Corona-zona

  Over the weekend, the Department of Energy changed its assessment of the origin of the pandemic. It had said the origin was inconclusive, but now according to an article in the Times   the agency now thinks  it was a lab leak from a Wuhan lab. The change was based on new intelligence (they won't say what) that "was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with 'low confidence,' suggesting its level of certainty was not high." DOE shared the same info with other agencies, none of which changed their assessments. The article outlines the diverging views among different intelligence agencies: In addition to the Energy Department, the F.B.I. has also concluded, with moderate confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses. Four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, with low confidence, that the virus most...

  The United States—and to be fair the rest of the world, but I will focus on here—whiffed the pandemic. We ignored warnings and abandoned programs designed to give us what little preparedness that we had. We couldn't make enough PPE or medical equipment, or ramp-up testing when we needed it most. Our reward is almost a million people dead, and around 11 million people with "long COVID." There were plenty of people warning us that we were unprepared for this. Back in 2005, Bush wanted to invest in preparedness  (for a replay of the Spanish Flu), but Congress wouldn't listen. In 2014, Obama asked for money to prepare for an Ebola epidemic, cut Congress wouldn't listen. In 2015 Bill Gates did a TED talk about how we weren't ready for a pandemic, nobody listened. Then just months before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started, the Trump administration undermined a federal-level pandemic unit that had been established. Now it's looking like deja vu all over again...

Last week the Biden administration said it's planning to ramp up vaccine production capacity to produce at least a billion extra doses per year by the end of 2022. That will be done by investing in companies with experience making mRNA vaccines. I've not been able to find details about how this investment will work. I'm a little worried that this will be another case of the government investing millions in pharma companies and helping them invent things, only to have them hog all the spoils like Moderna is trying to do now. This story was framed as a response to pressure to do more for poorer foreign countries, most of which have very low vaccination rates. That makes sense, because those are breeding grounds for new variants that could travel to the U.S. and wreak havoc like Delta has done. But something else caught my eye in the announcement. White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said : "This program would also help us produce doses within six to...

The other night, the Late Show re-ran an interview Stephen Colbert did with Sanjay Gupta in mid-March 2020, just as the Apocalypse was getting started. They had just eliminated the audience (in favor of a handful if staffers) and the following week they moved the show to Colbert's home. Gupta was Colbert's last guest before the shutdown. What is striking about the interview is what Gupta thought about the pandemic at the time.  Here's a review of the claims he made and what we know in hindsight. "For the majority of people, this is not something that's going to make them tremendously ill, this coronavirus. It might make them sick for a few days but they're likely to recover."  True .  According to research , 81% of people have mild disease, 14% have severe disease, and 5% have critical disease. "We have identified who the vulnerable population is here. It is elderly people." True . According to figures from Our World in Data there is a power cu...