[OrthoSpineNews] A dozen of America’s top scientists and a collection of billionaires and industry titans say they have the answer to the coronavirus pandemic, and they found a backdoor to deliver their plan to the White House.
The eclectic group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture capitalist, Tom Cahill, who lives far from the public eye in a one-bedroom rental near Boston’s Fenway Park. He owns just one suit, but he has enough lofty connections to influence government decisions in the war against Covid-19.
These scientists and their backers describe their work as a lockdown-era Manhattan Project, a nod to the World War II group of scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb. This time around, the scientists are marshaling brains and money to distill unorthodox ideas gleaned from around the globe.
They call themselves Scientists to Stop Covid-19, and they include chemical biologists, an immunobiologist, a neurobiologist, a chronobiologist, an oncologist, a gastroenterologist, an epidemiologist and a nuclear scientist. Of the scientists at the center of the project, biologist Michael Rosbash, a 2017 Nobel Prize winner, said, "There’s no question that I’m the least qualified."
This group, whose work hasn’t been previously reported, has acted as the go-between for pharmaceutical companies looking for a reputable link to Trump administration decision makers. They are working remotely as an ad hoc review board for the flood of research on the coronavirus, weeding out flawed studies before they reach policy makers.
#1
Maybe there is something to it.
Trump made some very good calls since the CV19 business started - and it's certainly he didn't get the expert advice from Fauci (who, probably, still believes in herd immunity).
[60 Minutes] When you're fighting a pandemic, almost nothing matters more than speed. A little-known band of doctors and hi-tech wizards say they were able to find the vital speed needed to attack the coronavirus: the computing power of artificial intelligence. They call their new weapon "outbreak science." It could change the way we fight another contagion. Already it has led to calls for an overhaul of how the federal government does things. But first, we'll take you inside BlueDot, a small Canadian company with an algorithm that scours the world for outbreaks of infectious disease. It's a digital early warning system, and it was among the first to raise alarms about this lethal outbreak.
It was New Year's Eve when BlueDot's computer spat out an alert: a Chinese business paper had just reported 27 cases of a mysterious flu-like disease in Wuhan, a city of 11 million. The signs were ominous. Seven people were already in hospitals.
Almost all the cases came from the city's sprawling market, where live animals are packed in cages and slaughtered on-site. Medical detectives are now investigating if this is where the epidemic began, when the virus made the leap from animals to us.
#3
Sounds like a search engine to me, similar to Google except that it sifts through data relating to infectious diseases and analyzes based on the criteria they give it. Probably not a bad idea. Couldn't be any worse than WHO.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/29/2020 13:38 Comments ||
Top||
#4
sifts through data relating to infectious diseases and analyzes based on the criteria they give it.
Exactly! Makes one wonder why are paying anyone at the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) at Ft Detrick, MD. Of course we wouldn't know for sure, their website is behind the Green Door https://www.intelink.gov/ncmi
[Zero] Last week President Trump suggested that injecting ultraviolet light into the body could be one method in killing COVID-19. Then, a biotech company, with unproven science, touted it could send a catheter into the throat of a patient, emitting UV rays into the body to defeat the virus.
The push for UV products in today's public health crisis is expected to increase, thanks to President Trump's comments. A search trend for "does UV light kill coronavirus" has recently soared:
#4
I have an air purifier w/ UV capability - I run it for about an hour a day. Anyone in the cleaning industry knows / knew this for years. Same goes for bleach - it's one of 5,000 reasons I hold the media in complete contempt.
#5
Ain't that the truth. I do the same, but I also use an ozone generator. the difference is it makes 2+ grams/hour of ozone. Which is a LOT. Same page though.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
04/29/2020 23:34 Comments ||
Top||
#2
^It's not obvious to me now. Just imagine a scenario where infected Manhattans flee to their summer houses all over the country.
If you look at the rest of the world, countries what initiated lockdown early did considerably better than these that did not.
It's all about not overstraining one's medical resources.
#3
But people claimed
a) everyone would eventually get it.
b) so we need everyone inside so we slow everyone getting it enough to have sufficient resources to cope with a peak.
Now the story has changed, but the MSM is incurious. I smell bullshit when this happens.
You know what you all remind me of? I once escorted a military track dragging a Hawk launcher from Sharm - A- Sheikh back to base in central Israel. Every f*cking time we'd come to "slow down - dangerous curve ahead", the driver would slow down, negotiate the curve, and then start cursing the stupid government road signs.
Not sure this necessarily follows. Disaster didn't happen. It's not clear that the lock down is why. Antibody tests coming out now are showing something between 20-30% of NY and CA have had the virus. If that's even within a couple of standard deviations of accurate, then this thing has already blown through the population. The lock down didn't stop it, or even slow it down much.
And keep in mind that the lock down was never intended to stop the virus, just slow it down. The virus will be with us 10 years from now. Stopping it was never a possibility. Instead there was (justified) concern about overwhelming medical resources. OK. Now here we are with empty ER's, furloughed doctors and ventilators being given away for free. Medical facilities are not overwhelmed, and they aren't going to be. And people with chronic conditions are dying because they can't access routine medical care.
So I'd like to think my personal response is a little more nuanced than the driver's in your story. I think the lock down made sense 2 months ago, and I think it's way overdue time to lift it.
#6
Lockdowns have almost zero correlation with fatality rates.
The lockdown in Ground Zero, San Fran/San Mateo/Santa Clara, only happened 3+ months after the disease had been circulating throughout these counties thanks to more than 50,000 travelers arriving in the area from China.
Tally in SF/SM/SC Counties as of this am: 175, out of total population = 3.5 million.
The real culprit in the death rate is almost certainly bad / unsanitary practices in and around nursing homes and other areas where the elderly come into close contact with people carrying the virus e.g. crowded urban tenements housing multi-generation households that don't practice good hygiene/safe distancing.
The lockdown is almost completely irrelevant to outcomes for the general population of healthy people under the age of 70.
[Arutz 7] - You don’t have to be Bill Gates to express an opinion on coronavirus, but when someone of his prominence expresses dissatisfaction with a certain country’s policy, people take notice.
And so, when, in an interview with MSNBC, Gates criticized Sweden and said, "I don’t think their policies are the right ones," Swedish health officials were quick to respond.
Sweden’s former state epidemiologist (and now an adviser to the World Health Organization), Johan Giesecke, told Swedish newspaper Expressen, "I think we are doing the right thing," while admitting that "up to two weeks ago, people laughed and said, ’Those stupid Swedes; they’re not doing anything.’" But he claimed that the tide of international opinion was turning, and named a list of countries whose officials had supposedly been in contact with him asking for advice. I guess, for some people that's enough to cheer for Swedish bureaucrats - after all Bill Gates is these people's new bête noire.
Well, should we want Sweden’s advice? Let’s look at the numbers to see.
As of today, 2,355 people have died in Sweden in deaths attributed to Covid-19. This translates to approximately 225 deaths per million people. The corresponding numbers for hard-hit Spain and Italy are 503 deaths per million and 446 in Italy. That sounds impressive for a moment, until you reckon with another factor that isn’t often mentioned in media reports — and that factor is population density. There is another statistic that Sweden's cheerleaders studiously ignore: death vs recoveries. In Spain & Italy - after the recovery from an initial shock - more people recover than die. In hyper civilized, super advanced Sweden more people die than recover. I wonder why? (Needless to say, I would never accuse the super-liberal Swedes of running death-panels).
Sweden is a very sparsely populated country; just 20 people per square kilometer. In Spain, that number rises to 92; in Italy, it’s almost 200. Spain and Italy also have a relatively high incidence of multi-generational households as well as an aging population, both factors known to inflate the death rate.
Densely-populated cities are already showing much higher death rates; forty percent of US deaths have occurred in New York City alone, where the population density is 10,194 people per square kilometer. (In Bnei Brak, population density is 27,338 people per square km, the 10th most densely-packed city in the world. In Israel in general, the number is just 400.)
So, has something gone wrong in Sweden? If you ask their top health officials, the answer is "no," and "we are acting correctly." Articles published in Swedish media in recent days still maintain a self-congratulatory note, commenting that "unemployment has almost tripled in Norway ... from 3.6 % to 10%. In Sweden, the corresponding figures are 6.8 % to about 8%. Now that's a magnificent economic achievement - IMO, Sweden should hire some Nork propagandists to properly present it to the World!
At the same time, the country tightened its restrictions on movement and congregation after it saw the largest rise in deaths in a single day so far — 185 people — on a day when the combined death tally of its Scandinavian neighbors (Finland, Denmark, and Norway) was just 50. Hypocrisy, much?
According to a major survey by polling firm Novus, quoted by the BBC, around 9 in 10 Swedes say they keep at least a meter away from others at least some of the time, up from seven in 10 a month ago. The health system is not collapsing; there are still ICU beds available. But as the number of fatalities shows, comparatively, it’s not good enough.
In that case, why is Sweden sticking to its course? Despite official protestations that the country is not aiming for herd immunity, key figures are still bandying about the term. Anders Tegnell is Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the person running the country’s policy on coronavirus. In an interview last week with Swedish media, he claimed that Sweden might reach the stage of herd immunity by May, although subsequent reports from Swedish health authorities revised the number down substantially.
...Tegnell claimed that, "lockdown ... [does not] have a historical scientific basis ... we looked at a number of European Union countries to see whether they have published any analysis of the effects of these measures before they were started and we saw almost none ... Closing borders, in my opinion, is ridiculous, because COVID-19 is in every European country now." And if that, my friends, doesn't strike you as the very essence of bureaucratic responsibility dodging, I don't know what will.
...There are a number of problems with the "herd immunity" theory, not least of which is that if the virus mutates, any immunity gained will be useless. After all, we all get colds on a regular basis, and many colds are actually variants of coronavirus. In addition, tacitly acknowledged when talking of herd immunity is the fact that in most cases, a large number of people have to die to reach that stage.
Not all Swedes think that’s a price worth paying; last week, 22 high-profile scientists and epidemiologists wrote a letter to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter saying that "public health authorities have failed; now politicians must intervene," with one signatory saying bluntly, "too many people are dying."
But the Swedish Public Health Agency has maintained high approval ratings throughout the pandemic, and some Swedes have responded with an "outburst of nationalism" and a "sense of pride, for Sweden deviating from the ... norm," Professor Nicolas Aylott, political scientist at Stockholm's Södertorn University, told the BBC.
"It sort of chimes with a rather deep-seated sense of Sweden's specialness." IMO, Swedes are special, alright.
#4
#2 From the same source: death per million:
Sweden - 244
Germany - 75
France - 362
USA - 179 (with NYC)
Italy - 453 (Italy got hammered through being unprepared)
Iceland - 29
Norway - 38
[GenesiusTimes] Presidential front runner Joe Biden has finally answered critics regarding the alleged sexual assault he committed on Tara Reade decades ago, saying, "It's not sexual assault, people, it's democratic sexual assault. That makes it a good thing."
Many women's rights activists replied to the defense with wholehearted acceptance of the friendly serial abuser and pedophile Biden.
"I wasn't thinking about it like that," #metoo advocate Rose McGowan said. "It's clearly not bad at all because it's democratic."
Democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have endorsed Biden only to criticize him about his sexual abuse were forced to agree that there was nothing wrong with his behavior after he prepended ‘democratic' to it.
Posted by: lord garth ||
04/29/2020 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[6 views]
Top|| File under:
#2
My guess is Joe's problems are media and Hollywood scripted. Good strategy to avoid testimony, avoid debates, garner sympathy, keep Hunters hounds at bay, etc.
h/t Instapundit
[WP] - Results from coronavirus antibody tests have started to trickle in, and they bolster the consensus among disease experts that the virus is significantly more lethal than seasonal flu and has seeded the most disruptive pandemic in the past century.
"I think it is the worst pandemic since 1918," said Cecile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center, alluding to the "Great Influenza" pandemic that claimed an estimated 675,000 lives in the United States.
The new serological data, which is provisional, suggests that coronavirus infections greatly outnumber confirmed covid-19 cases, potentially by a factor of 10 or more. Many people experience mild symptoms or none at all, and never get the standard diagnostic test with a swab up the nose, so they’re missed in the official covid-19 case counts.
Higher infection rates mean lower lethality risk on average. But the corollary is that this is a very contagious disease capable of being spread by people who are asymptomatic — a challenge for communities hoping to end their shutdowns.
The crude case fatality rates, covering people who have a covid-19 diagnosis, have been about 6 percent globally as well as in the United States. But when all the serological data is compiled and analyzed, the fatality rate among people who have been infected could be less than 1 percent.
But as infectious disease experts point out, even a seemingly low rate can translate into a shockingly large death toll if the virus spreads through a major portion of the population. Doesn't even have to be a major portion - just an essential one, as we're seeing with meat packing plants.
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said Monday that the latest antibody numbers in New York City indicate that 25 percent of the population of 8.8 million has already been infected. Chinese made antibody tests?
The city has recorded more than 12,000 confirmed covid-19 deaths, and lists another 5,000 as probable deaths. That is an infection fatality rate between 0.5 and 0.8 percent, depending on which death toll is factored in. (A spike in all-cause deaths in recent weeks also suggests that some coronavirus-related deaths have not been captured by mortality statistics.)
...Epidemiologists have said somewhere between 40 to 70 percent of the population will likely become infected in the next couple of years if there is no vaccine and the public does not take aggressive measures to limit the spread of the virus.
"Do the math!" said Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University epidemiologist who has been studying the coronavirus since early in the outbreak.
Shaman and his colleagues have developed a model of the coronavirus spread that estimates that only 1 in 12 infections in the United States have been documented in official counts. That leads to an infection fatality rate of 0.6 percent, he said — a figure that roughly matches what has been seen in New York City.
At that rate, the United States could potentially experience 1 million deaths if half the population became infected and no efforts were made to limit the contagion through social distancing, a vaccine or proven therapeutics, Shaman said. But, at least, the Economy would be saved!
The economic shutdown has harmed wealth creation considerably and thus health creation and for vastly longer than 6 months. The death toll for the over-reaction of the government "immune system" will lower life expectancy vastly more than COVID has with it's FLU * 6 potency.
#2
There is no Economy without trust. There is no trust without Social Contract. Israeli economic recovery, long term Swedish depression, and Chinese collapse will illustrate this point.
#3
Sweden's economic problems are caused by islamic-origin invaders not chinese.
Group punishing ALL the young/healthy to slightly postpone death of the extremely sick is a hyper optimised way to destroy any so-called "social contract".
Quarantine the vulnerable is the only way, especially now the enormous state over-reaction (and harm it caused) is being revealed.
Actually, I think lockdown is of immeasurable benefit to young people. It gives them opportunity to examine their life and to reevaluate their goals. If even 10% of MBA students decide to drop from college and learn a trade, it'll be a large benefit to society at large (as well as to them personally).
#5
The logic in the post is a bit confused if you ask me. As they find more people have Wuhan with no effects the lower the lethality gets. The greater transmission rate doesn't really matter if the super-vast majority comes out without knowing they even had the thing.
#6
^ exactly. The disease is much less lethal than the absurd doomsday models assumed. In the US we are likely to have no more than 100,000 COVID deaths, making this hardly worse than a bad flu season.
The epicenter of this flu bug is San Francisco and the two counties to its south, which house in total nearly a million Chinese / Chinese-Americans, a large percentage of whom traveled to China during the early days of the coronavirus's spread.
Out of 3.5 million people i.e. roughly 1% of US population this SF / Peninsula region has a grand total of 175 deaths. This us the epicenter. Do the math: it simply is NOT much more lethal than a bad flu strain.
#7
"You will have to test well in your blood to participate in society." Does this sound sort of like the "one drop" rule or Aryan Master Race bullshit?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/29/2020 10:44 Comments ||
Top||
#8
the United States could potentially experience 1 million deaths if half the population became infected
#9
Actually, I think lockdown is of immeasurable benefit to young people. It gives them opportunity to examine their life and to reevaluate their goals. If even 10% of MBA students decide to drop from college and learn a trade, it'll be a large benefit to society at large (as well as to them personally).
I think that's the biggest load of bullshit I've come across.
Learn to weld? That's your answer? Ever welded before? Some college boy who just figured out which end of the hammer to use is going to just start framing? Generations sold into indentured servitude for Lucky Numbers is not noble.
You want problems - teach the youngsters to be cows, ruin the entrepreneurial efforts of the middle age and tell them Mega-Low Mart is hiring, make the elders who worked their whole life live their remainder locked in their house, watch those living off savings crash with the value of the dollar, let's watch hospitals and better practice agriculture get shut down but hey Big Chicken Burger is hiring.
Learn to trade. You know, some people just spent four years in trade school like fabrication where the plants are closed and might open. Or culinary school and if you can't name the five mother sauces off the top of your head right now you have no clue how tough that course is. And those jobs don't get teleconferenced in. Who do you want working on your jet engines, the dude who started taking apart engines with his dad at age 10, or the 22 year old college drop out who thinks this is a good time to find out what a spark plug does?
There is a trade joke in these parts - the difference between a farmer and a welder is a welder knows he can't farm.
The real travesty is the person who was like, "4-6 weeks, got it because China is Asshole. Doable, my storm season budget, but doable." is on their third billing cycle being told by politicians with fresh haircuts and blatantly violating not just quarantine guidelines but the very basic precautions, telling them "Nah, we need another 2 to 4 months so we can get the numbers to match the models." being told, "Economy, nah it'll be fine."
Because if and when a real outbreak happens, there are going to be a lot of people who will say shove the models up your ass. Because those people, right now, are being told they must accept the very real and imminent act of becoming modern debt slaves instead of having the choice to maybe, maybe get sick enough to test for Wuhan Flu, and then maybe be sick enough to visit hospital, and then maybe be one of those who are legitimately susceptible to the point they could die.
Telling people that they must lose everything they had, worked for, and ever wanted because some mythical model justifies the end of their livelihoods - for something they are going to catch anyways - is not a good sales pitch.
#13
What a load of horseshit that stripping healthy people's civil liberties provides them a chance to reflect. If this exaggerated crisis has proven one thing, its that there is not even ONE real *leader* among the 50 governors of these United States. Were there even ONE, there would be at least ONE state that would have said "No thanks" to this exaggerated bullshit.
#18
That's how it works out here, its no time for victory laps, and it doesn't help to mock people getting their heads held in the toilet getting financial swirlies.
To think that people who put years into getting an MBA, no small thing, will just shrug and get a trade job anywhere other than Swift Trucking is wishing, hoping, which are not methods.
Its as wishful as thinking that a National Guard unit can be re-purposed for the trade of Large Animal Meat Processing, and it will cause even more problems.
Ford County, Kansas which includes Dodge City has a population 2010 of about 34,000. There are a total of some 550 confirmed cases even with the expedited testing of food source hubs. Last I heard, 1 hospitalization. No deaths.
If the models are good, including demographics, they would have indicated these trouble spots months ago like my campfire did. So only within the last week policy makers are making this revelation? That isn't good policy, in fact it is more like jerking the wheel.
I don't expect people outside, or even most inside, the United States to understand the culture which sweeps from Central Canada to Central Texas to understand, which is why I report; same as the Greensburg Tornado Outbreak of 2007 when college students were turned away because they lack basic tool and dangerous work place safety skills. This area is trade school central, because when the harvester breaks down in the middle of a wheat field in 100 degree heat we can't just call the AAA Auto Shop. There is a certain about of nobility in that endeavor I have not seen otherwhere.
I know how to weld. If I called myself a Welder, people would throw slag at me. It takes thousands of hours of practice, usually beginning at an early age, and numerous costly fkups to get a good bead on any metal worked on. One has to know metallurgical properties, effects of weather, and of equipment used to make it look like Hollywood does.
And there was a time when the Kansas Guard would have had enough members who were familiar with animal processing during their childhoods to fill that gap, but not today.
Same with any processing, especially in food service. It takes practice, skill, and a bit of abstract thinking to properly and practically get the right cuts of meat.
Now, I'm not a great thinker, I've know too many of them to think otherwise. I do have people ask my opinion, and there is no doubt the expertise here at Rantburg is a contributing factor. I also understand that historic traditions, what we call Culture, have an impact, such as a Quincenera, as a one-time celebration event danger be damned. I even have some olde time Great Inland Sea Salt over there to add as necessary, and I do try to point that out when appropriate. The descendants of pioneers, scouts, both environmental and financial, opinions are all open to discussion.
Not sure how many life skills I learned at my first not-family job of dishwashing, such as how to properly un-clog a toilet. The most important, what I didn't want to do as a career.
Those are your local restaurants, not Big Chicken Burger, but I've know plenty of people who did work for BCB who would say the same thing. Night y'all.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[60 Minutes] When you're fighting a pandemic, almost nothing matters more than speed. A little-known band of doctors and hi-tech wizards say they were able to find the vital speed needed to attack the coronavirus: the computing power of artificial intelligence. They call their new weapon "outbreak science." It could change the way we fight another contagion. Already it has led to calls for an overhaul of how the federal government does things. But first, we'll take you inside BlueDot, a small Canadian company with an algorithm that scours the world for outbreaks of infectious disease. It's a digital early warning system, and it was among the first to raise alarms about this lethal outbreak.
[Zero] Last week President Trump suggested that injecting ultraviolet light into the body could be one method in killing COVID-19. Then, a biotech company, with unproven science, touted it could send a catheter into the throat of a patient, emitting UV rays into the body to defeat the virus.
