Login
Enough Gaslighting. We Absolutely Need to Know Where COVID Came From.
We should be near a breakthrough on the question of how the COVID-19 pandemic began. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that U.S. officials have identified three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were sickened with a mysterious illness in November 2019. One of these researchers, Ben Hu, is reported to have studied bat coronaviruses, and reportedly did work on how they infect humans. (Hu denies having been ill.)
And over in the U.K., the Sunday Times reports that State Department investigators who scrutinized “top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research” concluded that “Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the COVID-19 outbreak.”
After initially ignoring a law requiring it to declassify the information it has on the origins of COVID by a certain date, the Biden administration finally released a perfunctory report through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Despite its brevity, the report contains plenty of alarming information: Scientists at the WIV “genetically engineered coronaviruses” using “techniques that could make it difficult to detect intentional changes,” and “some WIV researchers probably did not use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time prior to the pandemic in handling SARS-like coronaviruses.”
And yet for all that, the report reads like another attempt to throw our hands up and say “We’ll never know.” As Mike Turner, Chair of the House intelligence committee, noted, instead of declassifying intelligence about the WIV to help us get closer to an answer, the DNI “did a paper on what they believe about the intelligence,” concluding simply that it’s all inconclusive.
Outgoing CDC Director Says the U.S. Is Not Prepared for the Next Pandemic Because Parts of the Public Health System Still Use ‘Old Fax Machines’
As she prepares to step down as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on June 30, Dr. Rochelle Walensky has given the U.S. a grave warning: The nation is not prepared for future public health crises.
“To this day some of our public health data systems are reliant on old fax machines,” Walensky wrote in a guest essay in the New York Times on Tuesday. These faxes led to significant delays across the nation during the coronavirus pandemic.
Washington State even had to bring 25 members of the National Guard to help with manual data entry from faxes, The Times reported in July 2020. And Austin, Texas, was recording deceptively low coronavirus case counts because of lags caused by fax machines.
Technological failures also caused vital information associated with COVID-19 test results to get lost, causing delays and roadblocks for public health officials while contact tracing, according to the New York Times.
Walensky added: “I want to remind America: The question is not if there will be another public health threat, but when.”
COVID Could Harm Men’s Sperm Months After Infection
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Having even a mild COVID-19 infection could trigger a months-long drop in sperm, a new study finds.
Researchers found both lower sperm concentrations and fewer sperm that were able to swim when studying men an average of 100 days after COVID-19 infection, which is enough time for new sperm to be produced.
The research team recruited 45 men with an average age of 31 at six reproductive clinics in Spain between February 2020 and October 2022. All had a confirmed diagnosis of mild COVID. The clinics had data from the analysis of semen samples taken before the men were infected.
Motility and the total sperm count were the most severely affected. Half of the men had total sperm counts that were 57% lower after COVID compared to their pre-COVID samples, the study discovered. The shape of the sperm was not significantly affected.
Home Delivery of Alcohol Expanded During Pandemic, With Permanent Effects on Health
U.S. News & World Report reported:
During the COVID-19 pandemic home liquor delivery soared in the United States, as did binge drinking along with it, a new study finds.
Researcher Elyse Grossman, a social and behavioral sciences administrator at the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, and her team analyzed legal databases and found that more states permitted home delivery during the pandemic. In January 2020, 21 states permitted home delivery of alcohol by retailers, which grew to 38 states by January 2022.
“Although data from early in the pandemic showed large increases in alcohol sales, it was unclear at that time if individuals were increasing their alcohol consumption or only stockpiling the alcohol,” Grossman said in a meeting news release.
Your Blood Type Can Make You More Likely to Get COVID, New Research Suggests. Who’s Most at Risk
Can your blood type increase your chance of developing COVID? The idea was floated early in the pandemic, as scientists worked to determine why some became much sicker than others.
Initial research suggested that those with Type A blood might be at elevated risk compared to those with Type O — and new research published Tuesday in the journal Blood seems to confirm the notion.
Those with Type A blood — about a third of the U.S. population — are at a 20% to 30% greater risk of infection with the novel coronavirus than those with Type O blood (nearly half of Americans), Dr. Sean Stowell, associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and lead author on the study, tells Fortune.
More research needs to be done to understand if COVID shows a preference for blood types B and/or AB. Stowell’s team is currently looking into how the virus responds to Type B. While research is ongoing, whether or not one has such a blood type may become more relevant if they’re exposed to the virus orally.
Reckitt Creates ‘Air Sanitizing Spray’ Effective Against Coronavirus
Reckitt’s (RKT.L) Lysol disinfectant brand said on Tuesday that it would start selling in the U.S. an “air sanitizing spray” that kills 99.9% of airborne viruses and bacteria.
The spray, which Reckitt said helps reduce the spread of airborne pathogens such as cold, influenza and coronavirus, has been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Reckitt, Clorox (CLX.N) and other disinfectant makers benefited from a boom in sales of surface cleaners and wipes. At the time, there were no products suited to sanitizing air, though some anxious consumers took to spraying surface cleaners into their surroundings.
Fraudsters May Have Stolen $200 Billion in Federal COVID Relief Funds, New Report Says
More than $200 billion in COVID relief loans and grants were distributed to potentially fraudulent actors, nearly one-fifth of all Small Business Administration funds disbursed in the U.S., according to a new estimate by the inspector general for the SBA.
The estimate is the highest yet for the $1.2 trillion released under the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan from March 2020 to January 2022, by which time funding for both programs had ended. The figure is based on the watchdog’s casework, prior reports and advanced data analysis. Last year NBC News reported that fraud in the two programs, which together approved 22 million loans, could reach as high as $160 billion.
To date, at least $30 billion has been recovered, seized or returned to the U.S. Treasury. Financial institutions returned $8 billion and borrowers returned an additional $20 billion. The IG’s report said the watchdog’s work has produced 529 fraud convictions so far and that 570 investigations are ongoing.
Almost $1.9 Billion Left in COVID Vaccine Scheme for Future Health Efforts, Germany Says
Almost $1.9 billion left in the global scheme to share COVID-19 vaccines more equitably will be used to help prepare for future pandemics and other health threats, said the German development ministry on Tuesday.
Germany was a major donor to the COVAX vaccine initiative run by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the World Health Organization, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
As Reuters reported on Monday, donors and the Gavi board have been discussing what to do with the leftover funds as the emergency phase of the pandemic ends and vaccine demand dwindles.
At Gavi’s board meeting on Tuesday, they agreed to use $813 million for variant-adapted vaccines and boosters over the next two years, the spokesperson for Germany’s development ministry said. Almost $1.9 billion will now “be invested so that health systems are better prepared for future waves or pandemics,” they added.
