Coronavirus - China finally begining to admit they got things wrong!!!

I think we should all feel comfortable criticising British colonialism Glos, it’s a stain on our national conscience.

gloswhite wrote:This was quite interesting, until I got to the last sentence. 
Why is it you never miss an opportunity to denigrate anything British. Why do you still live in this country, or is it for selfish purposes like the NHS, pensions, and an easy life?

I am British and have contributed a great deal to this country - far more than I’ll ever get back- but I’m not especially proud of our history or what we’ve become despite our best efforts.
China is out of order on many fronts but who are we to criticise?

Covid-19: The disinformation tactics used by China




China’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak has been scrutinised since the virus was first detected in Wuhan.

In response, Beijing has tried to take greater control of what is said about its role in the pandemic - sometimes with questionable tactics.

Radio 4 and BBC Monitoring’s Krassi Twigg look at events that have shaped Beijing’s experiment with global misinformation.

Video produced by Suniti Singh

Covid-19 and Wuhan: Why don't we know more?

I found this interesting -

Chinese official says China's home made vaccine 'don't have high protection rates'.

China's top disease control official has said the efficacy of the country's Covid vaccines is low, in a rare admission of weakness.

In a press conference, Gao Fu added that China was considering mixing vaccines as a way of boosting efficacy.

China has developed four different vaccines approved for public use, though some trials abroad had suggested efficacy as low as 50%.

Mr Gao later said his comments had been misinterpreted.

More than 100 million people in China have received at least one shot of the vaccine.

What did Mr Gao say?

Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, on Saturday said at a conference the current vaccines "don't have very high rates of protection".

He suggested that the China was considering mixing Covid-19 vaccines, as a way of boosting efficacy.

Mr Gao explained that steps to "optimise" the vaccine process could include changing the number of doses and the length of time. He also suggested combining different vaccines for the immunisation process.

But he later appeared to backtrack on his comments, telling state media Global Times that "protection rates of all vaccines in the world are sometimes high, and sometimes low".

"How to improve their efficacy is a question that needs to be considered by scientists around the world," he told the paper.

He added that his earlier admission that Chinese vaccines had a low protection rate were a "complete misunderstanding".

Mr Gao's original and later comments have been largely unreported by Chinese media.

His original comments however, attracted some criticism on social media site Weibo, with commenters suggesting that he should "stop talking".

What do we know about Chinese vaccines?

With little data released internationally, the effectiveness of the various Chinese vaccines has long been uncertain.

Brazilian trials of the Sinovac vaccine CoronaVac for instance, showed an efficacy rate of around 50.4%, which is barely over the 50% threshold needed for regulatory approval by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Interim results from late-stage trials in Turkey and Indonesia however, had suggested the efficacy rate of the Sinovac shot to be between 91% and 65%.

How are they different from other vaccines?

China's vaccines though differ significantly from some vaccines, especially those developed by Pfizer and Moderna.

Developed in a more traditional way, they are so-called inactivated vaccines which means they use killed viral particles to expose the immune system to the virus without risking a serious disease response.

By comparison, the BioNtech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are mRNA vaccines. This means part of the coronavirus' genetic code is injected into the body, training the immune system how to respond.

The UK's AstraZeneca vaccine is yet another type of vaccine where a version of a common cold virus from chimpanzees is modified to contain genetic material shared by the coronavirus. Once injected, it teaches the immune system how to fight the real virus.


Read the full article here -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-56713663

Coincidence, fake or more to it?

A US intelligence report says three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sought hospital care a month before China reported the first cases of what became known as Covid-19, the Wall Street Journal reports.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-57225462

Fwiw Biden has not rubbished it and...

"The report comes after Dr Anthony Fauci said he was “not convinced” that Covid-19 developed naturally and called for a full investigation.

PolitiFact’s Katie Sanders asked Dr Fauci if he was “still confident that it developed naturally” during a “United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact Checking” event.

“No, actually. I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,” he said.

Dr Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, made the comments earlier this month but they were largely unreported at the time.

“Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else, and we need to find that out,” he added.

“So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-panemic-wuhan-lab-workers-b1852561.html

[I quote Fauci because along with Whitty and Van Tam they don't play any political games]



The source of the BBC story is from The Wall Street Journal, original article here -
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228

Extracts from the article -

Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist on that team told NBC News in March that some WIV staff did fall sick in the autumn of 2019, but she attributed that to regular, seasonal sickness.

David Asher, a former U.S. official who led a State Department task force on the origins of the virus for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told a Hudson Institute seminar in March that he doubted that the lab researchers became sick because of the ordinary flu.

“I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in the hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus,” he said, adding that the researchers’ illness may represent “the first known cluster” of Covid-19 cases.

Now Biden has stepped up the pressure on his investigators to clarify whether or not Covid began as a laboratory leak I'm wondering a) how they'll be able to find out (access issues etc) and b) if it turns out to be a lab leak why were the Chinese messing with it in the first place? Will it be automatically assumed that it was for military purposes and discount medical research? Either could be true given China's military nature on the one hand and the far east's historical problems with SARS etc on the other?

Thought I'd update this thread -

Covid: China rejects WHO plan for second phase of virus origin probe


China has rejected terms proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to further investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

WHO head Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on China to be more co-operative about the early stages of the outbreak, including with audits of laboratories.

Zeng Yixin, deputy health minister, said it showed "disrespect for common sense and arrogance towards science".

He said the plan was politicised and that China could not accept it.

The WHO was only able to send a team of experts to Wuhan - the city where the virus was first detected in December 2019 - in January this year.

Their investigators concluded that it was highly unlikely that coronavirus escaped from a laboratory, but the theory has persisted.

Earlier this month, Dr Tedros outlined the terms of a proposed second phase of the WHO investigation, including audits of science research institutions in the area where the virus was first identified.

He urged Beijing to "be transparent, to be open and co-operate" with investigators and provide raw patient data that HAD NOT been shared during the first probe.

More here -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-57926368


Seems to me the World Health Organisation have grave doubts over China's honesty in all this...


Fwiw I've said on here right from the start that we and the rest of the world were misled how the virus spread from human to human and how quickly it did.

It is also something of a massive coincidence that the only Laboratory in the world doing research on Corona virus before the outbreak is more or less directly, literally across the street to where the first outbreak started.

The general thinking (although it isn't really spelt out as such) is that scientists researching the virus accidently got themselves contaminated with it and that's how the whole thing kicked off.

Seems more reasonable than China's explanation that it started at some unknown place from Wuhan and transported into the country on frozen animals that just happened to be sold at the market directly across from the only laboratory in the world undertaking research on the Corona virus.

To be fair though neither explanation can be proved one way or another - although if China does have the information the WHO would like to see and could easily disprove the outbreak didn't escape from their lab, then why not simply show it to the world?