) are powerful predictors of hospitalization; however, admission oxygen impairment and markers of inflammation are most strongly associated with critical illness.

Here is the Physicians Weekly article, and here is the full text of the study.

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Eight meters, or kissy kissy kissy? | Added April 14

I don’t know if they do April Fool’s Day in Thailand, but the other day I found this article, dated April 1, in the Thailand Medical News (which has been a reliable source of interesting news through this crisis. This is not labeled opinion. It’s tagged “Breaking News,” and is in the “how far does it spread” genre.

From the article (long quote):

“Many are still wondering who is the charlatan who came up with the idea that social distancing of 1 to 3 meters would suffice to prevent the spread of the SARS CoV-2 coronavirus despite no official scientific studies to show that it true and is fully safe.

“To make matters worse, since the beginning of this Covid-19 breakout, we have allowed government authorities, health officials, unreliable medical experts and academics, social media platforms and search engines and also health organizations to get away with fake news and misinformation. Many of these ignorant charlatans have been advocating social distancing and misleading the public that it is safe as long as distances of between 1 to 3 meters is maintained although there are no supporting scientific studies to say it works.”

But they warn:

“A new research by qualified experts in their field from the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) lead by Dr Lydia Bourouiba, an Associate Professor at MIT, have researched the dynamics of exhalations (coughs and sneezes, for instance) for years at The Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory and found exhalations cause gaseous clouds that can travel up to 27 feet (8.2 meters).”

Oh really? Now we have to stand 27 feet apart? The Farmer’s Market would take up three football fields and everyone would need a self-enclosed golf cart. We could ride trains, but only two people to the car, at opposite ends.

Then this morning, I opened my email:

“The WHO (World Health Organization) concluded at the end of March that, contrary to earlier assumptions, Covid19 is not transmitted by aerosols (“through the air“). Transmission mainly takes place through direct contact or by droplet infection (coughing, sneezing).”

The link goes to the WHO’s report on the study. Here is part of an analysis from a Swiss website, which squares with the report:

“A recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine has evaluated virus persistence of the COVID-19 virus.10 In this experimental study, aerosols were generated using a three-jet Collison nebulizer and fed into a Goldberg drum under controlled laboratory conditions. This is a high-powered machine that does not reflect normal human cough conditions. Further, the finding of COVID-19 virus in aerosol particles up to 3 hours does not reflect a clinical setting in which aerosol-generating procedures are performed—that is, this was an experimentally induced aerosol-generating procedure.”

Droplets are different from aerosolized particles of 2019-nCoV RNA. Medical procedures require close contact and release sputum, and therefore require PPE protection.

The WHO report was published (and not reported further), of course, after more than three billion people were told to stay indoors and stand six feet apart from one another, including out of doors, where the air is circulated by wind. Additionally, the notion of wearing a cotton bandanna as a mask to “catch” these fraction-of-a-micron particles is like trying to catch a bird using the Grand Canyon as a net.

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Prelude to secession? Eastern, Western states form coalitions to work out re-opening economy; Trump claims his authority is “total” | Added April 14

Here’s the version that appeared in our favorite newspaper, the Lincoln County News in western Oregon:

Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Kate Brown and Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future.

Joint statement from the west coast Governors:

COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities.

We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business.

While each state is building a state-specific plan, our states have agreed to the following principles as we build out a West Coast framework:

Our residents’ health comes first. As home to one in six Americans and gateway to the rest of the world, the West Coast has an outsized stake in controlling and ultimately defeating COVID-19.

The Colonies Reunite

On the East Coast, from The New York Times:

Governors of seven states in the Northeast — Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island — have formed a coalition to fight the virus and to start early planning to reopen businesses. The governors of California, Oregon and Washington reached a similar pact.

Those moves apparently enraged Mr. Trump, who, in his extended diatribe, said it was up to him to decide when it would be safe to ease restrictions.

In response, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York questioned how Mr. Trump could claim the authority to open the economy when he had earlier said that he lacked the authority to close it down.

“When someone is president of the United States, the authority is total,” he tweeted in response on Monday evening.

In an interview with CNN, the governor added: “You don’t become king because of a national emergency.”

Conservatives have always been quick to hang their hats on the 10th Amendment, which leaves many rights “to the States, or to the People.” But I guess not now.

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Social distancing and weird shopping rules | Added April 14

It’s a little like going shopping in New Jersey on Sunday.

Throughout the United States, big box stores such as Target, Costco, and Walmart are being banned from selling items deemed “non-essential.” This piece from Markets Insider details how some local governments are taking steps to insure that items such as clothing and electronics are not sold at “big box” stores.

Such stores, which many people are now dependent on for groceries are “required by law in some parts of the US to remove any non-essential items from their stores or rope off areas of the store so that customers are unable to access these products.”

Vermont is one such state doing this. One reason this gained traction was that “Retail workers in the area…complained that customers were congregating in stores and browsing non-essential goods because they were ‘bored at home,’ thus filling up the aisles and putting these workers at greater risk.”

Another reason is that other businesses, that sell mostly “non-essential” items, complained that it was unfair that they had to close, while big box stores remained opened and continued to sell said “non-essential” items. The piece ends describing how some customers are content with the efforts, but that others have taken issue with the changes.

For example, as detailed in this Business Insider piece, Kerri Dennis, a Walmart customer shopping for groceries in Big Rapids, Michigan, attempted to buy an infant car seat for a pregnant friend due to give birth in May. “When Dennis stepped inside, she said, she found portions of the store — including the shelves stocked with baby gear — wrapped in yellow caution tape, with signs saying the store was prohibited by the state from selling ‘nonessential’ items.”

Despite the tape, Dennis attempted to buy the car seat but was told that it was illegal for her to leave the store with it because it came from a taped-off area. Dennis shared her story on Facebook, and Walmart’s corporate office attempted to clear up any confusion assured Michigan customers that they could purchase infant products from the store. Still, it’s a rather murky topic of which goods and businesses are “essential” and which are “non-essential.”

According to Business Insider, several lawsuits have been filed over the closure of businesses deemed non-essential including a number of gun stores, and “a small business in Pennsylvania that makes handbells for musician.”

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An unusual tweet from the World Health Organization | Added April 13

On Jan. 13, well in to the novel coronavirus crisis in China, with much research having been done, and the genome already having been unraveled, WHO issued the following from its official Twitter account:

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China”

“Clear evidence” cannot be presumed to mean “anecdotal evidence,” of which there was plenty at the time; there was an epidemic in Wuhan.

We must presume this statement to mean scientific evidence based in data. And if that is true, then we might want to see what the follow up is, proving that 2019nCoV is indeed the vector.

Others have asserted that the virus, as identified, is not a proven vector of transmission. FDA and CDC in its own documents have admitted that it may not be a vector of transmission, or of evidence of disease. Dr. Tom Cowan has demanded data proving that it’s a known vector, which would partially validate the polymerase chain reaction test that is the exclusive test for the virus.

It’s time to start asking what the truth is, and what is in fact causing so much illness around the world, if not 2019-nCoV.

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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists addresses vaccine-created polio outbreak in Africa | Added April 13

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is published by an organziation insisting on ethics in the use of science. We are aware of this article they published in 2018, an interview with Christopher K. Brown, which confirms some of the statements of fact made in the letter below by RFK Jr. From the article:

Polio, once among the most dreaded diseases even in the richest countries, has seemed on the verge of eradication for years now—but only on the verge. In a small handful of nations, the virus is holding on stubbornly despite a major vaccination effort backed by the United Nations and philanthropists such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Perversely, a current polio outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is caused by the polio vaccine itself. What explains this seeming paradox? What are the implications for polio eradication? To gain some insight, the Bulletin posed a few questions via e-mail to Christopher K. Brown, a scientist with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Brown holds degrees in biodefense, biostatistics and epidemiology, and biology—and just weeks ago wrote about Ebola vaccine for the Bulletin. A lightly edited version of his answers to the Bulletin’s questions appears below.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: A current polio outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is caused not by a “wild” poliovirus but rather by a virus derived from oral polio vaccine. How does a vaccine end up causing the very illness it’s intended to prevent?

Christopher K. Brown: There are several different ways to make a vaccine, one of which involves weakening the pathogen that causes the disease so that, ideally, it triggers the vaccine recipient’s immune system to recognize and fight off the pathogen without actually causing a case of disease. Because weakened—or attenuated, as they are called—vaccines still include a live, virulent organism, they are in very rare instances linked to disease, whether in a single individual or as the culprit behind an outbreak. Scientists do not fully understand why the intentional infection that the oral poliovirus vaccine causes might lead to unintended disease in an extremely small number of vaccinated people, but it is likely that having a weakened immune system may contribute to someone experiencing paralysis after getting the attenuated vaccine.

The process by which an attenuated vaccine leads to a larger outbreak is more complicated. When someone gets the vaccine, the viruses it contains replicate in the small intestine. The weakened viruses can then spread from person to person. This can be a good thing in that it offers immunity to people who are exposed through this type of transmission even though they didn’t get the vaccine themselves—and thus it increases the proportion of the population that most likely will not get polio even if exposed to poliovirus (that is, it bolsters herd immunity).

But if a vaccine-derived strain of the virus continues to spread and replicate, mutations in its RNA (the genetic material that controls the virus) can over time allow it to revert to a form capable of causing disease, including paralysis, as we are seeing among children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If most of a population is not immune to the particular strain, then more people may start to develop disease as a result of the vaccine strain becoming virulent again.

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Humans as experimental test subjects: RFK Jr. on Bill Gates, the Vaccinator | Added April 13

From his Instagram account

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. on BILL “NOT A DOCTOR” GATES—From his Instagram:

Vaccines, for Bill Gates, are a strategic philanthropy that feed his many vaccine-related businesses (including Microsoft’s ambition to control a global vac ID enterprise) and give him dictatorial control over global health policy—the spear tip of corporate neo-imperialism.

Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems fueled by a messianic conviction that he is ordained to save the world with technology and a god-like willingness to experiment with the lives of lesser humans.

Promising to eradicate Polio with $1.2 billion, Gates took control of India ‘s National Advisory Board (NAB) and mandated 50 polio vaccines (up from 5) to every child before age 5. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating vaccine-strain polio epidemic that paralyzed 496,000 children between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian Government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and evicted Gates and his cronies from the NAB. Polio paralysis rates dropped precipitously.

In 2017, the World Health Organization reluctantly admitted that the global polio explosion is predominantly vaccine strain, meaning it is coming from Gates’ Vaccine Program. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, the Philippines, and Afghanistan are all linked to Gates’ vaccines. By 2018, ¾ of global polio cases were from Gates’ vaccines.

In 2014, the Gates Foundation funded tests of experimental HPV vaccines, developed by GSK and Merck, on 23,000 young girls in remote Indian provinces. Approximately 1,200 suffered severe side effects, including autoimmune and fertility disorders. Seven died. Indian government investigations charged that Gates funded researchers committed pervasive ethical violations: pressuring vulnerable village girls into the trial, bullying parents, forging consent forms, and refusing medical care to the injured girls. The case is now in the country’s Supreme Court.

In 2017, the World Health Organization reluctantly admitted that the global polio explosion is predominantly vaccine strain, meaning it is coming from Gates’ Vaccine Program. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, the Philippines, and Afghanistan are all linked to Gates’ vaccines. By 2018, ¾ of global polio cases were from Gates’ vaccines.

In 2010, the Gates Foundation funded a trial of a GSK’s experimental malaria vaccine, killing 151 African infants and causing serious adverse effects including paralysis, seizure, and febrile convulsions to 1,048 of the 5,049 children.

During Gates 2002 MenAfriVac Campaign in Sub-Saharan Africa, Gates operatives forcibly vaccinated thousands of African children against meningitis. Between 50-500 children developed paralysis. South African newspapers complained, “We are guinea pigs for drug makers”

Nelson Mandela’s former Senior Economist, Professor Patrick Bond, describes Gates’ philantropic practises as “ruthless” and “immoral.”

In 2010, Gates committed $10 billion to the WHO promising to reduce population, in part, through new vaccines. A month later Gates told a Ted Talk that new vaccines “could reduce population”. In 2014, Kenya’s Catholic Doctors Association accused the WHO of chemically sterilizing millions of unwilling Kenyan women with a phony “tetanus” vaccine campaign.

Independent labs found the sterility formula in every vaccine tested.

After denying the charges, WHO finally admitted it had been developing the sterility vaccines for over a decade.

Similar accusations came from Tanzania, Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines.

A 2017 study (Morgensen et.Al.2017) showed that WHO’s popular DTP is killing more African than the disease it pretends to prevent. Vaccinated girls suffered 10x the death rate of unvaccinated children.

Gates and the WHO refused to recall the lethal vaccine which WHO forces upon millions of African children annually.

In 2010, Gates committed $ 10 billion to the WHO promising to reduce population, in part, through new vaccines. A month later Gates told a Ted Talk that new vaccines “could reduce population”. In 2014, Kenya’s Catholic Doctors Association accused the WHO of chemically sterilizing millions of unwilling Kenyan women with a phony “tetanus” vaccine campaign.

Independent labs found the sterility formula in every vaccine tested.

Global public health advocates around the world accuse Gates of hijacking WHO’s agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases; clean water, hygiene, nutrition and economic development.

They say he has diverted agency resources to serve his personal fetish – that good health only comes in a syringe.

In addition to using his philanthropy to control WHO, UNICEF, GAVI and PATH, Gates funds private pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines, and a massive network of pharmaceutical -industry front groups that broadcast deceptive propaganda, develop fraudulent studies, conduct surveillance and psychological operations against vaccine hesitancy and use Gates’ power and money to silence dissent and coerce compliance.

In this recent nonstop Pharmedia appearances, Gates appears gleeful that the Covid-19 crisis will give him the opportunity to force his third-world vaccine programs on American children.”

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On the front lines in New York City | Added April 13

One of the most truly horrendous issues is that the patients are often alone and afraid, are surrounded by agony and attended by medical workers whose faces and eyes they cannot see. From The New York Times – video included.

This is not a time to die.

Terror, pain and loneliness mingle in the air with the coronavirus in the “hot zone” of the emergency department at Jack D. Weiler Hospital in the Bronx. The room is jammed with patients whose frightened eyes peer above their oxygen masks as they struggle to breathe, feel that they are drowning, wonder if they will ever again see loved ones.

No family members are allowed here, yet the space is more than twice as crowded as normal. About 80 coronavirus patients, ranging in age from 31 to 97, are squeezed into the room, bed-to-bed, some near death. A group of newly arrived patients sit in chairs in a corner to await stretchers, and they look around in alarm. Doctors and nurses hurry about so sheathed in protective garb — some of it makeshift, such as welding helmets over ski goggles — that even co-workers cannot recognize them.

The truth is that the doctors too are frightened and exhausted, overwhelmed by death and their own helplessness. Dr. Nicole Del Valle, 29, told me that what shattered her was treating a 30-year-old woman with Covid-19 whose 23-year-old sister had just died of it; Dr. Del Valle called her own younger sister and ordered her not to leave her home.

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Videos Worth Watching | Added April 11-12

This video by Dr. Thomas Cowan contains an analysis of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test (the exclusive one being used today to test for the novel coronavirus) — and an explanation of why this is not a valid measure of the virus. I have verified Cowan’s claim that the inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis, that his protocol for valid testing is not being followed in the current crisis. Mullis invented the PCR test in the midst of the HIV “pandemic” and is the recipient of the Nobel Prize.

You can learn about that in this 18-minute video interview with him. The protocol calls for three things: one is isolating the pathogen as a proven cause of the illness; then figuring out how many sick people have it; and then establishing some baseline levels on the validity of those stats. None of this has been done; there are no reference standards. But the PCR test is still being used as the sole basis for determining infection. Once you watch the Mullis interview, Cowan’s position will make much more sense.

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept interviews Edward Snowden and others | Added April 12

This video is worth watching — it’s an analysis of the question of civil liberties versus protecting health interests. Greenwald and Snowden are working from the premise that this is indeed a viral pandemic. They are not questioning whether the most important level of coverage — what scientists know and do not know — is accurate.

So in that sense they are accepting the consensus view, which actually serves the discussion well. In that context, they evaluate the problems with giving governments and massive corporations more power. It’s a little long, but once you get up to Ed Snowden’s portion you will be hooked.

Greenwald is articulate on the point that dissent is being pathologized, and that we have to create the space for a discussion about what government measures make sense. Snowden notes that we are being asked to give up everything, and that this could be a permanent situation.

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Suspicion grows that virus emerged from Wuhan lab; U.S. grant funded research | Added April 12

NOTE: Once we had proof that the early cases of Covid-19 did not come from a bat at the Huanan fish and wildlife market, we were on notice that the official consensus version of events was not true. Said another way, once the official story is debunked, all bets are off — though the next step is a little more difficult: figuring out what really happened. Fish market fish tale is still being repeated by government officials even in the article below. But according to Britain’s own leading medical journal The Lancet, the first cases had no contact with anyone at the market; the market cluster was imported to the market, not from it.

This is from The Mail on Sunday.

The laboratory at the centre of scrutiny over the pandemic has been carrying out research on bats from the cave which scientists believe is the original source of the devastating outbreak.

Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday show the Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan – funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.

Sequencing of the Covid-19 genome has traced it to bats found in Yunnan’s caves.

It comes after this newspaper revealed last week that Ministers here now fear that the pandemic could have been caused by a virus leaking from the institute.

Senior Government sources said that while ‘the balance of scientific advice’ was still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, an accident at the laboratory in the Chinese city was ‘no longer being discounted’.

According to one unverified claim, scientists at the institute could have become infected after being sprayed with blood containing the virus, and then passed it on to the local community.

Now The Mail on Sunday has learned that scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments.

Results of the research were published in November 2017 under the heading: ‘Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.’

The exercise was summarised as: ‘Bats in a cave in Yunnan, China were captured and sampled for coronaviruses used for lab experiments.

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New Planet Waves FM evaluates coverage of scientific facts related to Covid | Added April 12

In the new Planet Waves FM, I explore whether scientific issues are being reported correctly by cable networks and the major news websites. I also (somewhat late in the show) look into the astrology, and in Tantra Studio, discuss the impact of social isolation on relationships and our relationship to ourselves.

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Bat virus? Bioweapon? What the science says about Covid-19 origins | Added April 12

I believe the most important issue in this crisis is the origins of the virus — the genesis point. Incredibly, this is not known, and instead, the myth that it started at the Huanan fish market in Wuhan has been accepted without much question. This is from the South China Morning Post:

As the Covid-19 pandemic has infected its way through human populations around the globe, it has been followed by a web of speculation about where the new coronavirus actually came from.

Some possibilities are scientific hypotheses based on genetic data while others borrow from dark conspiracy theories with little or no basis in fact.

Laboratory researchers have established solid genetic links between the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, and one found in a horseshoe bat in southeastern China.

Further genetic detective work – and what is known about the evolution of past coronaviruses that have infected people – indicates the pathogen may have passed through another animal species first. There, scientists believe, it mutated or combined with another virus before finding its way into a human body, latching onto cells and spreading.

But science has not stopped other theories from percolating. One theory – debunked last month by a genetic analysis from a group of the world’s top epidemiologists – is that the virus was bioengineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, the pandemic’s first epicenter.

The latest theory, laid out in a recent article by The Washington Post, has another spin on this: the virus source could have been a researcher infected by a bat, or the sloppy disposal of hazardous materials at a Wuhan Centre for Disease Control facility near the wet market linked to many early cases in the outbreak.

Scientists are quick to acknowledge that when so little is known about the evolution of the new virus there are endless possibilities for its origins. But, they say, groundless speculation is no help, and point to the role played by probability in the emergence of new diseases. What we do know about the coronavirus family points to other, more likely, paths of transmission to humans. [Coutinued.]

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Researchers said to warn that SARS-CoV-2 has HIV-like properties | Added April 12

Going back to the virus theory, here’s the second round of coverage I’ve seen about SARS-CoV-2 having HIV-like properties. But to be valid, one would need a lot more knowledge about HIV and moreover, HIV as the cause of AIDS. I have long wondered about these questions, and finally got some information in this 18-minute video interview with Kary Mullis, the inventor of one of the most important HIV tests. This is from the South China Morning Post:

The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 could kill the powerful immune cells that are supposed to kill the virus instead, scientists have warned.

The surprise discovery, made by a team of researchers from Shanghai and New York, coincided with frontline doctors’ observation that Covid-19 could attack the human immune system and cause damages similar to that found in HIV patients.

Lu Lu, from Fudan University in Shanghai, and Jang Shibo, from the New York Blood Centre, joined the living virus, which is officially known as SARS-CoV-2, on laboratory-grown T lymphocyte cell lines.

T lymphocytes, also known as T cells, play a central role in identifying and eliminating alien invaders in the body.

They do this by capturing a cell infected by a virus, bore a hole in its membrane and inject toxic chemicals into the cell. These chemicals then kill both the virus and infected cell and tear them to pieces.

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Digital surveillance threatens privacy | Added April 12

Here is an analysis of balancing the use of digital technology to stop the pandemic, versus threats to the most basic civil rights. From The Conversation:

Israel’s top spy agency has been using secretly collected cellphone data to retrace the movements of those who tested positive for the coronavirus.

The Polish government launched the “Home Quarantine” app so that people in quarantine can upload geo-located photos proving they’re at home.

The South Korean government is using a combination of mobile phone data, credit card information and facial recognition software to track the movements of people who test positive for Covid-19. The government posts the details publicly to alert people who might have come in contact with the infected person.

Public health benefits? Certainly. Privacy risks? Certainly as well.

As a technology, law and security scholar at American University Washington College of Law, I study questions of privacy and surveillance. The pandemic is confronting Americans with important questions about how much and what kinds of surveillance and tracking to accept in support of better health, as well as a revitalized economy.

Deaths in the U.S. from the coronavirus are projected to reach six digits, which adds urgency to decisions that have long-term consequences. Should location data be used to identify and warn those who have been exposed to the virus? Data be used to enforce quarantines? Can digital information be used to serve compelling health needs without boosting the reach of the surveillance state?

Already, cellphones, apps and digitally connected devices provide a range of data that can be used to track movements and associations with varying degrees of specificity. Though some of this digital surveillance requires users to opt-in to data collection, a lot is already in the hands of companies that are now using it to predict trends.

A smart thermometer company, for example, is using real-time temperature data to forecast the next COVID-19 hot spots, something it’s done successfully to predict the seasonal flu. Google has been compiling data from Google Maps to chart shifts in people’s movement over time. The company is repurposing data used to predict traffic flows to help officials determine how well the population is engaging in social distancing. Both are examples of population-level analysis, using aggregated data to assess trends in ways that, if designed and implemented properly, can provide important health information while also protecting personal privacy.

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Research from China indicates virus attacks hemoglobin, affecting oxygen transport | Added April 10

This research out of China seems to support the assertion of Cameron Kyle-Sidell, MD, the Brooklyn doctor who has asked whether we’re treating the wrong disease. He has said it’s more like altitude sickness.

From Thailand Medical News: Findings from a new study released by Chinese researchers , Dr Wenzhong Liu from Sichuan University and Dr Hualan Li from Yibin University has revealed that the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus attacks hemoglobin in the the red blood cells through a series of cellular actions, that ultimately renders the red blood cells incapable of transporting oxygen.

Though the virus is able to attack the ACE2 receptors in the lung tissues and cause damage and also while cytokine storms are creating more damage, it is most probability of the body’s inability get enough oxygen along with carbon dioxide build up that is creating the so called ARDS symptoms and stress and current protocols could be all wrong including the usage of ventilators in a non-proper manner way that could actually aggravate already ‘injured’ and inflamed lungs.

Red blood cells are critical oxygen carriers to the various cells in the body. Inside the red blood cells is a molecule called hemoglobin that contains heme groups. Each of these heme groups is molecular “ring” (porphyrin) that holds an Iron ion or FE ion. It is the FE ions that helps to transport oxygen in the bloodstream depending on states of oxidation.

Typically the red blood cells pick up oxygen from the lungs to transport to other parts of the bodies.

Once inside a human host cell, the virus’s RNA also codes for a number of non-structural proteins that are created during the replication process. These proteins are not part of the virus itself but helps the virus to ‘hijack” other cellular pathways or actions to facilate its survival in the host.

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UK’s coronavirus epidemic may have seeded from outside China, new study suggests. Cambridge University researchers have found a variant of the virus that initially infected Britain was not found in mainland China | Added April 10

We are tracking carefully all articles that cover the “different strains” and “did not start at the Huanan wet market.” Note, The Telegraph is still publishing the debunked “came from a bat in China” theory of the origins of the virus. It may have, though this is not sufficiently established to state as a fact. It did NOT come from the Huanan fish market; people outside the market had it first. In any event, this report is interesting. The Telegraph published today:

Britain’s coronavirus epidemic may have been seeded from Singapore, South Korea or Hong Kong – rather than China – the first genetic analysis of virus evolution suggests.

Using ‘phylogenetic’ techniques that are usually reserved for tracing the origins of our early human ancestors, researchers at Cambridge University discovered that there have been three distinct variants of coronavirus since the disease emerged in Wuhan in December.

Dubbed A, B and C, the three types have followed different paths throughout the globe, possibly because they have mutated to be better at infecting specific populations

Variant ‘A’ is the ancestral strain and is most closely related to the coronavirus found in bats and pangolins. Scientists believe the disease jumped into humans from one of the creatures at Wuhan Market.

The second type ‘B’ – which is most common in mainland China – is derived from ‘A’, and separated by two mutations, while ‘C’ is in turn a ‘daughter’ of ‘B’.

But interestingly it is type ‘C’ that initially infected Britain and Europe and that variant is not found in mainland China at all.

In fact, it is most common in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea suggesting that it spread to Europe from those regions. One English case also came directly from Australia.

Geneticist Dr Peter Forster, the lead author from the University of Cambridge, said: “You have the ‘C’ type, which is not directly from China associated with Singapore and offshore East Asia and that’s where English cases come from. We know of an engineer visiting a Singapore conference and then returning via a chalet in The Alps, so that comes up in the network.

“We usually use this analysis in tracing prehistoric human migrations, to allow you to see when they left Africa and populated the rest of the world, but nobody had thought to use it with a virus.

“The viral network we have detailed is a snapshot of the early stages of an epidemic, before the evolutionary paths of Covid-19 become obscured by vast numbers of mutations. It’s like catching an incipient supernova in the act.”

The technique has confirmed the importance of known infection routes, such as businessman Steve Walsh – the 53-year-old Brighton super-spreader who travelled to Britain from Singapore via The Alps in early February.

Surprisingly, it appears that the countries who now seem to be doing the best at controlling the spread of the virus inside their own borders, are the ones from which the disease spread initially.

Both Singapore and Hong Kong are yet to have a localised pandemic and are hopeful one might not happen. They have achieved containment through rigorous testing, contact tracing and localised quarantines.

Likewise, despite recording more than 110,000 cases, Germany has seen just 2,349 deaths.

But the new study shows that Singapore and Germany may have sparked the devastating outbreak in Italy, which has since spread to Britain.

The analysis suggests that one of the earliest introductions of the virus into Italy came via the first documented German infection on January 27, and that another early Italian infection route was related to a “Singapore cluster”.

Cases in Mexico, also appear to have spread from Italy, and in turn from the first German cluster in Munich – known as the Webasto case – which until now was believed to have been contained by German quarantine measures.

After the first wave of infections from east Asia in Britain, a large number of new cases were imported by people who had been to ski resorts in Northern Italy during the half-term break. Northern Italy appears to have also been initially seeded by the German cluster.

In contrast to Europe, the initial US outbreaks were of the ancestral ‘A’ variant. Mutated versions of ‘A’ were seen in Americans reported to have lived in Wuhan, and a large number of A-type viruses were found in patients from the US and Australia.

The A strain is largely absent across the Atlantic.

The team used data from 160 virus genomes sampled from across the world between 24 December 2019 and 4 March 2020.

Further work that has not yet been peer-reviewed using the analysis, suggests that the first infection occurred in humans somewhere between mid-September and early December.

The research also shows that mutations in the virus appear to have sped up as it swept across the globe.

The major Wuhan ‘B’ strain has not mutated much, which could mean it is immunologically or environmentally adapted to a large section of the East Asian population.

In contrast, the other types appear to have speeded up the mutation rate, perhaps to adapt to changing populations.

“If the virus wishes to infect someone from the US or Europe, these people have a different immunological response so you have predominantly type A and the English C type, so these are potentially to evade the immune response,” he said.

“If you are in a very localised part of China then will meet with a homogeneous population who have come through a similar disease progression, but once you get outside then Europeans have gone through a different disease history and also possibly there is a more diverse genetically diverse population, so you get more mutations.”

The team is keen to find out if certain strains are more aggressive than others, which could explain why some countries have much lower death rates.

However researchers are struggling because countries like Spain and Germany have only sequenced a few dozen virus genomes and Italy fewer than 10.

Dr Forster added: At the moment there are no clinical outcomes associated with the genomic sequences so we don’t know if the mutations are making some variants more lethal.

“Phylogenetic network analysis has the potential to help identify undocumented COVID-19 infection sources, which can then be quarantined to contain further spread of the disease worldwide,” added Dr Forster.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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One issue that I missed: S and L strains, with differing syndromes, was reported in March | Added April 10

In March, the National Science Review published a manuscript describing two distinct strains of the novel coronavirus, with two different sets of symptoms. The older S strain is less aggressive and also less pervasive; the newer L strain is more aggressive and also more pervasive, according to the study. [The way it was described to me anecdotally is that the S strain is the one with the runny nose and scratchy throat. The L strain is the one with severe respiratory disease. We have previously reported a third syndrome — rapid, acute gastrointestinal disease, principally in Oregon, that is NOT covered in this discussion.]

Before I proceed, obviously this issue needs followup, and we are looking for what’s available. In a crisis like this, there are often issues that arise and then mysteriously disappear. Often those issues are never discussed in TV coverage, and only rarely in newspaper coverage. The fact that any angle such as this does not have traction does not indicate that it’s not valid; sometimes the most important issues vanish and are forgotten.

Note, I am aware of the European vs. Chinese strains of the virus issue that was reported by the New York Times this week. I don’t know if there’s a relationship between these issues. We also need to be asking about bacterial co-infection, which was an issue during the 1918 “Spanish Influenza” outbreak.

Here is the language from the synopsis of the scientific paper reporting S and L strains:

Population genetic analyses of 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes indicated that these viruses evolved into two major types (designated L and S), that are well defined by two different SNPs that show nearly complete linkage across the viral strains sequenced to date. Although the L type (∼70%) is more prevalent than the S type (∼30%), the S type was found to be the ancestral version. Whereas the L type was more prevalent in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan, the frequency of the L type decreased after early January 2020. Human intervention may have placed more severe selective pressure on the L type, which might be more aggressive and spread more quickly. On the other hand, the S type, which is evolutionarily older and less aggressive, might have increased in relative frequency due to relatively weaker selective pressure.

Here is the writeup from Science Focus:

Scientists in China claim to have identified two main strains of the coronavirus that is circulating in humans, indicating that the virus is mutating.

Researchers at Peking University’s School of Life Sciences and the Institute Pasteur of Shanghai say the COVID-19 virus, which has since been renamed SARS-CoV2, has evolved into two major lineages, known as “L” and “S” types.

The newer and more aggressive L type strain accounted for about 70 per cent of the analysed cases, the researchers said, while the rest were linked to the older S type version.

The L type strain was found to be prevalent in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese city where COVID-19 was first detected late last year.

But its frequency decreased from early January, which the researchers attributed to human intervention.

The S type strain, meanwhile, is continuing to infect new patients, which experts believe could be because it is less severe, meaning people carry it for longer before going to the hospital, increasing the risk of it passing it on.

Writing in the journal National Science Review, the researchers said: “These findings strongly support an urgent need for further immediate, comprehensive studies that combine genomic data, epidemiological data, and chart records of the clinical symptoms of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).”

Here is how New Scientist reported the development:

Two strains of the new coronavirus are spreading around the world, according to an analysis of 103 cases. But the World Health Organization insists that “there is no evidence that the virus has been changing”. So how many strains are there, and why does it matter?

Viruses are always mutating, especially RNA viruses like this one, coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. When a person is infected with the coronavirus, it replicates in their respiratory tract. Every time it does, around half a dozen genetic mutations occur, says Ian Jones at the University of Reading, UK.

When Xiaolu Tang at Peking University in Beijing and colleagues studied the viral genome taken from 103 cases, they found common mutations at two locations on the genome. The team identified two types of the virus based on differences in the genome at these two regions: 72 were considered to be the “L-type” and 29 were classed “S-type”.

A separate analysis by the team suggests that the L-type was derived from the older S-type. The first strain is likely to have emerged around the time the virus jumped from animals to humans. The second emerged soon after that, says the team. Both are involved in the current global outbreak. The fact that the L-type is more prevalent suggests that it is “more aggressive” than the S-type, the team say.

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Study finds that only half of Seattle patients had fever on admission, and 58% were diabetic | Added April 10

From the New England Journal of Medicine: We identified 24 patients with confirmed Covid-19. The mean (±SD) age of the patients was 64±18 years, 63% were men, and symptoms began 7±4 days before admission. The most common symptoms were cough and shortness of breath; 50% of patients had fever on admission, and 58% had diabetes mellitus. All the patients were admitted for hypoxemic respiratory failure; 75% (18 patients) needed mechanical ventilation. Most of the patients (17) also had hypotension and needed vasopressors. No patient tested positive for influenza A, influenza B, or other respiratory viruses. Half the patients (12) died between ICU day 1 and day 18, including 4 patients who had a do-not-resuscitate order on admission. Of the 12 surviving patients, 5 were discharged home, 4 were discharged from the ICU but remained in the hospital, and 3 continued to receive mechanical ventilation in the ICU.

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Moscow to require hall passes for travel | Added April 10

Our contacts in the region say this was not mentioned in the Moscow newspapers.

Washington Post is reporting: Moscow will require citizens to download mobile passes to leave their homes for certain reasons, with the city’s mayor announcing stricter coronavirus measures Friday.

The capital is in its second week of a stay-at-home order, and after Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the government would be holding off on asking Muscovites to download a mobile pass each time they go out, a surge in cases has necessitated them, he said in a video address. The rollout of the pass system will occur gradually starting Monday, he said.

“On the first stage, we will introduce it for travel to work,” Sobyanin said, “on the second stage, for trips made for any other purposes, and on the third stage, if needed, for movements inside a district.”

Muscovites can only leave their homes to walk the dog within 100 meters of their residence, to take out the trash, to visit the doctor or to shop at the nearest grocery store or pharmacy. Sobyanin also announced that all construction and repair work in Moscow will be suspended next week; the construction of health-care facilities and the metro system are exceptions.

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Google, Apple will use phones to help people figure out if they came in contact with an ‘infected’ person | Added April 10

From the Washington Post: Apple and Google unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to help combat coronavirus, introducing new tools that could soon allow owners of smartphones to know if they have crossed paths with someone infected with the disease.

The changes the two companies announced targeting iPhone and Android devices could inject valuable new technological support into contact tracing, a strategy public-health officials say is essential to allowing people to return to work and normal life while containing the spread of the pandemic.

Apple and Google are hoping to harness Bluetooth, which is typically used to connect device-owners’ wireless speakers and keyboards. With the aid of the technology, public-health officials soon can deploy apps with the ability to sense other smartphones nearby. If a person learns they have coronavirus, they could indicate on their app they’ve been infected — and people whose smartphones have been in their vicinity would be notified, regardless of whether their devices run on Apple’s or Google software.

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Data firm says it can predict where next Covid-19 outbreak will occur | Added April 9

We are very interested in the technical angle of this whole issue. This includes any sort of digital certification of “immunity,” AI modeling, use of devices to track social distancing, and so on — you get the idea. This article is about how an AI model supposedly predicted a spike in covid cases.

From Futurism.com, with others sources indicated:

An artificial intelligence created by New York-based risk detection firm Dataminr was able to predict where the next spike in coronavirus cases will be in the UK and US by analyzing social media posts, The Next Web reports.

According to the company’s website, “growth in clusters of eyewitness, on-the-ground, first-hand public social media posts on COVID-19” allowed their algorithm to detect “hotspots 7-15 days prior to exponential growth in COVID-19 official case count.”

These social media posts include “posts ranging from people indicating they tested positive, people indicating they are experiencing symptoms, people indicating they have been exposed but not tested, first-hand accounts of confirmed cases” and so on.

Dataminr also predicted future spikes in 14 different US states. Seven days later, all 14 states were hit hard by the coronavirus, TNW reports.

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From USA Today: Oversight erased, Supreme Court hijacked: Trump turns the presidency into a dictatorship | Added April 9

This is from USA TODAY: When former Vice President Joe Biden entered the Democratic presidential race a year ago, he introduced the now familiar theme that the “soul of this nation” was at stake in the 2020 election. Judging by what we’ve seen from President Donald Trump over the past few days, Biden is right.

It began Friday night, when Trump informed Congress that he was firing Michael Atkinson, the Intelligence Community’s inspector general. This was nothing more than a vile act of political retribution that had been months in the making.

Atkinson fulfilled his legal responsibilities by informing Congress about a whistleblower complaint that exposed Trump’s impeachable crimes. What everyone else recognizes as following the letter of the law, the president views as cause for termination.

On Monday, Trump turned his attention to the inspector general who oversees the Department of Health and Human Services, who had just released a report revealing the extent to which hospitals were struggling to meet the health care demands associated with treating COVID-19 patients. The thorough review included interviews from 323 hospitals across 46 states and stood in stark contrast with the rhetoric coming from the president. Naturally, Trump labeled the report a “Fake Dossier” and suggested “politics” influenced it.

Editor’s Note: I love USA Today.

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Some doctors moving away from ventilators for virus patients | Added April 9

We are tracking this issue closely. Here is a new article from the Univesity of Chicago about helmet-based ventilators being preferable to masks or intubation. Here is a hospital industry publication commenting on the issue. This coverage is from Associated Press:

NEW YORK (AP) — As health officials around the world push to get more ventilators to treat coronavirus patients, some doctors are moving away from using the breathing machines when they can.

The reason: Some hospitals have reported unusually high death rates for coronavirus patients on ventilators, and some doctors worry that the machines could be harming certain patients.

The evolving treatments highlight the fact that doctors are still learning the best way to manage a virus that emerged only months ago. They are relying on anecdotal, real-time data amid a crush of patients and shortages of basic supplies.

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Am I reading this correctly? NPR is reporting that the federal government will stop funding testing sites as pandemic peak nears | added April 9

From NPR: Some local officials are disappointed the federal government will end funding for coronavirus testing sites this Friday. In a few places those sites will close as a result. This as criticism continues that not enough testing is available.

In the Philadelphia suburbs, Montgomery County has a drive-through site that has tested 250 people a day since March 21.

“It has been a very successful site. We are hoping by the time it closes Friday afternoon that we will have tested a little over 5,000 individuals,” says Dr. Valerie Arkoosh, who chairs the commission in the county of more than 825,000 people.

Montgomery County has been hit hard by the pandemic. By Tuesday the county identified 1,294 positive cases and reported 32 COVID-19-related deaths.

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U.S. intel agencies warned White House, Joint Chiefs, of possible cataclysmic event back in November | Added April 9

Evidence that the White House knew about a cataclysmic event developing in China continues to collect. ABC News is reporting:

As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.

Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.

The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.

“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.

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Gotta blame someone: Trump threatens to cut funding to World Health Organization | Added April 9

The WTO is funded at just over $2 billion. It is a public/private partnership, with about half of its money coming from governments, and the other half coming from non-governmental organizations — NGOs, meaning massive charities. The United States is the biggest funder, followed close second by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

From NBC News: The White House’s Office of Management and Budget is working on a possible plan to cut U.S. aid to the World Health Organization, administration officials said Wednesday, as President Donald Trump tries to deflect blame for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Administration officials said they also plan to look into the timeline of the WHO’s reaction to the coronavirus after it first appeared in China, as well as “links” to China. “What the WHO knew and how it reacted to that knowledge is relevant to the U.S. government’s response to the crisis,” a senior administration official said.

Trump’s focus on the WHO comes as he continues to face questions about his early statements playing down the virus and how unprepared his administration has been. The president’s embrace of a broadside against the WHO echoes similar criticism from hosts on Fox News Channel, including Tucker Carlson, and some Republican lawmakers.

Trump said Tuesday that he was putting U.S. aid to the WHO “on hold.”

“We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it,” he said, although he said later that his administration would review it. He also accused the WHO of being “China-centric” and slow to sound alarms about the coronavirus. “They could have called it months earlier,” the president said.

The director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, responded Wednesday by essentially accusing Trump of politicizing the virus.

From The New York Times: Replying to criticism from President Trump, the head of the World Health Organization made an impassioned plea for solidarity on Wednesday, warning that politicizing the coronavirus pandemic would result in “many more body bags.”

Mr. Trump unleashed a tirade against the organization on Tuesday, accusing it of acting too slowly to sound the alarm, and of treating the Chinese government too favorably. While the president, who threatened to withhold American funding for the W.H.O., spoke in unusually harsh terms, he was not alone in such criticism.

Asked about Mr. Trump’s comments on Wednesday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director-general, said, “We want to learn from our mistakes,” but added, “for now, the focus should be on fighting this virus.”

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Apple, Google develop app to tell you if you’ve come in contact with with an ‘infected’ person | Added April 10

This goes under the general heading of “digital interventions,” which include using phones to enforce social isolation, digital immunity certificates, and others.

From the Washington Post: Apple and Google unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to help combat coronavirus, introducing new tools that could soon allow owners of smartphones to know if they have crossed paths with someone infected with the disease.

The changes the two companies announced targeting iPhone and Android devices could inject valuable new technological support into contact tracing, a strategy public-health officials say is essential to allowing people to return to work and normal life while containing the spread of the pandemic.

Apple and Google are hoping to harness Bluetooth, which is typically used to connect device-owners’ wireless speakers and keyboards. With the aid of the technology, public-health officials soon can deploy apps with the ability to sense other smartphones nearby.

If a person learns they have coronavirus, they could indicate on their app they’ve been infected — and people whose smartphones have been in their vicinity would be notified, regardless of whether their devices run on Apple’s or Google software.

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Only half of hospital admitted cases had fever in Seattle, study says | Added April 10

This is filed under “potential evidence of different syndromes.” Also note that 58% of admitted cases were diabetic. From the New England Journal of Medicine:

We identified 24 patients with confirmed Covid-19. The mean (±SD) age of the patients was 64±18 years, 63% were men, and symptoms began 7±4 days before admission. The most common symptoms were cough and shortness of breath; 50% of patients had fever on admission, and 58% had diabetes mellitus. All the patients were admitted for hypoxemic respiratory failure; 75% (18 patients) needed mechanical ventilation. Most of the patients (17) also had hypotension and needed vasopressors. No patient tested positive for influenza A, influenza B, or other respiratory viruses. Half the patients (12) died between ICU day 1 and day 18, including 4 patients who had a do-not-resuscitate order on admission. Of the 12 surviving patients, 5 were discharged home, 4 were discharged from the ICU but remained in the hospital, and 3 continued to receive mechanical ventilation in the ICU.

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Reports of sabotage to 5G towers in England | Added April 9

This one is interesting. For about two weeks, we’ve been hearing numerous reports of people sabotaging 5G towers in England. Apparently, word is getting out that there may be a connection between Covid-19 and the ramping up of millimeter wave technology.

Advances in other types of radar and microwaves have been associated with mass illness in the past, including during the 1918-1921 pandemic of Spanish Flu. But this is never an officially admitted or acknowledged cause of a problem. Communication technology is always presumed harmless, even if it’s a repurposed weapons system that will spew heat and radiation on every street in the world

Note that if you think that any of this is something other than one virus causing one disease, you can be called a “conspiracy theorist.” If you ask questions, you can be called a conspiracy theorist. We need to be asking questions, so I guess wear the title proudly. EMFs are considered “probable carcinogens.” That is a problem.

From IT News for Australian Business: A conspiracy theory that links 5G mobile telecommunications masts to the spread of the novel coronavirus is dangerous fake news and completely false, Britain said on Saturday after masts in several parts of the country were torched.

When asked by a reporter about the so called “theory” that 5G telecommunications masts could play a role in the spread of the disease, British Cabinet Officer Minister Michael Gove said: “That is just nonsense, dangerous nonsense as well.”

Mobile phone masts have in recent days been vandalised and telecoms staff abused in Birmingham in central England and Merseyside in northern England, damaging connectivity at a time when people are relying on it more than ever.

An arson attack at a tower in Birmingham owned by BT, Britain’s biggest telecoms company, caused significant damage. It provided 2G, 3G and 4G services to thousands of people, but did not have 5G capability, the company said.

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Ventilators may be doing more harm than good | Added April 9

I’ve been waiting for this one. All over the world, there are demands and competition for ventilators. It’s every other word out of Gov. Cuomo’s mouth. However, I’ve read a diversity of articles that indicate there may be problems with using ventilators for Covid-19. The problem was raised recently by STAT News.

Getting hooked up seems to be the thing that happens right before patients die. For a greater understanding of how complex the use of a ventilator is, you can read this opinion piece in The New York Times. There is a lot about this syndrome that doctors do not understand, though it’s refreshing to see this:

From NBC News: As health officials around the world push to get more ventilators to treat coronavirus patients, some doctors are moving away from using the breathing machines when they can.

The reason: Some hospitals have reported unusually high death rates for coronavirus patients on ventilators, and some doctors worry that the machines could be harming certain patients.

The evolving treatments highlight the fact that doctors are still learning the best way to manage a virus that emerged only months ago. They are relying on anecdotal, real-time data amid a crush of patients and shortages of basic supplies.

Mechanical ventilators push oxygen into patients whose lungs are failing. Using the machines involves sedating a patient and sticking a tube into the throat. Deaths in such sick patients are common, no matter the reason they need the breathing help.

Generally speaking, 40% to 50% of patients with severe respiratory distress die while on ventilators, experts say. But 80% or more of coronavirus patients placed on the machines in New York City have died, state and city officials say.

Higher-than-normal death rates also have been reported elsewhere in the U.S., said Dr. Albert Rizzo, the American Lung Association’s chief medical officer.

Similar reports have emerged from China and the United Kingdom. One U.K. report put the figure at 66%. A very small study in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease first emerged, said 86% died.

The reason is not clear. It may have to do with what kind of shape the patients were in before they were infected. Or it could be related to how sick they had become by the time they were put on the machines, some experts said.

But some health professionals have wondered whether ventilators might actually make matters worse in certain patients, perhaps by igniting or worsening a harmful immune system reaction.

That’s speculation. But experts do say ventilators can be damaging to a patient over time, as high-pressure oxygen is forced into the tiny air sacs in a patient’s lungs.

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Evening Roundup | Added April 8

WebMD has picked up the discussion of Cameron Kyle-Sidell, video of which we posted below. He is an ER and critical care doctor from Brooklyn who says that we’ve been treating the wrong illness.

From the article: One doctor treating COVID-19 patients in New York says it was like altitude sickness. It was “as if tens of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers are stuck on a plane at 30,000 feet and the cabin pressure is slowly being let out. These patients are slowly being starved of oxygen,” said Cameron Kyle-Sidell, MD, an emergency room and critical care doctor at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn who has been posting about his experience on social media.

“A whole bunch of these patients really have low oxygen, but their lungs don’t look all that bad,” says Todd Bull, MD, director for the Center of Lungs and Breathing at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in Aurora. Doctors in Italy have noticed the same thing. And in some cases, that might mean patients need to be treated a little differently to ensure the best outcome.

Bernie Drops Out of Race

Here is an analysis from The Intercept: With Sanders out of the race, the progressive organizing effort is shifting to pressure Biden to make particular policy commitments and, more importantly, to shift his personnel in a more liberal direction and away from corporate allies. In a letter, eight organizations led by young people — Justice Democrats, March for Our Lives Action Fund, Alliance for Youth Action, NextGen America, Student Action, Sunrise Movement, If Not Now, and United We Dream Action — called on Biden to work to rectify his debilitating lack of popularity among people under the age of 45. “While you are now the presumptive Democratic nominee, it is clear that you were unable to win the votes of the vast majority of voters under 45 years old during the primary,” the letter notes. The groups, in an accompanying statement, detailed the failure:

As documented in extensive polling and a number of primary contests, Biden struggles to garner the support of voters under 45 years old, while Bernie Sanders’ base is made primarily of voters under 45. On Super Tuesday, Biden won only 17 percent of voters under 45. Bernie Sanders won voters under 30 in Michigan and Missouri by 76 points and 57 points respectively, according to exit polls. Democratic voters under 45 tend to be more progressive than their older counterparts.

Fauci says US may ease ‘back to normal’ if efforts work

Reuters is reporting: U.S. health officials are planning ways for the country to return to normal activities if distancing and other steps to mitigate COVID-19 this month prove successful in curbing the outbreak, the top U.S. infectious disease official said on Wednesday.

The Trump administration has called for 30 days of measures, including staying at least six feet away from other people, that have upended American life as most people stay isolated at home, shuttering schools and closing businesses through at least the end of April, with some states continuing certain closures through May and June.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said such steps must continue but that there are hopeful signs they are working.

“If in fact we are successful, it makes sense to at least plan what a re-entry into normality would look like. That doesn’t mean we’re going to do it right now, but it means we need to be prepared to ease into that,” Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, told Fox News in an interview.

Possibly Interesting: Brix Interview

A video interview with Dr. Deborah Brix. She says that over 90% of people are testing negative for the virus, but are told they may have Covid, or some other infectious disease– and should wear a mask at home, and self-quarantine at home — even if they test negative. They are concerned that negative may not mean negative, and that there may be some other infectious disease involved. Essentially they are lying to people.

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Wisconsin holds election during pandemic | Added April 7

From tonight’s New York Times: Tuesday’s mess of an election in Wisconsin is the culmination of a decade of efforts by state Republicans to make voting harder, redraw legislative boundaries and dilute the power of voters in the state’s urban centers.

The Republican-dominated state legislature, which has held a majority since 2011, due in part to gerrymandered maps, refused to entertain the Democratic governor’s request to mail absentee ballots to all voters or move the primary. Then the State Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservative justices, overturned the governor’s ruling to postpone the election until June.

Now Wisconsin is conducting an election that the state’s largest newspaper — which previously endorsed Republican leaders including former Gov. Scott Walker — called “the most undemocratic in the state’s history.”

Here’s a look at how it came to this point.

Why are Republicans fighting so hard to hold an election in the midst of a pandemic?

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders are on the ballot in Wisconsin, but the main event is the State Supreme Court race between the conservative incumbent justice, Daniel Kelly, and a liberal challenger, Jill Karofsky.

The winner will be in position to cast a deciding vote on a case before the court that seeks to purge more than 200,000 people from Wisconsin’s voter rolls — in a state where 2.6 million people voted in the last governor’s race. When the matter was first before the court in January, Mr. Kelly recused himself, citing his upcoming election. He indicated he would “rethink” his position following the April election, which comes with a 10-year term.

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Trump upends virus relief funding oversight, removing key official | Added April 7

Associated Press is reporting: President Donald Trump is moving aggressively to challenge the authority and independence of agency watchdogs overseeing his administration, including removing the inspector general tasked with overseeing the $2.2 trillion coronavirus rescue package that passed Congress with bipartisan support.

In four days, Trump has fired one inspector general tied to his impeachment, castigated another he felt was overly critical of the coronavirus response and sidelined a third meant to safeguard against wasteful spending of the coronavirus funds.

The actions have sent shock waves across the close-knit network of watchdog officials in government, creating open conflict between a president reflexively resistant to outside criticism and an oversight community tasked with rooting out fraud, misconduct and abuse.

The most recent act threatens to upend scrutiny of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus rescue effort now underway, setting the stage for a major clash between Trump, government watchdogs and Democrats who are demanding oversight of the vast funds being pumped into the American economy.

“We’re seeing since Friday a wrecking ball across the IG community,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group.

The latest broadside came Tuesday when the Defense Department revealed that Trump had removed acting inspector general Glenn Fine, an experienced official, from his role as head of a coronavirus spending oversight board. It was unclear who might replace Fine, who also lost his title as acting inspector general.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Fine’s abrupt removal “part of a disturbing pattern of retaliation by the president against independent overseers.” Trump, she said, is attempting to “disregard critical oversight provisions that hold the administration accountable to the law.”

Trump himself shed little light on the decision as he spoke to reporters Tuesday evening, saying he doesn’t know Fine, but had “heard the name.”

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Morning Roundup: British PM Boris Johnson is in ICU; American official warned Trump of “worst case scenario” in January | Added April 7

In a sign of how serious this problem is, Boris Johnson, the rockstar prime minister of the UK, is in the intensive care united of St. Andrews Hospital. According to multiple news reports, his condition deteriorated rapidly on Monday.

It’s my understanding that Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, also tested positive and was successfully treated by a homeopath. However, this seems to be the topic of a factchecking debate.

In 2019, Charles became a patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy. Homeopathy is a form of medical science developed in the 18th century by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann specifically to address the toxicity of allopathic or “regular” medicine.

Trump has said many times that nobody could have predicted this, but someone close to him did: trade advisor Peter Navarro

A senior White House official warned the Trump administration in January that a pandemic would cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

The warning, in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.

“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Mr. Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Mr. Trump was playing down the risks to the United States. He later went on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.

This blog is paid for by the Planet Waves Core Community

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Eric Francis Coppolino has served as editor of Health Professions Report and New York Education Law Report. His coverage of mass poisoning incidents and legal issues related to PCBs and dioxins has been published by The New York Times, Sierra, The Village Voice, Woodstock Times, The Ecologist and The Las Vegas Sun.

Eric is also an internationally renowned astrologer whose horoscopes have appeared in newspapers, magazines and websites across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and Asia. Today he is the horoscope writer for The Mountain Astrologer, the editor of Planet Waves, and host of Planet Waves FM – Pacifica.

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A few of my personal protocols | Added April 7

As you may know, I’m in the flow of a lot of information, both scientific and holistic, about the coronavirus issue. I’ve been reading and interviewing practitioners for months, to figure out the best protocol. I highly recommend staying in contact with herbalists, naturopaths and homeopaths in your area (or network to them outside your area) for coherent information. Make sure you ask questions and understand what you’re told.

I can’t share these practices as “recommendations” though here are a few of the things I’m doing, in the event that that the virus theory turns out to be true. Besides basic hygiene, and wearing a mask as a protest against Trump, who won’t wear one:

— I’ve been taking elderberry in some form twice daily (usually syrup or tincture). I agree with Susan Weed that this plant must call you. That can include getting some and keeping it in your kitchen; trying it and see how you agree with it; or some form of feeling a pull or friendly invitation. Elderberry called me. Someone told me about it and immediately its diva was living in my apartment.

— Next, I learned from an early coronavirus researcher that these viruses hate zinc. It kills them dead. So I have some zinc tincture that I gargle with, along with warm salt water, twice a day. Labcoat contingent says that the virus colonizes the throat before it gets to the lungs. Keep it out of the throat and you keep it out of the lungs. Get zinc tincture at any health food store or decent drug store. Lozenges also work; I prefer tincture plus warm salt water.

— Next, I have learned from studying the 5G/EMF side of the issue that part of the problem is the depletion of melatonin. That’s also true for people with lots of screen time. So I’m taking a high dose of melatonin (5mg) every night.

— Next, I use the homeopathic remedy Gelsemium 30 to treat anxiety related to this issue. I have also had good results treating others. This was the “Spanish Flu” remedy that saved many lives from 1918-1921. One can pick this up in many health food stores or a homeopathic lab like Hahnemann Labs in San Rafel or Helios in the UK (though there’s currently a run on it, I imagine Hahnemann is cranking it out; it’s not hard to make). Another place that may have it is Homeopathic Education Services. I’m not experiencing much anxiety but it’s happened a few times. Also useful for thinking “oh I feel like I’m getting this.” Homeopaths have also recommended Aconitum 200 and Bryonia Alba 30, in the event of the onset of symptoms.

I’ll be writing more about the homeopathic angle. When a health situation is weird, nondescript, murky and has a deceptive or elusive feeling, homeopathy is your friend.

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New from Jen Sorensen | Added April 7

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Highly relevant comment from The Intercept | Added April 7

From our friends at The Intercept:

THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITIES of this moment are different than anything we have ever experienced. We possess a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the United States a more humane country. But if we fail to seize it, we will face mortal danger from the right.That’s not hyperbole. The anger of Americans, once they figure out what’s being done to them right now, is going to be volcanic. The fallout from 9/11 and the great recession of 2007-2010 will be imperceptible in comparison.

Not long from now, almost everyone will have a family member or friend who died of Covid-19, many of them suffocating in isolation wards with insufficient treatment, perhaps deprived of a ventilator that would have saved their lives. Huge swaths of the country are plummeting into desperate penury, even as they witness large corporations unlock the U.S. Treasury and help themselves to everything inside.

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JAMA study says SARS-CoV-2 spreads in warm, humid weather | Added April 7

Which we know because the virus is spreading in New Orleans, however, here is an article on the study from Medical and Life Sciences News. The study appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association; here is the original.

A new study explores the possibility that the novel coronavirus, which is ravaging the world, can spread in hot and humid conditions, dispelling the view held by some investigators that the virus is more easily transmissible in colder climates.

The study published in the JAMA Network Open examines the possibility that the virus could have been spread by one infected person to 8 other people and showed no signs of weakening in warm and humid conditions. All nine people having used or worked at the same indoor public bath center.

The novel coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 that causes the acute respiratory condition called COVID-19, emerged in China’s Wuhan city in Hubei province in December 2019. Since then, it has spread to 200 countries and territories all over the world, causing over [death and devastation, in original data slightly dated, meaning from last week].

This blog is paid for by the Planet Waves Core Community

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Trump and associates have financial interest in anti-malaria drug | Added April 7

Notice how Trump always has a “gut feeling” or “just knows” that hydroxychloroquine will work? Well, now we know what he means:

From the Daily Beast: President Donald Trump has a “small financial interest” in the drugmaker of an anti-malarial drug that he has been touting as a “game changer” in treating coronavirus, according to The New York Times. Over the past two weeks, Trump and his Fox News allies have aggressively promoted hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure despite top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci urging caution and noting that there was not enough evidence of the drug’s efficacy.

The Times reports that the president’s family trusts all have investments in a mutual fund whose largest holding is Sanofi, the manufacturer of Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine. Associates of the president, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, have also run funds that hold investments in the pharmaceutical firm.

From The Times: Mr. Trump made clear on Sunday whose side he took in Mr. Navarro’s confrontation with Dr. Fauci. At his briefing after the meeting, he said it was wrong to wait for the kind of study Dr. Fauci wanted. “We don’t have time,” the president said. “We don’t have two hours because there are people dying right now.”

Some associates of Mr. Trump’s have financial interests in the issue. Sanofi’s largest shareholders include Fisher Asset Management, the mutual fund company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans, including Mr. Trump. A spokesman for Mr. Fisher declined to comment.

Another investor in both Sanofi and Mylan, another pharmaceutical firm, is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. Mr. Ross said in a statement Monday that he “was not aware that Invesco has any investments in companies producing” the drug, “nor do I have any involvement in the decision to explore this as a treatment.”

As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi.

This blog is paid for by the Planet Waves Core Community

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Finnish study shows coronavirus aerosols remain airborne for minutes | Added April 7

We keep reading different estimates of how long SARS-CoV-2 lingers in the air. It’s been getting longer and longer. I thought the next article I read would say they float across the ocean and land on the designated person’s tongue. However, now a study from Finland says that it’s a few minutes. From the article:

Coronavirus droplets ejected when a person coughs, sneezes or even speaks can remain suspended in the air for minutes rather than immediately sinking to ground, according to new research data.

The finding comes from studies conducted by researchers from Aalto University, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), the state-owned technical and innovation centre VTT and Helsinki University.

The organisations investigated how extremely small aerosol particles are released and travel on air currents when people cough, sneeze or even speak. The research teams included dozens of scientists from flow physicists to virologists, as well as experts in medical technology and infectious diseases.

The study modeled how novel coronavirus might spread using a trip to the supermarket as an example. For example if a person who has been infected with the virus sneezes between the aisles at the supermarket, they release a cloud of droplets that may also contain the virus. The model suggests that the cloud spreads some distance from the infected person.

This blog is paid for by the Planet Waves Core Community

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Evening news roundup | Added April 6

We — all of us on the Planet Waves Eco List — are reviewing about 20 to 30 articles a day, not counting what people read and don’t post.

In addition to a wide general scan, we are tracking selected major issues, including the testing problem, the “it may not be a virus” (or just a virus) issue, and the well established “potentially escaped from the Wuhan Virology Institute theory” (see second story on feed). We we see just about everting else, too. Cindy, Victoria, Sam, Amy, Yuko, Lanvi, Carol, Peter and others are working from behind the scenes. We are the world’s only astrology team with more than a century of total experience covering chemicals, toxins, mass poisoning issues, FDA, CDC, EPA and other agencies. I wish we could do more.

Here is some of what we’ve seen today:

Coronavirus from the viewpoint of FDNY chief

From Proublica, a nonprofit investigating reporting organization that I love: “I was a fireman here 25 years ago and now have returned as chief towards the end of my career. I thought that surviving Sept. 11, 2001, would be the part of history I would tell grandchildren, but COVID has clearly surmounted even that disastrous and heartbreaking day. The department lost 343; at least 50 of them were people I knew, including my chief, Dennis Cross. He taught me how to fight fires, but also how to sail a boat, and after his death his widow gave me use of his 25-foot Catalina.”

States restrict abortion using virus as pretext

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that some states are moving to restrict abortion, using the virus as a pretext. Note, if you were impressed by how 9/11 was used as a pretext, you will be stunned by how coronavirus becomes the excuse for absolutely anything and everything. From the article:

Six Republican-led states are moving to dramatically curtail access to abortion amid the coronavirus pandemic, prompting a wave of lawsuits that could soon bring the dispute to the Supreme Court.

While several states and the federal government have discouraged nonessential medical procedures like cosmetic surgery and elective dental work during the national health crisis, six states — Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas — went a step further, prohibiting abortion, unless to protect the life or health of the woman.

The Republican governors say their orders are vital to preserving hospital capacity and personal protective equipment for healthcare workers treating COVID-19 cases.

But abortion rights supporters say the states are exploiting the crisis to block or delay access to abortions, perhaps until a pregnancy is so far along it will be harder or impossible to end. They say the orders violate Supreme Court rulings first spelled out in Roe vs. Wade that states cannot ban abortion before a fetus is viable outside the womb, about 24 weeks.

This is already happening: data tracking using phones to monitor social distancing

This is charming: from the Daily Mail — a new use for metadata: The US government is talking to tech giants like Facebook and Google to see if users’ location data could help track and slow the spread of COVID-19. The data would be anonymous and could allow officials to see whether groups of people are keeping enough distance from each other.

Officials wants to see if private-sector companies could compile the data in a way that would allow them to map the spread of the deadly virus. Data collected on users’ locations would be used to track patterns and groups, rather than monitor any single individual, according to a report by the Washington Post.

And then there’s digital proof of immunity

On a similar tac, even more charming: “they” might make us carry “digital proof” of immunity. Oh, Bill Gates said so. For what it’s worth. From Off-Guardian:

In a recent candid interview, Bill Gates outlined that, despite the comparatively small threat of Coronavirus, he and his colleagues “don’t want a lot of recovered people” who have acquired natural immunity. They instead are hoping we become reliant on vaccines and anti-viral medication.

Shockingly, Gates also suggests people be made to have a digital ID showing their vaccination status, and that people without this “digital immunity proof” would not be allowed to travel. Such an approach would mean very big money for vaccine producers.

Penn study of anti-malaria drug (but see article above from April 7 about Trump financial interest in the product

Finally, Penn Medicine (University of Pennsylvania) is doing a trial of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug. From the article:

Penn Medicine is leading a new clinical trial evaluating hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug hyped as a possible treatment for COVID-19, the infection caused by the coronavirus.

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine are enrolling patients into the study, which will examine the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

Hydroxychloroquine, which also can treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is among various drugs that scientists say may prove effective at treating COVID-19. President Donald Trump particularly has pushed it, noting the federal government has stockpiled 29 million pills. But much remains unknown about its potential.

Initial research has produced mix results. In one study, the medication showed no significant benefit. In another, HCQ appeared to improve symptoms in COVID-19 patients, but the study’s small sample size and methodology have been criticized.

And thats what we’ve got for you for tonight. Stay safe. Stay sane. GET OUTSIDE FOR A MINUTE! Love from the Eco List.

PS — Cameo by Russian white supremacists

The Trump administration on Monday designated a Russian white supremacist group a “foreign terrorist organization” and hit its members with sanctions. This is from Associated Press:

The move against the Russian Imperial Movement is the first time the designation has been made for a white supremacist group and comes amid doubts the administration believes extremist organizations of that type merit such sanctions. It was not immediately clear what the practical impact will be as the group is relatively small and does not have major international reach.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his counterterrorism coordinator Nathan Sales announced the step, which makes it illegal to provide the group or its identified members with any kind of “material support.” Those penalties can include asset freezes and travel bans and can apply to non-Americans.

“These designations are unprecedented,” Sales said. “This is the first time the United States has ever designated white supremacist terrorists, illustrating how seriously this administration takes the threat. We are taking actions no previous administration has taken to counter this threat.”

Trump and his administration have been criticized for not appearing to take the threat of white supremacism seriously, either overseas or domestically. Trump came under fire for not responding more forcefully to violence provoked by some neo-Nazi groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and has been called out for supporting European nationalist politicians

Monday’s designations will make it easier for national security prosecutors at the Justice Department to bring terrorism-related charges against anyone who supports or provides aid to people affiliated with the Russian group. It’s illegal to provide money, equipment or even less tangible aid, to people connected with the movement.

This blog is paid for by the Planet Waves Core Community

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Coronavirus escape from Wuhan Virology Institute theory gets new life | Added April 6

When I interviewed wildlife pathologist Dr. Ward Stone [see fourth program down], he would not rule out that the novel coronavirus escaped from a lab — even if the chances were 99 to 1 against. Now the “lab escape” hypothesis has new life, as the Daily Mail has raised the question for a very wide audience.

We’ve been discussing it on these pages since we began publishing. The hypothesis is taken seriously because a Rutgers University professor named Richard Ebright has been warning of it for years, and it’s happened several times before.

Yes, the Wuhan Virology Institute Exists

What originally got my attention was The Wall Street Journal’s article acknowledging that there is indeed a Level 4 biohazard lab located right in Wuhan, where the first known or admitted outbreak occurred (that is linked somewhere; the article is not remarkable and considers lab-escape to be a conspiracy theory). Previously, the existence of the lab might have been considered sketchy, though that is unquestionably true: it’s there, it handles coronaviruses, and it appears to be the only facility of its kind in China.

It is also documented that the first case cannot be tracked back to the Huanan seafood market. Only the first cluster can, and the two are not related. This means that the official story has a logic problem. If it started in the market, it could not have started somewhere else. If it did not start in the market, it did start somewhere else. So we are now on alert to find out where that might be.

Recently, The Washington Post has confirmed that the Huanan seafood market story does not hold up to scrutiny, citing The Lancet (the leading British medical journal).

Then I read an article in the journal Nature which quotes the bat virus expert at the Wuhan Virology Institute as questioning whether the virus came from her own lab. The scientist, Shi Zhengli, assures the public that that the virus did not leak from her Wuhan lab, saying that its spread was “nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits.” Perhaps.

This Has Happened Before

Yet the Nature article also acknowledges previous problems with the SARS virus. To quote (in italics):

But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,” he says.

Ebright takes issue with Zhengli’s denial. “A denial is not a refutation,” Ebright told the Tennessee Star. “Especially not a denial based on ‘nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits’.”

So it’s not like this has not happened before — in China, and you can be sure, elsewhere. Today I learned that there is also a public health lab in Wuhan that does experiments with coronaviruses — a second lab where this could have escaped from.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Then we found an article by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the people who keep the Doomsday Clock (the one that tells us how close the world is to nuclear annihilation).

This article also quotes Ebright. Here is a big swath (I am leaving out quote marks to avoid the quote within a quote issue that will take a lot of editing to fix): QUOTE:

Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, a biosecurity expert who has been speaking out on lab safety since the early 2000s, does agree with the Nature Medicine authors’ argument that the new coronavirus wasn’t purposefully manipulated by humans, calling their arguments on this score strong. Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.

But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.

Except for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, two deadly viruses that have caused outbreaks in the past, coronaviruses have been studied at laboratories that are labelled as operating at a moderate biosafety level known as BSL-2, Ebright says. And, he says, bat coronaviruses have been studied at such labs in and around Wuhan, China, where the new coronavirus first emerged. “As a result,” Ebright says, “bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.”

Higher Safety Labs Would Be Appropriate

Higher safety-level labs would be appropriate for a virus with the characteristics of the new coronavirus causing the current pandemic. “Virus collection, culture, isolation, or animal infection at BSL-2 with a virus having the transmission characteristics of the outbreak virus would pose substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker, the public,” Ebright says.

Ebright points out that scientists in Wuhan have collected and publicized a bat coronavirus called RaTG13, one that is 96 percent genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2. The Nature Medicine authors are arguing “against the hypothesis that the published, lab-collected, lab-stored bat coronavirus RaTG13 could be a proximal progenitor of the outbreak virus.” But, Ebright says, the authors relied on assumptions about when the viral ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans; how fast it evolved before that; how fast it evolved as it adapted to humans; and the possibility that that the virus may have mutated in cell cultures or experimental animals inside a lab.

The Nature Medicine authors “leave us where we were before: with a basis to rule out [a coronavirus that is] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident,” Ebright says.

END OF QUOTE.

I am concerned that this substance that’s running around — if indeed it is — seems to have a superbug quality. While “coming from a lab” does not necessarily mean bioengineered, that possibility has not been not ruled out. Sharing 96% of the genome is quite small. Humans share 99% of the genome of bonobo apes, and we are rather different (though I reckon we would benefit from being more like them).

This blog is paid for by the Planet Waves Core Community

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Eric Francis Coppolino has served as editor of Health Professions Report and New York Education Law Report. His coverage of mass poisoning incidents and legal issues related to PCBs and dioxins has been published by The New York Times, Sierra, The Village Voice, Woodstock Times, The Ecologist and The Las Vegas Sun.

Eric is also an internationally renowned astrologer whose horoscopes have appeared in newspapers, magazines and websites across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and Asia. Today he is the horoscope writer for The Mountain Astrologer, the editor of Planet Waves, and host of Planet Waves FM – Pacifica.

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Pastor who defied social distancing (and claimed to have an anti-coronavirus machine) has been dropped by his insurance carrier | Added April 5

Friendly Atheist is reporting: Nothing and no one could make Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne listen to reason.

Louisiana officials pleaded with him to close his church, and he ignored them. News outlets and social media users held him up as a prime example of religious irresponsibility, and he shrugged.

The sheriff’s office threatened his arrest, then made good on that warning, and still Browne vowed that he’d keep gathering the flock at his Tampa Bay temple.

But suddenly the pigheaded pastor has had a change of heart. Alerted to news reports of his dangerous and possibly costly intransigence, the church’s insurance company canceled his policy. And Browne finally bowed his head and announced that he would close the place down for now (it’s all the result of relentless “religious persecution” and “government tyranny,” he continues to sputter).

He may be a jerk, but let’s check back with his constitutional theories in three months and see where we’re at.

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New York’s numbers may be leveling off | Added April 5

New York City is now Ground Zero in the coronavirus scenario. Today, the Daily News is reporting: Nearly 600 additional people in New York state died of coronavirus Saturday, bringing the grim toll to 4,159 but suggesting the toll could be around the “apex” of the outbreak, Gov. Cuomo said.

“We could be either very near the apex or the apex could be a plateau and we could be on that plateau right now,” he told reporters Sunday in Albany. “We won’t know until you see the next few days. Does it go up, does it go down?”

Italy’s numbers may be leveling off as well. In any healing situation, “not worse” is a form of better. Better is also a form of better.

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We are tracking articles on respiratory issues | Added April 5

This segment will be a work in development. Articles on respiratory-related issues are flying on the Eco list. Please see the video by the ER doctor, tagged as urgent.

This article appreciates clinical data published on COVID-19 in the context of another respiratory illness – high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE). Both conditions have significant similarities that portend pathophysiologic trajectories. Following this potential treatment options emerge.

According to this article on Chinese medicine: Absence of Phlegm (wutan) or Low Phlegm Production (shaotan): Typical symptomology includes either a dry cough or no cough. Because on one hand the normal way of phlegm expulsion by coughing is missing and on the other turbid damp pathogens are obstructing the middle burner, the resultant blockage of normal transformative pathways causes turbid phlegm to congeal into a rubbery and glue-like material that severely interferes with proper airway function and has no way out. This is the most important reason for the lingering “stalemate” quality of the disease, as well as the tendency to take a sudden turn for the worse.

This article focuses on gastrointestinal symptoms. We’ve heard quite a bit about the “mystery Oregon disease” from last fall with severe G-I issues; some of it reported below.

In my opinion, there continues to be a legitimate debate over whether SARS-CoV-2 is in fact a disease vector. The presenter discusses why a virus is not a vector — it’s a byproduct of another biological function. This is similar but more scientifically grounded than the presentation by Dr. Thomas Cowan that has been making the rounds. The issue of viral RNA potentially not being a vector or even a sign of infection is admitted in FDA and CDC documents, linked below. I think we might all agree that this is a question.

The other side of this debate involves whether what we’re calling SARS-CoV-2 is a weaponized virus. It has some very strange properties that are not garden variety. Pay no mind to the people screaming that it’s not, and cannot be. That is false certainty. They do not know. It might be, it night not be. Viruses are messed with all the time here in the age of Big Science. There is a coronavirus lab in Wuhan. That is ridiculous.

One of our correspondents, an ER nurse in New York, writes:

“I am seeing better outcomes with the patients that are being proned [placed in prone position, searchable issue] on the vents. The mortality rate with comorbidities is high [everyone is saying this], and intubation is definitely risky as we know some of these people will not make it.

“One of the most common symptoms that I am seeing with people on the sicker end of the spectrum is hypoxia with oxygen saturation’s much lower then where they should be.

“We are also limited with certain treatments like BIPAPS and nebulizers witch most often work well for people with underlying respiratory diseases, we can’t use albuterol treatments….. because aerosol….

“We are treating a lot of these patients as we would for ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) sans the aerosols due to the risk of aerosolizing the virus.”

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Aircraft carrier captain tests positive; Trump pushed for his dismissal above objections | Added April 5

From the Daily Mail: Captain Brett Crozier, the officer who was relieved of command of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt after a letter warning of a coronavirus outbreak on board the ship leaked to the press, has tested positive for COVID-19.

Two Naval Academy classmates of Crozier who remain close to the family revealed the diagnosis to The New York Times on Sunday. The classmates told the Times that Crozier began to show symptoms of the disease before he was dismissed by Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly on Thursday.

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Are viruses alive? Not like your pet iguana

From Scientific American

From Livescience

From Microbiology Society

From Khan Academy

From Woodward and Bernstein

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Eric Francis Coppolino has served as editor of Health Professions Report and New York Education Law Report. His coverage of mass poisoning incidents and legal issues related to PCBs and dioxins has been published by The New York Times, Sierra, The Village Voice, Woodstock Times, The Ecologist and The Las Vegas Sun.

Eric is also an internationally renowned astrologer whose horoscopes have appeared in newspapers, magazines and websites across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and Asia. Today he is the horoscope writer for The Mountain Astrologer, the editor of Planet Waves, and host of Planet Waves FM – Pacifica.

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I consider this of top-level importance | Added April 4

Check out this video. (I don’t know how to frame it). I’ve been reading stuff that supports this for weeks. It comports with the issue of the virus potentially not being a disease vector, as the FDA and CDC have admitted.

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Actual scientific testing out of Iceland shows that half of all positive results are from asymptomatic people | Added April 4

We may have some real data to work with. Iceland has been testing a large proportion of its total population — about 5% — and has made a few discoveries. This is from CNN:

“The results of the additional tests performed by deCODE have given an indication that efforts to limit the spread of the virus have been effective so far,” the government wrote last week, adding “testing in the general population will continue to elicit a much clearer picture of the actual spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Iceland.”

Some of the revelations have been stark. Although fewer than 1% of the tests came back positive for the virus, the company’s founder Dr. Kári Stefánsson told CNN that around 50% of those who tested positive said they were asymptomatic, confirming multiple studies that show that asymptomatic, or mildly symptomatic, people have played an important role in spreading the virus.

“What it means in my mind, is that because we are screening the general population, we are catching people early in the infection before they start showing symptoms,” Stefánsson said.
“Keep in mind that the screening is now randomized, but voluntary so there is some bias in the data,” the Directorate of Health said in a statement, adding that a “randomized screening program has started and a blood serum screening for antibodies is planned.”

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Washington Post compares coronavirus response debacle to unheeded 9/11 warnings | Added April 4

It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.

From the Article: By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary.

Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.

It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.

The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.

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Morning roundup: wearing a face mask is no longer considered terrorism | Added April 4

Wasn’t it a few years ago that wearing a mask could get you accused of being a terrorist protestor? Well, now it’s been recommended by the government.

As a result, discussion of face masks is the trending topic on Medium. Wear them or not? What is the scientific truth? If I use a bra, should I wash it first? Will Cuomo send the National Guard for my bandannas and deliver them down to the city? And so on. According to the newspaper of record, the mask market is a total mess. We didn’t know there was one.

Anyway, CDC has recommended (not mandated) that everyone in the entire United States of America wear a mask when they go outside.

It’s made headlines in The New York Times like one of the big days of the impeachment, across six columns as they say. [See graphic below.] The header should really read, “Feds emphasize home-made masks, not laboratory testing.”

In response, Planet Waves has joined the war effort and has sparked up the “Lips” edition of the mask featuring those of Patricia Quinn (Magenta).

In other news, I learned watching TV today that the reason USNS Comfort has so few patients is that they have to prove they’re corona-negative before they are allowed aboard, and apparently, this is not so easy to establish (a topic I’ve been covering).

Pink is pissed off that celebrities can get tested but most regular folks cannot, and has pitched in $1m to the cause.

The Times is reporting that “tensions” exist between Trump and his medical advisors. Yes, if you consider a reality gap the size of that canyon on Mars to qualify as tension. Don’t miss the latest portrait of Trump by our official favorite photographer, Doug Mills (who is assigned to follow the president).

The Washington Post has a piece about scientists’ concern over the failure of federal response to the growing crisis way back in January.

New York City is a Shitshow Right Now

New York City reported its highest death toll from the virus today as Jupiter approached a conjunction to Pluto [see Daily Planets for details]. The current count is nearly 3,000, with 562 dying in the past 24 hours. During that time, 1,427 newly sickened patients poured into hospitals, according to Times.

A continued surge in confirmed cases across America pushed the Trump administration to recommend Americans wear face masks when in public to reduce transmission.

“It is hard to put fully into words what we are all grappling with as we navigate our way through this pandemic,” Vicki L. LoPachin, the chief medical officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, wrote in an email to the staff on Friday. “We are healing so many and comforting those we can’t save — one precious life at a time.”

Note, I’m writing this blog about two hours north of the city, in Kingston. This is a heartache for everyone and especially for those of us who grew up there, seeing New York City take the brunt of this crisis.

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Half the world under stay home order | Added April 3

The New York Times reported today that half the world — about four billion people — is under a stay-at-home order. Today’s update includes an underutilized hospital ship in New York City, digital tracking strategies to do contact tracing, and political blame going around. Last night I posted an article to subscribers, called The Road Ahead, the Road Beyond. I look at the astrology of the situation, through the major turning point in late December. Here’s an interesting piece from the Times on profiteering and mayhem in the mask industry. Note, it seems like everyone but the Wall St. Journal has lifted their paywall.

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Comfort resting comfortably at Pier 90; tests negative for coronavirus | Added April 3

The New York Times is reporting that USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed hospital ship, only has 20 patients after sitting at Pier 90 for a week, ready for action. I would call up my friend David, who works in this field, and ask him what he thinks, but I know what he’s going to say.

From the article:

Such were the expectations for the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort that when it chugged into New York Harbor this week, throngs of people, momentarily forgetting the strictures of social distancing, crammed together along Manhattan’s west side to catch a glimpse.

On Thursday, though, the huge white vessel, which officials had promised would bring succor to a city on the brink, sat mostly empty, infuriating executives at local hospitals. The ship’s 1,000 beds are largely unused, its 1,200-member crew mostly idle.

Only 20 patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.

“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” said Michael Dowling, the head of Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital system. “Everyone can say, ‘Thank you for putting up these wonderful places and opening up these cavernous halls.’ But we’re in a crisis here, we’re in a battlefield.”

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U.S. and Europe turn to phone tracking strategies to keep us all safe | Added April 3

From The Wall Street Journal: welcome to the new ankle bracelet. Maybe this would have been a good idea in January. From the article —

Western governments aiming to relax restrictions on movement are turning to unprecedented surveillance to track people infected with the new coronavirus and identify those with whom they have been in contact.

Governments in China, Singapore, Israel and South Korea that are already using such data credit the practice with helping slow the spread of the virus. The U.S. and European nations, which have often been more protective of citizens’ data than those countries, are now looking at a similar approach, using apps and cellphone data.

“I think that everything is gravitating towards proximity tracking,” said Chris Boos, a member of Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing, a project that is working to create a shared system that could take uploads from apps in different countries. “If somebody gets sick, we know who could be infected, and instead of quarantining millions, we’re quarantining 10.”

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This is where this is all going | Added April 3

It’s been three weeks since Trump declared a national emergency? I guess this was leap year where March had 3,491 days. From the Washington Post:

In the three weeks since declaring the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, President Trump has delivered a dizzying array of rhetorical contortions, sowed confusion and repeatedly sought to cast blame on others.

History has never known a crisis response as strong as his own, Trump says — yet the self-described wartime president claims he is merely backup. He has faulted governors for acting too slowly and, as he did Thursday, has accused overwhelmed state and hospital officials of complaining too much and of hoarding supplies.

America is winning its war with the coronavirus, the president says — yet the death toll rises still, and in the best-case scenario more Americans will die than in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The economy is the strongest ever and will rebound in no time, he says — yet stock markets have cratered and in the past two weeks a record 10 million people filed for unemployment insurance.

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Working from home and other conditions create internet security problems…who knew | Added April 2

From the South China Morning Post’s N.Y. bureau: Cyber criminals are taking advantage of the US at an especially vulnerable time during the war against the coronavirus outbreak.

As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the United States, another invisible enemy is threatening America’s data security.

From stealing data to disseminating misinformation, hackers are taking advantage of the US at an especially vulnerable time during the war against the deadly outbreak.

Millions of Americans have been ordered to work from home to contain the spread of the virus and thus an unprecedented amount of data is now being transmitted outside secure business networks, making it a treasure trove for hackers.These unsecured home portals also provide opportunities for hackers to spread misinformation.

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Martha McSally calls on WHO director to resign over false China data | Added April 2

From Politico: Sen. Martha McSally is calling on the World Health Organization director general to step down over what she deems his assistance in covering up China’s underreporting of the coronavirus, part of an escalating series of GOP criticisms of the organization.

The Arizona Republican said on Fox Business on Thursday that Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus should resign over the organization’s handling of the virus, which originated in China. While China has claimed it has essentially flattened new cases of the deadly virus now killing thousands of Americans, new reporting has questioned China’s rosy data.

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Trump may order Americans to wear masks | Added April 2

Editor’s Note: Sorry, this is NOT an April 2 April Fool’s joke.

From STAT News: The White House is expected to announce a new policy, based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that would urge Americans to wear cloth masks in an effort to prevent coronavirus spread, according to a federal official familiar with the policy.

In a draft document obtained by STAT, the CDC recommended that the public use homemade face coverings when in public, reserving higher-grade protective equipment like N95 masks for hospitals and health care workers, who have faced severe shortages in personal protective equipment as the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated through the United States.

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Good morning world, it’s Thursday | April 2

Thank you for a day off from this oh-so-exciting madness. News that’s dominating the morning shows involves problems with federal supply lines getting equipment, masks, gloves and other PPE to the states. This is occurring during what is believed will be the apex of the crisis in the United States, where the death toll is expected to be the highest.

Montana’s governor described the problems in detail on CNN, saying he had received more supplies from North Dakota as he had from the federal government. Chuck Schumer described similar problems this morning on MSNBC.

After the federal government’s performance during Hurricanes Rita and Katrina and every one since, nobody should be too surprised.

Social Security Recipients Will Get Checks

Important stimulus news from the Washington Post: The list of people who won’t get $1,200 stimulus checks is growing, though the Trump administration reversed itself and now says that Social Security recipients who don’t usually file taxes will still get checks. The Trump administration is now requiring additional steps for one group and others don’t qualify at all. I have read that people who have not filed recently will need to submit a short-form tax return for 2019 to be eligible.

Record 6.6 Million Americans Filed for Unemployment Last Week

Some of the last openings for travel across borders are closing, as the number of reported cases of the new coronavirus world-wide approaches one million.

U.S. Considers Grounding Some Domestic Flights

From the Wall Street Journal: President Trump said Wednesday that he was considering grounding flights to and from U.S. cities that are virus hot spots. The U.S. has 216,722 reported cases of the coronavirus, which has spread with ferocious speed across the world, driven initially by global travel.

Also from Wa Po: More than 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week — a new record — as political and public health leaders put the economy in a deep freeze, keeping people at home and trying to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

The past two weeks have seen more people file for unemployed claims than during the first six months of the Great Recession, a sign of how rapid, deep and painful the economic shutdown has been on many American families who are struggling to pay rent and health insurance costs in the midst of a pandemic.

Job losses have skyrocketed as restaurants, hotel, gyms, and travel have shut down across the nation, but layoffs are also rising in manufacturing, warehousing and transportation, a sign of how widespread the pain of the coronavirus recession is.

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This was all a simulation | April 1

The Trump administration issued a statement today thanking everyone for participating in REX20, also known as Readiness Exercise 2020, a worldwide pandemic simulation.

Some of the last openings for travel across borders are closing, as the number of reported cases of the new coronavirus world-wide approaches one million.

U.S. Considers Grounding Some Domestic Flights

From the Wall Street Journal: President Trump said Wednesday that he was considering grounding flights to and from U.S. cities that are virus hot spots. The U.S. has 216,722 reported cases of the coronavirus, which has spread with ferocious speed across the world, driven initially by global travel.