1- UK tests reveal 17% of Londoners have COVID-19 antibodies
The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, says sample testing has shown that approximately 17 percent of London's population now have COVID-19 antibodies. The government has been criticized for its lack of testing across the country but has stepped up its efforts in recent weeks after setting a target of carrying out 200,000 tests a day by the end of May. Part of that process has included sample antibody testing in different regions of the UK to produce an estimate of the number of people who have contracted the virus.With a population of 8.9 million, the data mean roughly 1.5 million Londoners have had the disease during the crisis and produced antibodies that will fight the virus if they encounter the disease in the future.
2- Trump’s Vaccine Chief Has Vast Ties to Drug Industry, Posing Possible Conflicts
Moncef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive, is now overseeing the U.S. initiative to develop coronavirus treatments and vaccines. His financial interests and corporate roles have come under scrutiny.The chief scientist brought on to lead the Trump administration’s vaccine efforts has spent the last several days trying to disentangle pieces of his stock portfolio and his intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests, as critics point to the potential for significant conflicts of interest.The scientist, Moncef Slaoui, is a venture capitalist and a former longtime executive at GlaxoSmithKline. Most recently, he sat on the board of Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass., biotechnology firm with a $30 billion valuation that is pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. He resigned when President Trump named him last Thursday to the new post as chief adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the federal drive for coronavirus vaccines and treatments.Just days into his job, the extent of Dr. Slaoui’s financial interests in drug companies has begun to emerge: The value of his stock holdings in Moderna jumped nearly $2.4 million, to $12.4 million when the company released preliminary, partial data from an early phase of its candidate vaccine trial that helped send the markets soaring on Monday. Ms. Canter, a former ethics lawyer in the Obama and Clinton administrations, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies, pointed out that GSK’s vaccine candidate with Sanofi could wind up competing with other manufacturers vying for government approval and support.“If he retains stock in companies that are investing in the development of a vaccine, and he’s involved in overseeing this process to select the safest vaccine to combat Covid-19, regardless of how wonderful a person he is, we can’t be confident of the integrity of any process in which he is involved,” Ms. Canter said.In addition, his affiliation with Medicxi could complicate matters: Two of its investors are GSK and a division of Johnson & Johnson, which is also developing a potential vaccine.
Moderna has already received nearly $500 million from the government to help scale up production.
Oh, there’s Moderna, again. Fauci's darlings
3. From Yaya: Fighting Disinfo is one thing, but ...
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, former head of Cochrane [Wiki], expelled after publishing this book.You can, however, read his article: Corona: an epidemic of mass panic” LINK(The sad thing about the book is that it apparently can only be read with something like Amazon's "Kindle". It would be interesting to find out why.)You can read more about Dr. Gøtzsche at the blog of Dr. Malcolm Kendrick who states:
- ...when an organisation that I had a lot of time for, the organisation now known as Cochrane, which used to be the Cochrane Collaboration, loses its way, one wonders if the lamps truly are turning out across the world. Perhaps never to be turned on again.
4. Corona: An epidemic of mass panic- March 21/20
By Professor Peter C. Gøtzsche
Almost everyone I talk to, lay people and colleagues (I am a specialist in internal medicine and have worked for two years at a department of infectious diseases) consider the Coronavirus pandemic a pandemic of panic, more than anything else.On 8 March, I published in the BMJ about this. I wrote: “What if the Chinese had not tested their patients for coronavirus or there had not been any test? Would we have carried on with our lives, without restrictions, not worrying about some deaths here and there among old people, which we see every winter? I think so.”The WHO estimates that an influenza season kills about 500,000 people, or about 50 times more than those who have died so far during more than 3 months of the Coronavirus epidemic.
I also wrote: “Is it evidence-based healthcare to close schools and universities, cancel flights and meetings, forbid travel, and to isolate people wherever they happen to fall ill? In Denmark, the government recommends cancellation of events with over 1000 participants.”
Our main problem is that no one will ever get in trouble for measures that are too draconian. They will only get in trouble if they do too little. So, our politicians and those working with public health do much more than they should do. No such draconian measures were applied during the 2009 influenza pandemic, and they obviously cannot be applied every winter, which is all year round, as it is always winter somewhere. We cannot close down the whole world permanently.Should it turn out that the epidemic wanes before long, there will be a queue of people wanting to take credit for this. And we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time. But remember the joke about tigers. “Why do you blow the horn?” “To keep the tigers away.” “But there are no tigers here.” “There you see!”
The harms include suicides that go up in times of unemployment, and when people’s businesses built up carefully over many years lie in ruins, they might kill themselves. The panic is also killing life itself. John Ioannidis’ article from 17 March is the best I have seen so far: “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data.”
5. Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say
Medical professionals at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California have revealed their experiences in the hospital's trauma center after mental health took a nosedive amid lockdown.Dr Mike deBoisblank told ABC 7 News: 'We've never seen number like this, in such a short period of time. I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.'His colleague, nurse Kacey Hansen, has worked at the medical center for 33 years and has never seen so much 'intentional injury'.'They intend to die. Sometimes, people will make what we call a "gesture". It's a cry for help,' she added.