COVID-19 Has Benched A Critical Volunteer Workforce – Seniors

A couple of weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of senior volunteers left their homes early in the morning each day to perform myriad services that are vital to the fabric of communities across the nation.
Now they stay home.
One impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is the loss of an army of senior volunteers, an unpaid workforce that provides critical support to countless local public service organizations, from food banks and homeless programs to literacy organizations and pet shelters.
Some hardy senior volunteers remain on the “job” but most are taking a hiatus in the face of statistics showing that COVID-19 poses a potentially lethal threat to older people with underlying conditions.
As a result, countless organizations that perform vital work to millions of needy Americans are scrambling to execute their mission.

Meals on Wheels

Jenny Young, spokesperson for the national organization, Meals on Wheels America, said almost three-quarters of  MOW volunteers are age 55 plus.
Prior to the pandemic, they not only delivered meals to home-bound seniors but used their own cars to do so. Since the pandemic, she said, many seniors don’t feel comfortable doing home delivery or feel constrained by state-issued “stay at home” orders.
Young said some of MOW’s 5000 independently run local programs have been forced to rethink delivery schedules. Instead of one hot meal a day, they now deliver several meals once a week. She said many MOW programs have been forced to hire paid drivers to make delivery services.

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Meanwhile, Young said, “We are seeing an unprecedented increase in the number of homebound seniors who may not know from where their next meal will come.”
Young said MOW’s national website offers a “Find Meals” link that directs seniors to local MOW providers. She said use of the link has increased by as much 650% compared to an average week prior to COVID-19.
On the plus side, Young cited an outpouring of support from corporations, foundations and individual. She said the Meals on Wheels COVID-19 Response Fund has raised more than $8 million so far. Funds will help local communities across the country meet the increased demand for nutritious meals. She also noted Congress passed two laws allocating additional funds for nutrition programs under the Older Americans Act.
Meals on Wheels delivers about 220 million meals to 2.4 million seniors each year.

Community Food Bank

Prior to COVID, the community food bank in Tucson, AZ, was “staffed” at any one time by around 75 to 100 senior volunteers performing myriad services, from administrative duties to packing boxes on the assembly line and distributing the food boxes. About 80% of these seniors are now staying home due to fear of COVID-19, said Norma Cable, a spokesperson for the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona.
Cable said the food bank initially sought replacement volunteers from the ranks of college students and furloughed workers. She said from 30 to 60 members of the Arizona National Guard now help out each day.
“We’re grateful but at the same time no one can replace those senior volunteers,” said Cable. “They are a critical component of our operation in so many ways. They have knowledge, experience and are extremely dedicated … No one can replace them.”
It is estimated that 48 million people in the United States are “food insecure.”

Give money

While COVID-19 remains a threat, some would-be volunteers are asking what they can do to help.
Organizations are always happy to receive monetary donations.
The Association for National & Community Service lists several ways that every American can help, including giving blood, checking on neighbors, and becoming a medical volunteer.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2020/04/03/covid-19-has-benched-a-critical-volunteer-workforceseniors-volunteers/#66d0c57c449f

Researchers Warn Hydroxychloroquine May Be Toxic Combined With Metformin

Researchers have warned that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and chloroquine (CQ), two similar drugs repeatedly touted by President Trump to be promising treatments for COVID-19, may be deadly when combined with a common diabetes drug.
The new study was published yesterday online on scientific pre-print server BioRxiv and shows that 30-40% of mice treated with a combination of HCQ or CQ and diabetes drug metformin, died. Treatment with the same dose of either drug alone had no effect on the survival of the mice.
HCQ and CQ are typically used to treat malaria and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, but have also shown some early promise in the treatment of certain types of cancer, with several clinical trials ongoing.

“Our interest in this combination arose because both drugs individually have been shown to have anti-tumor effects in pancreatic cancer,” read a statement from two of the authors of the paper: Chi Dang, director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and Anirban Maitra, scientific director of the Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “To our utter surprise, both HCQ and CQ when combined with metformin resulted in a surprising death rate in 30-40% of mice. In contrast there were no deaths in the single treatment groups,” said the authors.
The work in the recently published study was done before the coronavirus outbreak, with the researchers testing HCQ/CQ and metformin for pancreatic cancer and coming up with this perhaps, serendipitous finding. Due to this, some of the mice had pancreatic tumors, however the drug combination proved fatal for the mice with and without pancreatic cancer, at a similar rate.

“Even in mice that did not have any tumors, we found this deleterious effect of the combination, underscoring that it is not dependent on the presence of a tumor,” said the authors.
Although no work has yet been done in humans to evaluate this interaction, there is also a plausible scientific reason by which these two drugs may negatively interact. Both of them affect a process called autophagy, which is where cells recycle proteins to enable them to make more.
“Autophagy literally stands for “self-eating” and is a form of “quality control” that most cells in our body engage in to recycle aging proteins so as to synthesize new ones. HCQ and CQ are both agents that inhibit autophagy and in fact this is the property that is important for its use in tumors like pancreatic cancer,” said the authors.
Metformin, on the other hand can actually induce autophagy, so it is possible that two drugs interfering with this recycling pathway at the same time could be toxic.
The researchers looked to see whether this process was disrupted in the mice dying after treatment with the combination and found increased numbers of autophagosomes (essentially recycling bins, containing cell proteins to be re-purposed), in the heart, liver and kidneys of the mice. They also designed the dosage of both drugs so that the amount they gave the mice should be proportional to how much humans typically receive.
“In this study we used a method called “allometric scaling” which uses the surface area of an average human being and an average mouse and uses this to identify comparable doses. Importantly this does not depend on the body weight which can lead to errors in estimation – most oncology therapeutics are actually calculated based on surface area,” said the authors.
So what do the researchers hope to achieve by publishing their work now?
“Our goal in communicating this work is not to scaremonger. We hope that the lethality we observed in mice will not translate to humans but instead there will be more “pharmacovigilance” or awareness regarding potential drug interactions between HCQ/CQ and metformin,” said the authors.
HCQ and CQ have been touted as a possible treatment for COVID-19, despite very scant and even conflicting evidence that it works for people with COVID-19, with some trials showing some promising effects of the drug and others showing no substantial benefit. Dozens of other trials are now up and running to properly evaluate HCQ/CQ in COVID-19, but the results of these studies will take time. Despite this, President Trump continues to mention it universally positively in his press briefings, yesterday even recommending that people take the drug.
“We have seen the escalating interest in HCQ for COVID-19, not only for therapy but now increasingly for prophylaxis following exposure to an infected family member or a patient. Because this drug is likely to be used in spades – either as part of a clinical trial or what we call “off label” – we wanted to get this information out at the earliest so that physicians treating COVID-19 patients are at least aware of this potential drug interaction,” said the authors.
Misuse of the drug has already resulted in at least one fatality, after man in Arizona died after ingesting fish tank cleaner containing CQ. Reports of poisoning were also been reported in Nigeria, a day after President Trump first mentioned it in one of his briefings.
“There is very good safety data on both drugs individually, as well as safety data on combination being used in patients who have autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. However, patients with COVID-19 are a whole different ballgame and typically much sicker than the average population. We have to remember that COVID-19 has been associated with adverse effects on the heart and the blood vessels – how all of these play out in addition to the two drugs interacting with each other will need to be studied,” said the authors.
Last week, the CDC reported that people with underlying health conditions are at more risk of severe COVID—19. People with diabetes are included in their initial dataset and appear to be more likely to be hospitalized/need to go to ICU than people with no underlying conditions, but with such small numbers it is difficult to tell currently why exactly this is. The report also had no information about how many of these people were currently on medications of any sort, whether it be metformin or HCQ/CQ, so currently there is no human data to back up the interaction seen in mice. However, the authors of the new study stress that this work must be done as soon as possible.
“Right now, the drugs are being used in a completely patchwork way. We need a national database on every COVID-19 patient that is receiving HCQ or CQ – either as part of a clinical trial or off label,” We ask either the FDA or companies like Flatiron to create such a registry for HCQ/CQ usage in COVID-19,” said the authors, stressing that the databases should record all adverse events that patients experience, including those reported by patients themselves and any other medications that patients are on. “This will allow us to sift through potential adverse drug interactions like metformin and others,” they added.
There are also two major points to be taken into account when interpreting the new study. Firstly, the research was done in mice, not humans. Testing drugs on mice is an important step in the approval of all new treatments to go into human clinical trials and promising drugs which cause severe toxicities in mice, generally don’t make it into human trials. However, some drugs do behave differently in mice to in humans, so although this result is indicative that HCQ/CQ and metformin may be especially toxic when combined in people, evidence from humans is needed to make a definitive conclusion.
Secondly, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed by other scientists to check its credibility and accepted for publication in a scientific journal. Most of the time during peer review, other scientists suggest ways in which the results or methodology could be improved to further support a study’s claims, sometimes they challenge the conclusions of the study and request that the authors be more conservative about their claims. Less commonly, they uncover significant flaws in the study meaning that they think the research needs to be completely overhauled parts repeated, or conclusions drastically changed. Although it is impossible to tell what will happen with this study during peer review, the scientists involved are all very experienced with thousands of accepted scientific publications between them, so that their work would be inherently flawed with little-to-no merit at all is rather unlikely.
Neither the lack of peer review or that the work was done in mice necessarily affect the implications of the work, but they do mean that a small amount of additional caution is warranted when interpreting the results, as is the case with all scientific pre-prints and work done in mice without corresponding human studies.
Considering the considerable burden of COVID-19 currently, it is understandable why many people want to view HCQ/CQ as a magic bullet, an old, reasonably safe and cheap drug, capable of quickly helping people who are seriously ill with COVID-19. But, the bottom line is that there are several reasons why many scientists and physicians are urging caution with HCQ/CQ. It isn’t because they think the drug is useless, it’s just because there simply isn’t enough evidence to suggest it is useful just yet.
This could change in weeks or months from now, as the results of new trials come out. But, if the relationship between HCQ/CQ and metformin found in mice is similar in humans, it serves as somewhat of a cautionary tale that even in these extreme and unusual times, there is merit to stepping back and thinking about how drugs may affect different people in different ways and what may help one person, may harm another.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2020/04/05/researchers-warn-that-covid-19-treatment-touted-by-trump-may-be-toxic-when-combined-with-diabetes-drug/#47112c3555f8

How Hoarding Medicine In A Pandemic Hurts Walgreens

Americans stocking up on their prescription drugs as COVID-19 stricken U.S. communities went on lockdown is hurting Walgreens – at least temporarily.
The nation’s largest drugstore chain earlier this week said its pharmacies are “now seeing declining sales trends, especially in quarantined areas.” The slowing of U.S. sales comes after three robust weeks of strong sales in March across multiple product lines including health, wellness and groceries as the spread of the Coronavirus strain COVID-19 raged across the U.S.
“There were two very distinct periods in March,” Walgreens Boots Alliance executive vice president and global chief financial officer James Kehoe told analysts Thursday.

“We delivered comp sales growth of 26% in the first 21 days of the month,” Kehoe added. “However, post March 21^st the comp sales trends turned negative, with the last week of the month running at a mid-teens rate of decline. Obviously, if this trend continues for an extended period it will quickly offset the sales uplift seen in the first 21 days of March.”
It appears health insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are to blame for stocking up of prescription drugs, according analysts who follows Walgreens. Health insurers have been waving co-pays and related cost-sharing for everything from prescriptions to Coronavirus treatments to hospitalizations to make it easier for those with insurance to get care amid a public health crisis.

“We think the weakness in prescription sales over the past two weeks is a result of insurance companies allowing people to get monthly prescriptions early without penalty, so there was likely stockpiling of drugs in early March,” Mizuho Securities USA analyst Ann Hynes wrote in a report issued after Walgreens second-quarter earnings call.
But the situation could be short-lived.
“We would anticipate these trends to normalize going forward and do not think there is a fundamental change in patient behavior if they are on existing therapies,” Hynes said. “The near-term risk could be new prescriptions not being written given the drop off in medical visits.”
It’s unclear whether other drugstore chains like CVS Health, Rite Aid or Walmart are facing a similar situation. Walgreens is the first major drugstore chain to report earnings since cases of Coronavirus spiked in March.
CVS Health owns the Caremark PBM and Aetna, the nation’s third largest health insurance company so its impact could be offset. CVS reports its first quarter earnings next month.
But CVS warned earlier this week of “COVID-19’s adverse impact” on the drugstore chain’s businesses.
“We believe COVID-19’s adverse impact on our businesses, operating results, cash flows and/or financial condition primarily will be driven by the severity and duration of the pandemic, the pandemic’s impact on the U.S. and global economies and the timing, scope and effectiveness of federal, state and local governmental responses to the pandemic,” CVS said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Those primary drivers are beyond our knowledge and control, and as a result, at this time we cannot reasonably estimate the adverse impact COVID-19 will have on our businesses, operating results, cash flows and/or financial condition, but the adverse impact could be material.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2020/04/03/how-pandemic-hoarding-of-medicines-hurts-walgreens/#19ac1e673c76

9 State Governors Who Have Refused To Issue Stay-At-Home Orders

While a vast majority of states have issued statewide stay-at-home orders in response to the coronavirus outbreak spreading across the United States, a handful of Republican governors have resisted mounting pressure to do so from many, including from the country’s top authority on infectious disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

• Nine different states in the South and Midwest have yet to announce statewide orders as of Saturday: Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota have all resisted issuing any kind of stay at home orders, while Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma and South Carolina have only issued orders in part of their states.
• The governors, all Republican, have often defended their actions out of a belief in smaller government, despite many calls from within their own states to do so.
• South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, for instance, told reporters earlier this week that “the people themselves are primarily responsible for their safety” and that state and national constitutions “prevent us from taking draconian measures much like the Chinese government has done.” She also added, “South Dakota is not New York City.”
• Governor Kim Reynolds, of Iowa, rejected  Fauci’s recent calls to implement a nationwide stay at home order: “I would say that maybe he doesn’t have all the information,” she told reporters this week. “I can’t lock the state down… people also have to be responsible for themselves,” she said.
• Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson also dismissed Fauci’s comments, calling the typical stay at home order a misleading “illusion,” because people would still go out in public. He argued against issuing an order because it would leave thousands in his state without jobs and the CDC has “not indicated that’s an appropriate or necessary step.”
• Similarly, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has questioned the necessity of a statewide order, while Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts said he hadn’t issued one because he was listening to medical advice from his own experts rather than national health officials.
• Other state governors, such as those in South Carolina, Utah, Wyoming and Oklahoma, have implemented some partial restrictions in cities and counties, but have stopped short of issuing statewide mandates.

Big number: Over 300 million people. That’s how much of the U.S. population, in 41 states across the country, is under mandatory stay-at-home orders, according to The New York Times. Some nine in ten Americans are now under instructions to not leave their house unless absolutely necessary.
Crucial quotes: In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Fauci made it clear that he believes all states should have stay at home orders. “I don’t understand why that’s not happening,” Fauci said. “If you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that. We really should be.” He recommended that the federal government should enact a nationwide stay-at-home order to curtail the spread of the virus. But President Trump and his administration have been reluctant to do so: “I leave it up to the governors. The governors know what they are doing,” Trump reiterated at his press briefing on Friday.
Key background: Some states, like Alabama and Missouri, had held out on issuing statewide orders for several weeks, before reversing course and doing so yesterday. Other states, such as Maine and Georgia, similarly issued stay-at-home orders earlier this week, amid mounting pressure from medical experts and lawmakers. In Florida, for instance, Governor Ron DeSantis for weeks resisted calls to impose a statewide order, despite a surging rise in coronavirus cases. He abruptly changed his stance earlier this week, citing President Trump’s “demeanor the last couple of days” as the reason for declaring a stay at home order, not because of warnings from health officials.
Chief critic: “What are you waiting for?” California Governor Gavin Newsom of California asked governors who hadn’t issued statewide stay-at-home orders. His state was the first to do so. “What more evidence do you need?”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/04/04/here-are-the-9-state-governors-who-have-refused-to-issue-stay-at-home-orders/#7b11b9944eeb

Hard Truths From Infectious Disease Specialists

We should expect more deaths from COVID-19 than previously predicted, leaders of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) said at a press briefing Friday.
The models on which the current national estimate of US mortality from COVID-19 are based assume that optimal social distancing will be practiced across the country, said Rochelle Walensky, MD, vice chair of IDSA’s HIV Medicine Association and chief of the infectious diseases division at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Under that scenario, the White House has said, the range of mortality would be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths.
However, Walensky noted, “We’re not properly social distancing. We’re not doing enough. And in that case, the models were wrong. Our prevention activities were not as robust as the models suggested, so the number of deaths will be higher.”

When the number of COVID-19 cases declines, Walensky cautioned, some degree of social distancing will still be needed. “We can’t think about not social distancing anymore until we can understand what it means to go from mitigation back to containment [of the coronavirus].
“When we go from mitigation to containment, that means that anyone who is symptomatic has access to a test, and we have to make sure that a person who tests positive is able to self-isolate and that we can ‘contact trace’ all of those people. We’re talking about blanketing tests so they’re universally available to anyone at any time.”
Thomas File Jr, MD, president of the IDSA and chair of the infectious disease division at Summa Health in Akron, Ohio, added, “As we go back from mitigation to containment, everyone is anxious to get back to business as usual. But I’m not sure we’ll ever get back to business as usual. The whole concept of promoting good health practices is going to have to continue even after we’re in the downslope. By that, I mean staying home if you’re sick, washing your hands, avoiding touching your face. We’ll have to continue those practices, even if there’s a downslope of this virus epidemic in our country and in the world pandemic.”

Test Accuracy

Walensky noted that the COVID-19 test now being used in hospitals is only 70% sensitive for negative results. “Therefore, we’re doing results review for every patient we take off precautions from the hospital to make sure they’re not a false negative.”
She clarified, “We believe the test is pretty good if it gives you a positive result. We think we can trust that to say the person really has the disease. But if it gives a negative result, the reported sensitivity of that is only about 70%.”
One reason for this, she said, is that there can be a sampling problem if the clinician doesn’t stick the test swab far enough into someone’s nose. “Second, as patients get sicker, the virus migrates from the nasopharynx to the oropharynx and into the respiratory tract. We don’t know, when it migrates down, whether it has left the nasopharynx.”
Patients aren’t being retested near the end of their clinical course, although that would be ideal to ensure they were free of infection, File said. “After people are afebrile for a certain period of time, usually after 14 days, we’ve considered that they’ve resolved their illness to the point where we can reduce the quarantine aspect of their care,” he said.
Infected healthcare workers, on the other hand, are not only quarantined for 2 weeks but also must have two negative tests, 24 hours apart, before they’re allowed to return to work at Massachusetts General, Walensky said.

Social Distancing Works

With most of the country on some form of lockdown, Walensky stressed there is abundant evidence that social distancing can slow the spread of COVID-19. “There have been empirical data going back to the 1918 flu epidemic that demonstrate that social distancing measures delayed the peaks in mortality, had lower mortality, and took longer for that mortality to happen,” she said. “We also have new data from China showing the infectivity of the SARS COVID virus. We know from those data that social distancing almost halved the infectivity and the reproductive number of SARS.”
The Trump Administration has signaled that everyone in the most infected areas will soon be urged, but not required, to wear masks in public. Walensky emphasized that people should continue to adhere to social distancing even if they wear masks. Also, she noted, “You’re not protecting yourself if you wear a mask, you’re protecting someone else from something you might transmit to them asymptomatically and unknowingly.”
Walensky acknowledged that “vulnerable communities,” including the poor, have less ability to socially distance than other people do. “They may not have the space, and they may have more need to go to work and get paychecks. And, where less social distancing is occurring, we’re seeing a higher incidence of the epidemic.”
Walensky said she hasn’t seen any triaging of patients by their ability to pay for care. But some vulnerable groups have less access to healthcare than more affluent people do, File noted.
A reporter asked Walensky whether doctors are collecting observational data on the effects of hydroxychloroquine, which was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use against COVID-19, and whether the data would be useful if they did. She said that 35 clinical trials of the drug are now being conducted, and a lot of physicians are already prescribing it. However, she added, “We need a big observational cohort, because not every hospital has the capacity to look through these charts and see what people got.”
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928146#vp_1

Bill Gates on coronavirus, epidemics, testing and cures

On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks.
https://youtu.be/Xe8fIjxicoo
https://youtu.be/Xe8fIjxico
The Gates interview is the second in a new series of daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews focused on COVID-19. The series’s website says that:

TED Connects: Community and Hope is a free, live, daily conversation series featuring experts whose ideas can help us reflect and work through this uncertain time with a sense of responsibility, compassion and wisdom.”

Anderson asked Gates at 3:49 in the video of the interview – which well over three million views now – about a ‘Perspective’ article by Gates that was published February 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“You wrote that this could be the once-in-a-century pandemic that people have been fearing. Is that how you think of it, still?” queried Anderson.
“Well, it’s awful to say this but, we could have a respiratory virus whose case fatality rate was even higher. If this was something like smallpox, that kills 30 percent of people. So this is horrific,” responded Gates.
“But, in fact, most people even who get the COVID disease are able to survive. So in that, it’s quite infectious – way more infectious than MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] or SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] were. [But] it’s not as fatal as they were. And yet the disruption we’re seeing in order to knock it down is really completely unprecedented.”

Gates reiterates the dire consequences for the global economy later in the interview.

“We need a clear message about that,” Gates said starting at 26:52.
“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But … bringing the economy back and doing [sic] money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in disease and death dimension.”

However, this goes directly against the imperative to balance the benefits and costs of the screening, testing and treatment measures for each ailment – as successfully promulgated for years by, for example, the Choosing Wisely campaign – to provide the maximum benefit to individual patients and society as a whole

As noted in an April 1 article in OffGuardian, there may be dramatically more deaths from the economic breakdown than from COVID-19 itself.

“By all accounts, the impact of the response will be great, far-reaching, and long-lasting,”

Kevin Ryan wrote in the article. Ryan estimated that well over two million people will likely die from the sequelae of the lock-downs and other drastic measures to enforce ‘social distancing.’
Millions could potentially die from suicide, drug abuse, lack of medical coverage or treatment, poverty and lack of food access, on top of other predictable social, medical and public-health problems stemming from the response to COVID-19.
Gates and Anderson did not touch on any of those sequelae. Instead, they focused on rapidly ramping up testing and medical interventions for COVID-19.
Gates said at 30:29 in the interview that he and a large team are moving fast to test anti-virals, vaccines and other therapeutics and to bring them to market as quickly as possible.

The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust with support from Mastercard and now others, created this therapeutic accelerator to really triage out [candidate therapeutics]…
You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, ‘Try this, try that.’ So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be done all over the world.”

The accelerator was launched March 10 with approximately $125 million in seed funding. Three days later Gates left Microsoft.
Not long before that, on January 23, Gates’s organization the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it will fund three programs to develop COVID-19 vaccines. These are the advancing of DNA-vaccine candidates against MERS and Lassa fever, the development of a “‘molecular clamp’ platform” that “enables targeted and rapid vaccine production against multiple viral pathogens,” and the manufacture and Phase 1 clinical study of an mRNA vaccine against COVID.

“The programmes will leverage rapid response platforms already supported by CEPI as well as a new partnership. The aim is to advance nCoV-2019 vaccine candidates into clinical testing as quickly as possible,” according to a news release.

Then at 32:50 in the video, Anderson asked whether the blood serum from people who have recovered from a COVID infection can be used to treat others.

“I heard you mention that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the blood serum of people who had had the disease and then recovered. So I guess they’re carrying antibodies,” said Anderson.
“Talk a bit about that and how that could work and what it would take to accelerate that.”

[Note that Anderson did not ask Gates about, instead, just letting most of the population – aside from people most vulnerable to serious illness from the infection, who should be quarantined — be exposed to COVID-19 and as a result very likely recover and develop life-long immunity. As at least one expert has observed, “as much as ninety-nine percent of active cases [of COVID-19] in the general population are ‘mild’ and do not require specific medical treatment” to recover.]

“This has always been discussed as, ‘How could you pull that off?’” replied Gates.
“So people who are recovered, it appears, have very effective antibodies in their blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out white cells, the immune cells.”

However, Gates continued, he and his colleagues have dismissed that possibility because it’s “fairly complicated – compared to a drug we can make in high volume, you know, the cost of taking it out and putting it back in probably doesn’t scale as well.”
Then a few seconds later, at 33:45, Gates drops another bomb:

We don’t want to have a lot of recovered people…
To be clear, we’re trying – through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million [people or approximately one percent of the U.S. population being infected with COVID-19 and the vast majority recovering]. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.”

It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.
And then, when the virus comes back again a few months later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, again selling billions of test kits and medical interventions.
Right after that, at 34:14, Gates talked about how he sees things rolling out from there.

Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…
…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly.
You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.
So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

[Some time on the afternoon of March 31 the last sentence of this quote was edited out of the official TED video of the interview. Fortunately, recordings of the complete interview are archived elsewhere.]
In the October 2019 Event 201 novel-corona virus-pandemic simulation co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a poll that was part of the simulation said that 65% of people in the U.S. would be eager to take a vaccine for COVID-19, “even if it’s experimental.”
This will be tremendously lucrative.
Vaccines are very big business: this Feb. 23 CNBC article, for example, describes the vaccine market as six times bigger than it was 20 years ago, at more than $35 billion annually today, and providing a $44 return for every $1 invested in the world’s 94 lowest-income countries.
Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2000, according to a 2017 Politico article. (While over the same time frame countries have reduced their contributions to the world body, particularly after the 2008-2009 depression, and now account for less than one-quarter of the WHO’s budget.) The WHO is now coordinating approximately 50 groups around the world that are working on candidate vaccines against COVID-19.
The Politico article quotes a Geneva-based NGO representative as saying Gates is “treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” and that Gates is one of the most influential people in global health.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-bill-gates-just-reveal-real-reason-behind-lock-downs
 

Japan to boost Avigan drug stockpile as part of coronavirus stimulus

Japan is considering increasing the stockpile of Fujifilm Holding Corp’s Avigan anti-flu drug during this fiscal year so it can be used to treat 2 million people, according to a planning document seen by Reuters.
Local media reported on Sunday that Japan was hoping to triple the production of the drug from current levels, which is enough to treat 700,000 people if used by coronavirus patients.
Avigan, also known as Favipiravir, is manufactured by a subsidiary of Fujifilm, which has a healthcare arm although it is better known for its cameras. The drug was approved for use in Japan in 2014. Avigan is being tested in China as a treatment for COVID-19.

In the emergency stimulus package expected to be rolled out on Tuesday, the government also planned to prioritise the clinical trial process of the drug so it can be formally approved to be used in treating coronavirus patients.
According to the document, Japan also plans to boost subsidies to domestic companies that supply masks and disinfectants and will secure enough capacity to supply 700 million masks a month.
The Nikkei newspaper reported on Sunday that in efforts to reduce its dependence on China as its manufacturing hub, it will subsidise companies that will move some of their production facilities back to Japan.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday a stimulus package to combat the coronavirus pandemic will target small firms and households hardest hit by social distancing policies that are affecting consumption.
The package will include cash payouts to small firms and households facing sharp falls in income, Abe said.
The government will also urge private financial institutions to join government-affiliated lenders in offering zero-interest rate loans to cash-strapped small and midsized firms, he said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-japan-avigan/japan-to-boost-avigan-drug-stockpile-as-part-of-coronavirus-stimulus-idUSKBN21N026