This comes from the 2023 EIU global risk assessment. The trouble is, lifting China's #zeroCOVID policy is the very thing propelling the evolution of a “new, highly aggressive variant of COVID”🧵 mkto-ab220141.com/NzUzLVJJUS00Mz…
China is too dependent on the productivity of its factory workforce. Factories are ill-ventilated sardines cans ripe for COVID eruptions disrupting manufacturing. Mass death/injury means worker supply is less than demand, pushing up the cost of labour. axios.com/2022/12/16/the…
Mortality from pandemics has historically increased the value of labour. The plague probably helped to end serfdom in Europe. Chinese manufacturing depends on cheap labour, but with #infiniteCOVID, CCP serfdom will struggle, and this critical cogwheel in the economy will stutter.
There is a risk that the resulting economic and social unrest may crash the Chinese property market, mentioned as a risk in the EIU 2022 report. Reduced manufacturing will lessen supply and drive up inflation worldwide, forcing “fast monetary tightening”. mkto-ab220141.com/NzUzLVJJUS00Mz…
Once again, I would issue a stern warning to economists that biosecurity risks to world socioeconomic stability are being gravely underestimated. The socioeconomic impacts of COVID are only just beginning to make themselves felt. The political storm is only just brewing.
Those familiar with infectious diseases in other species will know they can be as much an existential threat to species survival as climate change from asteroid strikes. As with anthropogenic climate change, we are not taking this seriously enough.
Pestilence has forever been accompanied by famine and war. That there are signs of growing geopolitical military instability at a time of worldwide pestilence is likely no coincidence. The more we let rip with the pestilence, the greater the amplification of geopolitical risk.
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The paper is now out in @Nature after I tweeted on this oral presentation @ISTH 2023 by @AkassoglouLab. Fibrin/fibrinogen may be a therapeutic target in СОVΙD neuropathology. Link in next tweet.
“...results reveal a role for fibrinogen as a SARS-CoV-2 spike-binding protein accelerating the formation of abnormal clots with increased inflammatory activity”…“fibrin-targeting immunotherapy suppresses SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis”.
From an #immunothrombosis perspective, this paper now shows fibrinogen to be a far more critical player in this field than previously thought. We used to focus more on contact, TF, and thrombin but now must look further downstream in the fibrinogenesis/fibrinolysis pathways too.
And this week's Grand Rounds “just a cold” is another young patient with enterovirus-induced fulminant myocarditis needing intubation, ECMO, and an Impella LVAD. I've never seen so many severe post-infectious complications presented in my life.
Last week's Grand Round? Another “just a cold” with Mycoplasma in a paediatric patient who developed encephalopathy, needing IV pulse methylprednisolone and IVIg. It's like every week we see a new case of previously rare infectious complications in young patients.
Another Grand Rounds case. A pregnant woman with severe cardiomyopathy caused by a combined adenovirus and enterovirus infections. Required ECMO.
Subjecting trial subjects to wearing surgical mаsks against an airborne virus is like running a bike helmet RCT with subjects in Tupperware helmets that weren't designed for that purpose. “But we don't know it doesn't work until we run an RCT” isn't good enough.
“But there was a 30% reduction in head injuries in the Tupperware group vs. placebo.” Not good enough! In a high-risk scenario for major head injury, a Tupperware helmet won't do. The magnitude of risk test subjects were exposed to needs investigation and quantification.
Non-pharmaceutical physical protective devices are subject to engineering standards of proof of efficacy. In the case of helmets, that means crash testing in a lab to see how they fare in high-risk situations that live subjects can't be exposed to. helmet.beam.vt.edu/lab.html
A reminder that there was once a titanic struggle between contagionists vs miasmatists over the mechanism of transmission of cholera before the need to cleanse the water of waterborne pathogens was accepted. We are going through a similar struggle today, fighting for clean air. abc.net.au/news/2024-07-3…
If you want to read about how divisive the debates between the contagionists and miasmatists was, you should read “Death in Hamburg” by @RichardEvans36. They didn't need Twitter back then to be almost reduced to pistols at dawn.
This trial should have been reported as having an unacceptable 70% failure rate, showing that a surgical mаsk is grossly suboptimal in design and not fit for purpose as RPE. Engineered physical protective devices aren't drugs. bmj.com/content/386/bm…
You wouldn't consider a parachute that failed to deploy 70% of the time to be an acceptable design to test by RCT, and neither should droplet protection against an inhaled bioaerosol be considered ethically acceptable for a study design.
Physics permits greater predictability than pharmacology. This RIKEN supercomputer study already predicted the results of the BMJ study. For a loose surgical/non-woven mаsk, there is a 45% infection rate (55% reduction) to the wearer (76% effective as source control). This is a pre-Delta study.
Another factor is that children have been turned into let-it-rip vectors of forced mass infection who bring home diseases that debilitate the parents who are out of sick leave while killing the grandparents. sbs.com.au/news/article/a…
And yes, children have been demonstrated to be key vectors of disease.
Note to be forgotten is the adverse effect that infections with SARS-CoV-2 have on fertility. This article reviews the impacts on female reproductive health. frontiersin.org/journals/rehab…