Fauci Showed Breakthrough Pfizer COVID Vaccine Results To Biden Before Trump: Azar

When news first broke about the headline numbers from Pfizer's vaccine trial on Monday morning, we couldn't help but wonder how the Trump Administration and the White House had seemingly been left out of the loop. The Biden team was reportedly briefed on the data Sunday, one day before its release. Meanwhile, many at the WH first learned about the data from the press.

Since then, the media's message that we were finally seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel" has been tempered by numerous 'experts' in fields from epidemiology to logistics assuring investors and the general public that there's still a lot we don't about the vaccines, from their long-term efficacy and side-effects, to what unanticipated delays might arise as the first approved vaccines start making their way from warehouses to doctor's offices or pharmacies, wherever the vaccines will ultimately be distributed.

During his first press briefing since the election, President Trump delivered a bitter 'I told you so,' and slammed Dr. Fauci and Pfizer for sharing the data with Joe Biden and his team before the White House.

Trump comments followed confirmation from DHHS head Alex Azar, who told WMAL host Vince Coglianese that he learned about the trial results from the press...even though the trials were being overseen by agencies within DHHS.

“I, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, learned about this from media reports on Monday morning,” Azar said Wednesday during an interview with Washington D.C. radio station WMAL.

If accurate, that would mean Dr. Fauci & Co. shared the results with Joe Biden, before his victory was even officially certified, which sounds like a pretty brazen gesture of disrespect toward the president and his administration.

"If the Biden campaign found out Sunday night but you...didn’t find out until Monday, that sounds like there’s a problem there," WMAL host Vince Coglianese said during his interview with Azar. “There certainly was a gap in communication, let’s say,” Azar responded.

According to media reports, White House staff were infuriated when they found out Biden had been given a sneak peak at the data ahead of Trump.

As the Federalist pointed out in a report on Azar's revelation, the fact that Biden was briefed before Trump is just another sign that the rollout was a coordinated effort between Pfizer, Dr. Fauci and the NIH to delay the results until after the election to try and boost the former vice president's chances.

Egged on by Bloomberg and other other media outlets, Pfizer has also been blatantly misrepresenting its participation in 'Operation Warp Speed'. Though Pfizer didn't receive any money upfront, the US government has promised to deliver a $2 billion payment in exchange for 100 million doses.

“We were never part of the Warp Speed … We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone,” company Senior Vice President Kathrin Jansen said in an interview reported by the New York Times. Pfizer later had to revise her statement, as they have indeed benefited from a $2 billion dollar contract with HHS.

In a matter of weeks, top Dems, including NY Gov Andrew Cuomo and Biden's running mate Kamala Harris, have gone from trying to discredit the Trump FDA, to trying to completely white was the administration's efforts and accomplishments with OWS and other aspects of the COVID-19 response.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/fauci-showed-breakthrough-pfizer-covid-vaccine-results-biden-trump-dhhs-confirms

1 in 7 students will head back to home town as asymptomatic Covid carriers

In the months leading up to the fall, much ink was spilled — including in this publication — about colleges’ plans to bring students to campus for a semester amid a global pandemic. But now just weeks away from Thanksgiving, there’s been little scrutiny focused on how hundreds of colleges are preparing to scatter their thousands of students across the country. 

There’s evidence to indicate that many colleges’ decisions to invite students back to campus contributed to the increase in positive COVID-19 cases across the country. Now experts are worried that sending students home en masse could have a similar impact.

Walter Casey, a political science professor at Texas A&M University-Texarkana and a member of the Texas Emergency Management Advisory Group, who has worked on models tracking and projecting the spread of COVID-19, said he estimates that after coming to college and circulating in the community, roughly 2 in 15 students will be heading back to their town or city as asymptomatic carriers of the virus. 

“We’re creeping up on a very frightening phase in the spread of the disease,” Casey said. 

Joshua Salomon, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the director of the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, a research consortium focused on modeling related to infectious disease, said Thanksgiving has “the makings of a real tragedy for lots of reasons,” including that students will be dispersing across the country.

“We know that colleges that are not adequately testing are very likely to have a lot of silent spread going on,” he said.  “If they’re sending students home without a rigorous testing regime in place then they’re almost certainly going to be sending some students home,” carrying the virus.  

A college with rigorous testing is keeping students ‘in the bubble’ as long as possible

At Colby College, students were tested before returning to campus in August, and they were also tested three times a week in the first few weeks following their arrival and twice weekly after that. Officials there are trying to “keep everybody in the bubble right up until Thanksgiving, so that we know they’re being tested twice a week, we know they’re being safe and healthy,” said Doug Terp, the school’s vice president for administration and chief financial officer. 

The school’s last day of classes before they send students home for Thanksgiving is Tuesday, Nov. 24 and they’ll be offering COVID tests right up until the end of the last class that day, said Terp, who oversaw the school’s return to campus plan. They’ll also be sending students home with information about travel conditions as well as tips for keeping safe while on the road — for example, if you’re driving, fill up the tank before you leave and minimize stops. 

They’ll also be providing grab and go food that students can take with them on their travel to avoid entering restaurants or other public places unnecessarily on their journey. 

In addition, school officials are asking students to remain as vigilant as they were on campus about following mask-wearing, social distancing and other guidelines when they go home, Terp said. 

“We want to be sure they understand you could have a negative test result on Tuesday and if you’re driving to Virginia and you need to stop for gas twice and you stop for lunch and dinner, you may have been fine when you left here, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t interact with someone on the way,” that could put you at risk of exposure, Terp said. 

“You still need to take all of those precautions that we ask people to do here, you need to bring that home,” he added. “If you’re not in this testing regime it’s all that more critical.” If students do test positive before they leave campus, the college will encourage them to isolate at the school and ensure they have housing, medical attention, food service and that their other needs are met, he said. 

Officials also expect that roughly 70 or 80 students will remain on campus through Thanksgiving and the December break either because they can’t travel home or home is not an optimal setting for them to perform well on exams, Terp said. The school will be providing a scaled back version of the food, transportation and other amenities it already offers and still be requiring twice weekly testing for students. 

Some colleges encourage students to refrain from non-essential activity in the weeks leading up to the holiday

At the University of Illinois, where officials have received attention both for the school’s robust testing program — and a brief uptick in cases in September — they’re advising students to get two negative COVID tests four days apart before heading home.

“The last thing we want to do is send students home infected and put their families at risk,” said Rebecca Lee Smith, an associate professor of pathobiology at U of I and one of the architects of the school’s COVID mitigation strategy. 

In addition to encouraging students to take advantage of the school’s vigorous testing capabilities, U of I officials are also urging students to refrain from leaving their homes other than to participate in class, secure food or exercise in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, Smith said. In fact, they’ve already advised students to limit their time outside their homes to nonessential activities due to rising positivity rates in the state. 

Though classes will be completely remote starting the week of Thanksgiving, the school will be maintaining its testing infrastructure throughout the rest of the year — except for two-day closures surrounding Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. The school is discouraging students with off-campus housing from returning to Urbana-Champaign, Smith said, but if they do they’ll be required to maintain their testing schedule. 

‘Now, it’s later’

In early summer, when many colleges initially made plans to send students home at Thanksgiving there was reason to believe that the country might have the pandemic under control before heading into the winter. Given that logic, sending students home before flu season would begin in earnest made sense as a strategy for preventing the spread of the disease on campus during the colder months. 

But in the intervening time between when colleges made that decision and when they’re being forced to execute on it, “some of the public health guidance has changed, the condition of the virus around the country has changed,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. 

“The main focus was getting students to campus and they’ll figure everything out later. Now it’s later,” he said. With a few notable exceptions — for example, the State University of New York system will be requiring students to test negative for COVID within 10 days prior to leaving campus — “I haven’t seen a lot of good information on what colleges are doing about Thanksgiving,” Kelchen said, “which is a little bit of a concern given that we’re that close.”

Some schools are inviting students to stay over the break

Instead of sending students home, some colleges are encouraging them to stay on campus during Thanksgiving. At St. Joseph’s College of Maine, officials decided to invite everyone to remain at the college in part because some students were participating in hands-on programs, like nursing or environmental science that would continue to need access to in-person courses after the holiday. 

“It is actually safer on campus than flying to the winds and coming back or even going back to some communities which might be hot sports, and so ideally everybody would stay,” said Olivier Griswold, the chief brand and marketing officer at the school.  

The college is asking its 700 students studying on campus, including commuter students,  to tell them where they plan to spend the holiday. So far, about 41 have said they plan to stay on campus, 439 have said they will go home and then return to the college and 231 will go home and stay there, Griswold said. The school expects those numbers may shift as Thanksgiving nears, particularly if government guidance changes. 

For example, Maine’s governor recently removed a testing and quarantining exemption from certain nearby states, making it more difficult for students to return to campus from those states if they leave. 

Those who decide to return will be taken straight to the school’s health and wellness center when they drive through the campus’ gates for a COVID-19 test and then will be tested again a few days later, he said. 

Even in typical years, the school has some students who stay on campus during Thanksgiving, either because they’re international students or because their home isn’t a place they want to return to. But given that they expect to have more students remain for Thanksgiving this year, “there’s more pressure on us to provide the kind of experience that they might expect when they go home,” Griswold said. 

“We’re going to have turkey, we’re going to have all the fixings,” Griswold said. “We’re going to try to make it feel as much like home as we possibly can, while acknowledging that this is a very strange time to be holding a holiday at a college.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/colleges-try-to-prevent-superspreader-events-as-they-prepare-for-a-mass-migration-of-students-going-home-11604938375

The Vulnerable Can Wait. Vaccinate Super-Spreaders First

He was one of 750,000 people, give or take, who passed through Grand Central Terminal that day. He worked as an attorney in a high-rise on 42nd Street that had direct access to the station, where trains departed every few minutes to 122 towns in New York and Connecticut. He and his wife ran a small firm, specializing in estate law, on the 47th floor of the building; he spent his hours there helping people negotiate death. At the end of the workday on Friday, February 21, the man made his way to the platforms for the New Haven line, boarded a train, and rode 30 minutes north to a commuter town in Westchester County called New Rochelle. At that moment, there were 34 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the United States, all of them linked to international travel.

The next day, the man went to his synagogue, Young Israel of New Rochelle, as he did every Saturday. He and his wife had four children, though only two lived with them at the time—a son who went to college in Manhattan and a daughter who was still in high school. Despite the demands of his job, he was a family man, someone who was as eager to play Connect 4 with his kids as write a brief for whatever big case he was working on. His house was close to Young Israel, within the boundaries of the eruv, a symbolic perimeter identified by telephone poles, power lines, and other landmarks. Inside the eruv, some rules of the sabbath are relaxed, as if the whole neighborhood were a communal home.

The man was back at the synagogue at 11 the next morning for a funeral. Hundreds of congregants turned out to honor a Holocaust survivor who had died the day before at age 93. That afternoon, some of them returned to Young Israel for a joint bar and bat mitzvah. As the children played, the man and the other adults chatted, ate hors d'oeuvres, and drank cocktails. During the two events, health officials later estimated, the man came into contact with between 800 and 1,000 people.

“I felt a cough, which wasn't crazy, and I thought it was allergies,” the man later told the New York Law Journal. When the cough didn't go away, he thought about making a doctor's appointment. But it wasn't until February 26, when he developed a fever, that he, as he put it, “started to put two and two together.” He was due to travel to Washington, DC, the following week for the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he would be in the same room with members of Congress and heads of state. The trip never happened. Instead, a friend drove him to the hospital, where a few days later he tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. He was one of the first people in the US known to have gotten the virus through community spread.

In the days that followed, the case count in New Rochelle began to climb. The man's wife and two children tested positive. So did the friend who had driven him to the hospital, along with members of the friend's family. Anyone who had been at Young Israel the weekend of February 22 was asked to quarantine, but dozens were already infected, including two of the caterers at the bar and bat mitzvah. The son's college shut down, as did the daughter's high school. On March 5, the rabbi of Young Israel announced that he, too, had contracted the virus.

At this point, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was holding daily press conferences about the outbreak. New Rochelle had “probably the largest cluster in the United States,” he said. “The numbers have been going up, the numbers continue to go up, the numbers are going up unabated.” The state authorities drew a circle around Young Israel, a 1-mile radius inside which all schools and places of worship had to close and large gatherings were banned. The rules were different within this perimeter, but not for long: The residents of New Rochelle were living in a future that would soon come to the rest of the United States.

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The man's condition worsened, and he was placed into a medically induced coma. His wife, who had a mild case, took to posting updates on Facebook. “We have wonderful friends who have cared for us despite the running fears all around us,” she wrote. The comments filled with wishes for a speedy recovery. “A whole community prays for your family every day,” one member of Young Israel wrote.

By March 11, more than 50 new cases had been linked back to the man. A week later, there were 50 cases tied to the daughter's school alone. Cuomo called the outbreak “one of the more complicated situations that we've come across because of the number of interconnections that this family has presented.” By the end of the month, some 10,000 cases had been diagnosed in Westchester County.

Finally, after more than two weeks in the intensive care unit, the man woke up. The first thing he did, his wife said, was to tell her over FaceTime that he loved her. Then he asked whether the rest of their extended family was OK. The press called him Patient Zero, the man who brought the disease from the dense city to New Rochelle, but that was assuming too much: The truth is, we don't know how the novel coronavirus was introduced to his community. What's clear, though, is that the virtues that made the man a good neighbor—there for friends and family in times of joy and pain alike—also made him highly efficient at spreading Covid-19. If he had come back from Grand Central and stayed at home that weekend, how many people would never have gotten the disease at all? Remove him from the chain of transmission, and the whole cluster might never have existed.

We've known about Covid-19 super-spreaders since the start of the pandemic. In January, a man transmitted the virus to 23 people during a bus ride on the Chinese coast south of Shanghai; in March, a member of a choir in Washington state passed it on to as many as 52 of her fellow singers; in August, the presence of an infected guest or guests at a wedding in Maine eventually led to more than 175 positive cases; and in September, President Trump hosted perhaps the most famous super-spreading event of all—a party to celebrate the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court that may have infected dozens of the most influential Republicans in Washington, along with members of the White House staff and press corps.

This is a pandemic defined by clusters. Some cause deadly outbreaks in nursing homes, prisons, and meatpacking plants. Others overwhelm families and friend groups. Although the numbers vary from study to study, SARS-CoV-2 seems to follow the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of cases stem from just 20 percent of infected individuals. Indeed, most people who test positive—one study in Hong Kong put the number at 69 percent—don't spread the disease at all. They get infected, remain asymptomatic or fall sick, recover or die, all without passing along the virus to anyone. And then there are the patients like the lawyer from New Rochelle.

Super-spreading makes the virus especially confounding. It explains why some places had huge outbreaks while others were spared, at least for a while, and why the same risky behavior (an indoor wedding, say) can lead to dozens of cases—or none. But it's also the virus's weakness: Eliminate the super-spreaders and you end the pandemic.

Eliminate the super-spreaders and you end the pandemic.

Until now, our tools to stop outbreaks have been blunt. We've imposed nationwide lockdowns and universal social-distancing orders, lumping everyone together no matter how likely they are to transmit the disease. When the first vaccines for Covid-19 arrive, our instinct may be to pursue the same approach, to vaccinate everyone we can as quickly as we can, brute-forcing our way to herd immunity—the point at which there are no longer enough susceptible people in the population for the virus to hop easily between hosts. But supplies of the vaccine are likely to be limited through the middle of 2021, if not longer. A sharper, more tailored strategy will be required. So: Who are the members of this super-spreading 20 percent?

According to Alessandro Vespignani, a computational epidemiologist who has been consulting with the US government on the response to Covid-19, it would be a mistake to search for some physiological trait connecting them. “Super-spreading is a word that many people associate with the idea that, for some strange biological reason, you're spreading the disease more,” he says. “This is not that. Generally it's because you have more contacts and you go to places that favor spreading.” After all, if an infectious person is a recluse, it doesn't matter how much virus he or she sheds.

To knock out the super-spreaders, the ideal target for a vaccine would be someone with many contacts in different settings—someone with a big, multigenerational family, a job that led to a lot of mixing with strangers, and a busy social life. But how do we find these highly connected individuals across 50 states and 330 million people? This is where most public health officials get stuck. To understand where the potential super-spreaders are in the general population, you would need a map of everyone's friends, family, and casual contacts—the people they see every day and those they interact with for only a few minutes. But that map, of course, doesn't exist, unless it's hiding on Mark Zuckerberg's laptop. In any case, it's not available to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At this point, we need to call in a different group of experts: the physicists.

In recent months, Albert-László Barabási has tried to walk around Budapest while taking calls, “to get some steps.” At 53, he is still youthful and fit, though the pandemic has kept him unusually busy. His standard route around town takes him by the peach-colored facade of the Alfréd Rényi Institute, named for a Hungarian mathematician who, with his collaborator Paul Erdős, helped lay the cornerstone of network science in the 1950s and '60s. Today the discipline informs all sorts of pursuits, from generating algorithmic recommendations on Facebook to mapping terrorist networks to, yes, forecasting the spread of lethal diseases. But when Rényi got started, he wanted the answer to a simple question: What would a network organized completely at random look like? How would it behave?

Although Erdős and Rényi were theoreticians, they thought their work might eventually have some practical application—say, in understanding the evolution of railways or the power grid. But a few decades later, Barabási and Réka Albert, his colleague in the physics department at Notre Dame, determined that the Erdős-Rényi model was actually too random to accurately describe most naturally occurring networks.

“Our first key discovery,” Barabási says, “was that there's really no random network out there.” They found that in most settings, from Hollywood to academia to the World Wide Web, networks tended to be “extremely heterogeneous, in the sense that their connectivity is dominated by a few very, very highly connected hubs.” Barabási and Albert called these networks “scale-free”: Most nodes could contact just a handful of others, but a small fraction were off the scale in terms of connectivity. Your website might link to four pages. Google links to 800 million.

It was Alessandro Vespignani, then at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, who tied this work directly into the study of epidemics, beginning with the digital kind. Why, Vespignani wondered, were computer networks still susceptible to viruses even though millions of individual users had antivirus software? The answer, he discovered, was that if you didn't inoculate the nodes, malicious code could still zip around the internet with relative ease.

Not long after that, a colleague asked whether all this work on the structure of networks had ever been applied to the spread of real biological epidemics. “I thought, probably they have already done that,” Vespignani says. They hadn't, and in 2002 he and a colleague wrote a paper on a “targeted immunization scheme in which we progressively make immune the most highly connected nodes, i.e., the ones more likely to spread the disease.” They ran a computer simulation of the effect of such a strategy on a scale-free network, which was meant to mimic “the web of human sexual contacts.” The results, they wrote, were “arresting”: You could protect the whole system by immunizing as little as 16 percent of the population, as long as you started with the most highly connected people.

Barabási remembers reading Vespignani's paper and trying to apply its logic to the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, where the US government had just announced an ambitious program to combat the disease. An epidemiologist schooled in network theory would give HIV drugs to the members of society with the highest number of sexual contacts, Barabási says—but that wasn't the government's approach. “The Bush administration was giving the treatment to mothers with children because that sounds really good, and it's soft and cozy,” he says. (It also protects against mother-to-child transmission.) “But what our measurement has shown is, no, no, no, you should actually give the HIV drugs to prostitutes, because those are the ones who are the biggest hubs when it comes to the spread of HIV.”

For sexually transmitted diseases, the barriers to targeting the super-spreaders may have been political. But for respiratory infections like influenza, SARS, and Covid-19, the limit is computational. There is no practical way to track down the most highly connected nodes in a network that is as big as the whole world, and where the definition of a link includes almost every type of human interaction. The physicists weren't done yet, however. They set themselves to that very problem: Can you find the nodes without a complete map?

In 2003, during the first SARS epidemic, Shlomo Havlin, a physicist at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, proposed one of the most ingenious solutions to this problem. In a paper called “Efficient Immunization Strategies for Computer Networks and Populations,” Havlin and two colleagues argued that you could achieve global effects on a complex network using only local knowledge. All you had to do was follow a simple script: Take a random sample of a population, ask each individual to name a single acquaintance, and vaccinate the acquaintance. “In this way

,” Havlin says, “you can reach the hubs, the super-spreaders, very easily.”

This acquaintance immunization strategy wasn't as efficient as one that targeted the most highly connected nodes based on complete knowledge of a network. But it was close. “If you do this,” Havlin says, “you reduce the number of units that you need to immunize by a factor of three or four.” Diseases that would normally keep spreading until 60 or 80 percent of the population was infected—the herd immunity threshold—could be stopped by vaccinating just 10 or 20 percent. Havlin likens the effect to a phase transition: A solid network of ice crystals melts suddenly into water.

Acquaintance immunization works because of a phenomenon known as the friendship paradox, which holds that, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. The very act of asking someone to choose a friend, any friend, played out over hundreds or thousands of iterations, leads inevitably to the most connected people. Consider, for example, a very simple network of three people from Casablanca, Morocco: Rick, Ilsa, and Louis. Ilsa and Louis both know Rick, but they don't know each other. If you ask each of them to name a friend, two out three times you wind up with the most-connected person: Rick.

Once a Covid-19 vaccine is available, if we asked every Louis and Ilsa and Rick in all the towns in all the world to choose a friend to receive it, occasionally we would end up vaccinating the “wrong” person—someone with fewer connections than the randomly chosen person. More often than not, however, we'd be eliminating a hub from the network of infection. Do it enough times and the disease eventually has nowhere to go.

Havlin's strategy worked when he modeled it on real computer networks, and there's also experimental evidence for its effectiveness with biological epidemics: In 2009, when H1N1 flu was circulating, the network scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler followed two groups of Harvard undergraduates. The first group was randomly chosen; the second consisted of the first group's friends. On average, the members of the friend group got the flu two weeks before the random group, whose infection rates matched the undergraduate population as a whole. If the friend group had been vaccinated at the beginning, the campus might have been spared an outbreak entirely.

Vespignani says that whenever there's an outbreak, network epidemiologists usually bring up acquaintance immunization as a possible solution. Its great appeal lies in its simplicity—no small matter when considering a plan that has to be implemented and effectively communicated by the government. When it comes to a vaccination campaign as big as the one planned for Covid-19, however, simplicity might not be an option.

Since the pandemic began, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the CDC has been studying the question of who should get the first doses of a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. In August the committee held a public meeting on Zoom. The members gave presentations on the makeup of the groups at highest risk of severe disease and heard an update on the clinical trials at Pfizer and Moderna, the two US producers that were farthest along in the vaccine approval process. Doctors and public health experts from around the country were allowed to ask questions. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC's director for immunization and respiratory diseases, weighed in occasionally as the voice of institutional wisdom—she had been planning for a scenario like this her entire career. Then, about five hours into the meeting, the floor was opened to public comment.

One of the first people to address the committee was Santa Claus. Or, more precisely, it was Ric Erwin, chairman of the board of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas. The committee members didn't quite take him seriously (one confessed that he had never stopped believing in Santa), but Erwin had come in earnest. “This year, Christmas will be more important to the American psyche than ever before,” he said. It was vital that the country have a cadre of vaccinated Santas ready to safely hear the wish lists of children everywhere.

“We're asking that professional Santas and other frontline seasonal workers be granted early access to the Covid-19 vaccine as soon as practical after tier-one release.”

...

https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-vaccine-super-spreaders/