In his 2015 TED Talk titled "The Next Outbreak? We're Not Ready," Bill Gates predicting: "If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war."
Over the past decade, the world’s richest man has become the World Health Organization’s second biggest donor, second only to the United States and just above the United Kingdom. This largesse gives him outsized influence over its agenda, one that could grow as the U.S. and the U.K. threaten to cut funding if the agency doesn’t make a better investment case.
“The foundation’s impact on the WHO is enormous,” said Garrett, of the Council on Foreign Relations. “If they weren’t there, if they walked away with their money, the deleterious impact would be profound, and everyone is all too aware of that.”
“To actually stop the virus, [China] had to do rapid testing of any suspect case, immediate isolation of anyone who was a confirmed or suspected case, and then quarantine the close contacts for 14 days so that they could figure out if any of them were infected,” Aylward told New Scientist in an exclusive interview. “Those were the measures that stopped transmission in China, not the big travel restrictions and lockdowns.”
A group of Iranian physicians have written a letter to certain regional heads of state, urging them to take necessary measures to destroy “all of the US biological laboratories,” amid reports and speculation that the global coronavirus outbreak has been caused by unidentified laboratories spreading the epidemic as part of a "biological warfare."
Fallout from Covid-19 outbreak puts Beijing and Washington on a collision course. Additionally, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and economic sacrifice, with or without a reboot of the world-system, a more pressing question remains: will imperial elites still choose to keep waging full-spectrum-dominance hybrid war against China?
"US irresponsible, opaque, selfish, disorganized: analysts" - "Low transparency" - "Anarchy in the US" - "The world should be worried about the situation in the US."
“It’s China’s fault,” Bolsonaro claimed on Twitter, retweeting a message that said: “The blame for the global coronavirus pandemic has a name and surname: the Chinese Communist party.” Yang Wanming, Beijing’s top diplomat in Brazil, demanded an immediate retraction and apology for the “evil insult”, while his embassy accused Eduardo Bolsonaro of contracting “a mental virus” during a recent trip to the United States.
Wuhan, the epicenter of China’s coronavirus epidemic, will likely see new infections drop to zero by the end of this month, an expert with the country’s top panel on battling the illness said on Thursday, even as the city reported a quicker rise in new confirmed cases.
Even in Hubei, where some 10,000 cases remain, the pressure on front-line medical workers has eased. On March 17, the first batch of nearly 4,000 medical workers who were parachuted into Wuhan to help control the outbreak were able to leave. With so many provinces having downgraded their emergency response levels, China is slowly - and cautiously - returning to normal lif
India, the world’s biggest democracy, built a massive database containing information and biometrics of its citizens in the form of Aadhaar back in 2009. Now, it’s planning to build a new database that will continually track the lives of 1.2 billion people living in the country — and further enable surveillance without legal frameworks to prevent its misuse.
Israel's Cabinet has authorized the Shin Bet internal security agency to use mobile-phone tracking technology to monitor the movements of coronovirus patients, despite an outcry from privacy advocates.
Denmark's parliament on Thursday night unanimously passed an emergency coronavirus law which gives health authorities powers to force testing, treatment and quarantine with the backing of the police. The far-reaching new law will remain in force until March 2021, when it will expire under a sunset clause. Jens Elo Rytter, law professor at Copenhagen University, said the measures were unlike anything passed in the last 75 years "It is certainly the most extreme since the Second World War," Initially, the government wanted to the law to give the police the right to enter private homes without a court order if there is a suspicion of coronavirus infection. But this was dropped after opposition from parties in the parliament.
#Comment: The biotech industry continues their go-to "we must control and engineer life on all levels, or all die" narrative, under the implicit "Everything is IP & Money" paradigm . It illustrates, that the industry by and large still has not comprehended the power of "scaling out" systems , instead of the legacy "scaling up". In short, greedy control freaks disregarding the flexibility and resilience of natural ecosystems which have been evolutionary fine-tuned for aeons.
Along with the climate crisis, the disappearance of non-human life is our most pressing problem. To fully understand how big the problem is, we need to think of this loss in terms of biomass instead of the number of species.
We cannot live on a dead planet. But it’s unknown how much non-human life we really need for Homo sapiens to survive. If people can manage in martian base camps with tanks of tilapia and a few green plants, a great deal more can be destroyed before our planet becomes truly unliveable.
As Aldana thinks about opening and closing his hand, engineers “hijack” this signal from his brain. They reprogrammed a robotic walking system to read that signal as an initiation of steps, allowing Aldana to walk for the first time since his accident. They hope to expand this work further. (Robert Camarena/University of Miami-Miami Project)
At age 16, German Aldana snaped his spine just below his neck. For the next five years, he could move only his neck, and his arms a little. Researchers with the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis carefully opened Aldana's skull and, at the surface of the brain, implanted electrodes. Then, in the lab, they trained a computer to interpret the pattern of signals from those electrodes as he imagines opening and closing his hand. The computer then transfers the signal to a prosthetic on Aldana's forearm, which then stimulates the appropriate muscles to cause his hand to close. The entire process takes 400 milliseconds from thought to grasp.
In 2016 astronomers discovered an earth-sized rock planet around the nearest neighbour of our sun, Proxima Centauri, which orbits its star within its life-friendly zone. Since then, the question of whether “Proxia Centauri b” itself is life-friendly or not has been the subject of scientific controversy. A new study confirms again that the planet could be life-friendly despite its active central star.
Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian wrote on Twitter: “This is so astonishing that it changed many things I used to believe in.” Photo: AP
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian took to Twitter on Friday to double down on an unproven claim that the US military brought the new coronavirus
to the central city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began.
Zhao urged his more than 287,000 followers in two tweets on Friday morning to widely share an allegation from a Canada-based conspiracy website that the coronavirus originated in the US rather than the Wuhan seafood market that is thought to be its source.
“This is so astonishing that it changed many things I used to believe in,” he wrote on his official account.
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a letter to the United Nations promoting a conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is a biological weapon created in a laboratory. In the letter, he claimed COVID-19 is “a new weapon for establishing and/or maintaining [the] political and economic upper hand in the global arena.” He went on to say the flulike illness, which has infected tens of thousands, was “produced in laboratories” by the “warfare stock houses of biologic war belonging to world hegemonic powers.”
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman who promoted online theories about the origins of Covid-19 is the latest high-profile figure to make unverified claims. Beijing angered by US politicians who have characterised it as a ‘Chinese virus’ and Senator Tom Cotton’s suggestion it came from a lab in Wuhan
Diplomat David Stilwell delivers a ‘stern representation’ of the US government’s position to Cui Tiankai. Meeting in Washington follows Chinese foreign ministry spokesman’s insinuation that the US military brought the coronavirus to China
The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) has issued updated guidelines for exposures to RF/microwave radiation. “The guidelines have been developed after a thorough review of all relevant scientific literature, scientific workshops and an extensive public consultation process. They provide protection against all scientifically substantiated adverse health effects due to EMF exposure in the 100 kHz to 300 GHz range,” according to Eric van Rongen, the chairman of ICNIRP. “We know parts of the community are concerned about the safety of 5G and we hope the updated guidelines will help put people at ease,” he said. Van Rongen is with the Health Council of the Netherlands. The new guidelines are published in Health Physics and are open access. A copy is available here. They were last updated in 1998. The ICNIRP press release is here.
As the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread around the world, only a couple of companies have successfully brought treatments to clinical trials so far. One of them is Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD), whose former Ebola drug candidate, remdesivir, appears to be an effective way to treat COVID-19 symptoms.
Gates: "Although the percentage of the HIV burden [The number of affected people] that’s in developed countries is actually very small, at roughly 5%, the spending to help those patients is a significant portion of the total globally. Gilead Sciences, which has made a lot of money from HIV-related drugs, including Tenofovir, is our partner in using Tenofovir as a daily-dose prophylactic in the developing world. It had some good results, but the adherence on a daily prophylactic was very poor."
Testing for the novel coronavirus in the Seattle area will get a huge boost in the coming weeks as a project funded by Bill Gates and his foundation begins offering home-testing kits that will allow people who fear they may be infected to swab their noses and send the samples back for analysis.
That is why today, we are joining forces with Wellcome and Mastercard to beef up our response—backed by $125 million in both new funding and money already earmarked to tackle this epidemic. The money will be used to identify potential treatments for COVID-19, accelerate their development, and prepare for the manufacture of millions of doses for use worldwide. The expertise of pharmaceutical companies will be critical to this endeavor, named the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.
