The U.S. government contributed to gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a recently released report alleged.

Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to President Biden, previously denied such research was ever funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).

The Intercept reported 900 new pages of NIH information previously undisclosed. Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, The Intercept obtained that the federal grant money was used by EcoHealth Alliance to fund dangerous bat coronavirus research in the Chinese lab. The Intercept reported:

The bat coronavirus grant provided the EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments.

The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”

The material was reviewed by Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University; he told The Intercept the “viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human-type receptors on their cell.”

In conclusion, Ebright accused Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins of being “untruthful” in their previous remarks.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” he wrote.

Fauci has admitted some funds went to Wuhan but claimed never to be used for “gain of function” support, as reported by Breitbart news.

Back in May, Fauci told the House Appropriations subcommittee the funds were given to the Chinese lab through EcoHealh Alliance to underwrite “a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus.”

Source: https://patriotnewsnetwork.com/bombshell-report-faucis-lie-exposed-by-fellow-scientist/

The post Bombshell Report: Fauci’s Lie Exposed By Fellow Scientist first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Hopes for a return to normal life after the coronavirus hinge on the development of a vaccine. But there’s no guarantee, experts say, that a fully effective COVID-19 vaccine is possible.

That may seem counterintuitive. So many brutal viral diseases have been conquered by vaccination — smallpox, polio, mumps — that the technique seems all but infallible. But not all viral diseases are equally amenable to vaccination. “Some viruses are very easy to make a vaccine for, and some are very complicated,” says Adolfo García-Sastre, director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “It depends on the specific characteristics of how the virus infects.”

Unfortunately, it seems that COVID-19 is on the difficult end of the scale.

A closely related virus of the same family, SARS, circulated in Asia from late 2002 to mid-2003 and killed more than 700 people. “They really are very similar viruses, both virulent and contagious,” says Rachel Roper, a professor of immunology at East Carolina University who took part in efforts to develop a SARS vaccine.

Given the similarities of the diseases, their response to vaccination would likely be close to identical. So it’s troubling that when researchers conducted animal testing on prospective SARS vaccines, they ran into difficulty. The two versions that they tested both successfully triggered the host animal’s immune system to produce antibodies, but neither was very effective at protecting against the illness. “People think, ‘Oh if you make antibodies to it, it’s going to be protective,’” says Roper. “That’s not necessarily true. We were able to induce an immune response, but it wasn’t good enough to really protect against the disease.”

It’s possible, Roper fears, that COVID-19 could be a virus that proves resistant to vaccination. “This may be one,” she says. “If we have one, this is going to be it, I think.” The FDA has never approved a vaccine for humans that is effective against any member of the coronavirus family, which includes SARS, MERS, and several that cause the common cold.

Even if researchers do develop a COVID-19 vaccine that’s effective at protecting animals, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will do the same for people. “One of the things that they say in science is that ‘mice lie, and monkeys don’t tell the truth,’” Roper says. “You can get something that works in mice, you can get something that works in monkeys, and it still might not work in humans.” So any animal tests will have to be followed by trials to demonstrate that the vaccines are safe for people to use, followed by trials to see if they protect against infection.

In a worst-case scenario, a phenomenon called “immune enhancement” can cause vaccines to make the symptoms of infections worse. Instead of preventing the virus from entering healthy cells, the antibodies actually help them to do so. In 2016, after some 800,000 Filipino schoolchildren were given a dengue-fever vaccine called Dengvaxia, officials realized that some of them had been put at increased risk of life-threatening complications. Investigators wound up looking into the deaths of some 600 children who’d taken part.

Back during the SARS outbreak, researchers were unable to test their SARS vaccine candidates for effectiveness in humans. To do so, they would have had to inoculate a population that was exposed to SARS, and the disease was effectively wiped out using public-health measures before that could happen.

That won’t be a problem for COVID-19 vaccine testing, obviously. And given the scale of the efforts underway, it’s quite possible that one or more vaccines will be found that will overcome whatever problems hampered the SARS vaccines. Currently, more than 35 companies and academic institutions around the world are working on COVID-19 vaccines. The first human trials started last month for a vaccine produced by Boston-area biotech firm Moderna Therapeutics. Pennsylvania-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals started testing its candidate vaccine earlier this month, and Novavax, a Maryland company, has said it will start trials in Australia in May.

Should a fully effective vaccine prove unattainable, Roper points out that even an imperfect vaccine, or one that is only fully effective for a short time, would be better than nothing. “Partially effective vaccines can still prevent serious illness and death,” says Roper. “And even though it’s not perfect protection, it does protect from hospitalization and death. It gives your immune system the jump.”

At this point, it’s not a given that even an imperfect vaccine is a slam dunk. The way that the COVID-19 virus behaves out in the wild makes it hard to predict how it will respond to vaccination. In a sense, immunization is a way to let your body think it’s already had the disease by teaching its immune system to make antibodies against the pathogen. A recent study in China, however, found that many patients who actually had the disease showed very low levels of antibodies in their blood after they recovered — and in some cases had none at all. This might indicate that people who recover from the disease or get vaccinated against it might be able to catch it nonetheless. “We just don’t know yet,” Roper says.

Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/will-there-be-a-coronavirus-vaccine-maybe-not.html

The post We Might Never Get a Good Coronavirus Vaccine first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The post Covid 19 antibodies breakthrough made in San Francisco first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Jacob Glanville – one of the stars of Netflix documentary Pandemic – runs Distributed Bio, which has been working to find an antibody therapy.

On Monday he tweeted that a development was imminent.

“I’m happy to report that my team has successfully taken five antibodies that back in 2002 were determined to bind and neutralize, block and stop the SARS virus,” Dr. Glanville told Checkpoint.

“We’ve evolved them in our laboratory, so now they very vigorously block and stop the SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] virus as well.

“This makes them suitable medicines that one could use once they’ve gone through human testing to treat the virus,” Dr. Glanville said.

“The new virus is a cousin of the old SARS. So what we’ve done is we’ve created hundreds of millions of versions of those antibodies, we’ve mutated them a bit, and in that pool of mutated versions, we found versions that cross them over.

“So now we know they bind on the same spot as the new virus, COVID-19.

“It binds the spot that the virus uses to gain entry into your cells. It blocks that.

“At this point, we know it binds the same spot extremely tightly with high affinity. The next step is we send the antibodies to the military, and they will directly put those on the virus and show that it blocks its ability to infect cells.”

Dr. Glanville told Checkpoint the military deals with the virus itself as he does not want COVID-19 or SARS in his laboratory.

“The other nice thing about it is you want the stamp of approval of a government military to independently test your work. This is one of the foundations of good science.

“Antibodies are attractive because you can give them to a patient right when they’re in the hospital like an antiviral. You can also give them to doctors, you could give them to the elderly people to prevent them from getting sick.”

There are a couple of groups around the world who have been working on developing antibodies, he said.

“Part of the reason we think we’re moving pretty fast is that instead of starting from scratch discovering an antibody, we went to these existing antibodies that were already extremely well-characterized against SARS. And we’ve adapted them. So we’re piggybacking on two years of research.

“It’s sort of like a short-term vaccine, except it works immediately.

“A vaccine could take six to eight weeks to take effect, where this will take effect within 20 minutes. You could give it to a patient who’s sick, experiencing COVID-19, then within 20 minutes of receiving the shot, their body is flooded with those antibodies.

“Those antibodies will surround and stick all over a virus and make it so it’s no longer infectious.”

The disadvantage compared to a vaccine is that a vaccine might give you a year or multiple years of protection, Dr Glanville said. Antibodies will only give protection for eight to 10 weeks.

The military will test the antibodies against COVID-19, and another laboratory will start tests to make sure the medicine is safe for humans.

If those are successful, production of the antibodies have to be scaled up.

“We use very exacting manufacturing standards called GMP for making a medicine, and that can take multiple months,” Dr Glanville said.

“Once that material is ready we go into a human trial. That’s a … trial where you give it to a series of 400 to 600 people who are in hospitals experiencing symptoms, and then you watch over the next five to 10 days to see whether it helped or not.”

He said he and his colleagues are doing everything they can to speed up the process, but it does take time.

“We have saved potentially years of research by piggybacking on the SARS antibodies and our technology is very good at engineering these things to cross and we’ve succeeded in doing that.

“The next step, the big-time consuming part, is the GMP manufacturer. Traditionally, that takes nine to 12 months, obviously, we can’t wait that long. So we’ve worked with two different partners to try to accelerate that to take a few months but that does take time and there’s really no way around.”

“Assuming that we’re able to complete our study, at the end of summer… and it looks good, then we would use something called compassionate use.

“This is was used in the Ebola crisis. And it’s been used in other cases where if you have something that’s effective, and there’s no other good medicine, you can begin releasing it to the world for use prior to going through all the approval process.

“That could be as early as September. Unfortunately, that’s also as far away as September.

“So that’s as fast as we can conceive of having this medicine widely available.”

He told Checkpoint it is essential for his laboratory that everyone gains access to the medicine.

He said they are talking to the European Commission and there is interest in Asia.

“My feeling is that we should also in anticipation that that study looks good… we should start scaling up a lot more doses, hundreds of thousands to millions for the next step.”

Source: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018740956/pandemic-scientist-makes-breakthrough-on-covid-19-cure

The post ‘Pandemic’ scientist makes breakthrough on Covid-19 cure first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.