Virus

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Publications

Manipulative magnetic nanomedicine: the future of COVID-19 pandemic/endemic therapy – Taylor & Francis Online

Published 14 Dec 2020

Nanobiotechnology is emerging very promising to investigate novel methodologies for managing COVID-19 pandemic/endemic successfully. In this direction, experts have explored the opto-electro-magnetic nanosystem to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus using a biosensing approach. Such optical, electrical, or magnetic biosensors function based on geno-sensing and immune-sensing has detected the SARS-CoV-2 virus selectively at a very low level. These efficient-miniaturized biosensors can be operated using a smartphone and promoted for clinical application for early-stage diagnostics of COVID-19 infection. The successful integration of these SARS-CoV-2 virus sensors with AI and IoMT enables virus detection at point-of-location and sharing of bioinformatics with the medical center at the same time for timely therapeutics decision. This approach is also useful for tracking tasks and managing COVID-19 infection according to patient infection profiling. To avoid human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission, experts have developed stimuli-responsive nanotechnology enable which can not only trap aerosol of virus size but can eradicate viruses on applying external stimulation for example nanoenable photo-sensitive virus degradation. Various types of clothes containing nanoparticles have demonstrated SARS-CoV-2 virus trapping and eradication successfully [2,9]. However, significant attention is required to increase the production and distribution of these masks for public use.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17425247.2021.1860938

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Opinion

Beijing’s useful idiots – UnHerd

Science journals have encouraged and enforced a false Covid narrative

Bear in mind that in the heat of this pandemic, papers printed in important journals were peer-reviewed within 10 weeks; one rattled through the process in just nine days for Nature. But, like Petrovsky, I have heard similar stories from many other frustrated experts who confronted the conventional wisdom that this lethal virus was a natural spillover event. Some could not even get letters published, let alone challenge those key papers promoting the Chinese perspective which have since turned out to be flawed or wrong.

Only now is acceptance emerging that the science establishment colluded to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, assisted by prominent experts with clear conflicts of interest, patsy politicians and a pathetic media that mostly failed to do its job. And yet, at the heart of this scandal lie some of the world’s most influential science journals. These should provide a forum for pulsating debate as experts explore and test theories, especially on something as contentious and fascinating as the possible origins of a global pandemic. Instead, some have played a central role in shutting down discussion and discrediting alternative views on the origins, with disastrous consequences for our understanding of events.

https://unherd.com/2021/06/beijings-useful-idiots/

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Publications

Design and Analysis of Shedding Studies for Virus or Bacteria-Based Gene Therapy and Oncolytic Products – FDA

Published August 2015

Design and Analysis of Shedding Studies for Virus or Bacteria-Based Gene Therapy and Oncolytic Products The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER)/Office of Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies (OCTGT) is issuing this guidance to provide you, sponsors of virus or bacteria-based gene therapy products (VBGT products)1 and oncolytic viruses or bacteria (oncolytic products)2 with recommendations on how to conduct shedding studies during preclinical and clinical development. For purposes of this guidance, the term “shedding” means release of VBGT or oncolytic products from the patient through one or all of the following ways: excreta (feces); secreta (urine, saliva, nasopharyngeal fluids etc.); or through the skin (pustules, sores, wounds). Shedding is distinct from biodistribution because the latter describes how a product is spread within the patient’s body from the site of administration while the former describes how it is excreted or released from the patient’s body. Shedding raises the possibility of transmission of VBGT or oncolytic products3 from treated to untreated individuals (e.g., close contacts and health care professionals). This guidance represents FDA’s current thinking on how and when shedding data should be collected for VBGT and oncolytic products during preclinical and clinical development and how shedding data can be used to assess the potential for transmission to untreated individuals. This guidance finalizes the draft guidance of the same title dated July 2014.

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Opinion

We have really good evidence that lockdowns don’t work – Dr Clare Craig, talkRadio

Diagnostic pathologist Dr Clare Craig: “We have really good evidence that lockdowns don’t work which people find very difficult to accept”.

  • Airborne viruses spread and you can’t control the spread, which is why making people hide away doesn’t have the impact that you think it has.
  • The data demonstrates lockdowns don’t work and have possibly made things worse.
  • We now have examples other than Sweden, such as US states like Florida and Texas, that demonstrate that lifting restrictions make no difference to the virus.
  • Florida and Texas prove that the lockdown advice was wrong.

Mirrors:

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Videos

Lockdown legacy facing future generations – Dr Rob Verkerk, Pandemic Podcast

Rob Verkerk, Founder, Executive and Scientific Director of the Alliance for Natural Health International, a scientist who has for 30 years been exploring positive ways to span the gulfs between science and the law, between academia and industry, and between governments and their people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mx5cbKVDQg

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Mirrored on odysee.com

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News

Vaccines of the future could be as contagious as viruses – Popular Science

Published 5th June 2017

But it’s hard to reach enough people for this to happen, especially in areas with poor public health infrastructure. So scientists are taking a leaf from the virus playbook. They’re devising vaccines and antiviral therapies that can spread from host to host.

https://www.popsci.com/contagious-vaccine-virus/

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Opinion

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis – Did the Coronavirus Escape from a Lab? – New York Magazine

hat happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210104114538/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

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Publications

No evidence for increased transmissibility from recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2 – Nature

We do not identify a single recurrent mutation in this set convincingly associated with increased viral transmission. Instead, recurrent mutations currently in circulation appear to be evolutionary neutral and primarily induced by the human immune system via RNA editing, rather than being signatures of adaptation. At this stage we find no evidence for significantly more transmissible lineages of SARS-CoV-2 due to recurrent mutations.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201125121534/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19818-2

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Publications

Covid-19: the problems with case counting – BMJ

While the testing data are so opaque, using them to direct local lockdowns is unhelpful, argues Heneghan. “The testing is there to drive the test and trace strategy,” he says. “But what seems to be happening is that, as soon as we see an outbreak, there tends to be panic and over-reacting. This is a huge problem because politicians are operating in a non-evidence-based way when it comes to non-drug interventions.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20200904104824/https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3374.full

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Opinion

Why vaccines are less effective in the elderly, and what it means for COVID-19 – The Conversation

A critical factor that makes the elderly more susceptible to infectious diseases is what immunologists call “immunosenescence”: the decline in the immune system’s functionality as people age. This is also associated with an increase in the incidence of inflammatory diseases, because an elderly body tends to be in a state of chronic low-grade inflammation. This “inflamm-aging” is one reason why older people have tendencies to develop more severe forms of respiratory diseases.

The key problem with SARS-CoV-2 infection is inflammation in the respiratory tract, which can be exacerbated in individuals predisposed towards potent inflammatory responses.

Immunosenescence also results in diminished responses to vaccination. Indeed, annual flu vaccines are notoriously less effective in the elderly. This phenomenon is very important in the context of the massive efforts and funds being invested worldwide into the ultra-rapid development of vaccines for COVID-19.

The fact that elderly people do not respond well to immunizations has largely been ignored in most discussions of COVID-19 vaccines, despite this being the group in greatest need. Most of the scientific community’s experience with vaccine development for any disease has been focused on vaccinating the relatively young.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200721234031/https://theconversation.com/why-vaccines-are-less-effective-in-the-elderly-and-what-it-means-for-covid-19-141971

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Publications

Amending Koch’s postulates for viral disease: When “growth in pure culture” leads to a loss of virulence – NCBI (2016)

It is a common laboratory practice to propagate viruses in cell culture. While convenient, these methodologies often result in unintentional genetic alterations, which have led to adaptation and even attenuation in animal models of disease. An example is the attenuation of hantaviruses (family: Bunyaviridae, genus: Hantavirus) when cultured in vitro. In this case, viruses propagated in the natural reservoir species cause disease in nonhuman primates that closely mimics the human disease, but passaging in cell culture attenuates these viruses to the extent that do not cause any measurable disease in nonhuman primates. As efforts to develop animal models progress, it will be important to take into account the influences that culture in vitro may have on the virulence of viruses. In this review we discuss this phenomenon in the context of past and recent examples in the published literature.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182102/