aim to genetically modify the virus to see what it needs to give it more of a deadly pandemic kick. That could make it more virulent more pathogenic and more transmissible capable of passing easily in droplets through the air from one mammal to another. reuters.com/article/us-bir…
The highest level, BSL4, requires military guard and applies to pathogens for which there are no preventives or treatments.
The Erasmus team has one of Europe’s most secure laboratories - a so-called Enhanced BSL3, or Bio-Safety Level 3, lab - the highest level of biosecurity for academic research and a facility in which agents can be studied that cause “serious or lethal disease”
but don’t ordinarily spread between people and for which treatments or preventives exist.
The highest level, BSL4, requires military guard and applies to pathogens for which there are no preventives or treatments.
Fouchier, one of only six people with security clearance to enter the Rotterdam lab, says that despite the presence of mutant viruses, he feels safer there than walking in the street.
“You need special keys to get in. You go though various changes of clothes and through all sorts of interlocked rooms,” he explained during a Reuters visit to the campus.

Like our #kids do when they go to school #covid😉
Fouchier spent years shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic arguing his case for conducting and publishing similar work on H5N1 bird flu which so alarmed US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity NSABB that it took unprecedented step of trying to censor publication
NSABB had said it feared work could fall into the wrong hands and be used for bioterrorism.
A year-long moratorium on such research followed while the World Health Organisation (WHO), U.S. security advisers and flu researchers sought ways to ensure the highest safety controls.
With those in place, the WHO satisfied and U.S. research funders broadly agreed, Fouchier and 22 other scientists announced in August that they planned to end the moratorium, and the Dutch team say now is the time to get going.
The easiest thing would be to back off and say OK, we won’t touch this any more’ But that’s not the right way to behave said #Osterhaus. As a scientist you have a responsibility towards the public. And if we can prevent a pandemic from happening, that could save millions of lives

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Mar 5
And Dr Fauci said in 2021 he was "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That was a shift from a year earlier, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans. bbc.com/news/world-asi…
China has hit back at suggestions the virus may have escaped from a laboratory by calling it a smear. State media have consistently accused the US government and Western media of spreading rumours about the source of the pandemic.
China has pushed another theory, suggesting the coronavirus may have entered Wuhan in food shipments of frozen meat from elsewhere in China or South-East Asia.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 5
Listings of WHO's response to COVID-19

July versie 2020 totaal herziene tijdlijn van origineel en...

Wat staat hier🤔: The Pandemic Supply Chain Network (PSCN) created by WHO, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, held its first meeting.👇
who.int/news/item/29-0…
Snapt u het? #missie 👇

The mission of PSCN is “to create and manage a market network allowing for WHO and private sector partners to access any supply chain functionality and asset from end-to-end anywhere in the world at any scale”.
29 januari 2020:

@WHO published advice on the use of masks in the community, during home care and in health care settings.
Read 17 tweets
Mar 5
who.int/docs/default-s… Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Routes of transmission
COVID-19 is transmitted via droplets and fomites during close unprotected contact between an infector and infectee. Airborne spread has not been reported for COVID-19 and it is not believed to be a major driver of transmission based on available evidence;
Updated report july20 states that before @WHO announced official #pandemic:👇

As of 26 January 2021, WHO’s landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines lists 63 candidate vaccines in clinical development and 173 in preclinical development.🤔
Read 6 tweets
Mar 5
Evaluation of science advice during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications nature.com/articles/s4159…
During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway.
. We argue that that scientific methodology was not followed by the major figures in the acting authorities—or the responsible politicians—with alternative narratives being considered as valid, resulting in arbitrary policy decisions.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 5
Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - United States Department of State

The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined 2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…
whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Read 14 tweets
Mar 4
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) - Dutch scientists hidden away in a top-security laboratory are seeking to create mutant flu viruses, dangerous work designed to prepare the world for a lethal pandemic by beating nature to it. reuters.com/article/us-bir…
Doctors and nurses attend a training course for the treatment of the H7N9 virus at a hospital, where a H7N9 patient is being treated, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in this April 5, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Chance Chan/Files
The idea of engineering viral pathogens to be more deadly than they are already has generated huge controversy, amid fears that such viruses could leak out or fall into the wrong hands.
Read 21 tweets

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