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Fauci Spins Yarn About How Alleged COVID Lab Outbreak ‘Ain’t a Lab Leak’
A virus breaking out of a lab does not necessarily constitute a “lab leak,” Dr. Anthony Fauci contended in his latest argument in favor of the natural origins theory for COVID.
In a newly published interview with The New York Times, Fauci entertained the notion that COVID did emerge from a lab in Wuhan, China while making the case that such a scenario would affirm his preferred theory of a “natural occurrence,” perhaps at a nearby wet market.
“If it’s not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab?” Fauci said. “If it wasn’t an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab and then spread it out to other people. That ain’t a lab leak, strictly speaking. That’s a natural occurrence.”
The comments elicited swift pushback on social media. “Fauci lies even when the facts are in full view and the lies are obvious. He has no shame, and he has no decency,” tweeted Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University.
A One-Stop Shot for Annual Vaccines?
Pharmaceutical companies and public health experts are eyeing ways to make vaccinations more accessible, considering the low uptake of bivalent COVID-19 boosters and annual flu shots. They envision a single jab that could offer yearly protection against respiratory viruses like COVID, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus.
Vaccination uptake for COVID and the flu are subpar: About 20% of adults have received a bivalent booster and less than half of adults got a flu shot this year, according to the CDC.
Advisers to the CDC said there could potentially be annual COVID-19 boosters, similar to the annual flu shot. The natural extension for several companies — including Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax — is to combine the two shots.
The combo candidates are in early- to mid-stage clinical trials. But regulators are interested: Pfizer has received fast-track designation from the FDA, which would speed up the review process; the company is still in the first phase of testing. And, in addition to testing a combo COVID/flu shot, Moderna has a vaccine that would protect against COVID, flu and RSV in early-stage trials. Novavax is conducting Phase II trials of a combo COVID/flu vaccine.
The COVID Public Health Emergency Is Ending: It Now Joins the Ordinary Emergency That Is American Health
In recent months, the Biden Administration has pointed to falling COVID death rates as a sign that the emergency is over. It’s true that COVID deaths have declined from the peaks of more than 3,000 daily deaths in winter 2021. Yet, even as COVID fatalities finally subside to weekly lows under 1,500 per week, COVID is on track to become the 9th leading cause of death in the U.S. Now, with the end of the public health emergency on April 10, COVID has simply joined the ordinary emergency that is American health.
Following the end of the public health emergency, Americans will continue living sicker, shorter lives than our counterparts in other high-income countries. Even before the pandemic, the U.S. spent more on healthcare as a share of its economy while lagging behind most other peer countries in life expectancy, chronic disease burden and preventable deaths. Study after study has revealed unequal access to healthcare — and to the conditions necessary for healthy lives — as the defining features of the American health landscape.
The pandemic made these chasms deeper. Life expectancy in the U.S. has fallen by 2.7 years since the start of the pandemic, reaching the lowest level since 1996, with large disparities by race. Maternal mortality soared in 2021, and racial gaps in maternal health outcomes widened. For the first time in decades, mortality rates among children and adolescents also increased in 2021, with firearms becoming the leading cause of death among youths aged 1 to 19. Though the American pandemic story is tragic, it is also, in a sense, an unremarkable chapter in American public health.
Lessons for the Next One
As the COVID-19 public health emergency enters its final weeks, Washington is still gripped by the debate over how the pandemic started and what the Trump and Biden administrations got wrong. But one thing most can agree on: This won’t be the last time we face off with a deadly pathogen, and we’d better be ready.
That’s the premise of a new report released by the COVID Crisis Group, headed by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. The group of 34 experts was assembled in 2021 to lay the groundwork for a future COVID commission that never came to be. So they released their findings today, offering a series of lessons about what went wrong — and occasionally right — in America’s pandemic response.
The Final Brick in the Vaccine Efficacy Narrative
Two key bricks seem to have already fallen from the COVID vaccines’ narrative — the one about their fantastic efficacy against infections and the one about their superb safety. However, one stubborn narrative brick seems to stand still, leading many people to believe that the booster doses of the vaccines are capable of providing long-term protection against severe illness and deaths (despite their failure to protect against infections).
But is this brick really that strong? Does the existing scientific literature really support the notion that the two types of protection are independent from each other — that the protection against severe illness and deaths somehow remained high while the protection against infections disappeared?
In our new article in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Yaffa Shir-Raz, Dr. Shay Zakov, Dr. Peter McCullough, and I aimed to answer these questions from a purely scientific point of view. We conducted a rigorous review of representative data from three types of sources: the original clinical trials by Pfizer and Moderna, the more contemporary studies on the fourth dose of the vaccine and the popular dashboards of pandemic statistics.
Please know that I am not arguing that our article can substitute for a comprehensive systematic review of all the available evidence. However, in scientific discourse, a single “black swan” as termed by Karl Popper — a single negative instance that does not fit in with the theory — may falsify a universal claim; and I promise you that our article portrays numerous such black swans that tear down this last brick of the vaccine efficacy narrative.
Dogs Could Be ‘Patient Zero’ for Virus With Potential to Infect Humans
A bird flu virus that has spread to canines may hop hosts in the future, potentially infecting humans through their pet dogs, according to scientists at China Agricultural University.
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic gained steam in 2020, more Americans have turned their eyes to the pathology and the origin of viruses, as well as methods to fight infection through vaccines and prevention. Although no dog-to-human infection of the H3N2 avian flu has been detected, the virus is evolving to exhibit new properties that show its potential of infecting other mammals in the future, such as humans.
The scientists published their study in the science journal eLife on April 11. The findings revealed that the virus infecting dogs is descended from H3N2, a type of avian flu. The virus first began affecting dogs nearly 20 years ago in China. It spread to American dogs by 2015. The virus causes mild respiratory symptoms in dogs, such as sneezing, coughing and lethargy. The mortality rate is low, according to VCA Animal Hospitals.
There was no proof of the virus spreading to humans from dogs, but experts believe the virus could mutate further if it continues to become established in dogs. The Independent reported that British scientists interpreted the study as revealing that dogs could be “patient zero” for the virus’s evolution. According to Professor James Wood, who heads the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, H3N2 seems to have become a dog-specific virus.
The Ongoing Search for Long COVID Treatments
As the federal government continues to wrestle with a response to long COVID, Food and Drug Administration officials are turning to patients who’ve experimented with unproven treatments for clues about how to manage the condition and design clinical trials.
The big picture: More than three years into the pandemic, there’s still no standard protocol for diagnosing or treating the neurological issues, cognitive difficulties, breathing problems and other health problems that plague millions of people after they fell ill with the virus.
Government efforts have so far yielded little for the more than 20 million Americans experiencing ongoing symptoms, with questions particularly swirling around a $1 billion National Institutes of Health effort called RECOVER, as STAT and Muckrock report.
Zoom in: During a six-hour meeting on Tuesday, patients told FDA officials about months-long waits to get into long COVID clinics and efforts to treat symptoms with old drugs and supplements, most of which aren’t covered by insurance because of the off-label use.
