New Coronavirus News from 14 May 2022

This Activist Group Tapped Into Partisan COVID Politics To Make Big Trouble For Anthony Fauci And The NIH [BuzzFeed News, 14 May 2022]

by Peter Aldhous

The White Coat Waste Project has pulled the “lab leak” strings and channeled right-wing anger over COVID to pursue its goal of defunding animal experiments backed by the federal government.
As much of the United States entered COVID lockdowns in April 2020, a tiny group that campaigns against federal funding for animal experiments spotted an opportunity.

Speculation was swirling in right-leaning media that the virus behind the pandemic had emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, rather than from wildlife sold for food in the city’s markets. As it happened, the White Coat Waste Project had been looking into taxpayer money going to labs in China, including in Wuhan. The group’s founder had strong contacts with Republican politicians and had launched the group with the mission of getting conservatives into animal activism.

The White Coat Waste Project sprung into action, persuading DailyMail.com to run a story saying the US government had funded the lab. Then all hell broke loose.

Then-president Donald Trump, keen to blame China for the pandemic, was soon involved. After prodding from the conservative outlet Newsmax at a press conference, his administration terminated the grant from the National Institutes of Health, which had been awarded to a New York–based nonprofit called the EcoHealth Alliance.

Since then, the controversy over whether the COVID pandemic started with a “lab leak” has escalated into a ferocious fight, with conflicting narratives that paint EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology either as out-of-control scientists who may have caused the pandemic through inherently risky research or as the victims of politically motivated conspiracy theories, unfairly vilified as the architects of a catastrophe that they worked for years to prevent by studying the risks posed by bat coronaviruses.

Two years on, and with the scientific trail going cold, it’s possible that the mystery of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may never be conclusively solved. But thousands of pages of NIH emails and other documents released to BuzzFeed News through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show how the White Coat Waste Project rode the wave of partisan pandemic politics to serve its cause, and in the process triggered a storm that engulfed EcoHealth, one of the world’s largest groups studying potentially dangerous animal viruses. They also show how the NIH, a behemoth that spends more than $40 billion annually on biomedical research, stumbled under the political pressure the White Coat Waste Project brought to bear.

The White Coat Waste Project has subsequently channeled right-wing anger toward Anthony Fauci, the public face of COVID policies including mask and vaccine mandates, accusing his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH, of funding “beagle torture.” The White Coat Waste Project is writing a controversial new activist playbook — and it’s unclear whether anyone can control the forces that it has helped to unleash.

“They jumped on the bandwagon of how I have become public enemy number one of the far right,” Fauci told BuzzFeed News. “If you engage and try and push back on that, it very often only gives it legs. And then it becomes even worse of a problem.”

The White Coat Waste Project was formed in 2013 by Anthony Bellotti, a campaign consultant who over the years had worked for Republican candidates including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lisa Murkowski, and on efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and Obamacare. But Bellotti’s real passion had long been animal protection, he told BuzzFeed News — an interest forged at the age of 17 when he worked as a summer intern in a lab doing research on pigs, studying ways to extend the time they could be kept under anesthesia during heart surgery.
Bellotti said he was struck both by the animals’ suffering and the “repugnant and callous attitude” of the experimenters. “It really made a mark on me,” he said.

Poring over polling data, Bellotti could see that there was a big gap between Democrats and Republicans on the issue. Democrats were much more likely to support campaigns against animal experiments, which had often focused on corporate labs, and Republicans tended to back the research. So Bellotti crafted a message calculated to bring the missing Republicans on board, focusing on government spending. He avoids the label “animal rights,” and has cast the White Coat Waste Project as a “taxpayer watchdog uniting liberty-lovers and animal-lovers.”

In addition to mobilizing support from the political right, there was another reason to target government spending: Congress has the power to shut it down. “The goal isn’t to change hearts and minds, it’s to win the fight,” Bellotti told BuzzFeed News. “We had to get to the root cause of the problem, which was the government spending.”

The group didn’t really take off until 2016, when Bellotti hired Justin Goodman, a former director of laboratory investigations with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, to head the White Coat Waste Project’s advocacy efforts. Goodman started digging into government databases and filing FOIA requests to identify projects that the group could campaign to defund.

Even before the pandemic, the White Coat Waste Project scored some victories. An early campaign, launched in a report called “Spending to Death,” highlighted experiments involving dogs in federal labs, including one studying the effects of blood transfusions in dogs with pneumonia in which some of the animals died. The group then turned up the heat on the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on experiments into heart disease in which dogs were run on treadmills after their heart rhythms were disrupted using implanted pacemaker devices. The White Coast Waste Project’s multiyear effort to shut down Veterans Affairs dog research eventually led Congress to restrict spending on the work and demand explicit approval from the secretary for veterans affairs for new dog experiments by the agency.

White Coat Waste
The cover of the White Coat Waste Project’s 2019 report titled “USDA Kitten Cannibalism”
But it was another campaign that sowed the seeds for the attack on EcoHealth and its collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2018, the White Coat Waste Project began to target the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, zeroing in on its research into toxoplasmosis, which can infect people exposed to cat feces and can cause brain or eye damage in those with compromised immune systems. The campaign culminated in a March 2019 White Coat Waste Project report called “USDA Kitten Cannibalism.” Its cover featured the Chinese flag superimposed over a photo of USDA’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

That framing drew on an experiment published in 2007 in which cats at the Maryland facility were fed meat from other cats purchased at a market in China to gauge its infectivity.
Although the full report noted that these experiments were no longer being run, the association between this gruesome-sounding research and a nation seen as a major adversary to the US resonated with members of Congress from both parties and with the media. Within a couple of weeks, the USDA announced that the cat toxoplasmosis research would be shut down, stating that it had “reached its maturity.”

After that win, Bellotti said that the White Coat Waste Project started to wonder about what else was being funded with taxpayer dollars outside of the US: “This is horrible stuff. What else is going on?” So Goodman started to look at research in foreign labs funded by the NIH, turning to a list of those given an “animal welfare assurance” needed to receive federal dollars for animal experiments. He focused particularly on labs in the US’s two main geopolitical rivals.
“One of the things that struck us was that there were at the time 31 labs in Russia and China,” Goodman told BuzzFeed News.

Dr. Fauci Just Said Something Every American Should Hear — Eat This Not That [Eat This, Not That, 14 May 2022]

By Michael Martin

Listen to what the nation's top infectious-disease expert has to say.
Right now, the CDC recommends that people over age 50 or who are immunocompromised get a second booster of the COVID vaccine. But what about everyone else? During testimony before a House budget panel on Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease expert, talked about why second boosters are important for certain groups, and how long it may be before everyone is advised to get one. Read on to find out more—and to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had COVID.

1 Vaccination Still Important
"If you look at the hospitalizations and the deaths of those who are unvaccinated compared to those who are vaccinated and boosted, the data are stunning, they're striking, the difference," said Fauci.

2 Boosters Are Needed
"In the era of Omicon, it is very clear that a boost is needed, a third shot," said Fauci. "If you look at both the durability of protection, there's no doubt—not only to natural infection from which you recover, but also from vaccination over a period of time—there's a waning of immunity."

"Other countries like Israel have really good data that when you get X number of months out, even from the third shot, you then get an increased risk, particularly among the elderly, and particularly among those with underlying conditions, of hospitalizations and death."

3 Who Should Get Boosted?
"The FDA and the CDC have said that people 50 years of age or older, are eligible for a fourth shot of an mRNA vaccine, not only the third boost, but the fourth shot right now," said Fauci.

Those recommendations may expand this fall. "The advisory committee to the FDA met and are looking at what the recommendations are going to be as we get to the fall, namely, what's going to happen when we get to September and October," he said. "It is very likely that all of us who've been vaccinated will have a diminution of the level of protection after a certain number of months. And it is likely that there will be recommended for everyone to get a boost then."

4 What About After That?
"Does that got to be every year, the way we do with flu? We don't know that right now," said Fauci. "Because of the fact that we're having different variants. But right now we're in an Omicron era, and the vaccines that we all got work pretty well … I think sometime in the middle of the summer, we're going to know what the cadence is going to be about how often we're going to have to vaccinate people."

5 How to Stay Safe Out There
Follow the fundamentals and help end this pandemic, no matter where you live—get vaccinated ASAP; if you live in an area with low vaccination rates, wear an N95 face mask, don't travel, social distance, avoid large crowds, don't go indoors with people you're not sheltering with (especially in bars), practice good hand hygiene, and to protect your life and the lives of others, don't visit any of these 35 Places You're Most Likely to Catch COVID.

Reversing COVID-free claim, North Korea reports 'explosive' outbreak [Nikkei Asia News, 14 May 2022]

by JUNNOSUKE KOBARA

Pyongyang sounds out potential for help from abroad, with as many as 187,800 isolated
SEOUL -- Abandoning past boasts of no COVID-19 cases, North Korea reported Friday that up to 187,800 people are "being isolated and treated," spurring speculation of a severe outbreak and a desire for international assistance.

"A fever whose cause couldn't be identified explosively spread nationwide from late April" to affect more than 350,000 people, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Friday in a story acknowledging "the nationwide spread of COVID-19." At least 162,200 of them have fully recovered, KCNA said.

The country had long said it had zero cases.

Thursday alone saw around 18,000 cases of fever, according to the story. It said six people have died so far, with one of them testing positive for the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant of omicron.

"The situation is more dire than we had expected," a source in the South Korean president's office said Friday. The new president, Yoon Suk-yeol, has expressed interest in discussing potential assistance in vaccines with Pyongyang.

North Korea had never published detailed case numbers before. "It likely changed its policy in response to a rapid increase in infections across the entire country," said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

"It's a message that it may ask international organizations for help with vaccines," said Yang, whose areas of interest include North Korean foreign policy.

Most North Koreans remain unvaccinated. In 2021, the country turned down a UNICEF offer to send shots developed by China's Sinovac Biotech. The U.S. also sounded out the North on potential vaccine assistance this January, though no shipments have been made.

The current outbreak is expected to further hurt North Korea's struggling economy. The country closed its border with China in 2020 in an attempt to keep out the virus, leading to a roughly 80% drop in bilateral goods trade. It reopened to freight trains this January, pushing goods trade up over 11-fold on the year to nearly $197 million in the first quarter, though it suspended traffic again in April.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ordered a national lockdown in response to the spread of COVID-19 -- a step only expected to further squeeze economic activity.

Sanctions by the United Nations Security Council already heavily restrict North Korean imports of oil and electronics. Rainfall in the country was roughly 40% of the average in April, sparking concern of a drought.

"If the impact from the coronavirus continues to spread, North Korea will have no choice but to consider receiving aid from China, the U.S. and Europe," said Cheong Seong-chang, senior research fellow in the Department of Unification Strategy Studies at South Korea's Sejong Institute.

"The new government in South Korea is hawkish on Pyongyang, so cooperation between the two Koreas will not be easy, but assistance on vaccines could create an opening for dialogue," Cheong said.

Yoon will meet with U.S. President Joe Biden on May 21, while North Korea is scheduled to hold a key policymaking meeting for its Workers' Party Central Committee in June. COVID-19 could have a major impact on North Korean foreign and military policy in the coming months.

Kim Jong Un admits North Korea's COVID-19 outbreak is a 'great disaster' [Yahoo News, 14 May 2022]

by Alia Shoaib

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that the country's COVID-19 outbreak is a "great disaster," the BBC reported, citing state media.

"The spread of the malignant epidemic is [the greatest] turmoil to fall on our country since the founding," in 1948, Kim said during an emergency meeting on Saturday, according to state news agency KCNA.

North Korea said on Saturday that there had been over half a million cases of "fever" in recent weeks, just two days after claiming to have found its first ever COVID case and imposing a national lockdown.

The new figure marked an increase from the estimated 350,000 cases reported on Friday.
The country is especially at risk due to its under-resourced health system, limited testing capabilities, and an unvaccinated, poorly-fed population.

Kim called for an all-out battle to slow the spread of the virus during the meeting on Saturday, and urged the country to have faith in overcoming the crisis, per KCNA.

"If we don't lose focus in implementing epidemic policy and maintain strong organization power and control based on single-minded unity of the party and the people and strengthen our epidemic battle, we can more than overcome the crisis," Kim said.

The North Korean leader blamed the outbreak on bureaucratic incompetence, and said that lessons could be learned from China's response to the virus, Reuters reported.

Experts have warned that the numbers of cases in North Korea are likely to be much higher than the reported figures.

It is one of only two countries in the world not to have had a known COVID-19 vaccination program, and has previously refused offers of vaccines from China.

The country of 26 million people ranks last in the world for its ability to rapidly respond to and mitigate the spread of an epidemic, according to the latest Global Health Security Index in December, Reuters said.