New COVID fears for US, shock Wuhan lab claims
A new COVID variant’s been detected in California, as Wuhan lab scientists described infected bats penetrating their gloves.
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US scientists have reportedly discovered a new coronavirus variant in California as the state continues to fight a rising number of cases and deaths.
The strain has been identified in more than one dozen countries and has been linked to multiple outbreaks in Santa Clara County, reported the Los Angeles Times.
The California Department of Public Health said it’s not fully clear whether the variant is highly contagious or is just being identified frequently as lab work becomes more refined.
Known as L452R, the variant is different from the highly infectious one that originated in the UK and has since swept across 18 US states.
As public health officials caution that this will soon become the dominant strain in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, says the warning should be a “clarion call” for Americans to get vaccinated.
As of Monday (local time), the new variant was identified in Lake, Los Angeles, Mono, Monterey, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Dan Diego, San Francisco and San Luis Obispo counties.
“This virus continues to mutate and adapt, and we cannot let down our guard,” said Dr Sara Cody, director of the County of Santa Clara Public Health Department, in a statement.
Dr Cody did confirm that variant was identified in an outbreak in San Jose that sickened 90 people and patients and may have been linked to an inflatable Christmas costume.
The new California variant has three mutations on the spike protein, Dr Charles Chiu, a virologist at UC San Francisco, told The New York Times.
It was first detected in Denmark in March and California in May.
Dr Chiu told the New York Times that although there is no evidence that the virus is more contagious, “there are worrisome signs that this variant may be highly transmissible”.
Dr Fauci also spoke to danger of new mutations in the US.
He said that although more research has shown that new variants are not more deadly, the fact that they are more transmissible will result in an increased number of infections.
This will lead to already overwhelmed hospital systems across the US experiencing even more strain.
“When you have a variant that is really very, very different, in the sense that it’s more contagious, it tells you to do two things,” Dr Fauci said on US TV.
“One, double down on the public health measures we’ve been talking about all the time. Be very compulsive, as the president-elect says, at least for the first 100 days and maybe more, everybody wear a mask, keep the distance, avoid congregate settings.”
Dr Fauci added that the other important thing is to get vaccinated.
“The easiest way to evade this negative effect of these new isolates is to – when the vaccine becomes available, people should get vaccinated,” Dr Fauci said.
“If there was ever a clarion call for people to put aside vaccine hesitancy, if we can get the overwhelming majority of the population vaccinated, we’d be in very good shape.”
WUHAN SCIENTISTS ‘BITTEN’ BY BATS, ‘SPATTERED’ WITH BLOOD
Scientists at a Chinese lab linked to the outbreak of coronavirus reportedly revealed they were bitten while collecting samples in a cave packed with infected bats.
One researcher – from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (W. I. V) – is said to have claimed fangs went through his rubber gloves “like a needle” leaving him spattered with blood, according to a report in The Sun.
A video – which first emerged two years ago – also apparently shows scientists working on “live viruses” without gloves and masks in an apparent breach of the World Health Organisation safety rules.
The startling claims come just 24 hours after it was revealed the scientist dubbed “Patient Zero” who vanished from the Wuhan lab at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak is still missing despite a year-long search.
Virus expert Huang Yanling was named online in China during the very first worrying reports of the deadly pandemic back in February of last year.
The US State Department believes she was the first of several working at the controversial institute who fell ill in the autumn of 2019 – months before the virus was officially acknowledged.
The claims created a link between the pandemic and the W.I.V. – which houses zoonotic bat diseases – and sparked fears the virus was accidentally leaked during experiments.
On the shocking video, researchers are seen collecting potentially highly- infectious bat faeces with no noticeable personal protective equipment (PPE) other than gloves.
One man then tells how he was bitten by a bat claiming it felt “like being jabbed with a needle.”
The video then cuts to a person’s limb showing swelling from another bite.
The narrator points out the fact that bats can carry a variety of potent viruses, reports the Taiwan Times.
Many experts fear the coronavirus could have spread from another Chinese lab that housed 600 bats which attacked and “peed on” scientists.
One researcher at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (WCDC) who was urinated on also had bat BLOOD on his skin and was forced to quarantine himself, an academic journal claimed.
A research paper, titled ‘The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus’, reported that one researcher named only as JH Tian “was once attacked by bats” and that “the blood of bat was on his skin.”
According to the journal, Tian isolated himself for 28 days after the “bats peed on him.”
The paper states: “ … the Chinese horseshoe bats were natural reservoirs for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) which caused the SARS outbreak in 2003.”
Last year, The Sun reported that the W.I.V. lied about taking safety precautions when collecting bat samples.
Shocking leaked photos – which revealed a scandalous lack of safety – were deleted from the website of under-fire China science hub.
In the wake of claims, cables were sent to the US State Department from the embassy warning about the risks of experiments on bats.
One read: “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The US State Department says the Chinese Communist Party has prevented investigators from interviewing researchers in Wuhan “including those who were ill in the fall [autumn] of 2019.”
“Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus and the next one,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said over the weekend.
Accusations of a cover-up by the Chinese government have been repeatedly dismissed and pressures for a full investigation into the lab suspected of being the source of coronavirus have so far been resisted.
But the US has always insisted China is to blame, with President Donald Trump vowing to declassify bombshell secret intelligence linking the virus to their science facility.
Mr Pompeo revealed new studies from the US intelligence claim that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in the autumn of 2019 – earlier than previously believed – with symptoms consistent with COVID.
“This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses,” Mr Pompeo said.
He spoke after a US government official said the most “credible” theory around the origin of coronavirus is that is escaped from the lab in Wuhan.
Top aide to Mr Trump Matthew Pottinger claimed leaders in China are “admitting” there is a chance theories suggesting COVID-19 started in a “wet market” are false.
UK, FRANCE BOOST VACCINE CAMPAIGNS
France and Britain on Monday (local time) joined a growing list of nations starting mass vaccinations for all elderly citizens as the UK began demanding all arrivals quarantine to try and halt the spread of a new COVID-19 variant.
The French drive aims to cover all people over 75 and comes after Brazil and India, which figure among the worst-affected countries, administered their first jabs over the weekend.
Health Minister Olivier Veran said more than one million vaccinations are being targeted by January and between 2.4 and 4 million by February.
France had earlier offered vaccinations to residents of retirement homes and health workers on the frontline.
Britain on Monday extended its own vaccination campaign to people over the age of 70, after first attending to over-80s, and frontline health workers and care givers.
Since the inoculation campaign began on December 8, more than 3.8 million people have received a first dose of vaccine in the UK.
Growing concerns over different strains of the virus have prompted governments to tighten curbs and stem a global death toll that has already crossed two million since the pandemic first emerged in China just over a year ago.
Russia is also due to start mass immunisations on Monday using its homegrown Sputnik V vaccine while Britain imposed a 10-day isolation and negative COVID tests on all travellers.
Arrivals will have to provide a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of travel or be banned from entering the UK.
New strains believed to be more contagious have emerged in Britain, South Africa and Brazil and have set off alarm bells.
Across the European Union there have been concerns that delays in the delivery of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine could further slow a campaign which critics have condemned as less agile than in the United States or Britain, a recently departed EU member.
US drugmaker Pfizer said it was working to “significantly” scale up production at its major plant in Belgium in the second quarter.
After a short delay, deliveries should be back to the original schedule to the EU from January 25.
But World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned the world was on the “brink of a catastrophic moral failure” if rich countries hog COVID-19 vaccine doses while the poorest suffer.
Tedros denounced the “me-first” attitude of wealthy nations and also blasted vaccine manufacturers for chasing regulatory approval in rich countries rather than submitting their data to the WHO to approve vaccine use globally.
“I need to be blunt. The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure,” the WHO chief said.
“And the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
FRESH DOUBT ON OLYMPICS
Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga pledged to tackle surging coronavirus cases and restore normal life “as soon as possible” as polls showed plunging support for his government.
The latest wave in Japan and abroad has also cast doubt on whether the pandemic-postponed Tokyo 2020 Olympics can go ahead, but Suga repeated he was still committed to holding the Games as “proof of mankind’s victory over the virus”.
In America, the world’s worst-hit country, President-elect Joe Biden’s goal of seeing 100 million vaccine doses injected within his first 100 days in office is meanwhile “absolutely” achievable, top US scientist Anthony Fauci said, days before he becomes the new president’s chief adviser on COVID-19.
“The feasibility of his goal is absolutely clear, there’s no doubt about it,” Dr Fauci said on US TV.
Mr Biden has unveiled a US$1.9 trillion ($A2.4 trillion) stimulus plan to revive the economy of the US, where the new coronavirus has claimed over 397,000 lives.
Until vaccination is widespread, countries across the globe are still having to rely on lockdowns, curfews and social distancing.
Slovakia began a new round of nationwide screening and Malawi said it would impose its first restrictions, including night curfew, a cap on gatherings and mandatory face masks in public.
Nearly three million people in two cities in China’s northeastern Jilin province were put under lockdown on Monday (local time) after a surge in coronavirus cases linked to a travelling salesman.
WHO, CHINA ‘COULD HAVE ACTED MORE QUICKLY’: PROBE
The World Health Organisation and Beijing could have acted faster when COVID-19 first surfaced in China, a group investigating the global response has concluded.
In its second report, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said that an evaluation of the “chronology of the early phase of the outbreak suggests that there was potential for early signs to have been acted on more rapidly”.
COVID-19 was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, before seeping beyond China’s borders to wreak global havoc, costing more than two million lives and eviscerating economies.
In its report, the panel found it was “clear” that “public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January.”
The panel also criticised WHO for dragging its feet at the start of the crisis, pointing out that the UN health agency had not convened its emergency committee until January 22, 2020.
And the committee failed to agree to declare the novel coronavirus outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) — its highest alert level — until a week later.
“It is not clear why the committee did not meet until the third week of January, nor is it clear why it was unable to agree on the (PHEIC) declaration … when it was first convened,” the report said.
Since the beginning of the crisis, the WHO has faced harsh criticism over its response, with claims it dragged its feet on declaring a pandemic and on recommending face masks.
WHO came under especially fierce attack from outgoing US President Donald Trump, who accused the organisation of botching its handling of the pandemic and of being a “puppet of China”.
Against that backdrop, WHO member states last May agreed a resolution calling for an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation … to review experience gained and lessons learned from the WHO-co-ordinated international health response” to the pandemic.
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