“In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the United States’ primary agency for public health research—only “diverted a small fraction of its budget to COVID-19 research”…
The UK’s Common Cold Research Unit closed down in 1980 after 50 years researching respiratory virus, looking for preventatives/cures. It discovered, among other things, the 4 Human coronaviruses that cause 10% of Common Colds and published over a thousand papers. It concluded cures/vaccines for respiratory virus were not effective.
Most other Countries had decades of similar research.
SARS CoV 2 means there was a SARS CoV 1 and several previous SARS, well researched.
The UK, along with most other developed Countries, had an Epidemic Plan based on a century of research and experience.
What further research was necessary?
We knew respiratory virus are transmitted by aerosols not water droplets and therefore surgical/medical masks could not be effective; we knew they were not transmitted by fomites (surfaces); we knew RNA virus evolve so quickly vaccines are effective (limited) only against the original, that they will be ineffective against subsequent versions and may promote transmission and dominance of new variant; we knew infectious people should not be brought into contact with non-infected people, but that is exactly what they did admitting cases into the general hospital population.
Just how much more is there to know?
The problem was, the ‘experts’ and political goons ignored everything we had learnt and knew, and did the exact opposite to what good practice demanded.
I agree with you. It has been much worse than anybody thinks today. Two years ago I started a big project to assess how Chileans responded to the virus, the disease, and the pandemic (I have been studying Microbiology to understand "the experts"). My basic hypothesis was that their responses were determined mainly by the information and knowledge they were getting from foreign sources and how they were transmitted/communicated first to the government and then to private organizations and ordinary people. Last week I stopped my project because there was too little abroad that could be considered uncertain but serious information and knowledge --yes, I failed to find reasonable inputs for Chileans' beliefs about the virus, the disease, and the pandemic. It'd have been "too easy" to approve/reject the government's responses by choosing some tentative ideas and rumors discussed abroad (domestic public and private organizations that could have helped are not transparent enough to rely on whatever their official say today). Don't be surprised we learn nothing from what happened in the past 2 years.
BTW, my final decision to terminate the project was heavily influenced by how U.S. "experts" had been manipulating information and knowledge about the monkeypox shock in the past two weeks. Science has always being unsettled but now it's being intentionally destroyed by the same barbarians that have taken over the U.S. government.
it's worse. it travels easily in many common lab animals (hmm i wonder why?) like ferrets, so they don't even need human challenge. covid on surfaces, proximity to infected fecal matter, droplets, aerosols you name it, could be tested (I'm assuming) Hell I'm sure you could even strap a mask on em of you tried hard enough.
May 29, 2022 might be the first time that I ever saw the word *bubbemeise* in a discussion of public policy. Perhaps the best known bubbemeise fitting to this particular topic is "Have chicken soup; it couldn't hurt."
The classifying of SARS-CoV-2 (covid-19 virus) as requiring BSL-3 laboratories limited researchers from doing the simple basic experiments like seeing how long a virus particle remains viable on a surface or what temperatures inactivate the virus on what surfaces. If you are not allowed to actually grow the virus, you can't know whether it is viable or not. A DNA test doesn't tell you whether a particle will infect a cell or not it only tells you whether it exists.
In 2007, 1,356 BSL-3 laboratories were registered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture (APHIS-USDA) for select agent research. Note: many are specialized for plant diseases.
BSL-3 is for a category of very high risk virus that you don't want to get out of a research lab. It was correct to start at BSL-3 and put the researchers in bunny suits and take drastic procedures to prevent lab leaks. However, when it spread everywhere and you could get viable virus particle in the local supermarket, it was destructive to keep the research restricted to BSL-3 labs that were in short supply (require special training) and doing more critical research than checking whether viable virus when breathing through a mask by exposing a plate of live cells and see if they get infected by a viable virus (plaque assay). Using the everywhere available BSL-2 labs to grow the virus to see if it is viable would add an insignificant risk of a lab leak, with great knowledge gain. A lab escape where the virus was everywhere was irrelevant, except in the eyes of the bureaucrats protecting their turf.
BSL-2 labs that can handle viable HIV virus and others like Hepatitis virus and common pathogens are everywhere. It is just a mater of good lab practices and basic sanitation: https://www.vumc.org/safety/bio/basics-biosafety-level-2. A change of SARS-CoV-2 to BSL-2 would have allowed a hundred times more researchers to work out the details. All biology labs in all universities could add to the knowledge, not just the CDC selected approved labs.
We don't care about inactive virus but need to know whether it is viable or not and that takes seeing if it will or will not infect a living cell. Just grow a cell in culture add the sample and look at it the next day and see if it killed the cell.
Here's a novel concept. Anyone paid by public funds to do "science" must allow their "science" be subjected to independent review and criticism, also paid for by public funds.
Imagine how different Covid policies would have played out if advocacy for lockdowns, mandates and vaccines was fairly balanced by opposition to Covid mania dogma. If scientists were compensated just as well opposing a policy as in supporting it logic suggests we would have seen much more open opposition to the "science" and the charlatans would have been reigned in much more quickly.
Or more generally, who think in terms of cost benefit analysis. I suspect that CDC/FDA and other regulatory agencies do not have Chief Economists who weigh in on policy
“In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the United States’ primary agency for public health research—only “diverted a small fraction of its budget to COVID-19 research”…
The UK’s Common Cold Research Unit closed down in 1980 after 50 years researching respiratory virus, looking for preventatives/cures. It discovered, among other things, the 4 Human coronaviruses that cause 10% of Common Colds and published over a thousand papers. It concluded cures/vaccines for respiratory virus were not effective.
Most other Countries had decades of similar research.
CoVid = coronavirus disease = Cold/‘flu-like symptoms.
SARS CoV 2 means there was a SARS CoV 1 and several previous SARS, well researched.
The UK, along with most other developed Countries, had an Epidemic Plan based on a century of research and experience.
What further research was necessary?
We knew respiratory virus are transmitted by aerosols not water droplets and therefore surgical/medical masks could not be effective; we knew they were not transmitted by fomites (surfaces); we knew RNA virus evolve so quickly vaccines are effective (limited) only against the original, that they will be ineffective against subsequent versions and may promote transmission and dominance of new variant; we knew infectious people should not be brought into contact with non-infected people, but that is exactly what they did admitting cases into the general hospital population.
Just how much more is there to know?
The problem was, the ‘experts’ and political goons ignored everything we had learnt and knew, and did the exact opposite to what good practice demanded.
I agree with you. It has been much worse than anybody thinks today. Two years ago I started a big project to assess how Chileans responded to the virus, the disease, and the pandemic (I have been studying Microbiology to understand "the experts"). My basic hypothesis was that their responses were determined mainly by the information and knowledge they were getting from foreign sources and how they were transmitted/communicated first to the government and then to private organizations and ordinary people. Last week I stopped my project because there was too little abroad that could be considered uncertain but serious information and knowledge --yes, I failed to find reasonable inputs for Chileans' beliefs about the virus, the disease, and the pandemic. It'd have been "too easy" to approve/reject the government's responses by choosing some tentative ideas and rumors discussed abroad (domestic public and private organizations that could have helped are not transparent enough to rely on whatever their official say today). Don't be surprised we learn nothing from what happened in the past 2 years.
BTW, my final decision to terminate the project was heavily influenced by how U.S. "experts" had been manipulating information and knowledge about the monkeypox shock in the past two weeks. Science has always being unsettled but now it's being intentionally destroyed by the same barbarians that have taken over the U.S. government.
it's worse. it travels easily in many common lab animals (hmm i wonder why?) like ferrets, so they don't even need human challenge. covid on surfaces, proximity to infected fecal matter, droplets, aerosols you name it, could be tested (I'm assuming) Hell I'm sure you could even strap a mask on em of you tried hard enough.
May 29, 2022 might be the first time that I ever saw the word *bubbemeise* in a discussion of public policy. Perhaps the best known bubbemeise fitting to this particular topic is "Have chicken soup; it couldn't hurt."
The classifying of SARS-CoV-2 (covid-19 virus) as requiring BSL-3 laboratories limited researchers from doing the simple basic experiments like seeing how long a virus particle remains viable on a surface or what temperatures inactivate the virus on what surfaces. If you are not allowed to actually grow the virus, you can't know whether it is viable or not. A DNA test doesn't tell you whether a particle will infect a cell or not it only tells you whether it exists.
In 2007, 1,356 BSL-3 laboratories were registered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture (APHIS-USDA) for select agent research. Note: many are specialized for plant diseases.
BSL-3 is for a category of very high risk virus that you don't want to get out of a research lab. It was correct to start at BSL-3 and put the researchers in bunny suits and take drastic procedures to prevent lab leaks. However, when it spread everywhere and you could get viable virus particle in the local supermarket, it was destructive to keep the research restricted to BSL-3 labs that were in short supply (require special training) and doing more critical research than checking whether viable virus when breathing through a mask by exposing a plate of live cells and see if they get infected by a viable virus (plaque assay). Using the everywhere available BSL-2 labs to grow the virus to see if it is viable would add an insignificant risk of a lab leak, with great knowledge gain. A lab escape where the virus was everywhere was irrelevant, except in the eyes of the bureaucrats protecting their turf.
BSL-2 labs that can handle viable HIV virus and others like Hepatitis virus and common pathogens are everywhere. It is just a mater of good lab practices and basic sanitation: https://www.vumc.org/safety/bio/basics-biosafety-level-2. A change of SARS-CoV-2 to BSL-2 would have allowed a hundred times more researchers to work out the details. All biology labs in all universities could add to the knowledge, not just the CDC selected approved labs.
We don't care about inactive virus but need to know whether it is viable or not and that takes seeing if it will or will not infect a living cell. Just grow a cell in culture add the sample and look at it the next day and see if it killed the cell.
Here's a novel concept. Anyone paid by public funds to do "science" must allow their "science" be subjected to independent review and criticism, also paid for by public funds.
Imagine how different Covid policies would have played out if advocacy for lockdowns, mandates and vaccines was fairly balanced by opposition to Covid mania dogma. If scientists were compensated just as well opposing a policy as in supporting it logic suggests we would have seen much more open opposition to the "science" and the charlatans would have been reigned in much more quickly.
Follow the money. Just follow the money.
Or more generally, who think in terms of cost benefit analysis. I suspect that CDC/FDA and other regulatory agencies do not have Chief Economists who weigh in on policy