Category: Corona Virus

(The Center Square) Lawmakers plan to interrogate the head of Eco Health Alliance, the group accused of conducting dangerous coronavirus research in Wuhan, China, just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will hold a public hearing May 1 where Dr. Peter Daszak is expected to testify. Daszak is the president of Eco Health Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit health research company that used taxpayer-funded grants to conduct coronavirus research.

The lawmakers on the committee allege that newly obtained documents show Daszaks previous testimony misled the committee or misrepresented the facts.

These revelations undermine your credibility as well as every factual assertion you made during your transcribed interview, the letter said. The Committees have a right and an obligation to protect the integrity of their investigations, including the accuracy of testimony during a transcribed interview. We invite you to correct the record.

One of those obtained documents appears to show Daszak saying he plans to work with Wuhan researchers.

A federal grant database shows that Eco Health Alliance received millions of dollars from the federal government since 2014 to study coronaviruses that originate in animals and in some cases can transfer to humans, with an emphasis on China.

A key and highly disputed part of the inquiry is whether Eco Health Alliance research included making coronaviruses more dangerous.

Under former President Donald Trump, the federal National Institutes of Health cut all funding to the group in question over the controversy.

Under the Biden administration, funding has been restored, and NIH has emphatically stated that Eco Health Alliance did not play a role in the start of the pandemic.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a definitive answer, misinformation and disinformation are filling the void, which does more harm than good, NIH said in a 2021 statement. NIH wants to set the record straight on NIH-supported research to understand naturally occurring bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded through a subaward from NIH grantee EcoHealth Alliance. Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.

In 2022 and 2023, NIH awarded Eco Health Alliance a total of at least $1,230,594 to research the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.

The idea that the COVID-19 virus began in a Wuahn lab was once denounced as a conspiracy theory but has now gotten more widespread credibility.

The FBI announced last year after its investigation that COVID-19 most likely came from the Wuhan lab. That news came just after the Department of Energy also said the Wuhan lab was most likely the origin of COVID-19, though neither agency expressed a high degree of confidence in that theory.

Other groups have suggested it came from the Wuhan wet market, though no definitive answer has been settled on.

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Wuhan-linked coronavirus researcher to testify before Congress - The Livingston Parish News

British Columbia

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Posted: April 08, 2024

For Vancouver resident Farrell Eckman, having a long conversation or attending a workout classwithout breaking into coughs is a majoraccomplishment.

The 50-year-old is one of many people whoresearchers saydeveloped pulmonary fibrosisa condition that thickens the tissue in lungs and can affect breathingafter experiencing asevere caseof COVID-19.

In January 2022, Eckman was admitted to Vancouver General Hospital because she was having trouble breathing along with flu-like symptoms.

"Ispent over amonth in ICU. I was on a ventilator. Not once, but twice. [My family]thought they were gonna lose me," she recalled. "It was the scariest time we've ever been through."

Eckman'stime in hospital was caused by her second bout of COVID. She had received three vaccines for the coronavirus that causes the disease.

While she eventually recovered and was released to go home along withsix litres of oxygen, which isthe maximum amount a patient can be discharged with. Eckmanwas later diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis,caused bythe toll that COVID took on her lungs.

"The damage that was sustained to my lungs from COVID pneumonia was severe. They've looked at my lungs numerous times.I don't know if I'll ever fully recover. I'm functioning, which is tremendous. ButI could possibly be dealing with this for the rest of my life."

A meta-analysis published in the Annals of Medicine & Surgeryin April 2022 found almost 45per centof recovered COVID-19 patients developed pulmonary fibrosis, and those patients often suffered persistent symptoms such as coughing, chest pain and fatigue.

The research also drew a link between severity of COVID-19 symptoms and severity of consequent pulmonary fibrosis.

It's something Daniel Marinescu, a respirologist at Vancouver General Hospital, says he is seeing more often, adding that patients are more prone to developing pulmonary fibrosis depending on how severe scarring of their lung tissue is.

Marinescu says he's seen "several dozen" of these cases.

"Most of the time it is a fairly mild disease and most of the time people slowly get better over months and years," he said. "But sometimes people take a big hit if they're in the ICUfor a long time or on the ventilator for a long time."

Janet Pope, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at Western University in London, Ont., says while research is limited, factors like age and smoking could affect the likelihood of patients developing the condition.

"We know that COVID pneumonia can cause pulmonary fibrosis. Not in most people who get COVID pneumonia, but if it's more severe, older age groups, more severe inflammation of the lungs from COVID," she said.

Pope adds patients may feel frustrated with their symptoms, but recommends sharing concerns with health-care professionals.

"They would take astethoscope and listen to the bottom of the lungs. It takes four seconds to do. If they hear what we call 'crackles' then theycan do a chest X-ray," she said.

"Have a listen to people if they say they'reshort of breath, if they're coughing, if they have a cold that's not improving," she advises.

For Eckman, recovery remainsa constant in her life. She says she works daily on improving herbreathing, and does pilatesregularly. However, shestill occasionally hasto use oxygen at night to help with her breathing.

"I just passed my two-year anniversary. I'm still dealing with it. It's an ongoing process," she said.

If youor someone you knowhas been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis,the Canadian Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation has resources availablethat can help.

Link:

Severe COVID leads to higher risk of pulmonary fibrosis: research - CBC.ca

WASHINGTON (TND)

The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday announced its COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force (CFETF) seized more than $1.4 billion worth of stolen COVID relief funds during the last three years.

In a news release, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at least 3,500 defendants were charged with federal crimes, which toteld more than $2 billion. He also said more than 400 civil lawsuits were filed, which resulted in court judgements and settlements of over $100 million -- and at least $1.4 billion seized or forfeited.

The information was part of a 33-page report that highlighted the "widespread fraud."

At least $1.4B in stolen COVID relief funds seized, Department of Justice says

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco shared similar sentiments.

Michael C. Galdo, who serves as the director of the Task Force, said there are still ongoing investigations into hundreds of cases involving identity thieves, transnational fraud and money laundering networks, large-dollar individual fraudsters, and businesses that helped facilitate the crimes.

"CFETF member agencies have improved their data analytics capabilities and are using these new skills to investigate fraud more efficiently and effectively," Galdo said.

The Task Force was established in 2021 to fight and prevent pandemic-related fraud.

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At least $1.4B in stolen COVID relief funds seized, Department of Justice says - CNYcentral.com

L.L. Bean has just added a third shift at its factory in Brunswick, Maine, in an attempt to keep up with demand for its iconic boot.

Orders have quadrupled in the past few years as the boots have become more popular among a younger, more urban crowd.

The company says it saw the trend coming and tried to prepare, but orders outpaced projections. They expect to sell 450,000 pairs of boots in 2014.

People hoping to have the boots in time for Christmas are likely going to be disappointed. The bootsare back ordered through February and even March.

"I've been told it's a good problem to have but I"m disappointed that customers not getting what they want as quickly as they want," said Senior Manufacturing Manager Royce Haines.

Customers like, Mary Clifford, tried to order boots on line, but they were back ordered until January.

"I was very surprised this is what they are known for and at Christmas time you can't get them when you need them," said Clifford.

People who do have boots are trying to capitalize on the shortage and are selling them on Ebay at a much higher cost.

L.L. Bean says it has hired dozens of new boot makers, but it takes up to six months to train someone to make a boot.

The company has also spent a million dollars on new equipment to try and keep pace with demand.

Some customers are having luck at the retail stores. They have a separate inventory, and while sizes are limited, those stores have boots on the shelves.

Excerpt from:

Alameda Health System using dogs to detect COVID - NBC Bay Area

There have been 3385 new cases of Covid-19 reported in the past week. Photo: 123RF

There have been 3385 new cases of Covid-19 reported in the past week, and 13 further deaths attributed to the virus.

Of the new cases, 2109 were reinfections.

There were 145 cases in hospital as of midnight Sunday, the Ministry of Health said.

Canterbury was the worst affected region, followed by Waitemat, Capital and Coast and Counties Manukau.

Last Monday, 3399 new cases and seven deaths attributed to the virus were reported for the previous week, with 168 cases in hospital.

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Covid-19 update: 3385 new cases, 13 further deaths - RNZ

UK health technology assessor theNational Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has published final draft guidance recommending use of remdesivir for treating COVID-19 in eligible adults and children.

Marketed by US antivirals giant Gilead Sciences (Nasdaq: GILD) under the trade name Veklury, remdesivir was the first medicine for COVID-19 to receive full marketing authorization in 2022. However, as the pandemic receded, sales of the

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NICE backs Veklury for treatment of COVID-19 in high-risk patients - The Pharma Letter

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A new study looking at the replication stage of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 reveals important mechanisms in its replication that could be the foundation for new antiviral therapies.

The study, which set out to investigate how the SARS-CoV-2 virus replicates once it enters the cells, has made surprising discoveries that could be the foundation for future antiviral therapies. It also has important theoretical implications as the replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has, so far, received less attention from researchers.

"These findings show what an exquisite cell biologist the SARS-CoV-2 virus is, and shed new light onto how infection with SARS-CoV-2 can disrupt the function of essential intracellular compartments, otherwise known as organelles," says Dr. Jeremy Carlton, reader in molecular and cellular biology.

The viral life cycle can be broken down into two main stages: the first stage is where the virus enters the cell. The second stage is replication where the virus uses the molecular machinery of the cell it has infected to replicate itself by building its parts, assembling them into new viruses that can then exit to infect other cells.

The majority of research into SARS-CoV-2the causative agent of COVID-19has focused on the Spike protein that allows viral entry. This has led to a lack of understanding of how the virus replicates once it has entered the cell.

A new paper led by Dr. Jeremy Carlton in collaboration with Dr. David Bauer at the Francis Crick Institute, focuses on how the Envelope protein of SARS-CoV-2 controls late stages of viral replication.

Publishing in Science Advances, the authors marked the Envelope protein with fluorescent tags to track its movement within cells and used proteomics to identify key pathways that allow SARS-CoV-2 to take over the internal compartments of the infected cellknown as organellesfor its replication.

The authors identified a surprising aspect of its replication in its use of a compartment called the lysosome during viral release. Lysosomes are acidic, degradative organelles, but SARS-CoV-2 uses its Envelope protein as an ion-channel to neutralize their acidity and so enhance viral release.

As well as broadening our theoretical understanding of the viral life cycle, such insights on replication could eventually be applied to create new antiviral therapeutics that inhibit the channel activity of the Envelope protein. These could apply not only to SARS-CoV-2, but to the -coronavirus family and any other virus that replicates with the same mechanisms.

More information: Guy J. Pearson et al, ER-export and ARFRP1/AP-1dependent delivery of SARS-CoV-2 Envelope to lysosomes controls late stages of viral replication, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adl5012

Journal information: Science Advances

Original post:

Discovery of how COVID-19 virus replicates opens door to new antiviral therapies - Phys.org

What is Disease X?

Dont panic! Disease X doesnt exist yet but it might one day. Disease X is the label that the World Health Organization uses to refer to some currently unknown infectious condition that is capable of causing an epidemic or if it spreads across multiple countries a pandemic. The term, coined in 2017, can be used to mean a newly discovered pathogen or any known pathogen with newly acquired pandemic potential. By the latter definition, covid-19 was the first Disease X. But there could be another in the future.

The World Health Organization has been warning global leaders about the risks of future pandemics at the World Economic Forums annual meeting. Some people say this may create panic, says WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. No. Its better to anticipate something that may happen because it has happened in our history many times and prepare for it.

We dont know that is why it is called Disease X. The coronaviruses, a large group of viruses, were long seen as a prime contender for producing a new pandemic, even before the covid-19 outbreak. That is because the novel coronavirus wasnt the first dangerous pathogen from this group. In 2002, a different coronavirus started spreading in China. It caused a form of pneumonia called SARS that killed around 1 in 10 of those it infected, before it was stopped by strict infection control measures. Another, even deadlier coronavirus called MERS occasionally breaks out, causing a pneumonia that kills 1 in 3 of those infected. However, recent work suggests SARS and MERS would have a harder time triggering a fresh pandemic because almost everyone in the world now has antibodies to the virus that causes covid-19 and these seem to give partial protection against most other pathogens in the coronavirus family.

Plenty of diseases, some well known and others less familiar, could pose a global threat. Flu strains have caused global pandemics several times in the past, including one of the deadliest disease outbreaks ever, the Spanish flu of 1918. A virulent strain of bird flu is currently sweeping the world, and it occasionally spreads from birds to mammals, causing mass die-offs. Just this week, it was named as the culprit in the deaths of 17,000 baby elephant seals in Argentina last October. Then there are other contenders, such as Ebola, which causes severe bleeding, and the mosquito-borne Zika, which can cause babies to born with smaller heads if the infection occurs during pregnancy. The WHO updated its list of pathogens with the most pandemic potential in 2022.

There is some good news: the covid-19 pandemic may have made it easier to stop any future Disease X. Covid-19 spurred the development of novel vaccine designs, including ones that can be quickly repurposed to target new pathogens. It led, for instance, to the advent of vaccines based on mRNA. This formula contains a short piece of genetic material that makes the bodys immune cells produce the coronavirus spike protein but it could be updated to make cells churn out a different protein, simply by rewriting the mRNA sequence.

Countries need better early warning systems for new diseases, and health services need to become more resilient to unexpected surges in demand, says Tedros. When hospitals were stretched beyond their capacity [with covid], we lost many people because we could not manage them. There was not enough space, there was not enough oxygen. To prevent the same thing from happening when Disease X strikes, Tedros says health services must be able to expand their capacity on demand. Luckily, they can make those preparations without knowing exactly what Disease X will be. Disease X is a placeholder, he says. Whatever the disease is, you can prepare for it.

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What is Disease X and do we need to worry about it? - New Scientist

Investing

Published: April 6, 2024 2:07 pm

The Covid-19 Pandemic and subsequent global lockdowns impacted billions of people, and its repercussions are still being felt. Within the financial industry, the S&P 500 took a hit from 3,337.75 in February, 2020 to 2,304.92 by March 20: a thousand point crash in only 30 days.

Since that time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed to new heights, largely on the back of The Magnificent Seven, which are: Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Meta Platforms (Facebook) (NASDAQ: META), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA).

Nvidia has been one of the leaders of this post-pandemic surge, so lets take a look as to why Nvidia stock, which has gained over 13X since that time roughly four years ago, was able to accomplish so much.

Nvidias beginnings were filled with struggles. Within its first three years of operation, founder and CEO Jensen Huang had to fire half of his employees trying to get the RIVA 128 graphic accelerator for 3D graphics completed and out to market. Having burned through $20 million in Venture Capital funding down to being a month away from bankruptcy, Nvidia finally succeeded, and the RIVA 128s sales fueled Nvidias fortunes enough for it to go public in 1999.

Nvidia soon after released its first Graphics Processing Unit, the GeForce 256, which was crucial for accelerating 3D consumer hardware for video content, leading to landmark graphics hardware design contracts for Microsoft XBOX and Sony (NYSE: SONY) PlayStation 3s RSX graphics processor. By 2012, the companys GPUs would be crucial to powering the AlexNet neural network, which set the stage for commercialized Artificial Intelligence (AI).

As Nvidia continued to grow, it expanded its product line, including their RTX series GPUs in 2018, which pioneered real-time ray tracing, This graphic rendering method mimics the actual physical behavior of light, which creates the hyper-realism key to the success of virtual reality in video graphics for video gaming and AI.

High profile deals with Toyota (NYSE: TM), Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU), and Alphabet (still Google in 2018) would follow.

Unlike thousands of other companies that were negatively impacted by the local government mandated lockdowns during the Covid-19 outbreak, Nvidia was not one of them.

AI would prove to be the winning horse in Nvidias race to the top. Nvidia continued to improve its GPU offerings and created new partnerships for expanding the applications for AI. In October 2020, Nvidia announced the plans to design the Cambridge-1 supercomputer. In collaboration with AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Kings College London, the Guys and St. Thomas NHS Foundation, and other organizations, the Nvidia Cambridge-1 is the UKs largest supercomputer, and was specifically created for British healthcare research since its launch in 2021.

Nvidia also announced plans to acquire UK chipmaker Arm from Softbank, for $32 billion, but would be forced to withdraw after the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation. Nevertheless, Nvidia apparently still owns a $147.3 million stake in Arm as of February 2024, according to Forbes.

According to The Harvard Business Review, AI adoption skyrocketed because of the pandemic lockdown. As the pandemic lockdowns ended, the use of AI continued to grow, with ChatGPT and other platforms rapidly gaining popularity. Nvidias H100 GPU has since become so in demand from all of the top tech hardware companies that Larry Ellison of Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) told The Wall Street Journal that he and Elon Musk both had dinner with Jensen Huang, and the two tech titans literally spent an hour of sushi and begging with Huang for more H100s.

Nvidias GPUs became ubiquitous with AI, and Jensen Huangs following would rapidly expand to arguably become as loyal and eager for his latest updates as those from the late Steve Jobs. The Taiwan-born tech entrepreneur who faced bankruptcy less than 30 years ago is now one of the top AI leaders on the planet.

Nvidia, which was roughly trading at$63 per share on March 23, 2020, has risen to$880.08.That is an amazing run of 1,560%.

In fact if you invested $10,000 during the Covid crash and held it to today, you would have $165,510.

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Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us? Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.

Link:

This Is How Much Nvidia Is Up Since the Corona Virus Market Crash - 24/7 Wall St.

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Abbey's Road: Remembering the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 lockdowns - The Newark Advocate