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Post by efg72 on May 18, 2021 21:30:08 GMT -5
Rise of B.1.617.2 in the UK
May 18, 2021 | Genomeweb
The B.1.617.2 variant first detected in India is expected to soon be the dominant version of SARS-CoV-2 in the UK, the Guardian reports.
Last week, the World Health Organization classified the B.1.617 variant as a "variant of concern" due to preliminary studies suggesting it may be a more transmissible version of the virus. Public health officials in the UK additionally reported last week that B.1.617.2, a sublineage of B.1.617, may be transmitted as easily as or even more easily than the B.1.1.7, or UK, variant.
According to the Guardian, Matt Hancock, the UK health secretary, has told MPs that there are now 2,323 confirmed B.1.617.2 cases there, as compared to 1,313 on Thursday. Further, it reports that a new analysis from the Wellcome Sanger Institute found that the variant was present in about 30 percent of COVID-19 samples collected the first full week of May.
"There is no evidence that the recent rapid rise in cases of the B.1.617.2 variant shows any signs in slowing," Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia tells the Guardian. "This variant will overtake [the UK variant] and become the dominant variant in the UK in the next few days, if it hasn't already done so."
The University of Oxford's John Bell tells the Financial Times that there is increasing evidence that vaccines are protective against this variant.
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Post by Chu Chu on May 19, 2021 14:36:38 GMT -5
td, the operative word in the comment is could. As of today, there is no evidence that COVID-19 was intentionally caused by anyone.
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Post by bfoley82 on May 19, 2021 15:18:17 GMT -5
Does anybody else find the prospect that a pandemic of the sort we have experienced might have been intentionally caused? Read on: justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/bill-gates-hopes-companies-see-lasting-benefits-remote-working-afterGates also said that "the pandemic risk will always be there," breaking down the risk in two categories.
"Natural pandemics like we're quite sure this one was" and there are "intentionally caused pandemics," he said. "As we invest, we have to look at both those scenarios, which if you're not ready for the toll can be very horrific."Interesting comment by Mr. Gates. To think that there are intentionally caused pandemics would seem to me and I might imagine many others to be rather troubling. That comment by Mr. Gates, though, resonates in light of this statement from September 2019 in this commentary from Vox: "The next big one to hit us could be naturally occurring, deliberately created, or accidentally released. Although we’ve got new vaccines and drugs that previous generations didn’t have access to, we’ve also got new developments working against us. Scientific advances have made it possible for disease-causing microorganisms to be engineered or recreated in labs, or to escape labs when explosions and other accidents occur."www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/19/20872366/global-pandemic-prevention-who-world-bank-reportThat's right, September 2019. There has been a ton of pandemics around the world. The USA being affected was a ticking time bomb just based on time..... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
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Post by efg72 on May 19, 2021 16:16:31 GMT -5
If you have some conversations with a group of Langley/and former Langley types I am sure that would be part of a much larger conversation. Given how we just handled the Russia pipeline issue who the heck knows if there will be a discussion on the topic for many years- probably be in a book a few years from now-- as we know the intel world is rarely as it appears and there is always the mirror and looking glass
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Post by longsuffering on May 19, 2021 17:07:54 GMT -5
Can't blame anyone for assuming that due to the quality of healthcare in the developed world pandemics were now limited to the developing world. Unless that person was an elected national leader with a huge science and medicine infrastructure reporting to him. I use the male pronoun because elected female national leaders like Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand seemed to lead their nations through the pandemic fairly well.
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Post by efg72 on May 19, 2021 21:57:10 GMT -5
For those unfamiliar withPolitico it is by most accounts a left of center newspaper in DC
May 19, 2021 POLITICO Nightly logo BY MYAH WARD AND RENUKA RAYASAM Presented by Facebook With help from Joanne Kenen
ORIGIN STORY — The hypothesis that Covid-19 was leaked from a Wuhan lab has leaped from its original host — Trump administration officials and people dismissed as conspiracy theorists — into the body of mainstream debate. Last week, 18 leading scientists published a letter in the academic journal Science calling for further investigation to determine the origin of the pandemic that has killed 3.4 million people worldwide. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” the scientists wrote.
The letter echoes a similar call from WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. During a Senate hearing last week on the U.S. response to the pandemic, Anthony Fauci said he was “fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China” after sparring with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about the origins of the virus. And this month, the former New York Times science reporters Nicholas Wade and Donald G. McNeil Jr. have written long essays on Medium outlining why they take the lab leak hypothesis seriously.
Nightly reached out to experts, two of whom signed the letter as well as others who have taken the opposite side in the public debate, to ask how credible they find the lab leak theory. Their edited responses are below.
A view of the P4 lab inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology is seen after a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021.
A view of the P4 lab inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology is seen after a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. | AP Photo/Ng Han Guan
IT’S POSSIBLE
“Much of the currently available information suggests that a lab-based origin of Covid-19 is plausible. There remains no sign of an intermediate animal host that could have passed the virus to humans in 2019. There is no evidence that live mammals were sold at the Wuhan seafood market in 2019, and none of hundreds of animal samples collected from that market had any trace of the virus. In other words, there is zero evidence that supports a zoonotic origin of the virus that excludes the involvement of research activity.
“There are copious precedents of pathogens leaking from labs — the original 2003 SARS virus leaked up to six times from labs across three countries. Consider that the SARS research and animal infection experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for more than 10 years, were all performed at relatively low biosafety levels. It is currently not possible to tell from the genetic evidence whether the virus ever passed through a laboratory or a lab personnel.
“The question is: How did a virus, whose lineage is found only in southern China, make its way into humans in the metropolitan city of Wuhan, more than a thousand miles away? We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had possibly the greatest collection of SARS viruses from numerous trips across China. We know that they were working with a batch of viruses very closely related to SARS-CoV-2. Details of these viruses and the experiments performed with them have not been shared in a timely manner.” — Alina Chan, molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
“It is worthy of a careful, rigorous, unbiased, objective examination, based on relevant, verifiable data. There are a number of plausible scenarios embedded in this label, ‘lab leak,’ and importantly, they include an unrecognized infection of a well-intentioned lab worker attempting to recover or study new coronaviruses from bats. It does not imply malice or even necessarily awareness (of the accident). Lab accidents are much more common than any of us know, or would like to admit, and they occur worldwide and even in the most safe and secure labs. U.S. biosafety labs are by no means strangers to accidents; leaks of some of the most dangerous infectious agents have occurred at CDC and other U.S. government labs.” — David A. Relman, microbiologist at Stanford University
“The following lines of circumstantial evidence are noteworthy:
“The outbreak occurred in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people that does not contain horseshoe-bat colonies, and that is tens of kilometers from, and outside the flight range of, the nearest known horseshoe-bat colonies. Furthermore, the outbreak occurred at a time of year when horseshoe bats are in hibernation.
“The outbreak occurred in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the laboratory that conducts the world’s largest research project on horseshoe bat viruses and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the outbreak virus. The laboratory actively searched for new horseshoe-bat viruses in horseshoe-bat colonies in caves in remote rural areas in Yunnan province, brought those new horseshoe-bat viruses to Wuhan, and then mass-produced, manipulated, and studied those new horseshoe-bat viruses, year-round, inside Wuhan.
“Documentary evidence establishes that the bat-SARS-related-coronavirus projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used personal protective equipment (usually just gloves; sometimes not even gloves) and biosafety standards that would pose high risk of infection of field-collection, field-survey, or laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.” — Richard Ebright, molecular biologist at Rutgers University
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Post by longsuffering on May 20, 2021 1:21:32 GMT -5
Heard a great name for the vaccine shot today: the "Fauci Ouchie".
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Post by hcpride on May 20, 2021 3:49:46 GMT -5
For those unfamiliar withPolitico it is by most accounts a left of center newspaper in DC May 19, 2021 POLITICO Nightly logo BY MYAH WARD AND RENUKA RAYASAM Presented by Facebook With help from Joanne Kenen ORIGIN STORY — The hypothesis that Covid-19 was leaked from a Wuhan lab has leaped from its original host — Trump administration officials and people dismissed as conspiracy theorists — into the body of mainstream debate. Last week, 18 leading scientists published a letter in the academic journal Science calling for further investigation to determine the origin of the pandemic that has killed 3.4 million people worldwide... “ So the ‘experts’ who bought China’s narrative and denounced reasonable questions as ‘conspiracy theories’ could have been wrong? Say it isn’t so. Apparently more and more folks (including ‘experts) are suddenly realizing (after a year and a half) that China’s narrative lacks that evidence thingy one often hears scientists and journos prattling on about. One imagines this could become quite an important story — if getting to the cause of a pandemic that kills 3.5 million folks and infects hundreds of millions of others strikes one as important. Not to mention the obvious point of possibly preventing another and similar catastrophe.
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Post by ndgradbuthcfan on May 20, 2021 4:47:05 GMT -5
You spoil an otherwise reasonable comment when you use words like "prattling".
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Post by hcpride on May 20, 2021 5:25:09 GMT -5
You spoil an otherwise reasonable comment when you use words like "prattling". Yes, it is funny that the 'experts' and journos who were loudly demanding data and evidence to support the notion (early on) that this might have been a lab leak (while denouncing it as a conspiracy theory) apparently forgot all about the need for data and evidence while swallowing China's narrative. So, how seriously did they really take their own words regarding data and evidence?
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Post by efg72 on May 20, 2021 10:06:57 GMT -5
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Post by purplehaze on May 20, 2021 12:08:44 GMT -5
Looked at the school's instagram today and (presumably vaccinated) seniors are enjoying their sr week 'outdoor' activities fully masked-up - so let's be consistent and demand that they remain fully masked through the entire week including the fitton field graduation ceremony tmro - I say this is ridiculous and I hope there are students and parents that dare to expose their faces tomorrow - too late to suspend anyone
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Post by ndgradbuthcfan on May 20, 2021 13:46:56 GMT -5
This issue must be incredibly important to you.
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Post by efg72 on May 20, 2021 14:24:19 GMT -5
The pandemic is a critical issue for all of us, and we each experience it differently. How we process it and express it might very well be complicated but understandable. Indeed, these times will impact the mental health of our children for decades, but I am willing to bet this virus will be a part of us for the remainder of our time on earth.
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Post by purplehaze on May 20, 2021 15:14:53 GMT -5
My point is that we're at the stage of the pandemic where many of us have been vaccinated and we can exercise our personal judgement whether to wear masks or not - ask Dr. Fauci, he was very clear this week. And yes, it is that important to me that anyone at an outdoor event have the freedom to do what they want.- will be interested to see the photos from tmro's graduation
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Post by longsuffering on May 20, 2021 15:43:51 GMT -5
My point is that we're at the stage of the pandemic where many of us have been vaccinated and we can exercise our personal judgement whether to wear masks or not - ask Dr. Fauci, he was very clear this week. And yes, it is that important to me that anyone at an outdoor event have the freedom to do what they want.- will be interested to see the photos from tmro's graduation This thread has brought me around to realizing there might be something to the Wuhan lab leak theory. Thanks everyone. The only factor I can think of that might make masks mandatory at graduation is because students might not have two weeks in after the second shot and the administration might want to close the door on this school year in conformity to the policies they have had all semester and then exhale before revising policies for summer and fall semesters.
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Post by bfoley82 on May 20, 2021 15:50:04 GMT -5
My point is that we're at the stage of the pandemic where many of us have been vaccinated and we can exercise our personal judgement whether to wear masks or not - ask Dr. Fauci, he was very clear this week. And yes, it is that important to me that anyone at an outdoor event have the freedom to do what they want.- will be interested to see the photos from tmro's graduation I got the vaccine within a week when I was eligible and still not technically "FULLY" vaxxed. Remember, Mass didn't let people without issues get the shot until Patriot's Day.
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Post by longsuffering on May 20, 2021 18:23:15 GMT -5
My point is that we're at the stage of the pandemic where many of us have been vaccinated and we can exercise our personal judgement whether to wear masks or not - ask Dr. Fauci, he was very clear this week. And yes, it is that important to me that anyone at an outdoor event have the freedom to do what they want.- will be interested to see the photos from tmro's graduation I got the vaccine within a week when I was eligible and still not technically "FULLY" vaxxed. Remember, Mass didn't let people without issues get the shot until Patriot's Day. Patriot's Day eh. I guess you got the shot heard round the world.😂
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Post by Sons of Vaval on May 20, 2021 19:20:39 GMT -5
Thankfully all graduates who sat in an open air stadium distanced from one another were wearing masks. We have come so far. We can’t let our guard down now.
Also smart to limit graduates to have just two family members in attendance (1,500 people), safely spread around a 23,500 seat stadium.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on May 20, 2021 20:06:27 GMT -5
There is at least one student positive this week. Four last week. I am surprised at the testing volume over the last seven days, given the school ran a vaccination clinic and is requiring students to be vaccinated for the summer sessions and the fall terms. In anticipation of the latter, it appeared, from the webcam, that the testing facility at The Jo was being dismantled today.
Students at the Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony today were masked. The event was outdoors, under a tent.
Massachusetts lifts restrictions on outdoor seating capacity on May 29. So commencement conforms to existing state and local guidelines.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on May 21, 2021 7:31:39 GMT -5
Baccalaureate mass held at Fitton Field. Students seated on the field. Some students with masks, some not. As Fauci has said, the CDC guidelines about dispensing with masks etc apply to those who are vaccinated. I assume students without masks are vaccinated; students with masks either are unvaccinated, or have elected as a matter of personal choice, to continue wearing masks, even though vaccinated.
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Post by nhteamer on May 21, 2021 7:55:11 GMT -5
Virtue signaling par excellence
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Post by timholycross on May 21, 2021 8:05:32 GMT -5
Personal choice, fine with me. Can't wait for 12 days from now when I'm officially over this sh*tt. Will at that point wear mine as little as regulations allow, especially recalling how uncomfortable I was last summer wearing a mask in hot weather.
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Post by alum on May 21, 2021 8:05:59 GMT -5
Virtue signaling par excellence Using terms like "virtue signaling," "social justice warrior," and even calling the 44th President "the Messiah" are ways the "real men" "own the libs." What harm is there in wearing a mask? People in Asia have been doing it for decades. I wouldn't wear a mask in the setting described above, but I don't give a rat's -----whether someone else does. Did it ever occur to you that they do it because a friend or relative might be nervous and they just want to make that person more comfortable?
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Post by newfieguy74 on May 21, 2021 8:15:25 GMT -5
Virtue signaling par excellence Why the pejorative for people who want to wear a mask? Maybe it's unnecessary, maybe not. I know people who are older or immunosuppressed who want the extra protection. Maybe it's just for their mental health, who cares? Covid is alive and well in the world. There are have been a few cases of the virulent variation from India in the US. Viruses continue to adapt to defeat what precautions we take. We also don't know how long a vaccination protects us. This virus may be part of our lives in some way for many years. If someone wants to wear a mask why would that offend anyone? If, after almost 600,000 deaths in the US, someone is still frightened why is it a big deal if they want to wear a mask?
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