Research, editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
News on disease control, CCP, covi traceability, Cambodia, Taiwan
News (1)
Beijing adds 7 more local cases, anal swab test reappears
Reporter : Qiao An / https://www.ntdtv.com/gb/2022/01/21/a103327251.html / Image : Video Screenshot
Two weeks before the opening of the Winter Olympics, the epidemic in Beijing is gradually heating up, and the notorious "anal swab" test has once again emerged.
According to the official notification issued by the Beijing Municipal Health Commission on the 21st, from 12 am to 4 pm on the same day, there were 7 new local confirmed cases and 5 local asymptomatic infections in Beijing. Since 15 January, Beijing has officially reported 23 local cases, involving four districts of Haidian, Chaoyang, Fengtai and Fangshan, with a total of two medium-risk areas.
Under the attack of the two virus variants of Omicron and Delta, the Beijing authorities once again used the "anal screening" test, which has become notorious in the international community.
According to the "Beijing News" report, on January 15, epidemic prevention personnel in Beijing began to conduct "anal swab" screening in the apartment building where the infected case was found.
Since 2020, mainland China has used "anal swabs" to detect covi, and in March last year, it required foreign arrivals to undergo "anal swab" tests, which once triggered protests in many countries. Some netizens ridiculed that the "anal swab" test was "not very harmful but extremely insulting".
News (2)
New evidence has emerged that suggests that Dr. Anthony Fauci not only initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 but actively shaped a highly influential academic paper that excluded the possibility of a lab leak.
Fauci’s involvement with the paper wasn’t acknowledged by the authors, as it should have been under prevailing academic standards. Neither was it acknowledged by Fauci himself, who denied having communicated with the authors when asked directly while testifying before Congress last week.
The article, Proximal Origin, was co-authored by five virologists, four of whom participated in a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference that was hastily convened by Fauci, who serves as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Jeremy Farrar, who heads the UK-based Wellcome Trust, after public reporting of a potential link between the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the COVID-19 outbreak.
The initial draft of Proximal Origin was completed on the same day the teleconference, which wasn’t made public, took place. Notably, at least three authors of the paper were privately telling Fauci’s teleconference group both during the call and in subsequent emails that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab.
Until now, it was not known what role, if any, Fauci played in shaping the contents of the article, which formed the primary basis for government officials and media organizations to claim the “natural origin” theory for the virus. While the contents of emails previously released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show the Proximal Origin paper clearly conflicts with the authors’ private views on the virus’ origin, it was unclear if the authors had preemptively reshaped their views to please Fauci or if Fauci himself had an active role in shaping the article.
As the head of NIAID, Fauci controls a large portion of the world’s research funds for virologists. At least three virologists involved in the drafting of Proximal Origin have seen substantial increases in funding from the agency since the paper was first published. Any interference by Fauci in the paper’s narrative would present a serious conflict of interest.
News (17)
Emails show that Fauci, Collins exerted influence
Newly released notes taken by House Republican staffers from emails that still remain largely redacted clearly point to Fauci having been actively engaged in shaping the article and its conclusion. The GOP lawmakers gained limited access to the emails after a months-long battle with Fauci’s parent body, the Department of Health and Human Services.
The new emails reveal that on Feb. 4, 2020, one of the article’s co-authors, virologist Edward Holmes, shared a draft of Proximal Origin with Farrar. Like Fauci, Farrar controls the disbursement of vast amounts of funding for virology research.
Holmes prefaced his email to Farrar with the note that the authors “did not mention other anomalies as this will make us look like loons.” It isn’t known what other anomalies Holmes was referring to, but his statement indicates that Proximal Origin may have omitted certain anomalies of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suggesting that the paper may have been narrative-driven from the start.
During Fauci’s teleconference, participants had discussed at least two anomalies specific to the virus—the virus’s furin cleavage site, which has never been observed in naturally occurring SARS coronaviruses, and the pathogen’s unusual backbone, which fails to match any known virus backbone.
Farrar almost immediately shared Holmes’s draft with Fauci and Collins via email, while excluding other participants of the teleconference. The ensuing email thread containing discussion among the three suggests that the reason for the secretiveness may have been that they were shaping the content of the paper itself, something that has never been publicly acknowledged.
It is notable that the email thread included only the three senior members of the teleconference. Using Farrar as a conduit to communicate with the authors may have been seen by Fauci and Collins as adding a layer of deniability.
News (18)
Fauci, Collins express concern over "Serial Passage"
During a Feb. 4, 2020, email exchange among the men, Collins pointed out that Proximal Origin argued against an engineered virus but that serial passage was “still an option” in the draft. Fauci appeared to share Collins’s concerns, noting in a one-line response: “?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice.”
Serial passage is a process whereby a virus is manipulated in a lab by repeatedly passing it through human-like tissue such as genetically modified mice, which mimic human lung tissue. This is notable given that during the Feb. 1 teleconference, at least three of Proximal Origin’s authors had advised Collins and Fauci that the virus may have been manipulated in a lab through serial passage or by genetic insertion of certain features.
One day after Fauci and Collins shared their comments, on Feb. 5, 2020, Farrar emailed Fauci and Collins stating that “[t]he team will update the draft today and I will forward immediately—they will add further comments on the glycans.”
The reference to glycans is notable as they are carbohydrate-based polymers produced by humans. The push by Fauci, Collins, and Farrar to have the paper’s authors expand on the issue of glycans appears to confirm that they were exerting direct influence on the content of Proximal Origin.
According to Rossana Segreto, a microbiologist and member of the virus origins search group DRASTIC, emphasizing the presence of glycans in SARS-CoV-2 might suggest that Fauci and his group were looking to add arguments against serial passage in the lab. A study later found that Proximal Origin’s prediction on the presence of the O-linked glycans wasn’t valid.
The newly released emails do not reveal what additional discussions may have taken place among Fauci, Collins, and Farrar in the ensuing days. Perhaps that’s partly because Farrar had noted on another email thread addressed to Fauci’s teleconference group that scientific discussions should be taken offline.
News (19)
Online version appears to incorporate Fauci, Collins suggestions
Eleven days later, on 16 February 2020, Proximal Origin was published online. The paper argued aggressively for a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2.
An immediate observation from an examination of the February 16 version of Proximal Origin is that “glycans,” the term that Farrar, Fauci and Collins wanted to emphasize, is cited 12 times. We don’t know to what extent glycans were discussed in the Feb. 4 draft as it remains concealed by National Institute of Health (NIH) officials.
An item of particular significance is that the February 16 version omits any mention of the ACE2-transgenic mice that Fauci had initially flagged in his Feb. 4 email to Collins and Farrar. While the Feb. 16 version of Proximal Origin acknowledges that a furin cleavage site could have been generated through serial passage using animals with ACE2 receptors, the cited animals in the Feb. 16 version were ferrets—not transgenic mice.
The authors’ use of ferrets is peculiar not only because the term “transgenic mice” was almost certainly used in the February 4 version but also because it was known at the time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting serial passage experiments on coronaviruses using ACE2 transgenic mice.
Even more conspicuously, the reference to ferrets was removed entirely from a March 17 updated version of the paper. In its place, a passage was added that stated “such work [serial passage experiments with ACE2 animals] has also not previously been described,” in academic literature—despite the fact that the Wuhan Institute’s work with ACE2 transgenic mice has been extensively described in academic papers.
News (20)
Published version of proximal origin was altered
Following the online publication of Proximal Origin on 16 February 2020, the article was published in the prominent science journal Nature on 17 March. In addition to the changes surrounding the transgenic mice, a number of other notable edits were made to strengthen the natural origin narrative.
On 6 March 2020, the paper’s lead author, Kristian Andersen, appeared to acknowledge the inputs from Collins, Farrar, and Fauci, when he emailed the three to say, “Thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 ‘origins’ paper.”
Perhaps most strikingly, the most often publicly cited passage from the March 17 version of the paper, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” doesn’t appear in the Feb. 16 version. Additionally, while the Feb. 16 version states that “genomic evidence does not support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct” the March 17 version was altered to state that “the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Similar changes in language are evident in various parts of the March 17 version. For example, a section that stated “analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct” was amended to read “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct.”
The March 17 version also omits an entire section from the Feb. 16 version that centered around an amino acid called phenylalanine. According to Segreto, a similarly situated amino acid in the original SARS virus had “mutated into phenylalanine as result of cell passage in human airway epithelium.” Segreto surmises that the Proximal Origin authors might have deleted this section so as not to highlight that the phenylalanine in SARS-CoV-2 might have resulted from serial passage in a lab.
Segreto’s analysis is backed up by the fact that another section in the Feb. 16 version which states that “experiments with [the original] SARS-CoV have shown that engineering such a site at the S1/S2 junction enhances cell–cell fusion,” was reworded in the March 17 version to leave out the word “engineering.” Indeed, while the Feb. 16 version merely downplayed the possibility of the virus having been engineered in a lab, in the March 17 version, the word “engineered” was expunged from the paper altogether.
Another sentence omitted from the March 17 version noted that “[i]nterestingly, 200 residents of Wuhan did not show coronavirus seroreactivity.” Had the sentence remained, it would have suggested that, unlike other regions in China, no SARS-related viruses were circulating in Wuhan in the years leading up to the pandemic. That makes natural spillover less likely. The director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, herself admitted that she never expected a SARS-related virus to emerge in Wuhan. When viruses emerged naturally in the past, they emerged in southern China.
Shi’s credibility already was coming under fire for failing to disclose that she had the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 in her possession for seven years—a point noted early on by Segreto. Additionally, the Wuhan Institute took its entire database of viral sequences offline on Sept. 12, 2019. Despite the Wuhan Institute’s documented deletion and concealment of data, Proximal Origin’s central argument is that SARS-CoV-2 had to be natural since its backbone didn’t match any known backbones.
However, even before the March 17 version was published, Segreto had stated publicly that Proximal Origin’s central backbone argument was inherently flawed, precisely because there was no way of knowing whether the Chinese lab had published the relevant viral sequences.
News (21)
Fauci, Collins, Farrar roles improperly concealed
The email exchange among Fauci, Farrar, and Collins presents clear evidence that the three men took an active role in shaping the narrative of Proximal Origin. Indeed, a careful comparison of the Feb. 16 and March 17 versions show that the changes made fail to reflect any fundamental change in scientific analysis.
Instead, the authors employed linguistic changes and wholesale deletions that appear to have been designed to reinforce the natural origin narrative.
Close scrutiny of the email discussions by the three scientists also suggests that there was no legal justification for redacting any of the newly released information in the first place.
Science journals require that contributions to scientific papers need to be acknowledged. According to Nature’s publishing guidelines, “[c]ontributors who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.” The newly revealed sections of the still-redacted emails appear to confirm that Fauci, Farrar, and Collins met the criteria for acknowledgement but their names have never appeared on any published version of Proximal Origin, suggesting that the three didn’t want their involvement in the paper’s creation to be known.
News (22)
Collins asked Fauci "to help put down" Fox News Story
A final email released by the House Republicans shows that Collins wrote Fauci several months later on April 16, 2020, telling him that he had hoped that Proximal Origin would have “settled” the origin debate, but it apparently hadn’t since Bret Baier of Fox News was reporting that sources were confident the virus had come out of a lab.
Collins asked Fauci whether the NIH could do something “to help put down this very destructive conspiracy” that seemed to be “growing momentum.” Collins also suggested that he and Fauci ask the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to weigh in. As was revealed in previous emails released under FOIA, Fauci’s group had pushed NASEM in early Feb. 2020 to promote the natural origin narrative.
Fauci told Collins that the lab leak theory was a “shiny object” that would go away in time. However, the next day, Fauci took responsive action when he categorically dismissed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19 during on April 17, 2020, White House press conference. In doing so, Fauci cited the Proximal Origin paper as corroboration of his claims. Notably, Fauci feigned independence, telling reporters that he couldn’t recall the names of the authors. Unbeknownst to reporters and the public at the time, four out of the five authors had participated in Fauci’s Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference.
Now, we know that Fauci had involvement in shaping the very article that he cited.
Fauci’s intervention at the April 17 White House briefing was effective, since media interest in the lab leak theory quickly waned. It didn’t resurface until May 2021, when former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade published an article discussing the likelihood of a lab leak. Wade noted that “[a] virologist keen to continue his career would be very attentive to Fauci’s and Farrar’s wishes.”
Notably, Segreto had raised a similar concern after Proximal Origin was first published in February 2020, asking whether certain virologists were scared that if the truth came out, their research activities would be curtailed.
Tennis star Novak Djokovic and his wife own an 80 percent share in a Danish biotech firm developing a treatment for COVID-19 that does not involve vaccination, the company’s boss said on Wednesday.
The Serbian native 34, and his wife Jelena, 35, bought a majority stake in QuantBioRes back in June 2020, just months into the pandemic, the company’s chief executive Ivan Loncarevic confirmed to Reuters.
Loncarevic did not say how much the stake was worth but confirmed that Djokovic owns 40.8 percent while his wife owns 39.2 percent of the company.
Efforts to contact a Djokovic spokesperson for comment were unsuccessful.
QuantBioRes has about 12 researchers working in Denmark, Australia, and Slovenia, according to Loncarevic, and the company is developing a peptide that inhibits COVID-19 from infecting the human cell.
The CEO stressed that the company was working on a treatment and not a vaccine for COVID-19, and expects to launch clinical trials in Britain this summer, according to Loncarevic.
The company’s website says it started developing a “deactivation mechanism” for COVID-19 in July 2020 and utilizes a “unique and novel Resonant Recognition Model (RRM).”
RRM is a “biophysical model based on findings that certain frequencies within the distribution of energies of free electrons along the protein are critical for protein biological function and interaction with protein receptors and other targets,” according to QuantBioRes.
These predictions can be used to help design treatments for viral diseases and resistant bacteria.
“With our innovative and insightful RRM technology, we strive to help humanity by developing treatment and cure for retroviruses and resistant bacteria,” the website states. “Our highly skilled team of biochemists, physicists, engineers, and programmers have worked tirelessly to bring QuantBioRes – QBR to the forefront of the industry.”
Djokovic flew out of Australia to his native Serbia on 17 January after losing a legal challenge to overturn the cancellation of his visa by Australian Immigration Minister Alex Hawke.
News (24)
Ireland to end most covid restrictions, including covid passport
Reporter : Lily Zhou, The Epoch Times PREMIUM
Almost all CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus restrictions in Ireland will end on Saturday, including domestic COVID-19 Certificates, curfews, social distancing, and capacity limits.
Addressing the nation following the recommendation to lift the restrictions from the National Public Health Emergency Team, Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Micheál Martin declared it’s time for the Irish to “be ourselves again.”
This makes Ireland the second country following England to remove mandatory vaccine passports after they were implemented.
But the mask mandate, self-isolation rules, and protective measures in schools will remain, and Martin “strongly encourage[d]” people to get themselves and their children vaccinated.
After a Cabinet meeting on Friday afternoon, Martin said the Coalition government agreed to lift most of the restrictions the next day.
“Humans are social beings and we Irish are more social than most. As we look forward to this spring, we need to see each other again. We need to see each other smile. We need to sing again,” he said.
“As we navigate this new phase of COVID, it is time to be ourselves again.”
The Taoiseach said people’s trust in the government is a “precious and powerful,” yet “fragile” thing that requires “confidence that the government will do what is needed in an emergency,” as well as knowing “their government will not impose restrictions on their personal freedoms for any longer than is necessary.”
From 6 am on Saturday, COVID certificates, which are currently required as proof of vaccination or recovery to access indoor hospitality venues, cinemas, theatres, gyms, and leisure centres, will be scrapped.
Premises will no longer have to manage people’s movements, group sizes, and distances, and the 8 p.m. curfew for hospitality businesses and indoor events will be lifted.
Restrictions on private indoor meetings (up to four families) and capacity limits for events and weddings will also be removed.
However, mask-wearing will still be required on public transport for those aged 9 and over, in schools for children in third class and above, and in most indoor public spaces for those aged 13 and over, unless food and drinks are being consumed.
The testing and isolation guidance for people with CCP virus symptoms, positive cases, and their contacts remain the same.
The mask mandate and testing and isolation guidance will be reviewed in mid-February, by which time Martin estimates children aged between 5 and 11 “will have had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated.”
In Ireland, all over-16s have been offered a booster dose of a covi vaccine, and children aged between 5 and 15 have been offered one dose.
The rules on international travels also remain unchanged, with all arrivals required to show proof of vaccination, recovery, or negative PCR test results.
The Taoiseach went on to say that “a number of key supports particularly the employment wage subsidy scheme” will be extended to support the recovery of society.
News (25)
Deltacron: the story of the variant that wasn't
Reporter : Freda Kreier, Nature
On 7 January, virologist Leondios Kostrikis announced on local television that his research group at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia had identified several SARS-CoV-2 genomes that featured elements of both the Delta and Omicron variants.
Named by them as ‘Deltacron,’ Kostrikis and his team uploaded 25 of the sequences to the popular public repository GISAID that evening, and another 27 a few days later. On 8 January, financial news outlet Bloomberg picked up the story, and Deltacron became international news.
The response from the scientific community was swift. Many specialists declared both on social media and to the press that the 52 sequences did not point to a new variant, and were not the result of recombination — the genetic sharing of information — between viruses, but instead probably resulted from contamination in the laboratory.
“There is no such thing as #Deltacron,” tweeted Krutika Kuppalli, a member of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 technical team based at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, on 9 January. “#Omicron and #Delta did NOT form a super variant.”
Spread of misinformation
The story behind how a small crop of SARS-CoV-2 sequences became the focus of a brief and intense scientific controversy is complicated. And although some researchers applaud the system for quickly catching a possible sequencing error, others warn that the events of last week may offer a cautionary tale on the spread of misinformation during the pandemic.
Kostrikis says that aspects of his original hypothesis have been misconstrued, and that — despite the confusing name that some of the media took to mean that the sequences were those of a Delta–Omicron recombinant virus — he never said that the sequences represented a hybrid of the two.
Nevertheless, 72 hours after the researchers uploaded the sequences, Kostrikis removed them from public view on the database, pending further investigation.
Cheryl Bennett, an official at the GISAID Foundation’s Washington DC office says that, as more than 7 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes have been uploaded to the GISAID database since January 2020, some sequencing mistakes should not come as a surprise.
“However, rushing to conclusions on data that have just been made available by labs that find themselves under significant time pressure to generate data in a timely manner is not helpful in any outbreak,” she says.
An error in the sequence?
The ‘Deltacron’ sequences were generated from virus samples obtained by Kostrikis and his team in December as part of an effort to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants in Cyprus. While examining some of their sequences, the researchers noticed an Omicron-like genetic signature in the gene for the spike protein, which helps the virus to enter cells.
In an e-mail to Nature, Kostrikis explains that his initial hypothesis was that some Delta virus particles had independently evolved mutations in the spike gene similar to those common in Omicron. But after the wide news coverage, other scientists working on genetic sequencing and COVID-19 pointed out another possibility: a lab error.
Sequencing any genome depends on primers — short bits of manufactured DNA that serve as the starting point for sequencing by binding to the target sequence.
Delta, however, has a mutation in the spike gene that reduces some primers’ ability to bind to it, making it harder to sequence this region of the genome. Omicron doesn’t share this mutation, so if any Omicron particles were mixed into the sample owing to contamination, it might make the sequenced spike gene seem to be similar to that in Omicron, says Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport.
This type of contamination, says Kamil, is “so, so common”.
Kostrikis counters that if Deltacron was a product of contamination, sequencing should have turned up Omicron sequences with Delta-like mutations, as Omicron has its own primer-hindering mutation. He adds that the Deltacron lab contamination argument was “spearheaded by social media without considering our complete data, and without providing any real solid evidence that it is not real.”
Debunk debacle
However, other researchers have also pointed out that even if the sequences aren’t the result of contamination, the mutations identified by Kostrikis are not exclusive to Omicron and are found in other variants, making ‘Deltacron’ something of a misnomer.
In fact, GISAID is littered with sequences that have elements of sequences seen in other variants, says Thomas Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. Such sequences “get uploaded all the time”, he says. “But, generally, people don’t have to debunk them because there isn’t a load of international press all over them.”
“Scientists need to be very careful about what they are saying,” one virologist, who wanted to remain anonymous to avoid becoming embroiled in the controversy, told Nature. “When we say something, borders can be closed.”
Kostrikis now says he is “in the process of investigating all the crucial views expressed by prominent scientists around the world about my recent announcement”. He says he plans on submitting the research for peer review.
In the interim, Kamil and other researchers fear that such incidents could make researchers more hesitant to share time-sensitive data. “You have to allow for the scientific community to self-correct,” he says. “And, in a pandemic, you have to facilitate the rapid sharing of viral genome data, because that’s how we find variants.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00149-9
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