Coronavirus News & Updates

[Scorpion]

oh the communists, it fails everywhere but they still love it

I am glad Bernie sanders dropped out. AOC should follow suit. Imagine a communist US. Man we are doomed.

 

[Zeeman]

Until last election the attorney general of Ontario was my childhood friend Yasir Naqvi . Lots of Pakistanis are in some good positions here .

Saskatchewan’s chief medical officer becomes a celebrity, source of comfort during COVID-19 pandemic | Globalnews.ca

Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer has become a source of comfort for many in the province, and now a household name.

globalnews.ca

 

[Zeeman]

Why is India spending money showering petals on hospitals but making workers pay for train tickets?

Gestures should not come at the cost of real action.

www.dawn.com

 

[space cadet]

To find a coronavirus vaccine, can we ethically infect people with a disease with no cure?

To have a vaccine by next summer will require both luck and cutting corners, putting once seemingly academic questions suddenly front and center.

www.usatoday.com

To find a coronavirus vaccine, can we ethically infect people with a disease with no cure?
Elizabeth Weise
USA TODAY









Vaccine trials can take decades. In the race against COVID-19, we don’t even have years.
To have a vaccine by next summer will require both luck and cutting corners never cut before, putting once seemingly academic questions about vaccine testing suddenly front and center.
Current rules are meant to protect volunteers from harm, but with the global death count from the coronavirus over 250,000, scientists are asking: Is it acceptable to deliberately infect healthy people with a disease that could kill them, and for which there is no cure?
It's called a challenge trial, and increasing scientists say the answer is yes.
The tried and true method would be to vaccinate tens of thousands of people, let them go about their daily, socially distanced lives and see who gets sick, knowing some small number would have anyway. That takes time.
To speed up the process, some researchers are planning to give volunteers experimental vaccines and then infect them with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
“You’re weighing risks and benefit to the individual versus benefit to society as a whole,” said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University.

The ethical quandary will be fast upon us. As of Tuesday, eight candidate vaccines were in clinical evaluation, four in China, one in Britain, one in the European Union and two in the United States, according to the World Health Organization. None are yet at Phase III trials, in which a vaccine is tested on large numbers of people to see if it works, is safe or has side effects.

The usual vaccine timeline
The timeline for vaccines is usually measured in years. When Edward Jenner gave the first smallpox vaccine to the son of his gardener in 1796, he waited two years before he tried it again on anyone else.

The fastest a vaccine has ever been produced, for mumps, took four years. An Ebola vaccine took five.

The process is complex. First scientists must find a way to trigger the body to produce antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, then test it in cell cultures and in animals. This is known as the pre-clinical phase.

Human testing comes next. Phase I, to ensure the vaccine is safe, usually involves fewer than 100 people. Phase II employs several hundred volunteers and tests how their immune systems respond to the vaccine as well as safety and side effects.

Antibody tests:They were supposed to help guide reopening plans. They've brought more confusion than clarity.

Phase III is pivotal. Tens of thousands of people are given the vaccine and compared with people who received a placebo. The large cohort is necessary to look for common, along with rare, side effects.

“Phase III trials are the primary source of data that helps us know whether we have a vaccine we can use at a broad scale,” said Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale University School of Public Health who studies vaccine policy.

The clinical trials for the human papillomavirus vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer, included 30,000 subjects. The tests for the rotavirus vaccine, which protects against a common disease that causes severe diarrhea in children, included 70,000 research subjects, he said.

Only after Phase III is complete can a manufacturer apply for a license to market the vaccine for human use.

COVID-19 challenge trials
Scientists hope to speed up the process for the coronavirus vaccine by running tests for each phase at the same time. In a normal scenario, each part of each phase of testing would be completed and carefully analyzed before the next one was begun. That’s partly for safety and effectiveness but also to save money by not continuing down paths that lead to dead ends.

This time, companies and nonprofits are pouring billions into the search. The rules also are being loosened. The FDA is working closely with companies that have SARS-CoV-2 vaccine trials underway to streamline the process as much as possible.

Phase III is the conundrum. Usually, researchers watch tens of thousands of volunteers as they go about their normal lives to see if they become infected. With COVID-19, because volunteers would still be following social distancing guidelines, few of them would even be exposed to the virus. That's partly why the group must be so large.

“Then we would use statistical techniques to see if there were fewer cases than we would expect there should have been among those vaccinated,” said Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University.

In a challenge trial, volunteers are purposefully infected with the virus. The number could be much smaller because most would get sick. The time would be shorter because COVID-19 appears within two weeks.

It’s an ethical minefield. Some percentage of the volunteers, no matter how young and healthy, could die.

For that reason challenge trials are done only with diseases where there’s a 100% cure, said Susan Ellenberg,a professor of biostatistics, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Even when there is a cure, taking part is no fun. When challenge trials were launched for malaria and cholera, participants got very sick.

“The volunteers had lots of diarrhea and vomiting, but they were standing by with IV fluids and antibiotics. so the people who took part were miserable but there was very low risk of actual permanent harm or death,” said Stanford’s Magnus.

With COVID-19, the death rates aren’t even known, and the one current potential treatment, remdesivir, appears only to lessen the duration of the illness.

Is it ethical to infect someone with COVID-19?
In 2016, researchers wanted to infect volunteers with the Zika virus to test a possible vaccine. The National Institutes of Health said no.

COVID-19 may be different. Scientists have been debating the ethics of employing challenge studies – so-called because they “challenge” the immune system – in the fight against the pandemic since at least March. That's when three senior scientists published a paper in the Journal of Infectious Diseases suggesting the risks to volunteers must be weighed against deaths that will occur every week a vaccine is not available.

It can be ethical given very strict guidelines, said one of the authors, Nir Eyal, a professor of bioethics at Rutgers University.

Only young and healthy participants, whose risk of death from COVID-19 is real but low, should be selected, he said. They would need to be from areas of heavyinfection so the risk of getting sick is high anyway. And they would have to be isolated while infectious so they couldn’t pass it along.

Society allows others to decide to do dangerous things for the greater good, Eyal said.

“We rely on healthy volunteers to take on risks as organ donors, drug toxicity trial participants, and, in this crisis, emergency medical service volunteers,” he said.

Health care providers are probably the best choice for Phase III trials, said Dr. Machteld Wyss-van den Berg, a public health researcher who focuses on vaccine ethics with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, Switzerland.

“Their health literacy is high so they have the capacity to understand the risks and potential benefits,” she said.

Decisions about how to conduct Phase III trials have not been made, or at least been made public, but political pressure to use rapid testing techniques is building.

A bipartisan group of 35 lawmakers on April 20 sent a letter to the heads of the U.S. Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration calling for “a more rapid testing and approval process."

“Every week of delay in the deployment of a vaccine to the seven billion humans on Earth will cost thousands of lives,” the letter said. “Justifiable risks may be taken."

An ad hoc group has already set up a website – 1 Day Sooner – to gather volunteer names.

“We have to understand that this is a serious disease, the mortality and morbidity and the social consequences that are a result of this infection are enormous,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, scientific director of the Vanderbilt University Vaccine Research Program said in a call by the Infection Diseases Society of America.

“We have to figure out how to stop it, not to simply treat it,” she said. “This is a balancing act.”

 

[space cadet]

This virus has likely been around longer than thought

https://www.thelocal.se/20200505/the-coronavirus-may-have-arrived-in-sweden-in-november

Coronavirus may have arrived in Sweden in November: Public Health Agency

A hospital worker in protective equipment is pictured outside Capio S:t Göran Hospital in Stockholm. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

t's likely that there were individual cases of coronavirus in Sweden as early as November 2019, according to the Public Health Agency, but the country is not currently working to trace the earliest cases.

The news follows a report from France that a man was infected with the coronavirus on December 27th, several days before the first cases were reported in China. The patient was diagnosed with pneumonia but a sample taken at the time has now tested positive for the coronavirus. That man has fully recovered since his illness, but reportedly has no idea how he caught the virus.

Now state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has said there were likely infected individuals in Sweden at this time too.

"There wasn't any spread [of infection] outside Wuhan until we saw it in Europe later. But I think that you could find individual cases among Wuhan travellers who were there in November to December last year. That doesn't sound at all strange, but rather very natural," said Tegnell.

Currently the first confirmed case of the virus in Sweden was a woman in Jönköping who tested positive on January 31st after a recent trip to China. She has since recovered from the illness.

The 2019 Summer Military World Games were held in Wuhan in late October, and a troop of more than 100 people from the Swedish Armed Forces stayed in the city for two weeks during this time. Several of those who competed fell ill and were tested for the virus, although none were reported to have tested positive.

Knowing when and how the first cases in a country occurred can be helpful to understanding the spread of infection. But there are no plans in Sweden for large-scale testing of samples from patients who received care for respiratory symptoms or flu last year to see if they had the coronavirus.

"It's not something that's being discussed in a structured way," said Tegnell. "At the moment it feels like we don't want to burden the healthcare sector with this type of investigation. They have a lot of other things to do, and this would not lead to any measure."

He added: "Instead, what could be interesting to find out is how the virus spread in China and how it behaved in the early stages of its spread. If it was an individual spread from an animal to a person or if it spread to a group of people over a longer period of time."

"There aren't many instances where we have been able to track a contagion of a completely new virus from animals to humans. We don't have much knowledge of how this happens in reality," Tegnell explained. "It would be valuable to see how people could protect themselves against this type of development in the future."

 

[space cadet]

This article seems to contradict some other media I had read, it's from the Daily Mail
@Mingle , @Falcon29

Bombshell 'Five Eyes' Western intelligence dossier claims China lied about human-to-human transmission, 'disappeared' whistle-blowers and refused to help other countries prepare a vaccine for coronavirus

Bombshell 'Five Eyes' Western intelligence dossier claims China lied about human-to-human transmission, 'disappeared' whistle-blowers and refused to help other countries prepare a vaccine for coronavirus

China lied about the human-to-human transmission of coronavirus, made whistle-blowers disappear and refused to help nations develop a vaccine, a leaked intelligence dossier reveals.

The 15-page document drawn up by the Five Eyes security alliance brands Beijing's secrecy over the pandemic an 'assault on international transparency' and points to cover-up tactics deployed by the regime.

It claims that the Chinese government silenced its most vocal critics and scrubbed any online scepticism about its handling of the health emergency from the internet.

China has roundly come under fire for suppressing the scale of its early outbreak which did not afford other nations time to react before the disease hit their shores.

Five Eyes - the pooling of intelligence by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - laid bare its scathing assessment of the Xi Jinping administration in a memo obtained by the Australian Saturday Telegraph.

The smoking gun file claims to have found evidence the virus spawned in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, close to the wet market China says it came from, and unearths 'risky' research on bat-related diseases stretching back years.

It describes how Beijing was outwardly downplaying the outbreak on the world stage while secretly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease.

This involved 'destroying' laboratory samples, bleaching wet market stalls, censoring the growing evidence of 'silent carriers' of the virus and stonewalling sample requests from other countries.

The secrecy has fanned a clamour in Five Eyes nations for Western governments to come down hard on Beijing when the pandemic eventually passes.

Tory MP Bob Seely told MailOnline that 'at the end of this when the dust settles it is also clear that there has to be a re-evaluation by the West of its relationship with China'.

In a damning portrayal of a mass cover-up, the bombshell report reveals:

How the Five Eyes alliances lets the English -speaking countries share intelligence
The Five Eyes alliance is an intelligence-sharing pact among the leading English-speaking nations: US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
It is one of the most comprehensive pooling of security information in the world and traces its roots to the Second World War, although it was formally founded in 1946.
Its cornerstone arrangement is ECHELON - a mammoth surveillance system operated by the US and used by the other members.
Although the group have largely had shared interests - especially during the Cold War when the Soviet threat level spiked - the agreement has come under strain.

Britain's decision to sub-contract Chinese telecommunications giant Huwaei to build part of the 5G network is a sticking point, with the US voicing concerns and hinting it could jeopardise intelligence sharing.
The Five Eyes dossier paints an alarming image of increasingly authoritarian powers used by Beijing to hide its disease to the wider world.

One of the most critical aspects of the report is of China's lack of transparency over how the disease spreads.

The file points to a 'deadly denial of human-to-human transmission' in the early stages of the the outbreak in Wuhan.

Intelligence gathering reveals China had 'evidence of human-human transmission from early December,' but continued to deny it could spread this way until January 20.

The World Health Organisation regurgitated Beijing's claims despite officials in neighbouring Taiwan and Hong Kong raising concerns, the report says.

Evidence of asymptomatic cases, known as 'silent carriers', was also reportedly buried

But while the Chinese regime were downplaying the threat of the virus on the world stage, it was secretly scrambling to vanish all traces of the epidemic, the intelligence memo claims.

On January 3, China's National Health Commission reportedly ordered virus samples be destroyed and issued a 'no-publication order' about the virus.

As part of a mass 'suppression and destruction of evidence', the state ordered samples of the virus to be destroyed in laboratories while wet market was bleached to extinguish remnants of the disease.

The report reveals China had started censoring news of the virus on search engines from December 31, deleting terms such as 'SARS variation, 'Wuhan Seafood market' and 'Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.'

Anecdotal reports from the time also suggested Beijing's hand in hiding evidence of the then unknown disease from the web.

The document is also scathing of China's downplaying of the need for other countries to impose travel bans while Beijing officials were simultaneously quaranteeing Wuhan's 11 million citizens.

Underscoring the regime's hypocrisy, the paper says: 'Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23,' according to The Telegraph.

'Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbors and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.'

Dossier suggests China's coronavirus cover up dates back to November 2015
November 9, 2015: Wuhan laboratory announces they have created a new virus from SARS-CoV.
December 6, 2019: The first evidence of human-to-human transmission occurs when a wife contracts a pneumonia-like disease after her husband displayed similar symptoms after visiting the Wuhan wet market.
December 27: Beijing announced a new coronavirus which had infected 180 people.

December 31: Chinese state officials start monitoring the internet for searches of the unknown virus.

January 1, 2020: A handful of Wuhan medics raising the alarm bell on the virus are arrested.

January 3: China bans scaremongering about the new virus.

January 10: Chinese official Wang Guangfa insists the outbreak is 'under control'.

January 11: China reported its first coronavirus death.

January 23: Wuhan was put into lockdown.

January 30: The WHO branded the outbreak a global emergency.

February 7: Dr Li Wenliang who spoke out about the virus died after contracting it.

April: Wuhan revises up its cases as other countries wrestle the global pandemic.

Doctors and scientists who tried to raise the alarm about the virus and China's handling of it have also vanished or been punished, according to the documents.

Huang Yan Ling, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and thought to be patient zero for the global pandemic, mysteriously disappeared and her biography was deleted from the lab's website.

The institute has denied she was so-called 'patient zero' and said she is alive but she has not been heard from since.

Other whistleblowers including businessman Fang Bin, lawyer Chen Qiushi and former state TV reporter Li Zehua are reportedly being held in extrajudicial detention centers for speaking out about China's response to the pandemic.

The dossier shows some disagreement among the Five Eyes nations over whether the virus originated in the Wuhan lab or the wet market, the Telegraph reported.

It claims the nations were probing the possibility the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with several studies led by scientist Dr. Shi Zhengli being cited as concerns in the report.

The dossier outlines that Dr Zhengli and her team have conducted research in the lab into deadly bat-derived coronaviruses, with at least one of the virus samples being a 96 per cent genetic match for Covid-19.

Donald Trump has been leading the Western backlash to China, while Downing Street yesterday said 'there are questions to be answered' of Covid-19's origins.

This week, Trump said he had seen evidence that coronavirus may have been created in the Chinese lab.

'Yes I have. Yes I have,' Trump said when asked if he had seen proof the virus originated in the institute.

He would not divulge what the evidence was that confirmed his suspicions.

In Britain, Number 10 would not be drawn on the specifics of Mr Trump's comments but reiterated its desire for an international probe into the start of the outbreak.

Asked if Boris Johnson agreed with Mr Trump, the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman said: 'There are clearly questions that need to be answered about the origin and spread of the virus, not least so we can ensure that we are better prepared for future global pandemics.

Conservative MP Bob Seely, who sits on the Commons foreign affairs select committee, told MailOnline: 'There is little doubt that China misled the world at a critical early phase of Covid-19.

'Its aggression and threats to others now – both to individuals and countries – is an attempt to hide that.

'It is really clear that we need a reappraisal of our relationship with China. We need to work with China now to solve Covid-19 for the good of our people and the world.

'But at the end of this when the dust settles it is also clear that there has to be a re-evaluation by the West of its relationship with China, both in terms of dependency but also because of the many treaties and agreements and rules that China broke by keeping silent over the true nature of the coronavirus, despite the fact that it was in its early days.

'That breach of trust has come at the cost of tens of thousands of lives in Europe and throughout the world, and a devastating impact on our economy and the lives of people in Britain but also in other Five Eyes and other free states.'

However, Australia has maintained the virus most likely came from the Wuhan live animal market and said there was only a 5 percent chance it came from the lab.

Australia's own connections with the lab were also documented in the dossier, according to The Telegraph.

The Telegraph reported that the Australian government trained and funded key scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as part of an ongoing partnership between the CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The team members worked in the CSIRO's Australian Animal Health Laboratory where they carried out research into deadly pathogens in live bats.

It was revealed in April that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had received a $3.7million grant from the US government, and had been carrying out research on bats.

 

[space cadet]

The world will have to hold China accountable for this

 

[!eon]

How an Iranian airline 'helped spread coronavirus'

 

[space cadet]

Beijing demanded praise in exchange for medical supplies

The quid pro quo is tainting China's bid for global leadership.

www.axios.com

Beijing demanded praise in exchange for medical supplies

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
A growing number of reports indicate Chinese officials pushed their counterparts in Europe to make positive statements about China in order to receive shipments of medical supplies to fight the novel coronavirus.
Why it matters: The revelations further taint Beijing's attempts to portray itself as a responsible and trustworthy leader in global public health.
Context: Over the past two months, numerous high-ranking government officials from countries fighting coronavirus outbreaks have offered seemingly effusive praise to China for its assistance.

• The Italian foreign minister credited China with saving lives in Italy, the Serbian president kissed the Chinese flag as he welcomed a shipment of medical supplies on the tarmac, and the Mexican foreign minister tweeted a photo of a plane delivering Chinese aid, writing "Gracias China!!!"

What's happening: Officials in some countries are now saying there was pressure to praise Beijing.
Poland: In exchange for medical supplies, Chinese officials pressured Polish President Andrzej Duda to call Chinese President Xi Jinping to express gratitude

• “Poland wasn’t going to get this stuff unless the phone call was made, so they could use that phone call” for propaganda purposes, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, told the New York Times.

Germany: German officials have been approached by Chinese counterparts trying to get them to make positive public statements about China’s coronavirus response and international assistance, according to German newspaper Die Welt Am Sonntag.
What they're saying: “What is most striking to me is the extent to which the Chinese government appears to be demanding public displays of gratitude from other countries; this is certainly not in the tradition of the best humanitarian relief efforts," Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations told the Times.

• “It seems strange to expect signed declarations of thanks from other countries in the midst of the crisis.”

The big picture: A quid pro quo for vital medical aid alienates global audiences who had at first been inclined to welcome Chinese Communist Party leadership in the fight against the coronavirus.

• "The fairly aggressive party-state effort to 'tell a good China story' actually increases public awareness that these propaganda efforts on the Chinese side are going on," Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, told Axios.
• "They are shooting themselves in the foot by being so pushy on this."

Go deeper:

 

[space cadet]

Mayor says Moscow's real coronavirus case tally is more than triple the official - TASS

HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/RUSSIA-MAYOR (URGENT):Mayor says Moscow's real coronavirus case tally is more than triple the official - TASS

news.trust.org

Mayor says Moscow's real coronavirus case tally is more than triple the official - TASS

MOSCOW, May 7 (Reuters) - Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said on Thursday that the real number of coronavirus cases in the Russian capital was actually around 300,000, a figure that is more than three times higher than the official total, the TASS news agency reported.

Authorities have reported 92,676 cases of the novel coronavirus in Moscow. The nationwide case tally as of Thursday was 177,160. (Reporting by Andrey Kuzmin; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Maria Kiselyova)

 

[space cadet]

nope

China warns the UK against a new 'cold war' as it accuses British politicians of poisoning relations with Beijing

Liu Xiaoming said that UK MPs who were critical of China were not in step with Boris Johnson or the UK Parliament.

www.yahoo.com

China warns the UK against a new 'cold war' as it accuses British politicians of poisoning relations with Beijing
[email protected] (Adam Payne)
Business InsiderMay 6, 2020, 5:48 AM MDT

President Xi reviews an honour guard on October 20, 2015 in London, England.
Getty

• China has warned the UK against pursuing a new 'cold war' with the East amid rising international criticism of Beijing's handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
• China's ambassador to the UK accused British politicians of poisoning relations with Beijing.
• He accused UK politicians of being "addicted to the cold war mentality to compare China to the former Soviet Union and urge a review of the China-UK relationship, and even call for a new cold war."
• The comments came after the UK backed calls by President Trump for an investigation into China's handling of the outbreak

China has warned the UK against pursuing "a new cold war" after Boris Johnson's government joined growing global criticism of Beijing's handling of the coronavirus outbreak

Liu Xiaoming, Beijing's ambassador to the UK, said in a webinar on Tuesday that British politicians could "poison" the UK's relationship with China, in remarks reported by Bloomberg.

"Regrettably a few politicians in the UK have been addicted to the cold war mentality to compare China to the former Soviet Union and urge a review of the China-UK relationship, and even call for a new cold war," he said.

"If they go unchecked they will poison the China-UK joint effort, and even international solidarity just as it's needed most."

The First Secretary of State Dominic Raab, who deputized for Johnson while he recovered from the coronavirus, warned last month that the UK's relationship with China could not return to "business as usual" after the pandemic.

A growing number of Conservative Members of Parliament are now calling on the UK to reset the UK's ties with China and rip up the deal with Huawei to develop Britain's 5G network.

Business Insider reported last week that a number of influential Conservative MPs have set up a new parliamentary bloc called the "China Research Group," in order to push Johnson to scrap the deal.

Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the group, predicted that Johnson would revisit the controversial agreement.

"I can't see how it doesn't change that. Clearly, it's going to have implications," he told Business Insider.

"It makes the Huawei position hard."

REUTERS/Toby Melville

The UK government last week backed calls for there to be an investigation into how the coronavirus outbreak started in China.

"This is the third virus, I think, to come out of China before the century is a quarter old," Dame Karen Pierce, the UK's ambassador to the US, said.

She added: "I think there definitely needs to be some sort of review or investigation."

Despite the rising tensions, Xiaoming said he believed the two countries could still work together.

"They do not even represent the [UK] Parliament," he said of China's critics in London.

"I believe the UK government and Prime Minister Johnson is still committed to a stronger relationship with China.

"I feel confident that we can work with the UK government."

 

[Zeeman]

Seventh Pakistani British doctor dies of COVID. May Allah have mercy on him and all that have died .

 

[Zeeman]

while the world is rushing to find cure Modi wants scientists to check filthy polluted disgusting water of Ganges for treatment. this is after BJP cow urine cure claims .....

Gilead Sciences in talks with pharma companies in Pakistan, India to start remdesivir production

Says goal "is to make remdesivir both accessible and affordable to governments and patients around the world".

www.dawn.com

 

[Zeeman]

Modi govt request to test Ganges for virus cure declined

NGO Atulya Ganga has claimed that a “ninja virus”, called bacteriophage, in Ganges water could cure Covid-19.

www.dawn.com

 

[!eon]

German Spy Agency Doubts U.S. 'China Lab' Coronavirus Accusations

BERLIN (REUTERS) - A German intelligence report casts doubts on U.S. allegations that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory and says the accusations are an attempt to divert attention from U.S. failure to rein in the disease, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Friday.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday there was "a significant amount of evidence" that the coronavirus had emerged from a Chinese laboratory, but did not dispute U.S. intelligence agencies' conclusion that it was not man-made.

Spiegel said Germany's BND spy agency had asked members of the U.S.-led "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance for evidence to support the accusation. None of the alliance's members, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, wanted to support Pompeo's claim, it said.
An intelligence report prepared for German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer concluded that the U.S. accusations were a deliberate attempt to divert public attention away from President Donald Trump's "own failures".

A German government spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Trump has said he has evidence the virus could have originated in a Chinese lab, but he has declined to elaborate.
U.S. deaths from the coronavirus exceeded 75,000 on Thursday, according to a Reuters tally, with mixed messages from the White House and state governments on how to slow the rate of infection.