Coronavirus Hits Poor, Black & Hispanic Children: It is NOT What It Is!

August 5, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Coronavirus Hits Black & Hispanic Children

By Shlomo Maital

   “It is what it is”. That statement by President Trump, about America’s massive death toll from COVID-19, [160,000 persons so far and rising by 1,000 or more a day, every day since April 1] raised the blood pressure of a lot of people. So did his blatantly false statement that children are “totally immune”, modified to “virtually immune”. 

     But what was truly upsetting was not Trump’s lies, but medical facts, reported in the journal Pediatrics, and described in a CNN report. Black children, Hispanic children, poor children – all suffer far far more from the virus than others.   The virus has swept over society like a tsunami, but it has hit hardest the racial and income groups who always get hit hardest by everything. It is unfair, immoral, unacceptable. Black lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. Children’s lives matter. ALL lives matter. And no, it is NOT what it is.   What it is, is – White House officials and the President are tested daily, and get the results within hours. For the rest of America – the wait can be many days. The inequality starts right at the very top.  So does the moral rot.

     Here is a summary of the report in Pediatrics:

* Coronavirus infection rates in the United States are significantly higher among children of minority race and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, according to a new study

* The study examined 1,000 child patients tested between March 21 and April 28 in Washington DC. Only 7.3% of White children tested positive for coronavirus, in contrast to 30% of Black children and 46.4% of Hispanic children, the study found.

* Three times as many Black children reported known exposure to the virus as White children, the researchers reported.

* The test site collected basic demographic information for all patients; the research team then used survey data to estimate family income based on home addresses.

Of the 1,000 people tested, 207 were positive for coronavirus. About 9.7% of those in the highest income quartile were infected, while 37.7% in the lowest quartile tested positive, the team found.

* Of the patients tested, about one third were Black and about a quarter were Hispanic. The team found that the inequities existed even after they adjusted for age, sex and median family income.

   The data speak for themselves. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, lower-income groups, all suffer disproportionately. Why? They have to go to jobs with little social distancing, just to survive, and they have far poorer medical care and far less access to quality care.

     I hope we will NOT go back to the good old days. They weren’t so good. A great many things need fixing, and the virus has swept away the topsoil and revealed all the rot beneath.  Any society that accepts “it is what it is”, among children of color, is unworthy.  And its leaders are criminals.

How Soap Kills Corona

July 27, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

How Soap Kills Corona

By Shlomo Maital

       Political leaders, public health officials, doctors, talk show hosts, even Donald J. Trump, they all exhort us to wash our hands. Masks, distance, hygiene.

       But those of us who are curious may wonder: If the novel coronavirus is able to survive inside our hostile bodies, even when the immune system tosses fragmentation grenades at it, and T-cells and antibodies and who knows what —   why does soap kill virus? Simple soap? Really?

         I follow cable news closely, but have not heard anybody, including doctors, explain why soap kills virus. This is just a tiny symptom of the truly awful manner in which we the public are given information, or in fact, NOT given it. We are told what to do, endlessly – but we are not told clearly, carefully, exactly why, based on science. I guess the assumption is, the public is dumb, dumber, dumbest. And that’s just not true.

           So here, from a back-page article in the New York Times, printed in March, is the explanation. It is by Ferris Jabr, March 13, 2020.:

“People typically think of soap as gentle and soothing, but from the perspective of microorganisms, it is often extremely destructive. A drop of ordinary soap diluted in water is sufficient to rupture and kill many types of bacteria and viruses, including the new coronavirus that is currently circling the globe. The secret to soap’s impressive might is its hybrid structure.   Soap is made of pin-shaped molecules, each of which has a hydrophilic head — it readily bonds with water — and a hydrophobic tail, which shuns water and prefers to link up with oils and fats. These molecules, when suspended in water, alternately float about as solitary units, interact with other molecules in the solution and assemble themselves into little bubbles called micelles, with heads pointing outward and tails tucked inside.  

   “Some bacteria and viruses have lipid membranes that resemble double-layered micelles with two bands of hydrophobic tails sandwiched between two rings of hydrophilic heads. These membranes are studded with important proteins that allow viruses to infect cells and perform vital tasks that keep bacteria alive. Pathogens wrapped in lipid membranes include coronaviruses, H.I.V., the viruses that cause hepatitis B and C, herpes, Ebola, Zika, dengue, and numerous bacteria that attack the intestines and respiratory tract. When you wash your hands with soap and water, you surround any microorganisms on your skin with soap molecules. The hydrophobic tails of the free-floating soap molecules attempt to evade water; in the process, they wedge themselves into the lipid envelopes of certain microbes and viruses, prying them apart.

   “ “They act like crowbars and destabilize the whole system,” said Prof. Pall Thordarson, acting head of chemistry at the University of New South Wales. Essential proteins spill from the ruptured membranes into the surrounding water, killing the bacteria and rendering the viruses useless.”

Mankind has used soap for 4,000 years.   Now we know why it works. If only we could find a therapeutic drug that works as well INSIDE our bodies, as soap does on our hands.

 

Modern-day Prophets Who Foresaw the Pandemic: We Ignored Them

July 26, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Modern-day Prophets Who Predicted the Pandemic: We Ignored Them

By Shlomo Maital

Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of the Holy Temple, by Rembrandt

   On Wednesday evening, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av, we Jews mark the anniversary of the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem 2,606 years ago, in 586 BCE. We sit on low benches and read the book of Lamentations — “How you sit, alone, great city, a great nation, now bereaved, like a widow”.

     The prophet Jeremiah warned King Hezekiah – and foresaw the disaster. Hezekiah ignored him, then imprisoned him. Hezekiah paid a heavy price.   Some scholars say Jeremiah wrote the Book of Lamentations.

     Today, when we refer to prophecies of doom, we call them ‘jeremiads’, lower case ‘j’.

     Fast forward from 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and took the people of Israel into exile, to Babylon — to 2020, and the pandemic.

     We were warned. And by more than one “Jeremiah”. Here is the proof:

   * Bill Gates, TED  talk, 2015: 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,” Gates said. “Not missiles, but microbes.”   Gates noted that many countries worked for years to reduce the risk of nuclear war, and needed to give similar attention to a massive mobilization against a killer virus.   “We’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic,” he said, echoing warnings in recent years from infectious disease doctors. “We’re not ready for the next epidemic.”

   Vaclav Smil, “Global Catastrophes and Trends” (book), Sept. 2012: “Consequently, the likelihood of another influenza pandemic during the next 50 years is virtually 100 percent”

     Preparing for the Next Pandemic, By Michael T. Osterholm, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005: “This is a critical point in our history. Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic. We must act now with decisiveness and purpose.” And in “Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs”, he warned, the US is not properly prepared for a pandemic.

     Robert G. Webster, “Flu Hunter: Unlocking the secrets of a virus”: “Nature will again challenge mankind with an equivalent of the 1918 influence virus. We need to be prepared.”

     In 2018, the US intelligence community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment team warned that “a novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat”.

   In the 2019 threat assessment: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic …that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources and increase calls on the US for support.” [The Trump administration, without explanation, postponed the DNI’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment which warns that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic. The office of the DNI was scheduled to deliver the Assessment to the House Intelligence Committee on February 12].

     US AID Director Jeremy Konyndyk, Politico, 2017: “At some point a highly fatal, highly contagious virus will emerge, like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which infected one-third of the world’s population and killed between 50 and 100 million people”. He added that President Trump is unprepared for such a pandemic.

   US National Security Council, Dr. Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness: in 2018: “The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern. Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no”. (John Bolton disbanded the NSC team).

     2006: Massachusetts Flu Pandemic Preparedness Plan: public health officials predicted as many as 2 million people could become ill. [4.25 million people have so far been ill with the coronavirus in the US and the numbers mount].

     Stephen Soderberg’s movie Contagion, released in 2011, is about a fictional virus called MEV-1, which became a global pandemic after a bat spread it to a pig, who spread it to a person…. The fictional virus had a 72-hour incubation period and high fatality rate.

       Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague described an epidemic in Algeria….

       Nobody listened to Jeremiah, who warned against allying with Egypt, against powerful Babylon. And nobody listened to the modern-day prophets either. Indeed, fake news/conspiracy mongers blame Bill Gates for the pandemic (along with George Soros), even though the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has donated, by some reports, over $350 million to COVID-19 mitigation and innovation.

       Why did we not heed Jeremiah? And for 2,606 years, why have we consistently turned a deaf ear to wise experts who warned of impending disaster and urged us to prepare?

     Jeremiah too paid a price, sent into exile in Egypt. It would appropriate if modern-day naysayers too were sent into exile ….. at least metaphorically.

 

Dr. Maurice Hilleman – Unsung Vaccine Hero Who Saved Millions

July 24, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dr. Maurice Hilleman – Uncelebrated Vaccine Hero Who Saved Millions

By Shlomo Maital

Dr. Maurice Hilleman – Saved Millions!

     Vaccines are front and center in the news these days; strangely, rumors and news and false news and half-truths about vaccines drive the stock market up and down.

   So perhaps it is worth recalling one of the world’s greatest vaccine innovators, Dr. Maurice Hilleman – thanks to a great piece in the New York Times, published a month ago and recently featured on the BBC. Hilleman, while working for Merck, was responsible for the measles mumps rubella (MMR) triple vaccine that has saved the lines of countless children. Here is the story:

     At 1 a.m. on March 21, 1963, an intense, irascible but modest Merck scientist named Maurice R. Hilleman was asleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Lafayette Hill when his 5-year-old daughter, Jeryl Lynn, woke him with a sore throat. Dr. Hilleman felt the side of her face and then the telltale swelling beneath the jaw indicating mumps. He tucked her back into bed, about the only treatment anyone could offer at the time. For most children, mumps was a nuisance disease, nothing worse than a painful swelling of the salivary glands. But Dr. Hilleman knew that it could sometimes leave a child deaf or otherwise permanently impaired.   He quickly dressed and drove 20 minutes to pick up proper sampling equipment from his laboratory. Returning home, he woke Jeryl Lynn long enough to swab the back of her throat and immerse the specimen in a nutrient broth. Then he drove back to store it in the laboratory freezer.   The name Maurice Hilleman may not ring a bell. But today 95 percent of American children receive the M.M.R. — the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella that Dr. Hilleman invented, starting with the mumps strain he collected that night from his daughter.

We read endless stories of the US Federal government, UK government, and governments in China and Russia, throwing billions of dollars at pharmaceutical companies, buying in advance millions of doses of vaccines that are as yet unproven. And I think of Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one irascible physician and vaccine developer who saved more persons than any other scientist alive or dead.

It was by no means his only contribution. At Dr. Hilleman’s death in 2005, other researchers credited him with having saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century. Over his career, he devised or substantially improved more than 25 vaccines, including 9 of the 14 now routinely recommended for children. “One person did that!” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a longtime friend of Dr. Hilleman’s and now director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Truly amazing.”

Is there a Maurice Hilleman out there, applying perseverance, creativity, wisdom, and, yes, opportunism (his daughter’s illness) to save the world?

 

 

You Cannot Manage What You Cannot Measure: How to Implement Evidence-Based COVID-19 Strategy

July 22, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

You Cannot Manage What You Cannot Measure:

How to Implement Evidence-Based COVID-19 Strategy

By Shlomo Maital

  As a management educator, I stress a simple principle: Management begins with measurement. What you do not, cannot, measure, you cannot, will not, manage. But you have to measure wisely, correctly, accurately, and promptly.

   Man, does this ever apply to the chaos we find ourselves now, in my country Israel and in other hotspot countries like the US!

   So, what should we be measuring?   Here is a thorough, reasoned proposal by Tom Frieden and Cyrus Shahpar.   Frieden is a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, runs the nonprofit group Resolve to Save Lives, and Dr. Shahpar is the director of a team devoted to preventing epidemics.   * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opinion/coronavirus-state-data.html     Here is the URL for the list of 15 (if it is hard to read the jpeg’s below: https://preventepidemics.org/covid19/resources/indicators/

     Resolve to Save Lives, a coalition of national, state and academic partners including the American Public Health Association and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, has developed a list of 15 indicators. Their report argues: Every state and county should be able to collect and publish nine of these immediately and the other six within a few weeks.

       If we had these measures, our leaders, policymakers and the general public would know far better where we stand, what the goals are, how we are doing, and what lies ahead.

       The mass media continue to report on new cases, total cases, and deaths. The result is misleading, because, for instance, “very ill” cases lag behind new cases by two weeks or more.

       Here are the 15 measures that we really need, to manage the pandemic. CLI is COVID-like illness; ILI is influenza-like illness. PCR is polymerase chain reaction, widely used to rapidly make millions to billions of copies of a specific DNA sample, to detect, e.g., coronavirus. No country, I believe, has the full set of 15 – and very few countries have even a partial set of the 15.

       So ideally:   A team of epidemiologists, virologists and statisticians join together, and put in place a system for collecting data for the 15 indicators. In the US, this should be the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (notice: the acronym CDC omits the all-important P, Prevention!). The results are shown on a dashboard, simple, clear and understandable. And all of us can see for ourselves where we are, what is happening, what’s good, what’s bad, and how close we are to our goals. And, derived from the dashboard, what each of us needs to do to help reach the measured goals.

 

   

How to Save 40,000 Lives

July 21, 2020 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

How to Save 40,000 Lives

By Shlomo Maital

   OK – I am a very broken record. But I simply can’t get my mind around this one.

   The Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation, University of Washington, is perhaps one of the highest regarded credible sources of data and projections, related to the pandemic.

   They have just completed a comprehensive study of data, regarding the impact of wearing facial masks.   They not only read all the many studies – they re-analyzed the actual raw data.

     Here are the results, just published.

      Projected deaths from COVID-19 Under Three Scenarios, as of November 1: United States

                                                                                       Total Deaths                     Daily Deaths

  1. Easing, Opening                                          241,000                             1,341
  2. Current Mix: Closed/Open                         224,546                                815
  3. Universal masks worn (95%)                     183,242                                273 

     How can the leader of the richest nation in the world live with himself, knowing that his public scorn of masks, and politicization of mask-wearing as an invasion of freedom (the freedom to die and to kill), will potentially kill 40,000 people – the total number of people who die in traffic deaths every year in the United States? Run the numbers: Easing and opening, return to schools, as the Administration wishes, versus universal mask wearing (and that, by the way, refers to ordinary cloth masks) kills 58,000 unnecessarily — and the current open/closed mix?   224,546 minus 183,242 equals over 40,000 superfluous deaths.  

The IHME study shows conclusively that wearing a simple cloth mask, if everyone does, reduces the spread of COVID19 by 30%.  That is a really big number.  It could be the difference between an R0 number that creates a huge new wave, and an R0 number that gradually extinguishes the virus. 

       POTUS.  A one-man death squad, aided by some Neanderthal southern governors.  

The EU is back – the US is not

July 21, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The EU is back – the US is not

By Shlomo Maital

The Brexit fiasco generated enormous pessimism about the future of the European Union. There was talk about Italy leaving the EU, after extreme elements there broached the idea, or even Netherlands, which resents handouts to spendthrift EU nations.

   Well, the EU is back. Here is what the Financial Times reported on the bailout deal struck yesterday, after four long days of meetings, wrangling and compromise:

     “EU leaders have struck a deal on a landmark coronavirus recovery package that will involve the European Commission undertaking massive borrowing on the capital markets for the first time.   After days of sometimes bitter debate, the bloc’s heads of government agreed on a €750bn package aimed at funding post-pandemic relief efforts across the EU. The deal was announced in a tweet from Charles Michel, the European Council president at 05.31am (CET) on Tuesday and was hailed by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, as a “historic day for Europe”.   The recovery fund centers on a €390bn programme of grants to economically weakened member states — a significantly smaller sum than the €500bn package originally proposed by Berlin and Paris in May. Leaders also signed off on the EU’s next seven-year budget, which will be worth €1.074tn.   The deal, orchestrated by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Mr Michel, is the fruit of marathon negotiations under way in Brussels since Friday morning. The summit was the second longest in the bloc’s history, falling just shy of the record set at a meeting in Nice in 2000.”

  Once again, Angela Merkel, the lame-duck Chancellor of Germany, long after she announced her retirement, has returned to bring together disparate EU elements – from the autocratic Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, to the frugal four northern nations.

   Smaller frugal nations won an agreement to increase their rebates from the EU — Austria’s annual reduction will be doubled to €565m a year ($644 m.) compared with previous proposals, while the Netherlands’ rebate will jump to €1.92bn ($2.2 b.) from €1.57bn ($1.78 b.) .

   Contrast the ability of the fraught wrangling 27-nation European Union, moving to help the poor nations among it, with the hopeless helpless United States, where a) President Trump dumped responsibility for battling the pandemic on the 50 state governments and their governors, and saw as a result a horrendous second wave emerge, and b) led Republican opposition to provide financial help to state governments, while pressing them to re-open schools on Sept. 1, without the money it would take to do so safely.

  A New York Tmes Op-Ed asks, which major nation will emerge strongest from the pandemic? Not the US. And no, not China. Answer: Germany, the enlightened leader of sanity and compromise in the European Union.

A Little Bird that LOVES Summer – and flies 40,000 miles a year to enjoy it

July 19, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

A Little Bird that LOVES Summer – and flies 40,000 miles a year to enjoy it 

By Shlomo Maital

Arctic tern

   So – we humans love summer, right. In normal times: vacation, hiking, Nature, beaches, ocean, sunshine…   But there is a little bird, that weighs 100 grams, that REALLY loves summer. I mean, LOVES!   And it flies 40,000 miles round trip, or more,  just to enjoy permanent year-round summer.

   But how?

   So, Arctic terns breed during the summer, in the Arctic and northern temperate regions, in May-June. Then later in July they begin their migration south– far south, 12,000 miles to Antarctica. And they arrive in time for the Antarctic summer. Before winter again returns to the Antarctic, they fly back to the Arctic, another 12,000 miles.

   25,000 miles round trip – the distance around the Earth, at the equator. All this, for a little bird that weighs 100 grams.

     And if this is not amazing enough —   baby birds do it too. Fledglings are born, and within three months, they do the long migratory flight from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back.

     But wait. We do not do it justice. Arctic terns do not fly in a straight line, North Pole to South Pole and back. Tracking devices show this:

   Eleven birds that bred in Greenland or Iceland covered 70,900 km (44,100 mi) on average in a year, with a maximum of 81,600 km (50,700 mi). The difference from previous estimates is due to the birds’ taking meandering courses rather than following a straight route as was previously assumed. The birds follow a somewhat convoluted course in order to take advantage of prevailing winds.

   And consider this:

     The average Arctic tern lives about thirty years, and will, based on …. research, travel some 2.4 million km (1.5 million mi) during its lifetime, the equivalent of a roundtrip from Earth to the Moon over 3 times.

There are so many wonders on our beautiful planet — I wish more people would support Green Planet programs — and respect the Arctic tern and other miraculous creatures that share the Earth with us.

It is not fanatical to claim that indirectly, this awful pandemic reflects our deep lack of respect for Nature, in all its facets, and our arrogant underestimation of Nature’s value and power. If a little bird that weighs one-fifth of a pound can travel a distance equal to the Moon and back over three times in its lifetime —   maybe we humans should be a tad more humble.

   By the way – we know all this, partly because experts place high-tech tags on the Arctic terns’ legs – the tag weighs only 1 gram, has a GPS chip on it, does not burden the bird and helps us understand its habits. Few people see the bird, because it always flies over water.

Univ. of Oxford Vaccine: Ready by September?! Meet Sarah Gilbert!

July 18, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Univ. of Oxford Vaccine: Ready by September?!

Meet Sarah Gilbert!

By Shlomo Maital  

Prof. Sarah C. Gilbert, Univ. of Oxford

A Bloomberg News report has optimistic information about the University of Oxford’s burgeoning COVID-19 vaccine, which, Bloomberg says, could be ready by September.*  In a deal with Astra-Zeneca, the latter says it could quickly prepare as many as 2 billion doses. And sell them on a not-for-profit basis!   And there is a lovely human side to this medical tale. So – meet Sarah Gilbert.  She might just save your life.

     “In April, Sarah Gilbert’s three children, 21-year-old triplets all studying biochemistry, decided to take part in a trial for an experimental vaccine against Covid-19.     It was their mother’s vaccine—she leads the University of Oxford team that developed it—but there wasn’t a big family talk. “We didn’t really discuss it as I wasn’t home much at the time,” Gilbert told me recently. She’d been working around the clock, as one does while trying to end a pandemic, and at any rate wasn’t worried for her kids. “We know the adverse event profile and we know the dose to use, because we’ve done this so many times before,” she says. “Obviously we’re doing safety testing, but we’re not concerned.”   With safety low on her list of worries (her triplets are fine), Gilbert is focused on quickly determining how effective the vaccine will be and how it will be made. In April, Oxford struck a deal with British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca Plc to spearhead global manufacturing and distribution and help run more trials around the world. AstraZeneca has agreed to sell the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis during the crisis if it proves effective and has lined up deals with multiple manufacturers to produce more than 2 billion doses.

   Prof. Gilbert shuns the limelight. But she may soon well be one of the most famous scientists in the world:

    ” Gilbert has been all over the British press, but she appears to regard public attention as a distraction. For more than two decades she worked anonymously, developing vaccines while also, of necessity, churning out endless grant applications. Her research was rarely discussed outside scientific circles. Now she’s leading one of the most high-profile and advanced vaccine candidates against Covid-19, with Phase III, or final-stage, trials under way involving thousands of people in Brazil, South Africa, the U.K., and, soon, the U.S. Money is no longer a struggle. At the end of April, crunching a process that normally takes about five years into less than four months, Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford’s Jenner Institute started a human trial on 1,100 people. When Gilbert testified before a parliamentary committee in early July, one member compared her effort to going into a shed and coming out with a jet engine. Gilbert’s team has leapfrogged other vaccine contenders to the point where it will likely finish vaccinating subjects in its big 10,000-person efficacy trial before other candidates even start testing on that scale, Kate Bingham, chair of the U.K. government’s Vaccine Taskforce, told the parliamentary committee in early July. “She’s well ahead of the world,” Bingham said. “It’s the most advanced vaccine anywhere.”

   This is no overnight success. Gilbert has labored for years in her laboratory, to develop the knowledge and skill that perhaps has prepared her for this moment, to save the world:

    ” Gilbert, who is 58, has the hyper-efficient, serious demeanor you’d expect from someone who might be on the cusp of a breakthrough and hasn’t a minute to spare. When I first called her in early March, she abruptly ended the conversation after 10 minutes to speak to someone about the technical process of manufacturing the vaccine. It would have been crazy to take offense. Gilbert says she wakes up at around 4 a.m. most days “with lots of questions in my head,” works from home for a few hours, then rides her bicycle to the institute, where she works into the evening. The Oxford team, just a handful of people in January, now comprises roughly 250.     The vaccine is a so-called viral vector type based on years of research by Gilbert and Adrian Hill, the head of the Jenner Institute. Traditional vaccines are made with a weakened or inactivated form of the germ that causes infection to stimulate an immune response. Those vaccines aren’t easy to develop and produce quickly. The Oxford team has developed a technology that can speed up the process by using a harmless virus as a kind of Trojan horse to carry the genetic material of a pathogen into cells to generate an immune response. In the case of Covid-19, Gilbert has taken a chimpanzee adenovirus (a common cold virus) and inserted genetic material from the surface spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a way of tricking the immune system to fight back. The chimp adenovirus platform stimulates both antibodies and high levels of killer T-cells, a type of white blood cell that helps the immune system destroy infection.

   The Oxford – Gilbert vaccine could still fail. But I don’t think so. Gilbert is confident.

   “Gilbert has voiced remarkable confidence in her chances, saying the Oxford vaccine has an 80% probability of being effective in stopping people who are exposed to the novel coronavirus from developing Covid-19. She has said she could know by September. Asked by MPs in early July whether the world would have to struggle through the winter without a vaccine, Gilbert said, “I hope we can improve on those timelines and come to your rescue.”     “We could say, ‘OK, we can start tomorrow.’ We don’t have to make 10 different varieties of this. We knew it could be manufactured”

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/oxford-s-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-coronavirus-front-runner

Indian Scientists: Mythbusters!

July 18, 2020 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Indian Scientists: Mythbusters!

By Shlomo Maital

   There is a huge and growing amount of misinformation, disinformation, lies, conspiracy theories and bizarre ‘facts’ on the Internet about COVID-19.

   In a famous TED lecture in 2015 Bill Gates predicted a catastrophic pandemic that would kill millions. He said we are simply not ready to deal with it. Today, crackpots claim he is responsible for the pandemic. George Soros, too, stars in this role.

     I applaud and embrace a large group of Indian scientists who have decided to fight back. They have set up a superb website to debunk hoaxes.

     Indian Scientists’ Response to CoViD-19 (ISRC) started as a group of Indian scientists who came together voluntarily in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has now grown to include more than 500 scientists, engineers, technologists, doctors, public health researchers, science communicators, journalists and a number of students; they hail from a range of disciplines but principally the physical and life sciences; they are affiliated to eminent research institutes of science and technology, universities, colleges, hospitals and private laboratories. The group also includes Indian scientists from laboratories all over the world.

      On this website, you can find some 30 such ‘hoaxes’, some of the totally bizarre, and the scientists’ evidence they are totally made up. The material exists in some 20 languages.

https://indscicov.in/about-us/

I wish American scientists would join together and do the same. 

Here is one example of a myth-buster post: It is clear, simple, easy to read. We need the same in the West…

 

 

Blog entries written by Prof. Shlomo Maital

Shlomo Maital

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