“That is saying a lot, because the scientific justification for the TSA’s rule has always been weak, given that the conditions on airplanes are not conducive to COVID-19 transmission. The ventilation systems on commercial aircraft, which mix outdoor air with air recycled through HEPA filters and limit airflow between rows, help explain why there were few outbreaks associated with commercial flights even before vaccines were available.
“The risk of contracting COVID-19 during air travel is low,” an October 2020 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted. “Despite substantial numbers of travelers, the number of suspected and confirmed cases of in-flight COVID-19 transmission between passengers around the world appears small.”
Sebastian Hoehl, a researcher at the Institute for Medical Virology at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, concurred in an interview with Scientific American the following month. “An airplane cabin is probably one of the most secure conditions you can be in,” he observed.”
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“On February 25, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stopped recommending general indoor masking in parts of the country it rates as “low” or “medium” risk, which as of last week covered more than 98 percent of the U.S. population. According to the CDC, then, it is safe to dispense with masks in stores, churches, schools, bars, and restaurants—environments where the risk of virus transmission is much higher than it is on airplanes.
Yet the TSA said it extended its mask rule “at CDC’s recommendation” so the agency could develop “a revised policy framework” based on “the latest science.” Mask rules for transportation are complicated, said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, because people are “moving from one zone to another”—an explanation that makes little sense when virtually the entire country is in the same “zone” as far as the CDC’s mask advice goes.”
“Among other priorities, the plan includes funding for: creating vaccine candidates for each of the 26 families of viruses known to infect humans; developing antiviral medications that can work against a broad spectrum of viruses; building out manufacturing capacity for vaccines, antivirals, tests, and other countermeasures; deploying genomic sequencing as a way to track outbreaks; developing broadly useful diagnostic technologies and better regulatory processes for approving and disseminating plentiful rapid tests; and improving security in laboratories dealing with dangerous viruses.
The White House, to its credit, has already proposed funding around this level. Most recently, in its 2023 budget proposal, the Biden administration asked for $88.2 billion in funding over five years on pandemic preparedness. That includes $40 billion for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the Department of Health and Human Services to “invest in advanced development and manufacturing of countermeasures for high priority threats and viral families, including vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and personal protective equipment (PPE),” as well as $12.1 billion in research funding for the National Institutes of Health for vaccine, therapeutics, and diagnostics development.
Bumb notes that the Biden proposal actually drew on the original Apollo plan put out by the bipartisan commission. That’s part of why the new commission report is so notable: This is a group that’s capable of driving policymaking at high levels.
That said, Congress has yet to appropriate money at the commission’s desired level to prevent the next pandemic. It’s barely interested in further funding response to the current, ongoing pandemic, which is still killing hundreds of Americans a day. A group of senators recently cut a deal for $10 billion to fund Covid-19 response, after slashing funding the White House wanted to help fight the pandemic abroad — only to have Republicans block the deal on the Senate floor over separate immigration concerns. Even if the funding eventually passes, it’ll have to wait until after the Easter recess ends on April 22.”
“Shanghai, China’s bustling cosmopolis of 26 million has been under lockdown since late March under the nation’s strict “dynamic zero-Covid” protocols, a system so poorly managed that residents are frequently unable to access basic necessities like food, medications, and medical care, prompting fairly widespread, spontaneous protests both online and in real life.
The government has touted the zero-Covid strategy, the government’s system of containment using intensive testing and tracing, combined with partial or complete lockdowns when a case is detected, has kept case counts and deaths low over the past two years. But the reports coming out of Shanghai suggest that the local government was unprepared for an outbreak in the country’s economic center and cast doubt on the feasibility of zero Covid at this point in the pandemic. That’s translated into serious struggles for residents, including hours-long ambulance wait times, dwindling savings, and inadequate or rotten food supplies, among others. Although the central government is reportedly stepping up efforts to get supplies to the city, the overall policy is driving many residents to criticize the government’s policy — and Shanghai’s implementation of it — despite serious potential risks to their safety and freedom by doing so.”
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“The Shanghai outbreak is thus far China’s most serious since the beginning of the pandemic; a staggering 200,000 cases have been reported since the outbreak started in March, though that’s likely under-reported, according to the New York Times. What started as a patchwork of temporary lockdowns to limit the spread of disease quickly turned into an interminable, city-wide shutdown with people only allowed out to take PCR tests, as a New York magazine piece explained earlier this week. Shanghai’s lockdown, two years into the pandemic, is rivaled only by those in Wuhan in 2020 and Xi’an at the end of last year in terms of strictness.
Shanghai residents’ outrage — which they’ve expressed by singing and chanting from their balconies and co-opting anti-American hashtags used by government officials to criticize the US — is borne from the fact that the government isn’t providing the stability it promises in exchange for personal freedoms, according to Rui Zhong, program associate at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. “I think what makes people angry in Shanghai, and what made people angry in Xi’an is, Covid has been a problem for years,” she told Vox. “I think they’ve been really stunned at the degree to which their local officials haven’t necessarily prepared, including non-supply-chain issues,” like hospital admissions.”
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“Shanghai’s local government enjoys a degree of relative autonomy in the context of President Xi Jinping’s China; it’s technically directly under the control of the central government, as a province-level city, but enjoys special status as the country’s financial hub and a showpiece for the rest of the world. Until March, the local government had handled the pandemic well, with no major outbreaks. But the rapid onset of the omicron variant and the corresponding draconian government measures are pushing some citizens to the brink.
“I have no more money … What am I to do? I don’t care anymore,” one man shouts to his whole building in a viral video on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. “Just let the Communist Party take me.””
“for millions of Americans, many of whom have chronic conditions or disabilities that make them especially vulnerable to Covid-19, the pandemic is far from over.”
“Way back in May 2020, three researchers at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) published an op-ed in Nature arguing that with respect to developing universal coronavirus vaccines “the time to start is now.” As it turns out, the time to start for the NIAID was 15 months later when the agency got around to awarding three academic institutions a little over $36 million to research pan-coronavirus vaccines in September 2021.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed could serve as a much better model for incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to greatly speed up the development and deployment of the candidate pan-coronavirus vaccines on which some are currently working. In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, two immunologists point out that the global cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is an estimated $16 trillion, compared to the cost of developing a typical vaccine at $1 billion. They note that even a $10 billion vaccine is minuscule compared with the pandemic’s toll.
Among the promising pan-coronavirus candidate vaccines are the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research’s spike ferritin nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine; Osivax’s nucleocapsid vaccine targeting a protein widely prevalent among coronaviruses that is unlikely to mutate; and Inovio’s DNA vaccine encoding variant sequences of the spike proteins the virus uses to invade cells.”
“Late last year, Laura Wing-Kamoosi visited her 79-year-old father at the hospital in northern Michigan. To her surprise, a worker asked her to remove her N95 and replace it with a surgical mask. She declined, layering the surgical mask atop her N95 instead.
She saw no staff wear N95s, among the best respiratory protection available, while they treated her father for a tear in his aorta and other medical issues, she told POLITICO. One doctor wore his surgical mask under his nose, she said. Her father, who was hospitalized for about a month, contracted Covid-19 during his stay, and while he survived, the virus slowed his recovery.
The hospital, Munson Healthcare, said it requests visitors wear the surgical masks it provides to ensure people are using quality masks and that it allows visitors to layer one over their own. The hospital is following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and for many public health advocates, that’s exactly the problem.
They fear that surgical masks put the most vulnerable people at higher risk of catching Covid-19. N95s, which seal tighter to the face, offer better protection against the airborne virus, studies show. For more than a year, many have called on the Biden administration to change its guidance to offer more protection inside hospitals, even as mitigation measures have been dialed back and case counts decline.
And yet, patients across the country say they are often told to replace their N95s with surgical masks as they enter hospitals.”
“In two February preprint papers, first reported by the New York Times, researchers traced the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen that causes Covid-19, in 2019 in Wuhan. One study looked at initial infections at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first cases were detected. The other examined the genomes of the earliest strains of the virus. Around the same time, researchers from the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published their own findings from virus samples they collected from animals and the environment around the market in early 2020.
In addition to seafood, vendors at the market sold live animals, including those collected from remote wilderness areas.
Together, the studies connect the dots of transmission at the epicenter of the pandemic, observing that the virus likely made the leap from animals to humans more than once. “Once you understand that there were infected animals in the market, then multiple spillovers are not just a possibility, they’re what you would expect at that point,” Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University and a co-author on both papers, told Vox.
The studies’ conclusions contradict some early reports that the Huanan market was not the original locus of Covid-19. The results also echo how scientists think the first SARS virus spread to humans in 2002. According to Garry, they make the possibility that the outbreak began with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology much less plausible.”
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“while researchers have narrowed down the location in the market where the outbreak likely began and have identified several potential animal hosts, they still haven’t found the specific animals that were infected. And though scientists have found several related viruses in the wild, they haven’t found one yet that they think could have directly spawned SARS-CoV-2.”
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“it may not be possible to find out since the specific infected animals were likely culled. “You’d have to be a time traveler or something like that to go back and see,” Garry said.”
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“The lab leak hypothesis holds that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a facility roughly eight miles from the Huanan market. Proponents of the theory point to several factors. Researchers there were known to be studying bat coronaviruses. Specifically, they documented a bat coronavirus called RaTG13. Discovered in 2013, it has a genetic sequence with 96 percent overlap with SARS-CoV-2.
Scientists at the Wuhan Institute were also conducting experiments under lower safety conditions than most scientists would recommend for respiratory viruses. Some researchers argue that the types of experiments they were conducting constitute gain of function, where a virus is engineered to become more infectious.
Circumstantially, pathogens have escaped from Chinese laboratories before. And the Chinese government’s actions have added to the suspicions. They may have covered up the extent of the original outbreak, and international investigators have complained that the Chinese government still has not been fully transparent with what happened during the early days of the outbreak.
However, there appears to be no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an actual isolated sample of SARS-CoV-2, nor did they have any live ancestor to the virus, including RaTG13. They only recorded the genetic sequence.
The latest studies show also that the earliest clusters of the virus were concentrated in a specific area of the Huanan market. If the virus were introduced by a person from outside the market, environmental samples testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 would likely have been spread out more through the building.
In addition, the fact that two distinct lineages emerged in the early outbreak would require that someone from the lab would have had to introduce two different versions of the virus to the lab on two separate occasions.
“The simplest explanation is that infected animals infected people,” Garry said. “You have to go through quite a bit of mental gymnastics to go ‘it came from the lab to the market,’ and you have to believe that happened twice.””
“47 countries still have inoculation rates below 20 percent.
Now, many health organizations involved in the global vaccination effort aim to immunize 90 percent of vulnerable populations in every country — a move that seems to undercut the WHO’s 70 percent target.”
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“Prioritizing vulnerable populations — health care workers, elderly individuals and those with comorbidities — could undermine the global push to prevent variants if it reduces the total number of vaccinated people, some experts said. But facing the reality that the 70-percent-vaccination goal by mid-2022 is virtually doomed, some health groups working on the global vaccination effort are focusing on letting countries set targets according to their abilities and advising them to first target vulnerable populations.”
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““Striving to vaccinate 70 percent of the population of every country remains essential for bringing the pandemic under control — with priority given to health workers, older people and other at-risk groups,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at a press conference Wednesday.”
“Conflict over President Joe Biden’s immigration policy is complicating passage of a $10 billion coronavirus bill before a two-week congressional recess.
Just a day after Republican Sen. Mitt Romney and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a deal on billions for therapeutics, vaccines and testing, GOP senators threw in a wrench that could mean Congress will break with nothing. Senate Republicans say they want a vote on an amendment that would keep in place the Title 42 border restrictions, which allows limits on immigration due to the pandemic. Without one, they say the bill can’t proceed.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters Tuesday that “there’s going to have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill.” Without agreement among all 100 senators, the Senate will be unable to take up and quickly move the bill this week.”
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“The impasse could stall for weeks what Biden called much-needed coronavirus aid, unless senators can reach a deal before they plan to leave on Thursday or Friday. Without a breakthrough, the aid won’t be approved until late April or perhaps May. Republicans blocked a vote advance the bill on Tuesday, though Schumer can quickly bring it back up if there’s a deal on amendments.”
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“Democrats already think they’ve conceded plenty to the Republicans after Monday’s bipartisan agreement left out global vaccine funding. So there’s not a ton of enthusiasm for giving Republicans their immigration vote.”
“The roughly $10 billion in pandemic aid the Senate is preparing to vote on after a weekslong impasse will keep the nation’s testing, treatment and vaccination programs afloat for only a couple months, lawmakers, Biden administration officials and public health experts warn.”
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“This round of funding — if it can pass the House and Senate — would help restart key Covid-19 programs that recently ran out of resources, including the development of future variant-specific vaccines and federal government purchases of drugs for people at risk of hospitalization.
But the package was whittled down from more than $30 billion federal officials originally argued was needed to $22.5 billion the White House pitched to Capitol Hill last month to $15.6 billion congressional leaders tried to attach to the 2022 spending bill.
Now, $10 billion is on the table and the money for the global vaccination effort and for testing, treating and vaccinating the uninsured was dropped, all but guaranteeing the Biden administration will shortly need Congress to do this all over again.”
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“Public health leaders warn that these short-term bursts of cash are creating gaps in preparedness, leaving millions vulnerable to a new Covid surge.”
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“with no global money in the current deal, policymakers fear the disruption to the U.S.’ pandemic work overseas will continue indefinitely.
“Doing nothing to slow the global spread of COVID-19 is foolhardy,” Senate Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) warned Monday. “As the virus continues to mutate and wreak havoc overseas, more Americans will become sick and die.”
For months, officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development have warned lawmakers that they would soon run out of money to help facilitate vaccinations in low- and middle-income countries, and advocated for at least $19 billion for the global Covid fight.”
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“On the domestic front, the funding delays have forced the federal government to halt purchases of enough additional booster doses for all Americans and slash the purchase and distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments and antiviral pills for high-risk Covid patients. It has also disrupted research into new treatments and cut off reimbursements to doctors around the country for testing, treating, and — as of Tuesday — vaccinating the uninsured. Even if Congress manages to approve the funding this week, public health experts say, there’s a good chance all of these threats will reemerge in just a few months, damaging the stability and continuity of their fight against the virus.”