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David Cranmer Underdown

5 Jul, 54 tweets, 22 min read

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.

@mofa_kr

"#COVID19 test kits were just loaded at Incheon airport & are bound for the U.S. The #USROKAlliance is ironclad and we're grateful to @mofa_kr for helping make this purchase by @fema possible. #WeAreInThisTogether."

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.

'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