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Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

29 Apr

SARS-CoV-2 elimination, not mitigation, creates best outcomes for health, the economy, and civil liberties

(As has been obvious to anyone with a functioming brain since Jan-Feb 2020.)

thelancet.com/journals/lance…

"COVID-19 deaths per 1 million population in OECD countries that opted for elimination (Australia, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea) have been about 25 times lower than in other OECD countries that favoured mitigation"

"[E]limination is preferable to mitigation in relation to a country's economic performance..GDP growth returned to pre-pandemic levels in early 2021 in the five countries that opted for elimination, whereas growth is still negative for the other 32 OECD countries."

Read 7 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

22 Apr

"We need the countries and companies that control the global supply to share financially, to share their doses with Covax...and to share their know-how to urgently and massively scale up the production and equitable distribution of vaccines."

nytimes.com/2021/04/22/opi…

"One way to do this is through voluntary licensing with technology transfer, in which a company that owns..patents on a vaccine licenses another manufacturer to produce its shots..Some companies have done this on a bilateral basis. But such agreements tend to be..nontransparent"

"A more transparent method is for companies to share licenses through the Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, a globally coordinated mechanism proposed by Costa Rica and started by the W.H.O. last year."

Read 5 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

21 Apr

"US government can use its ownership of..vaccine patent to push companies to share..expertise..and boost global access to coronavirus jabs, according to..Barney Graham..NIH scientist..who invented..key..technology used in..Moderna and..Pfizer jabs"

ft.com/content/d0c70c…

"US government patent in question—US patent..10,960,070..— relates to how the spike protein is stabilised in the vaccine, a technique that was developed by..NIH’s Vaccine Research Center. It is..key component of..mRNA vaccine jointly developed by Moderna and the NIH last year."

"'Moderna infringes..NIH’s patent with every dose.. of vaccine it makes or sells in..US,” said Christopher Morten..of NYU..Technology Law and Policy Clinic..'If..US government decides to sue Moderna, Moderna could conceivably owe over $1bn just for..sales through..end of..year.'"

Read 4 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

20 Apr

Taiwan: 0.5 per million (11 deaths)
China: 3 per million (4,636 deaths)
Singapore: 5 per million (30 deaths)
Hong Kong: 28 per million (209 deaths)
South Korea: 35 per million (1,802 deaths)
Japan: 77 per million (9,671 deaths)

US: 1,800 per million (582,401 deaths; +800 daily)

New Zealand: 5 per million (26 deaths)
Australia: 35 per million (910 deaths)

UK: 1,900 per million (127,307 deaths)

Nations that successfully suppressed outbreak include both small and large, both island and non-island, and both autocratic and democratic.

Sole relevant parameter for success or failure is whether government took prompt resolute action (success) or whether it did not (failure).

Read 5 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

15 Apr

"The world is..failing to develop desperately needed antibacterial treatments, despite..urgent threat of antibiotic resistance..[N]o..antibiotics..currently in clinical development sufficiently address..drug resistance in the..most dangerous bacteria."

who.int/news/item/15-0…

"The persistent failure to develop, manufacture, and distribute effective new antibiotics is further fueling the impact of antimicrobial resistance..and threatens our ability to successfully treat bacterial infections"

"Almost all the new antibiotics that have been brought to market in recent decades are variations of antibiotic drugs classes that had been discovered by the 1980s."

Read 6 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

10 Apr

Coronavirus origins: how unseen Wuhan research notes could hold the answers

Secrecy has only served to foster distrust among the international scientific community – and fuel speculation that Sars-Cov-2 escaped from a lab
scmp.com/week-asia/heal…

"Koblentz said the search should include an independent audit of all labs in Wuhan working on bat coronaviruses and researching Sars, given the deaths and global disruption caused by the pandemic, and most importantly the threat of a repeat."

"Koblentz, the biosecurity specialist, said it was unusual for (WIV) database to be taken offline and never restored, as cybersecurity breaches were usually fixed after companies or government agencies detected a hacking attack."

Read 5 tweets

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