1 Year Later: The Biogen ‘Superspreader’ Conference That Sparked Boston’s Coronavirus Outbreak – NBC Boston
One year ago this weekend, more than 100 people from around the world convened at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel for a biotech leadership nbcboston.com/news/coronavir…
conference led by the Cambridge-based biotech company Biogen.
The biotech conference would quickly become a superspreader event, launching the COVID-19 outbreak in eastern Massachusetts and causing as many as 330,000 cases of coronavirus worldwide, according to a study
published in the journal Science.
According to the study, the conference was responsible for introducing more than 120 new coronavirus cases into the Boston area. More than a quarter of the introductions accounted for an estimated 85% of cases, the study found.
Nearly 100 people became ill following the Cambridge-based company's leadership conference, prompting the Marriott hotel to shut down in mid-March. But it was too late. Conference attendees had already hopped on planes to head home to destinations around the world, before many
public health precautions were put in place.
In one case, a former Biogen employee who contracted COVID-19 through a contact who attended the conference allegedly hid her symptoms to board a flight to China.
Army germ lab shut down by CDC in 2019 had several 'serious' protocol violations that year
A sign on the door of a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md., Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2011.
The lab itself reported that the shutdown order was due to ongoing infrastructure issues with wastewater decontamination, and the CDC declined to provide the reason for the shutdown due to national security concerns.
Earlier that year, the US Army Medical Research Institute had announced an experiment at the Fort Detrick laboratory that would involve infecting rhesus macaque monkeys with active Ebola virus to test a cure they were developing.
Several of the laboratory violations the CDC
noted in 2019 concerned "non-human primates" infected with a "select agent", the identity of which is unknown — it was redacted in all received documents, because disclosing the identity and location of the agent would endanger public health or safety, the agency says.
In addition to Ebola, the lab works with other deadly agents like anthrax and smallpox. Select agents are defined by the CDC as “biological agents and toxins that have been determined to have the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety, to animal and plant
health, or to animal or plant products.”
In this observation, the CDC notes that the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases had “systematically failed to ensure implementation of biosafety and containment procedures commensurate with the risks
associated with working with select agents and toxins.”
The violation specifically observed involved “entity personnel [...] propping open” a door while removing “large amounts of biohazardous waste” from an adjacent room, “[increasing] the risk of contaminated air from [the
room] escaping and being drawn into the [redacted]” where the people working “typically do not wear respiratory protection.”The CDC reports that someone at the lab did not maintain an accurate or current inventory for a toxin. The CDC reports that a building at the Fort
Detrick laboratory didn’t have a “sealed surface to facilitate cleaning and decontamination.” This included cracks around a conduit box, cracks in the ceiling, and a crack in the seam above a biological safety cabinet.
U.S. Government Suspends Operations At Army Medical Research Institute Of Infectious Diseases After Failed Inspection
Aug 09, 2019 Military lab, which handles Ebola and other dangerous pathogens, suspended after failing CDC inspection
“A military laboratory in Maryland used for
biological defense research, which houses some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens, was ordered to stop research last month after failing an inspection…” (Dedaj, 8/8).
New York Times: Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns
“… ‘Research is
currently on hold,’ the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Md., said in a statement on Friday. The shutdown is likely to last months, Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman, said in an interview…” (Grady, 8/5).
One year on, Wuhan market at epicentre of virus outbreak remains barricaded and empty
SEOUL, April 14 (Yonhap) -- A shipment of South Korean-made coronavirus test kits will depart for the United States early Wednesday, officials said, under arrangements made after U.S. President Donald Trump asked for medical supplies during a phone call with President
Moon Jae-in last month, Later in the day, U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Harry Harris tweeted a similar message, along with a picture of a box of the test kits being loaded for delivery at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul.
Maryland spent more than $11.9 million for 500,000 COVID-19 testing kits from South Korea during the early weeks of the pandemic, but a months-long legislative audit released Friday found no comprehensive contract for the purchase or the identity of the state employee who
ultimately approved it.
In April 2020, to much fanfare, Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R) and first lady Yumi Hogan greeted a Korean Air cargo plane at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport for the delivery of 500,000 test kits from South Korean company LabGenomics.
ultimately approved it.
In April 2020, to much fanfare, Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R) and first lady Yumi Hogan greeted a Korean Air cargo plane at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport for the delivery of 500,000 test kits from South Korean company LabGenomics.
'Super-spreader' aunty and a cult has South Korea on its toes as coronavirus cases multiply mysteriously
A doomsday church in the southeastern South Korean city of Daegu has become the centre of coronavirus in the country after a 61-year-old woman known as "Patient 31" who
attended services at the church tested positive for the virus last week. More than half the additional cases were found to be linked to a Shincheonji Church of Jesus congregation in the southeastern city of Daegu after a 61-year-old woman known as "Patient 31" who attended
services at the church tested positive for the virus last week.
What makes Patient 31 special? The woman had no recent record of overseas travel.
While authorities call her "super spreader", the locals have dubbed her "crazy ajumma (Korean for aunty)". Diagnosed with pneumonia-
like symptoms on February 18, the sexagenarian resisted doctors’ recommendations to get tested for coronavirus not once but twice. The New Yorker Hotel was successful in its early years, hosting many famous personalities. In the 1950s, the hotel was sold multiple times,
including to Hilton Hotels. By the time Hilton reacquired the New Yorker Hotel in 1967, it had become unprofitable and Hilton closed it in 1972. The Unification Church purchased the building in 1975, and two decades later, elected to convert a portion of the building to use as a
hotel again. When it was built, the New Yorker Hotel had coal-fired steam boilers and generators sufficient to produce more than 2,200 kilowatts of direct current electric power. At the time, this was the largest private power plant in the United States. In his final years, the
inventor Nikola Tesla lived in the hotel's room 3327 and died there penniless on January 7, 1943. In early 1943, two days after the death of Nikola Tesla, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the Office of Alien Property Custodian to seize Tesla's belongings.[8] Trump was
called in to analyze the Tesla artifacts, which were being held in government custody.[8] After a three-day investigation, Trump's report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands. During World War II, Trump switched from work on
hospital X-ray machines to research into similar technologies, especially the development of radar. During 1940, he joined the newly formed National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), as technical aide to Karl Compton, President of MIT, who was serving also as the Chairman of the
Radar Division within the NDRC. Karl Taylor Compton was born in Wooster, Ohio, on September 14, 1887, the eldest of three brothers (including Arthur Compton and Wilson Martindale Compton) and one sister, Mary. Beginning in 1897, Compton's summers were spent camping at Otsego Lake
Beginning in 1897, Compton's summers were spent camping at Otsego Lake, Michigan
In 1930, Compton accepted an invitation from the MIT Corporation to be president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an engineering school that was redefining the relationship
between engineering and science.
The start of World War II motivated the start of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), created in 1940 under the chairmanship of Vannevar Bush. Compton was a member of the NDRC and became head of Division D which was responsible for
assembling a group of academic and industrial engineers and scientists that would study primarily radar, fire control and thermal radiation. In 1941, the NDRC was assimilated into the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) where Compton chaired the United States
Radar Mission to the United Kingdom. In August 1942, Roosevelt appointed Compton to the Rubber Survey Committee, which investigated and made recommendations to help resolve conflicts on technical direction in the development of synthetic rubber, arising due to the loss of rubber
supply during the war.[6] In 1945, Compton was selected as one of eight members of the Interim Committee appointed to advise President Harry S. Truman on the use of the atomic bomb. When Japan surrendered in 1945, World War II came to an end and Compton left the OSRD. In 1946,
Compton chaired the President's Advisory Commission on Military Training. From 1946 to 1948, he was a member of the Naval Research Advisory Committee. Compton chaired the Joint Research and Development Board from 1948 to 1949, when he stepped down for health reasons.
President Harry S. Truman with members of the National Defense Research Committee. Seated are Dr. James B. Conant, President Truman and Dr. Alfred N. Richards. Standing are Dr. Karl T. Compton, Dr. Lewis H. Weed, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Dr. Frank B. Jewett, Dr. J. C. Hunsaker, Dr.
Roger Adams, Dr. A. Baird Hastings and Dr. A. R. Dochez
In 1948, President Harry Truman appointed Richards to the Medical Affairs Task Force of the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government; Richards also became a director of Merck & Co. During World War II, Camp Detrick and the USBWL became the site of
intensive biological warfare (BW) research using various pathogens. This research was originally overseen by pharmaceuticals executive George W. Merck and for many years was conducted by Ira L. Baldwin, professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin became the
first scientific director of the labs. He chose Detrick Field for the site of this exhaustive research effort because of its balance between remoteness of location & proximity to Washington, D.C. –as well as to Edgewood Arsenal, the focal point of U.S. chemical warfare research.
The United States Government Accountability Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the United States Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and
experiments involving hazardous substances.
The goal of the program was to determine dose response for these agents. The volunteers were then treated with antibiotics to cure the infections. Some volunteers, under experimental protocol, were also given investigational vaccines
for Q fever and tularemia, as well as for yellow fever, Rift Valley fever, hepatitis A, Yersinia pestis (plague), and Venezuelan equine encephalitis and other diseases.[1] Some soldiers were given two weeks of leave in exchange for being used as a test subject. These experiments
took place at Fort Detrick which is a U.S. Army research installation in Frederick, Maryland.[
Origins: Apparently the lesson of the Claire Swire incident hasn’t quite yet reached Korea: Don’t send messages
describing your sexual exploits from your employer’s e-mail system (especially if you work for a staid professional firm), no matter how much you trust the recipients
One invocation of the ‘forward’ command by any of the recipients is all it takes to start a chain reaction that will send your e-mail on its way to thousands of e-voyeurs, land your name (accompanied by an embarrassingly graphic story) in the newspapers, and possibly get you
fired from your job. The most recent victim is Peter Chung, an associate with the Seoul office of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.
In May 2001, Mr. Chung, a 24-year-old Princeton graduate who had started his job with Carlyle in South Korea only a few days earlier, sent
the bit of braggadocio quoted above to eleven friends at the New York office of Merrill Lynch where he previously worked. At least one of them passed it outside the circle of recipients to acquaintances on Wall Street, and it didn’t take long before Mr. Chung’s private message
was making the rounds of the financial world, eventually reaching his bosses at Carlyle. Chung soon found himself an ex-employee.
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A squad operating in a densely populated urban area might need to use a wedge formation to navigate a crowd while simultaneously monitoring for potential threats and using information warfare tactics to counter enemy propaganda.
Tlaib was born to working-class Palestinian
immigrants in Detroit in 1976. She graduated from Southwestern High School in Detroit in 1994, from Wayne State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1998, and from Thomas M. Cooley Law School with a Juris Doctor in 2004.
Tlaib and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the first female members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSOC) like D-suck to serve in Congress. Tlaib is a member of The Squad, an informal group of U.S. representatives on the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Pentagon Official Removed From Joint Chiefs Of Staff For Anti-Israel Posts
“Along with the World Health Organization and United Nations, we (Department of Defense, Department of State and the U.S. Intelligence Community) consider the dailywire.com/news/pentagon-…
Gaza Health Ministry figures to be generally reliable (though not precise),” he wrote, “but probably less so now than they were originally due to the general destruction and chaos in Gaza.”
The Daily Caller was founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. After raising $3 million
in funding from businessman Foster Friess.
Friess trained to be an infantry platoon leader and served as the intelligence officer for the 1st Guided Missile Brigade at Fort Bliss, Texas.
Although these men were initially "pretty much kept on ice", resulting in the
Qassem Soleimani airstrike: Ring from corpse identified Iran's top general
The vehicle was struck by at least two missiles fired from a US MQ9 Reaper drone. nypost.com/2020/01/03/qas…
U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O'Brieninsisted that Soleimani "was plotting to kill, to attack American facilities, and diplomats, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines were located at those facilities".
O'Brien was the California managing partner of the law firm
Arent Fox LLP for seven years.
O'Brien took office as the twenty-seventh United States national security advisor on September 18, 2019. President Trump appointed O'Brien to succeed John Bolton, who resigned earlier that month.
Federal agents combating child exploitation must also grapple with public reluctance to talk about crisis - CBS News
The Justice Department, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino have launched cbsnews.com/news/combating…
efforts to raise the profile of the crisis.
In a public campaign branded "Operation Restore Justice", the Justice Department executed a nationwide public campaign by federal agents and local law enforcement to track down offenders, execute arrests and file criminal charges.
“This coordinated effort across all FBI field offices was not just about making arrests, it was about standing up for those who cannot defend themselves,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Sanjay Virmani.
January 16, 2024
Sanjay Virmani Named Special Agent in Charge of the
The Museum of the Fur Trade is located near Chadron, at the site of the American Fur Company's former Bordeaux Trading Post.
Among the founders of the town were the businessman Charles Henry King and his wife Martha. King established retail and freight businesses and banks in
towns along the railroad's route; he capitalized on the flow of settlers and pioneers to the region. Four of the five King children were born in Chadron, including their second son Leslie Lynch King. In 1908 the family moved to Omaha, the business center of the state.
In 1912 Leslie married, and in July 1913 became the father of the future president, Gerald Ford. King and his wife divorced soon after that.
Because of problems with alcohol abuse and domestic violence, Dorothy and Leslie were separated sixteen days after their son's birth.