They don’t target the virus; they target the hosts.
Let’s hope it works.
[Update a few minutes later]
And now we have a new vaccine that seems to build antibodies in mice.
As always, faster, please.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Cutting through the fog about the potential cures.
I think that 95% of the media resistance to the idea that hydroxychloraquine would be effective is because Trump said it could be.
[Update a few more minutes later]
More vaccines on the way. Fortunately, as the article points out, this bug is relatively easy to target, more so than the flu. It’s just too bad that we didn’t have a head start on it.
It is amazing that so much has been done so fast. Had the effort been applied a month earlier, there might not have been the same energy applied as now and not as much progress.
A few weeks ago everyone complained about the lack of testing. Now, we test so many people the labs can’t keep up. This will change too. A juggernaut has been awoken and will continue building strength as it plows through obstacles.
Back at the beginning of January we had the CCP and the WHO (but I repeat myself) telling us it wasn’t human-to-human transmissible.
Our bureaucrats seem intent on dragging development out for a year to a year and a half, but other countries won’t be so procedure-bound. About two weeks after another country runs a vaccination campaign and sees its case-loads plummet, every other country will have to follow suit, otherwise its leaders will have to explain why they prefer to let a big hunk of their population continue to die horrible needless deaths “because rules.” “You need to take one for the team!” will not be an acceptable message to a frightened public.
“You need to let your child take one for the team” is where it gets to be problematic.
George, what is the year and a half delay attributed to? Is is long term testing to determine safety and efficacy, to weight one against the other? I suppose there is some justification there considering the aftermath of the 1976 swine flu outbreak vaccination campaign (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak ), but the difference now is that we know COVID-19 is a mass killer where there was only 1 death associated with the 1976 H1N1 outbreak and significant greater overall injury associated with the vaccine.
I suppose the government would have to similarly indemnify the vaccine manufacturer as they did to Merck in 1976.
Yesterday the Daily Mail ran a horribly written article (as if the CCP and a special needs student teamed up on it) on a Chinese documentary about the brave young scientist who went into caves to collect bats and to take them back to the lab in Wuhan to study their dangerous viruses, which he said could be the source of the next pandemic. Other scientists had criticized him as “sloppy”, and noted that he had to put himself in quarantine for 14 days after accidentally exposing himself to SARS from a bat.
Well, there was much more information to be found, and someone dug into the lab and its bat-borne corona virus research and produced a short video of what they’ve uncovered so far.
Youtube video on the source of the corona virus
The lab even had a job posting saying they’d just discovered a new human transmissible corona virus and were looking for specialists to study it. I think this was about the same time it must’ve been entering the seafood market. The lead bat researcher apparently disappeared in December.
So, there was a virus lab studying corona viruses in the bats of Hubei province (that were known to harbor about 200 potentially human-transmissible viruses), and less than a kilometer away there was a seafood market – that ostensibly sold seafood, which is food from the sea. It’s enough to make one wonder if the bat virus is more likely to have come from the bat-virus lab that said it had discovered a new human-transmissible corona virus than to have came from the neighboring seafood market.
*Note: I saved a copy of the guy’s video in case Youtube yanks it down.
Wanted: Experienced researcher needed to study deadly & highly contagious viri to replace previous researcher. PhD highly desirable, only child with deceased parents required.
Let’s open an institute to study the ability to gene re-sequence smallpox virus. What could possibly go wrong?
In New York City.
China will no doubt stonewall any investigation into what happened, to maintain the long list of lies and cover-ups they’ve engaged in so far. But after this is over, the world needs to take a look at this disaster and how sloppy scientists likely caused it. Even in the West, researches go out to remote areas to find new and potentially deadly diseases (so as to be prepared for the next pandemic) and ship the diseases back to their urban labs full of underpaid graduate students.
Our scientists will of course say they use every precaution, but what scientist isn’t going to make that claim no matter how sloppy they really are? Sure, they’re overseen by some equivalent of the FDA or CDC, but the strings of horrible decisions those agencies have been making would at times incline one to think they’re working for the pandemic instead of against it.
In any event, and although it may prove almost politically impossible, somehow we need to get more virus samples from the bats in the caves in Hubei and see how the DNA matches look. What does the original genome look like, how varied is it, and how much does it differ from the one that got loose? Does it look like it underwent significant mutations sometime between the wild population and the seafood market?
I will concede that a lot of good research papers are coming out of China on SARS-CoV-2. Trump by playing nice with Xi (and getting castigated for it in the MSM) might be allowed to send a CDC team to collect Hubei bat samples for research. The morbidity rate of the COVID-19 disease seems low enough to work in within a BSL-3 lab, but due to the fact that its highly transmissible and of course it now has a history of killing at least tens of thousands worldwide[1], politically, it’d have to be worked within BSL-4. A preliminary look would indicate places like the University of Texas at Galveston[2] or Boston University[2].
Now, I understand that PhD scientists prefer to live in a big city with a cultural life but given the severity of the consequences of a mistake, maybe a BSL-4 lab at a secret mountain laboratory where an outbreak could be contained. Do we have any of those? Well sort of yes. The Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. Sits deep in the Bitteroot River Valley. Near the Montana/Idaho line about 30 miles south of the University of Montana in Missoula.[3,4] For you PhD hotshots, you can forgive seeing a Broadway show for some great mountain hiking and trout fishing, you know, take one for the team.
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/biocontainment-research-facilities
[3] https://www.liquisearch.com/biosafety_level/list_of_bsl-4_facilities
[4] https://www.orf.od.nih.gov/PlanningSpaceManagement/NIHMasterPlanning/Documents/RMLMasterPlan031709forCD.pdf
While it’s an interesting story, there’s still two problems with it. First, I still don’t find the alleged research center a few hundred yards north of the seafood market in various satellite images. It’s just not there.
Second, the narrative strongly depends on a particular staff member, Huang Yan Ling being patient zero, mostly based on the woman having disappeared from the staff webpage. But there are plenty of other reasons someone might disappear from the website in question, such as a falling out with senior staff, or choosing a career outside of research (say starting a family). We only have the narrator’s word that anyone aside from the narrator has been looking for this person.
Karl: I still don’t find the alleged research center a few hundred yards north of the seafood market
There is certainly some confusion here. Two different Wuhan labs doing virology research with live Chinese horseshoe bats are mentioned in Botao Xiao’s February paper: https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/114720192-5eb8307f-017c-4075-a697-348628da0204.pdf
1) Wuhan Institute of Virology, 12 km SE of the seafood market: https://goo.gl/maps/AoVnhUDuDjpP8q7H6
2) Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention, supposedly 280 m S of the seafood market, but here is the confusion.
2a) The paper includes a map pointing to a building across the street (just west of) the Tianya 1911 Hotel, 280 m S of the seafood market, but this is unlabeled on Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/qpBJSApD2pbLPGzK8
2b) The Wuhan Jianghan Disease Prevention and Control Center appears to actually be 1.2 km S of the seafood market, here: https://goo.gl/maps/4dSbLV9V5y2erLjQ6
So the video may have conflated the two labs and Botao Xiao’s paper appears to have a mapping error — unless there is a laboratory annex at the unlabeled location.
To make things even more confusing, Google Maps has a significant alignment error between its satellite and map views. (Satellite view imagery is displaced 600 m NW of the map view. Offset overlain roads make the satellite view quite cluttered; toggle “Satellite / Labels off” in the hamburger menu of the sidebar to make them go away, though that behavior is inconsistent.)
Satellite views:
* Huanan Seafood Market: https://goo.gl/maps/Uf4MTkQsMFNnVvXe9
* Building (or parking lot?) across from Tianya 1911 Hotel, 280 m S of the seafood market: https://goo.gl/maps/BxV1wbrHfKy5QKdG9
* Wuhan Jianghan Disease Prevention and Control Center, 1.2 km S of the seafood market: https://goo.gl/maps/WWzRJioRVo94nevf9
AdvChina and Serpentza are also good channels.
These and many more are interesting theories, but what is not a theory is the prevalence of the procurement and ingestion of bats and other bush meats in rural China and other parts of the world. Bush meat is the problem. I’ve heard there are more pigs in China than people. Let’s raise a few more pigs and leave the bush meat in the bush. And by the way, none of it improves your virility. Also my family members who are all working from home have been in countless conference call in the past two week. Not one goes by without the emphasis on dual sourcing for all products. Want to guess what country they had pinned their economic futures on?