Covid-19: Preparing for a National Commission on Pandemics, Biodefense and the Health Effects of Global Travel and Climate Change
According to infectious disease experts, global travel, climate change and humans moving into closer proximity with animals will lead to a rise in the number of Pandemics. People who study biodefense say that pandemics are as big of a threat to national security as terrorist attacks. But the public will not see it that way.
McCaul said that a report he released in 2016 as a ranking member of the Foreign affairs panel, found a lot of the evidence that the flu was caused by a leak from the Wuhan lab.
Some experts think a broad-based examination of the Pandemic is too daunting. It might not be easy to overcome the intense partisanship that surrounds Covid-19 if a commission is established. The nation was so deeply divided after Sept. 11 that “partisan pressures almost tore apart our commission,” said Philip D. Zelikow, a University of Virginia historian and former government official who was the executive director of the Sept. 11 panel. The problem is even worse today, he said.
The vision that we showed in the early 2000s at creating an architecture that fixes things that we got wrong then, that addresses things that we didn’t think of then, is no substitute for showing it to the public.
The Covid Commission Planning Group, made up of about three dozen experts, has spent the past two years conducting research in order to prepare for a national inquiry. The group, which has held several hundred interviews, grew tired of waiting for Congress and plans to publish its findings in a book this spring, Mr. Zelikow said. He wouldn’t talk about details.
Indications for Expanding the Covid-19 Wastewater Surveys in the U.S. and China, and a comment from a US official
It requires some agreements to be made with the airlines but it does look like a promising area of vigilance for the future. Expanding the wastewater surveys is a data point that can be helpful and is not intrusive in nature.
“I think they’ve done some early piloting of one flight, for example, testing the blue water in one flight,” she said, adding that such a program could be expanded to test collections of wastewater from multiple flights or a single airport.
According to United Airlines, it has been in touch with the CDC and is evaluating its participation in the program. CNN has requested comment from the CDC and other US carriers that serve China.
A federal health official told CNN last month that they only have limited information about what’s being shared regarding increased hospitalizations and deaths. There has been a decrease in testing across China. So that also makes it difficult to know what the true infection rate is.”
Travelers from China will have to show a negative Covid-19 test result before traveling to the US as Beijing easing restrictions on Covid-19 leads to a surge in cases. The UK, Australia and Canada are implementing the same measures. The Chinese government has warned that China would take countermeasures against the restrictions.
China has insisted that its Covid-19 data is transparent despite its strikingly low official figures, given the rapid spread of the virus and the relatively low vaccine booster rates among the elderly. But the US, the World Health Organization and other countries have urged China to share more data. A US official told CNN that Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged China to upload more health data during a phone call last month.
The Biden administration is not planning, as of now, to impose any punitive measures on China if it does not release more Covid-19 data, a second US official said.
Why the WHO hasn’t done its phase-two work in two years? “It was badly neglected by China,” M. Van Kerkhove told Nature
But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. She said that the plan of work to be done in phases had changed. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.
The work is believed to be an important contribution from Chinese scientists, as it shows that theviruses probably had not arisen as early as September and were not widespread in the city in late 2019.
In July of that year, the WHO sent out a circular to member states about how it intended to advance origins studies. To start with, the proposed steps included an assessment of wild-animal markets in and around Jinhua, as well as audits of farms that supplied those markets, and labs in the area where the first cases were identified.
But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. The WHO proposal was not agreed to by all member states and the second phase should not be focused on pathways, according to the China’s foreign ministry.
The origins investigation was poorly handled by the global community, says Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Institute at Boston University. It was poorly handled by China. It was poorly handled by the WHO.” The WHO is supposed to have created a positive relationship with the Chinese authorities, but it should have been more open about that.
A public-health doctor who was part of the team that went to Wuhan, said she still hoped that progress would be made.
The latest science report from the Department of Energy was presented to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sunday (I): Covid Lab Leak Wuhan-china Intelligence
Intelligence agencies can make assessments using either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.
The assessment from the Department of Energy was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The intelligence assessment was updated in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside the government, as was told by a senior US intelligence official.
A Department of Energy spokesperson told CNN in a statement: “The Department of Energy continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”
The Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is one of 18 government agencies that make up the intelligence community, which are under the umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing for further investigation into the lab leak theory, while accusing the Biden administration of playing down its possibility.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Mike McCaul said Sunday he was “pleased” that the Department of Energy “has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to.”
“I have requested a full and thorough briefing from the administration on this report and the evidence behind it,” the Texas Republican said in a statement.
McCaul said it was critical that the administration begin to work with partners and allies around the world to hold the Chinese Communist Party responsible and to put in place updated international regulations to make sure something like this never happens again.
There needs to be extensive hearings. I hope our Democratic colleagues in the Congress can support that. The senator said that Republicans in the House were supportive of it.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html
“I don’t know what the Chinese have to say about the world,” Sullivan told the House of Oversight Chairman James Comer
The last three years has seen one of the biggest pandemics in a century. A lot of evidence that it’s coming from the Chinese,” Sullivan said.
A spokesperson for House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement that the committee was “reviewing the classified information provided” by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a letter requesting information earlier this month.
Sullivan said that the intelligence community has not come up with a definitive answer. Some elements of the intelligence community are on one side and on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”