The Moderna COVID Vaccine was created on Jan 13, 2020. This was one month before the first recorded US COVID death. Ten months was mainly spent on trials and statistical proving how effective vaccine was effective. Experts were very certain that the potential vaccines would be safe. Clearly the effectiveness testing and verification should be much faster. If we know the vaccines are safe there should be a process volunteer process to prove effectiveness in months.
China and Russia used their own rapidly developed vaccines for their own militaries in July and August.
The COVID vaccines are coming out now. We cannot redo the actions around this Pandemic. However, there are other ways we MUST prepare for the next possible pandemics.
We know there are about 50-100 virus families that might be able to trigger a pandemic. We could spend $3 billion to pre-make vaccines against all of the pandemic potential viruses. This money would get possible vaccines on the shelf and ready to be deployed once one of those specific viruses was found to be spreading. This would save 5 months.
Global Social Media Monitoring Could Save 1-2 Months
The fits news about a mysterious illness in Wuhan started emerging in December 2019. Taiwan sent their own investigators. Taiwan started inspecting plane passengers coming from Wuhan December 31,2019. We need to setup social media monitoring of all countries. This was how Taiwan noticed messages about a mystery disease. We do not wait for any country to identify and then admit they have a dangerous disease spreading.
The 2005 SARS impacted countries (Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea. Thailand) had very effective rapid pandemic response command centers ready for COVID-19. All countries need to learn and pay to create these pandemic commands. The fully scaled-up testing and contact tracing needs to be ready for next time.
Routine Blood Test Monitoring of Blood Donations Could Detect Spreading Viruses 2+ Months Earlier
Blood tests of donated blood found that coronavirus was in the USA by December, 2019.
Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020
Samples from 7,389 routine blood donations collected by the American Red Cross from December 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020, from donors resident in nine states (California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin) were tested at CDC for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
Of the 7,389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor binding domain / Ace2 blocking activity over 50%, suggesting the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies.
Over 1% of people in the USA had coronavirus by Dec 2019- Jan 2020.
We need to constantly monitor blood samples for potential pandemic viruses. Sampling 10,000 to 100,000 samples every month for every country. This would detect virus outbreaks at the 0.01% population level. If doubling time is once every 3-4 days. This would detect 6-7 doublings before over 1% level in December, 2019. This would push the detection a potential outbreak to early November, 2019 and maybe October, 2019.
Vaccine Clinical Trials for Phase 1, Phase 2 and Part of Phase 3 Can be Done Ahead of Time
Krammer – Phase I clinical work and the larger, longer Phase II safety trials can be done ahead of time. All before the arrival of new pandemics. Some Phase III efficacy testing could be done before pandemics. We can check if the vaccines provoke the right immune response. We can make antigens in the research center and just test it and it would be inexpensive.
A Phase III trial if it were deemed necessary could be done in ten weeks.
Combining early detection, Taiwan Caliber Contact tracing, Fully Scaled Testing Capability and pre-made and prepared Vaccines against all potential pandemic viruses will mean complete global pandemic proofing and resistant.
With the blood tests and social media monitoring, we could detect a pandemic to the equivalent of Nov, 2019 in this timeline. The pre-made vaccines would be scaled up and we could be at our current emergency authorization level by the equivalent of February, 2020.
SOURCES- Foreign Policy, NY Mag Intelligencer, Clinical Infectious Disease, Journal Cell
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I guess if you define "herd immunity" to include "sufficient to cause the disease to go extinct" then that makes sense.
But people use the phrase herd immunity to include the situation with a whole lot of diseases (such as measles) that are still extant.
Very late reply, but if you are still interested this is the reason: we know that her immunity does not work without vaccines, because different pathogens (from measles to the plague) survived multiple rounds of infection across the population, Infections become less and less efficient the more the population got infected (because the individuals either die or become immune) so the spreading slows down. But while the infection slows the population of immune people starts to decline too: immunized people die or lose their immunity and children born after the last big infection round are not immune. The elderly and the children are always reservoirs of infection.
With vaccinations you can immunize all the population (or the vast majority of it) eliminating the reservoirs of infection (you effectively maintain the rate of immunization as high as you can achieve with your medical infrastructure, while an infection in a population speeds up quickly and then moves slowly for long periods before speeding up again). This is why vaccines can effectively cause the extinction of pathogens (like smallpox) while letting an infection on its own does not.
Is the gain of function engineering anything other than a totally speculative guess?
Not because they found a novel virus in a cave somewhere, but because they performed gain of function experiments on it in a lab with very loose or no safety standards. Detecting vs. creating. Detecting is fine and I'm all for that. Creating is a whole different mess and I'm not for that one.
I see the value of testing air filters in airports and such to gain advance knowledge of what's out their. This is a very different thing from the gain of function experiments the CCP was conducting in Wuhan less than 100 meters from the "wet market" they blamed for the outbreak. Passively monitoring vs. actively creating sort of scenario.
Died of is not the same as died with. You could die of congestive heart failure but die with a common cold; that doesn't mean you died of the common cold. The CDC and other health authorities need to stop intermingling those two numbers so everyone can get a clearer picture of the seriousness.
As testing increases, positive results naturally increase. The tests aren't perfect, so of course there are both false positives and false negatives. These days, when you go into a medical facility for other unrelated things, you get tested. After multiple positive antigen tests that probably rules out false positives. That said, presence of the antigen just says you once had it. How are these positives counted? If the same person is positive for the antigen multiple times over multiple months does that equal one or more than one. As a whole, the health community needs to get their methodology straight and report accurate numbers. The mess we have today leads to hysteria and lockdowns. The cynical side of me says that's by design.
Not distributing and publicizing vitamin D was the biggest failure in enabling the infected to survive Covid-19. This was primarily due to Big Pharma's suppression of this info.
The most effective therapeutic drug (both for prevention and treatment) has been cheap off-patent ivermectin and this has also been suppressed by Big Pharma.
My best recent reading has been from a Johns Hopkins newsletter:
The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, Nov. 22, 2020; Yanni Gu, A Closer Look at US Deaths from Covid-19.
Our local "Health Authority" is looking for a 5% positive rate at the Covid screening clinics. This gets them a little outside the "False Positive and False Negative" bounds of their tests. DrPat and I exchanged thoughts on this previously. The positive results allow them to stoke the fear and extend the control. We had a 16% increase in deaths this week! From a population of ~700,000, we went from 6 to7, total, since March 2020.
Over the past 25 years it has been increasingly difficult to obtain an autopsy, and sophisticated serology on dead patients does not appear to increase political support.
Coronaviruses cause colds. Seropositive results are interesting.
The blood donors in the study above would have been asked if they were well as part of the screen.
Our clinical laboratories were not prepared or equipped to diagnose your illness. Our local survey of anonymous clinical (outpatient) specimens showed about 9 times more seropositive than symptomatic people, and I am assuming that the reported "cases" (positive PCR) reflect about one tenth of those with immunity.
Mindbreaker, below, states that we "need to know" what killed people. Usually it is their last illness, and for the past 40 years, the top line on the death certificate has been a best guess, generally on people of a certain age (old has moved up with my perspective!) with other conditions, and particularly in nursing homes.
Pretty much a good analogy for gain of function experiments with dangerous pathogens.
No, what they were doing, assuming it wasn't biowarfare research, was creating possible new diseases to determine if they'd be dangerous. I really wouldn't suggest doing that unless you used much better precautions.
More like a seismologist dropping explosive charges down a hole by a fault in order to calibrate his instruments, I'd say.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm saying that Brett's claim that nobody does it currently has some strong evidence against it.
Astute and un-PC observation which would make you very popular with the PRC and earn you a vacation at a re-education camp.
But yes, regardless if this was the case for SARS-COV-2, such risks exist. What are the alternatives?
Didn't the entire problem (probably) start BECAUSE the Chinese government had a lab that was going out and studying novel pathogens that existed in animal populations?
Like a seismologist was setting up a sensor, dropped it, and that causes the Earthquake.
Why do you think that herd immunity can't develop naturally? What would be the mechanism where a vaccine can give someone immunity but actually getting the disease can not?
And isn't that the whole process we see with the yearly flu? Even before immunisation was available, a new flu would arise, it would go around the world, the flu numbers would go up and up until some given proportion (eg. 2/3) of the population had got the flu, then there were less and less people who weren't immune, and then that flu strain couldn't spread any more and it would peter out.
Bush meat should be a no-no but chickens and ducks are fine if we modify them to not carry the flu. https://www.thepoultrysite.com/news/2019/06/uk-scientists-edit-chicken-genes-to-make-them-resistant-to-bird-flu
The main danger from birds is flu.
With bush meat, you have no idea what you might get. The diseases from cows, pigs, sheep, and goats, are not as concerning, as we have lived with these diseases for thousands of years and also reduced these diseases in these domesticated animals dramaticly.
I has taken a year but they appear to have some treatments now (Regeneron antibodies being one), but clearly we needed a powerful general antiviral. We have known that DRACO was very promising since at least 2011.
Molnupiravir is the latest antiviral directed at Covid, and seems to be effective. It has activity against flu, SARS and MERS. IMP-1088 may be able to cure colds. If we cure colds and get a universal flu vaccine, people might take the infections that remain more seriously.
There are concerns about Molnupiravir. Hopefully that can be resolved, because it sounds like it is very powerful. And there are other broad acting things that are interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17986-9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_flu_vaccine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMP-1088
https://newatlas.com/cure-common-cold-protein-imperial-college/54599/
I know I contracted COVID in late November 2019 in Asia. I had symptoms of a "mild flu" first week of December. Went to the Doc in a box, got tamiflu and a steroid shot. It was over in a week. Starting with some unrelated medical things where I got tested due to entering a medical facility, I have been positive for the anitegen starting in April and as late as last month (November 2020). It's not outside the realm of possibility that many other Americans, especially those that travel internationally frequently, could be in the same situation. How many of them had no symptoms at all? How many just figured it was the usual flu thing? I don't pretend to know. I can only talk with certainty about my own personal experience.
There is no such thing as herd immunity without vaccines: infective agents exist by thousands of years and spread over every country. Herd immunity works only because with vaccines you could immunize more people than the amount that the virus would reach normally
Also, when people die of something, we need to know precisely what killed them. They just test for flu. Now they probably test for Covid too. But when they don't get a positive they just chalk it up to "other". This is unsatisfactory. Blood samples need to be drawn and the cause pinned down…every time. Does not mater how old the patent was, or how many underlying conditions they had…find it. If we can't find it, store the blood and try new techniques as they arise.
We also must improve general health. We need to get people to a healthy weight. We need to get serious about unhealthy foods. We need to teach the young how to make good healthy foods in school, and not just theoretical…hands on. Teach how to use spices instead of browning and frying. We need means for the public to exercise and year round. A variety of things. Year round swimming would be nice. Lots of municipal pools. They could be heated in the winter and/or make large indoor pools.
And we need culpability when someone takes their sick kid to the mall or the grocery or the school or the Sunday school. And it needs to become socially acceptable and expected to wear a mask when you are sick with a cold, but have to go out and do something. The Japanese have been doing this for years. Shopping carts need to be washed daily and the handles and seats washed prior to every use. And we need effective long lasting antipathogen surfaces for freezer/refrigerator doors in groceries and public counters and rails.
DRACO is the solution, but professor Rider could never get any traction with the majors because of the bottom line… Where is the money in one solution to all small viruses? No, they proceeded on their own; developing dozens of boutique mRNA therapies (few of which have been successful) in order to maximize return – as opposed to dealing one knockout blow to the plagues of humanity. Disgusting…
JD
I've often said that, if meteorologists approached the weather the same way the medical profession approaches pandemics, they wouldn't go out and measure the wind speed until a hurricane had already struck. If seismologists approached earthquakes the same way the medical profession does pandemics, they'd start setting out sensors when buildings started shaking.
We need to do as Brian suggests, and start a program of random sampling to pick up novel pathogens BEFORE they spread widely enough to become a threat. If you just filtered air in airports, and ran it through a gene sequencer, you'd have advance notice of what was coming in.
Inovio had a vaccine already ready. But they only got a fraction of funding and late. We don't know if it works, but if it does, it means having it doesn't mater…politics wins out. As soon as the genome was known, they knew they already had a vaccine for that one.
If you have an administration that does not believe in science, there is going to be a delay.
No, this is the wrong approach. We need general powerful antivirals. Then it does not mater that science and government are slow. We need to fund DRACO antiviral and other antivirals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO They could not get $500,000 crowdfunding even though it had shown that it could kill several viruses. And we need a healthcare system that makes people less concerned about the cost of going in when they are sick. People are waiting, hoping to get better. By the time they come in, it is too late. Single payer is the most straight forward way to do this.
Monitoring the blood supply is fine, and obvious. We also need to screen passengers who come in the country. Take a blood sample. Have sensitive tests that can pick up any of 500 diseases/strains in 20 minutes. And we need all the countries in the Americas to follow the same procedures. Ideally, any traveler between continents should be so checked. Limiting a new disease breakout to one region has obvious benefits. We also need, no cost to the traveler, high quality enforced quarantine, for those who test positive. Paid for with flight insurance.
It is also a terrifying idea. This idea is the most likely explanation for how the SARS-COV-2 pandemic started in the first place. It is a neat, parsimonius and plausible explanation, compared to the natural origin hypothesis.
We know they were making chimaeric viruses at WIV. The white papers exist. We know they were doing gain of function research on these types of coronaviruses. We know the outbreak started close to the lab were they are studying exactly this type of coronavirus collected from bats, pangolins and other animals. We know viruses leak from labs all the time; SARS-COV-1 leaked 6 times, 4 times in Beijing alone and that was a BSL-3 facility. Even smallpox has repeatedly leaked and that's the most terrible BSL-4 pathogen we know of. We know they used laboratory animals such as transgenic rats with humanized ACE-2 to study respiratory coronaviruses, which would pre-adapt these viruses to human physiology and explain why this virus has not changed much since the original lab accidental release, where SARS-COV-1 changed rapidly to adapt to humans.
Imagine this, repeated thousands of times for all manner of terrible pathogens like a strain of avian flu engineered for pandemic potential. Creating the very virus that this kind of research is trying to avoid and hoping there are no unrecognized flaws in the protective equipment and ventilation systems (which there frequently has been, even with BSL-4 pathogens) and nobody mistakes active virus from inactivated.
Yes, we can. Two ways: First we can stop hunting wild animals for food, especially bats and civets. Second, we can stop eating meat, especially chickens and ducks.
This is a great idea. Considering the potential loss of life and disruption to the world economies, why wait when we have the money and resources to prepare?
There is definitely room for development of viral test platforms using microfluidics and cell cultures from different people to quickly simulate thousands of different clinical trial participants over different age, sex, and ethnicity groups.
So called 'lab on a chip' technology featuring actual human cells is already being used to test drugs for various uses in place of animal trials – obviously getting some kind of framework to simulate a proper immune system would be more complex than current work, but the benefits of being able to scale up such a framework would massively benefit speedy testing of such novel vaccines.
"We need to setup social media monitoring of all countries."
How would that work in totalitarian China, birthplace of the Wuhan plague, where they took a pretty aggressive approach to suppress any news of the outbreak, and are constantly trying to snuff out anything that is contrary to the party line?
Ahhhh . . . the double edged sword of technology.
The only question I have about the CID article, is how many cycles did it take to obtain the positive results? As that seems to be were the inflated case numbers are coming from. Otherwise, they provided enough information to satisfy me that the virus was detected in older blood donations. This also is reinforced by Italy retrospectively identifying it's first cases in September of 2019. https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-circulating-italy-earlier-thought.html
So I think there is a realistic basis for the idea, and an assertion that there is not requires countervailing evidence to be considered.
Perhaps they are practicing techniques for tracking the next pandemic?
(I'm joking, in case it isn't apparent.)
No, if that was the case, we'd be at herd immunity by now with near zero casualties.
This is just showing that people who've recently had other coronaviruses (colds) are being picked up in immunological tests. Basically there's a false positive rate of 1%.
There is no realistic basis for the idea that there was community spread of Covid in the US in December 2019. The antibody test results on blood samples are easily accounted for by false positive artifacts and that seems far more likely. What happens if you test even older samples? Is there ever a zero rate? Doubtful.
I have a question, how is it that after visiting the 2 links given by jimofoz and nothing else, someone from Kimer Med found my linkedin profile ? (and I am not even logged in on Linkedin)
Maintaining contact tracing and other infrastructure during possibly decades-long off time will be difficult for some (many?) countries. Others may not have the means to even set up such infrastructure. The public response also varies between countries due to cultural and political differences. So I doubt a global preparedness can be achieved any time soon.
But certainly, at least some of the developed countries can be better prepared, and that can also help the other countries. New international treaties on travel restrictions in the face of emerging epidemics, on monitoring, and on other cooperation measures, could also help prevent the next pandemic.
Two or three days from now, the headlines will be screaming "300,000 Covid Deaths!"
Could 100,000 of those have been avoided, if "warp speed" hadn't just been "warp speed…relative to the usual FDA pace"?
Wait, didn't taiwan get a jump on things because they were actively hacking and had penetrated government networks in china, thus they had seen the alarming internal mailing list messages between doctors? I'm pretty sure that's been all but acknowledged by taiwan. Their pandemic response is separate though, and pretty well done, but since they had an early start it was easier to deal with border entries.
Also, what ever happened to the DARPA DRACO work on a broad spectrum antiviral? I understood they had faced issues with the volume of medicine needed for a human might trigger an autoimmune response, but it seems like it wasn't a definitive dead end either.
The DRACO anti viral approach has been revived by an NZ group now that it is off patent:
https://donate.kimermed.co.nz/campaign/2/ending-viral-disease
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2020/09/kimer-med-founded-to-develop-the-draco-antiviral-strategy/
After the horrifying, nearly unthinkable cost of lives and economic losses of SARS-COV-2, a more aggressive approach of finding the bastards wherever they are and making remedies preemptively is fully justified.
We shouldn't be victims of fate anymore. We must embrace the technology we have and end this kind of dramas once and for all.