New Coronavirus News from 29 Sep 2021

Owner devastated after 3 pet cats killed following positive Covid-19 test [South China Morning Post, 29 Sep 2021]

By Phoebe Zhang

China coronavirus: killing of 3 cats who tested positive for Covid-19 while owner was in hospital sparks heated debate

The killing of three pet cats in China after they tested positive on a nucleic test for
Covid-19 has created a public outcry.

The cats belong to a confirmed Covid-19 patient living in northeast China’s Harbin. The woman, surnamed Liu, contracted coronavirus on September 21 and was admitted to the hospital, leaving her cats at home with ample food and water, and community workers helped care for them, The Beijing News reported.

On Monday, she received a notice from the community workers that her cats had tested positive for the virus.

“Because there was no prior example of treating the cats, they want to euthanise the cats and wanted me to give them a written authorisation, I did not agree,” she said, adding that she wanted them to receive treatment.

On Tuesday, the community workers told the newspaper there’s no professional treatment available for animals and they told Liu the cats would be euthanised.

“If the environment is positive, then she cannot move back and the whole residential area could not move back, the outbreak will never end,” the worker said.

On Tuesday night, the cats were put down, The Beijing News reported.

“I never wanted to blame anyone, I just wanted to find them a chance to stay alive, but that chance was never given,” Liu wrote on Weibo on Tuesday night.

This case generated public controversy. Some supported the termination, saying it’s for the greater good.

“If you don’t take care of people first and expose more people to danger, then isn’t the effort of the doctors and government wasted?” one said on Weibo.

Others were sceptical about the test result for animals.

“They were tested on the 27th and euthanised on the 28th? Who has authority over these tests and can prove they were indeed sick? And if they test positive, does that mean they are sick?” another asked.

The current round of local outbreaks in Harbin started last week with 67 confirmed cases so far. A fourth-round of citywide nucleic tests is being conducted.

Since the pandemic first broke out last year, there has been significant international debate about whether pets can catch the virus and if they pose danger to humans.

There has been significant concern from animal welfare groups that owners would dump or kill their pets in fear of spreading the virus.

South Korea tests pets for Covid-19 after first animal infection
Last year, Hong Kong government veterinary experts who observed and tested 52 animals under quarantine concluded pets do not play a significant role in spreading the coronavirus.

The veterinarians at the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department tested 32 dogs, 18 cats and two hamsters quarantined for varying periods since February, only two dogs and one cat tested positive for the virus. They concluded that pets do not get infected easily, a
nd do not transmit the virus to other pets or humans.

Last year, the Life Times, a newspaper run by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, called for the public to not panic about the chance of pets getting the virus, saying even if cats contracted the virus, the chance of them spreading it was low.

“In a pandemic, the pets are victims to the virus just as humans,” it said.

South Korea to adopt 'With Corona' strategy to ease COVID restrictions: Health Minister [Republic World, 29 Sep 2021]

By Rohit Ranjan

The South Korean administration recommended starting the 'With Corona' strategy of progressive daily recuperation from the beginning of November

South Korean administration has informed that it will devise a plan for a phased return to normalcy as maintaining the current 'social distance' limitations to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging. The administration recommended starting the 'With Corona' strategy of progressive daily recuperation from the end of October to the beginning of November.

Minister of Health and Welfare Kwon Deok-cheol remarked on September 28 at an inviting debate hosted at the Korea Artist Center in Yangcheon-gu, Seoul. "Considering other countries with high vaccination rates, we are reviewing whether to maintain the current social distancing system. It is quite difficult for the people to continue to comply with the current quarantine restrictions."

The government will design mechanisms to execute social distancing
The South Korean Health Minister further said that with the help of experts and the media, the government will design mechanisms to execute current social distancing and quarantine limitations, as well as strategies to gradually reclaim normal lives. He also remarked that the end of October, when the vaccination rate for the elderly is more than 90%, and for the general public is more than 80%, could be the moment to switch. Kwon said that because the immunological impact develops two weeks after vaccination, they are considering using the 'With Corona' system starting in early November.

READ | UK to send 1 million COVID vaccine doses to South Korea in 'vaccine swap' deal
The Minister also said that in terms of the progressive recovery of the everyday living plan, the government is looking into methods to relax prohibitions on private gatherings and social distancing at multi-purpose venues. Only people who have finished the vaccination are fully recovered from COVID-19, or have tested negative are allowed to utilise the facility in Germany and the government is thinking about implementing this system.

Vaccinated people are given Vaccine Pass
Those who have finished the vaccination process are given a Vaccine Pass, which is a type of health certificate. According to Health Minister Kwon, they will gradually relax regulations so that people who have been vaccinated, treated or have a negative certificate can utilise multi-purpose facilities. Additionally, the business hour restriction will be gradually loosened from 22:00 to 24:00 by simplifying the quarantine requirements to the greatest extent practicable.

Authorities have recommended those who have returned from vacation get tested for COVID-19 symptoms, even if they are moderate. This is especially important before returning to work.

Drosten expects another Corona wave in October [The Germany Eye, 29 Sep 2021]

By Florence Jenkins

Virologist Christian Drosten believes that the current calming of the nationwide Corona infection figures is a temporary phenomenon. He said it is already apparent that incidence is picking up in eastern German states, apparently independent of the end of the vacations.

"I think there are now signs of the autumn and winter wave that we will probably see again in October," the scientist from Berlin's Charité hospital said Tuesday evening in an excerpt from the podcast "Coronavirus Update" on NDR-Info.

The previous rise in incidence had been due in particular to testing at schools after the end of the summer vacations and imported cases - and was not yet necessarily the start of the winter wave, according to Drosten's assessment.

Given the current rate of about 64 percent fully vaccinated in the population, he expects them to roll loose this year at a time like last year, the Corona expert told the station. At that time, he said, it was clear in the second half of October "that we were going back into an exponential increase."

Closing the vaccination gaps must be the goal of society as a whole, Drosten further emphasized. It is a matter of convincing those who are still unvaccinated or otherwise getting them to get vaccinated. This is no longer a scientific task, but a political one.

The virologist judged the current vaccination progress to be inadequate. "The numbers look bad." Denmark, for example, is in a much better position than Germany. Drosten did point to the uncertainty that more people in Germany may already have been vaccinated than has so far been recorded in the reporting system. This is a "nice hope" at the moment, but should not be the basis for decisions and planning.

With regard to the treatment of Covid-19, the virologist pointed out that there are now better options for severe courses of the disease. In the early stages of infection, however, monoclonal antibodies are the only option. According to Drosten, these relatively expensive preparations, which are not widely available, can be given to newly infected unvaccinated people with certain risk factors. These drugs are intended to prevent the development of a severe course of the disease.

He sees monoclonal antibodies more as reserved for the few patients who cannot be vaccinated or who do not respond to vaccination, Drosten described. Preventive use in high-risk patients is also conceivable, he said. "But none of that is a solution that would be universally recommended. And that's just always the worse solution in competition with vaccination."

Certain people have 'superhuman' immunity to corona. How? [The Jerusalem Post, 29 Sep 2021]

Recent studies found that one segment in the general population is much more resistant than others to coronavirus infection. Who are they and what causes their resistance?

More than a million people in Israel have had corona and recovered, but many of them have chosen to avoid getting vaccinated with one dose, which is common practice, as they estimate that they have enough antibodies to prevent being reinfected. New research might change their minds.

Several studies have recently shown that at least some of the people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 who were then vaccinated with mRNA vaccines like Pfizer or Moderna this year, have "superhuman" or "hybrid" immunity, meaning they produce very high levels of antibodies capable of neutralizing different strains of COVID-19 and other viruses.

In one small study from Rockefeller University in New York, with findings which weren’t peer reviewed, antibodies from 14 people vaccinated with one vaccine after already being infected with coronavirus were able to neutralize six strains of coronavirus, including Delta and Aeta, and several other related viruses, including the first virus, SARS-CoV-1, first identified in 2003 and drastically different from SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes corona. In other words, these "flexible" antibodies may even neutralize other viruses. Antibodies from vaccinated people who haven’t had corona or unvaccinated people who had COVID-19 have meanwhile been "helpless" against some of these viruses or variants.

“It’s reasonable to predict that people with hybrid immunity will be fairly protected from most, and perhaps all, of the SARS-CoV-2 versions we’re likely to see in the foreseeable future," said study editor Paul Bieniasz, a Rockefeller University virologist. He suspected that they will also have some extent of immunity against future SARS-like viruses that at this stage haven’t infected humans.

Another study found that healthy people who had the virus and received one vaccine had six to 100 times more antibodies when compared to people who were vaccinated once or twice, or had previously been infected with corona and weren’t vaccinated.

Another study published in the Telegraph found that up to a third of people with a previous infection don’t produce antibodies at all.

On the positive side, a study supervised by University of Pennsylvania immunologist John Wherry and his colleagues showed that "some of this antibody development occurs in people who have just been vaccinated."

Zoonotic Bird Flu News since 3 Aug till 7 Sep 2021

Bird flu detected in Luxembourg poultry breeding operation [The Poultry Site, 7 Sep 2021]

An amateur poultry breeder in Olingen, Luxembourg, has reported a case of avian influenza in imported birds.

According to a report in RTL Today, the birds were imported from Belgium. Animal health officials have issued a reminder to poultry keepers that importing and transporting birds for unlicensed businesses is prohibited. The ban also extends to poultry exhibitions.

Officials from the Veterinary Services Administration (VSA) say that newly acquired birds must undergo a quarantine period before they can join larger flocks. The VSA is also advising poultry breeders to keep their birds indoors as a precaution.

Bird flu: Poultry farmers happy with compensation from government [Modern Ghana, 31 Aug 2021]

The Greater Accra Poultry Farmers Association of Ghana has welcomed further steps taken by government to ensure that compensation is paid to farmers who lost their birds to the recent bird flu outbreak in Ghana.

After the Food and Agriculture Minister said a request had been made to Cabinet for the compensation, the President of the Association, Michael Nyarko-Ampem, was optimistic that the farmers will receive the support they desire.

He stressed that the goodwill from farmers will be important to the government.

“We trust that they will get the approval from Cabinet and carry it through so that farmers will have the confidence that whatever happens, the government will support them and take care of farmers as well.”

“I am trusting that now that a presentation has been made to cabinet, the whole process will be expedited so that we can get the people who have been affected to be paid,” Mr. Nyarko-Ampem said.

According to the government, the bird flu outbreak has affected nearly 110,000 birds.

Poultry farmers have indicated that their industry is likely to record its severest shock in years because of the outbreak.

Following the recent outbreak, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture announced a total ban on the importation of poultry and poultry products from neighbouring countries where the disease has been confirmed.

There is also a ban on the movement of poultry and poultry products within and from the affected regions and districts to other parts of the country.

Outbreaks of bird flu have previously been recorded in Ghana in 2007, 2015, 2016 and 2018.

Lack of avian flu compensation will hurt poultry sector, says FairPlay [IOL, 31 Aug 2021]

By Banele Ginindza

The government’s attitude towards avian flu compensation will discourage existing poultry farmers and is a massive disincentive to aspirant broiler or egg farmers, civic organisation FairPlay has said.

This comes as poultry organisations have drawn a blank in efforts to engage the government in the establishment of a fund, as is global practice, to compensate farmers for loses incurred from culling chickens either directly affected by Avian Influenza or those at risk due to contact with infected birds.

A statement by Mpho Maja, the director of animal health at the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, states that “Animal Health will not offer incentive agreements in the foreseeable future for the destruction of healthy but at-risk commercial chickens”.

The department compensates for sick birds culled, but not the millions culled by official directive because they had been in contact with or near infected birds.

Recent reports have put the value of culled birds at R1.5 billion.

FairPlay founder Francois Baird said the stance by the government flies in the face of efforts by the government and the poultry industry to encourage new entrants in terms of the transformation objectives of the poultry master plan. Knowing they would be at risk in a future bird flu outbreak might cause them to take their talents to other industries.

There was little of no compensation during the 2017 bird flu outbreak. This is set to be repeated in the current wave of infections gripping South Africa, which is not yet over.

Compensation is recognised internationally as an important control mechanism during bird flu outbreaks, because it encourages the reporting of infections and enables a swift response to contain and eradicate the disease.

The World Organisation for Animal Health says compensation schemes are “a key incentive to support early detection” of bird flu.

“The converse, unfortunately, is also true. Farmers who know they are going to have to kill some or all of their flocks if they report an outbreak, and face financial ruin because of a lack of compensation, will be tempted to keep quiet. That will slow down containment efforts and enable the disease to spread,” Baird said.

“Government should be helping poultry farmers, not shutting them down. When culling is ordered by government-appointed veterinarians, there should be government compensation.
FairPlay appreciates that money is tight in all departments, but, in the national interest, the government should reconsider its stance on culling compensation,” Baird said.

Belgium, France register avian flu outbreaks in backyard flocks [WATTAgNet Industry News & Trends, 28 Aug 2021]

BY JACKIE LINDEN

France's agriculture minister raises risk level from low to moderate

In the past two weeks, new outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) have been officially recorded in poultry — two in France and one in Belgium. Meanwhile, the avian flu situation has been declared closed in Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. One year on from some significant outbreaks, officials in the Republic of Tatarstan appear to be encouraging a preemptive cull of backyard poultry flocks.

Earlier this month, France’s agriculture minister raised the avian flu risk level from “low” to “moderate.” This followed the detection of the H5N8 HPAI virus variant in a small mixed poultry flock in Ardennes. Located in the north of the country, this department borders Belgium.

Further details of the outbreak emerged in a subsequent official report from the French veterinary authority. According to the notification to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), a total of 598 birds were affected by the outbreak in Vandy. Privately owned, the flock comprised six Egyptian geese, and 592 birds of different species, including chickens, ducks, quail, turkeys, and doves. Of these, 46 birds died, and the rest have been culled.

In the report, it is noted that the virus belongs to the clade 2.3.4.4.b, and it has a different cleavage sites from the virus of the same “family” that was circulating in France in late 2020 and earlier this year.

A previous French outbreak has been reported to the OIE retrospectively. At the end of August, a bird owner in Aubenton in the department of Aisne reported the death of 18 of the 33 birds in the flock. Testing positive for the H5N8 HPAI virus, some of the birds had recently been purchased from the Belgian market trader linked to other HPAI outbreaks in the area.
Aisne borders Ardennes.

France’s last HPAI disease wave resulted in almost 500 outbreaks in 15 departments, and the culling of around 3.5 million birds. Worst affected were the duck and goose flocks in the south-west of the country.

At the start of September, the ministry had announced that the 2020-2021 HPAI outbreak series linked to the H5N8 virus variant in France had been closed.

In recent news, the French agriculture ministry has eased some of the restrictions on hunting during this autumn/fall. As long as the avian flu risk level remains at moderate — as it is currently — transportation of decoy birds is permitted. If it is raised to high as a result of new outbreaks, such bird movements will only be permitted by registered owners, who must have no more than 15 birds, and no connections with poultry. Furthermore, it will be required that all such movements are recorded so officials can track and trace any future infections.

Belgium records third outbreak
In the province of Luxembourg, a third Belgian poultry flock has tested positive for the H5N8 HPAI virus variant. Affected were five birds, all of which died.

These cases bring to three the country’s number of confirmed outbreaks since the end of August. Directly impacted have been a total of 362 poultry.

Bulgaria, UK declare avian flu situation closed
To the OIE Bulgaria’s animal health agency last week declared avian flu “resolved” across the country.

This declaration followed three earlier confirmed outbreaks at farms with a total of almost 122,000 poultry. All were located in Plovdiv, and were infected in April and May of this year. The province of Plovdiv is in central-southern Bulgaria.

Over the past two weeks, the veterinary authority in the United Kingdom (U.K.) has reported to the OIE that a number of avian flu outbreaks are now “closed.”

For the poultry sector, most important has been closure of the H5N8 HPAI outbreak waves. Between October of 2020 and March this year, 19 outbreaks occurred that were linked to virus variant. Directly impacted were almost 408,000 birds, including more than 406,000 poultry on farms and in non-commercial flocks.

Following two outbreaks — one in December of last year and one in February — the authorities have also closed the situation relating to the H5N1 HPAI virus in UK poultry. Furthermore, the situation is resolved regarding H5N2 and H5N3 low-pathogenic avian influenza virus subtypes in domestic birds.

As for cases in wild birds, the U.K. has reported the disease situation closed with respect to the H5N8 HPAI virus. Furthermore, no new cases have been detected for several months regarding the H5N1, H5N3 or H5N5 variants.

Current overview of the avian flu situation across Europe
In 2021, 1,188 HPAI outbreaks in poultry have been registered across 19 European states.

This is according to the latest update on the Animal Disease Information System of the European Commission (EC; as of September 22).

Recording the highest number of outbreaks was France (474 outbreaks for the year to date), followed by Poland (339), and Germany (229). Only Kosovo and Poland reported new cases to the EC in August, and there has been none so far this month.

Based on information supplied to the this source, 29 countries have recorded 1,702 HPAI outbreaks in wild birds and non-commercial poultry flocks so far this year.

In the month of September to date, new cases in wild species or captive birds have been confirmed in Belgium, Finland, France, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Sweden.

Tatarstan owners urged to carry out preemptive poultry cull
Earlier this month, officials in the Republic of Tatarstan were urging backyard poultry owners to slaughter their birds, reported Realnoe Vremya. Any signs of ill-health or unusual mortality in birds must be reported, and all vehicles transporting poultry must be cleaned and disinfected.

Veterinarians said that these flocks increased the threat of avian flu to the territory’s commercial poultry.

When HPAI infected poultry flocks in the region around 12 months ago, migrating wild birds were blamed for spreading the disease. So authorities have ruled that from now on, commercial poultry must be isolated from wild species, particularly wild ducks.

A total of 18 HPAI outbreaks have been reported in Russia, according to a senior official at the regional office of the nation’s agriculture watchdog. These have occurred in a number of areas, including the oblasts of Astrakhan, Chelyabinsk, Krasnodar, Rostov, and Tyumen, as well as Dagestan and Tuva, reports the same source.

Located in Russia’s Volga federal district, Tatarstan experienced a major HPAI outbreak in a commercial turkey flock at the end of last year.

Nigeria: H5N1 bird flu outbreak confirmed in Delta state,164,473 birds affected - Outbreak News Today [Outbreak News Today, 28 Aug 2021]

The Delta Government on Wednesday confirmed the fresh outbreak of Avian Influenza, also known as Bird Flu with an estimated population of 164,473 birds so far affected in farms across seven Local Government Areas of the state.

Egbedi said that the affected farms were located in Udu, Oshimili South, Ughelli North, Ughelli South, Okpe and Sapele Local Government Areas, stressing that samples from the reported farms had been sent to the National Veterinary Institute, Jos, and all were confirmed to be the H5N1 strain of the Avian Influenza.

He said that the state government, through its Department of Veterinary Services, had disinfected the affected farms and had also forbidden the operation of poultry farms for the next three months, adding that more efforts were underway to contain the situation with collaboration from all the LGA Chairmen.

‘’From what we have discovered, wild birds are the primary hosts of Avian Influenza. We suspect that these wild birds may have gotten in contact with some birds in the poultry and that may have been the genesis of the outbreak.

‘’We are using this medium to enlighten our poultry farmers across the state to take all necessary measures in protecting their farms. They should not bring in birds which they suspect to have been infected or allow people from infected farms into their farms’’ Egbedi said.

The Commissioner for Agriculture further advised all farmers in the state to insure their farms to cushion the burden from such outbreaks or other natural disasters, even as he urged farmers to immediately report suspected cases to the Ministry for timely intervention.

Meanwhile the Commissioner for Information, Mr. Charles Aniagwu, hinted that the state government is putting measures in place to ameliorate the loss of affected farms as they have contributed to the prosperity vision of the Governor Ifeanyi Okowa-led administration.

‘’The State Government will meet them halfway because we believe that their actions have helped us to mop unemployment by creating jobs for our people. The fact that the government is making efforts to curtail spread by disinfecting farms means that we are already intervening and taking actions.

‘’We are not only sympathizing with the affected farmers but we are also assuring them that, as a government, we will take those steps that will ensure that we are able to sustain poultry and the agricultural sector in the state’’ he said.

Delta confirms outbreak of Avian influenza [Vanguard, 26 Aug 2021]

By Festus Ahon

Delta State Commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Mr Julius Egbedi confirmed the outbreak of Avian Influenza, also known as Bird Flu, decrying that over 164,473 birds have so far been killed by the Influenza in poultry farms across seven Local Government Areas of the state.

Egbedi who made the confirmation at a press briefing in Asaba the Commissioner for Information, Mr Charles Aniagwu, Asaba, said the affected farms were located in Udu, Oshimili South, Ughelli North, Ughelli South, Okpe and Sapele Local Government Areas.

Saying that samples from the reported farms had been sent to the National Veterinary Institute, Jos, and all were confirmed to be the H5N1 strain of the Avian Influenza, he said the state government, through its Department of Veterinary Services, had disinfected the affected farms and had also forbidden the operation of poultry farms for the next three months in the affected farms.

Egbedi who was flanked by his Information counterpart, Mr Charles Aniagwu and officials of the Ministry of Agriculture, said more efforts were underway to contain the situation with collaboration from all the Local Government council Chairmen.

He said; “from what we have discovered, wild birds are the primary hosts of Avian Influenza. We suspect that these wild birds may have gotten in contact with some birds in the poultry and that may have been the genesis of the outbreak.

‘’We are using this medium to enlighten our poultry farmers across the state to take all necessary measures in protecting their farms. They should not bring in birds which they suspect to have been infected or allow people from infected farms into their farms’’.

On his part, the State Commissioner for Information, Mr Charles Aniagwu, said the state government was putting measures in place to ameliorate the loss of the affected farmers, adding that they have contributed to the prosperity vision of the Governor Ifeanyi Okowa-led administration.

Aniagwu said: “The State Government will meet them halfway because we believe that their actions have helped us to mop unemployment by creating jobs for our people. The fact that the government is making efforts to curtail spread by disinfecting farms means that we are already intervening and taking action.

‘’We are not only sympathizing with the affected farmers but we are also assuring them that, as a government, we will take those steps that will ensure that we are able to sustain poultry and the agricultural sector in the state’’.

Nigeria's southern state reports bird flu outbreak_china.org.cn [China.org.cn, 25 Aug 2021]

ABUJA, Aug. 25 (Xinhua) -- More than 160,000 poultry birds have been reported dead in a bird flu outbreak which has so far affected six local government areas in Nigeria's southern state of Delta, said a local official on Wednesday.

At a press conference in Asaba, the capital of Delta on Wednesday, Julius Egbedi, the commissioner for agriculture in the state, said the state government has taken action to curtail the spread of the disease recorded since late June.

"On June 22, we got a call from some poultry farms in Ughelli (a town in the state) on birds dying in their numbers. We dispatched our team of veterinary experts to the farms and they collected samples which we sent for analysis," Egbedi said.

He said result of the analysis confirmed outbreak of the bird flu in the town, and later six local government areas reported cases of the disease.

The bird flu, also known as avian flu, is influenza that spreads among birds and can affect humans. The spread could lead to the catastrophic loss of revenues by poultry farmers and pose huge risks to consumers of poultry products.

Egbedi said the government had sent experts to disinfect the affected farms to further help curtail the spread.

Nigeria: Delta State Confirms Outbreak of Bird Flu, 164173 Birds Reported Dead [AllAfrica - Top Africa News, 25 Aug 2021]

Authorities in Delta have confirmed the outbreak of bird flu in the state, with 164,173 birds reported dead.

The Commissioner for Agriculture, Julius Egbedi, made this known while addressing a newsmen on Wednesday in Asaba.

"Government has taken action to curtail the spread of the disease.

"So far, some poultry farms across seven local government areas of the state have been affected by the flu.

"With reported figures put at 164,173, we know it may be more than this, but this is the official number from the reported cases.

"On June 22, we got a call from some poultry farms in Ughelli on birds dying in their numbers.
"We dispatched our team of veterinary experts to the farms and they collected samples which we sent to the Veterinary Institute in Gwon, Jos for analysis.

"However, when the result came out, it confirmed a case of the Avian Flu Influenza," Egbedi said.

The commissioner said the affected farms are located in Sapele, Udu, Ughelli North, Ughelli South, Oshimili South and Okpe LGAs.

"Following the confirmation of the disease, the State Ministry of Agriculture sent experts to go disinfect the affected farms to help curtail the spread," he said.

Egbedi advised residents of the state not to panic, saying that the government is working round the clock to ensure the disease is curtailed.

"We want to assure the general public and all poultry farmers that government is on top of the situation. There is no need for panic.

"We equally want to use this medium to reach out to poultry farmers across the state to report to the ministry of they notice any form of bird deaths.

"The state government is alive to its responsibility and will do everything necessary to protect the poultry business which is an integral part of our agriculture economy," Egbedi said.(NAN)

Benin confirms H5N1 avian flu outbreak [Al Jazeera English, 25 Aug 2021]

Virus detected in two districts near the country’s capital, Porto Novo, agriculture ministry says.
Benin has identified an outbreak of the highly contagious H5N1 avian flu in two districts near the capital Porto Novo, the agriculture ministry says.

On Wednesday, Benin became the latest West African country to declare an avian flu outbreak, after Ivory Coast identified the disease last week near its commercial capital Abidjan.

Cases have also been detected this year in Ghana, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Mauritania and Senegal.

Laboratory testing conducted last week showed that several recent bird fatalities in Benin’s southern Seme-Podji and Abomey Calavi districts were associated with positive H5N1 cases, the agriculture ministry said in a statement.

Benin is now waiting for those results to be confirmed by a laboratory in Italy, the statement said.

“To date, the situation at infected farms is under control and measures are being taken to determine the extent of any spread,” it said.

It called on those working in the poultry sector to strengthen biosecurity measures and report any suspected cases to the ministry.

H5N1, which was first detected in 1996 among geese in China, has since been detected in more than 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. It can occasionally spread to humans, although no community spread of the virus among humans has been detected.

Rare gene variants found to increase vulnerability to H7N9 avian influenza infection [Medical Xpress, 23 Aug 2021]

by Bob Yirka

An international team of researchers has found evidence that suggests people with MX1 gene variants are more susceptible to H7N9 avian influenza infections. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their work involving genome sequencing samples from people known to have been infected with H7N9 along with samples from people known to be at greater risk of being infected from poultry, and what they found.

H7N9 is a bird flu strain of the species Influenza virus A—human infections from it are still relatively rare, though it has been found to be more deadly than other types, with a mortality rate of 39%. Prior research has shown that exposure to poultry is the biggest risk factor for transmission to humans. But prior research has also shown that only 7% of all infections were in poultry workers. This finding has led to suggestions that some people are more susceptible to infection from the H7N9 strain than are other people, which suggests a genetic difference. In this new effort, the researchers went looking for that genetic difference.

The work by the team involved collecting tissue samples from 220 people in China who were known to have been infected by the H7N9 strain between 2013 and 2017and then conducting genetic sequencing on them. The researchers did the same with 116 poultry workers who had never been infected by the virus.

In looking at the results of their sequencing, the researchers found what they described as a preponderance of infections in people with MX1 gene variants—the MX1 genes code for inducing the interferon antiviral protein MxA. Without such proteins, people are more at risk of infection. The researchers found that it was present in 10% of the infected patients and were unable to find it in any of those people who had not been infected, even those who worked on poultry farms. In a wider test, the researchers found MX1 variants in approximately 1.78 percent of 4,078 people randomly tested. In another test, they found that all but three of the MX1 variants they had identified in their study, could be associated with sub-standard MxA activity against the virus behind H7N9.

The researchers conclude by suggesting their work shows that individuals with MX1 variants are less able to ward off H7N9 avian influenza infections. Because of this, they suggest people with similar variants that are less able to ward off other viral infections be identified to help mitigate future pandemics.

Yongkun Chen et al, Rare variant MX1 alleles increase human susceptibility to zoonotic H7N9 influenza virus, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abg5953

Bird Flu Susceptibility Strongly Increased by Variants in Viral Defense Gene [GenomeWeb, 19 Aug 2021]

NEW YORK – A research team from China, Germany, and elsewhere has identified rare variants in a host immune gene coding for myxovirus resistance protein A, or MxA, that appear to increase susceptibility of humans to avian influenza, or bird flu.

"Our results provide compelling evidence for a monogenic etiology of severe influenza due to MxA deficiency and are in agreement with early genetic studies in inbred mice and unbiased collaborative cross studies," co-first author Yongkun Chen, a researcher affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University's School of Public Health in Shenzhen, and colleagues wrote, noting that the results "complement previous findings demonstrating that severe disease can be caused by inborn errors of immunity affecting the antiviral [interferon] system."

Avian influenza A sometimes spills over to humans but the exact mechanism is poorly understood. While exposure to poultry appears to be a major risk factor for infection with the H7N9 subtype, poultry workers only make up about 7 percent of cases, suggesting that genetic factors also play a role in disease susceptibility.

For an analysis appearing in Science on Thursday, the researchers sequenced and analyzed the genomes of 217 Han Chinese individuals infected with the H7N9 avian influenza A virus, or IAV, between 2013 and 2017, as well as those of 116 epidemiologically linked healthy poultry workers.

From some 18.5 million autosomal variants detected in the genomes, they saw a preponderance of rare IAV-associated variants in and around the MX1 gene, which codes for the interferon-induced antiviral protein MxA.

The team focused on 17 MX1 variants — 15 missense mutations, a nonsense mutation, and a splice donor variant — that were overrepresented in the IAV cases, including half a dozen variants that had not been previously reported in the gnomAD or Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Database.

"The interferon-regulated MX1 gene encodes myxovirus resistance protein A, an antiviral restriction factor active against a broad range of RNA and DNA viruses, including IAVs," the authors explained, noting that past studies pointed to a role for MxA in inhibiting the activity of a polymerase enzyme in the bird flu virus.

While such variants turned up in nearly 10 percent of the H7N9-infected patients, they were not detected in 116 unaffected control individuals, including poultry workers from sites that were epidemiologically linked to IAV cases. In contrast, the MX1 variants appeared to be found at a frequency of almost 1.78 percent in a population cohort comprised of 4,078 individuals from the Han Chinese population and 1.2 percent of the 10,588 Chinese individuals enrolled in the China Metabolic Analytics Project.

In a series of cell line experiments, including antiviral activity assays and assays focused on H7N9 replication levels in H7N9-infected cell lines, the investigators found that all but three of the rare MX1 variants identified in the IAV patients were associated with poorer-than-usual MxA activity against H7N9 avian influenza.

From these analyses, the authors suggested that heterozygous individuals carrying deleterious missense variants affecting one copy of the MX1 gene are deficient for antiviral MxA activity against the H7N9 virus.

Based on these and other results, the authors suggested that "to decrease the risk of pandemic viruses [in the future], it will be important for disease surveillance to monitor MxA sensitivity of newly emerging avian IAVs and to screen vulnerable human populations for deleterious variations in MX1."

Ivory coast confirms H5N1 avian flu outbreak [Reuters, 19 Aug 2021]

by Alessandra Prentice, Cooper Inveen and Jason Neely

ABIDJAN, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Ivory Coast has identified an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu near the commercial capital Abidjan and has taken steps to curb its spread, the livestock ministry said in a statement.

Testing confirmed the presence of the virus after a large number of poultry started dying in the Grand Bassam commune on July 20, the ministry said on Wednesday.

Movement of poultry has been limited within the Grand Bassam area, which is about 42 kilometres (26 miles) outside Abidjan, the statement said. Poultry imports from other infected countries have been suspended.

Birds have been culled in the vicinity of the outbreak, the statement said, without saying how many.

Ivory Coast, which last declared avian flu outbreaks in 2006 and 2015, is the latest of several West African nations to declare H5N1 outbreaks.

Togo and Ghana culled thousands of birds after detecting cases in June and July. Cases have also been detected in Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Mauritania and Senegal this year.

Bird Flu Cases Confirmed by China [PrecisionVaccinations, 9 Aug 2021]

By Don Ward Hackett

The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health announced on August 6, 2021, it is closely monitoring two human cases of avian influenza A(H5N6) on the China Mainland. From 2014 to date, Mainland health authorities have reported 37 human cases of avian influenza A(H5N6).

"All novel influenza A infections, including H5N6, are notifiable infectious diseases in Hong Kong," a spokesman for the CHP stated in a news release.

The first case involves a 61-year-old woman living in Guilin in Guangxi who had prior exposure to a live poultry market before the onset of symptoms. She is in stable condition.

And the second case involves a 65-year-old woman living in Yibin City in Sichuan Province, who is in critical condition.

While local surveillance, prevention, and control measures are in place, the CHP will remain vigilant and work closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) and relevant health authorities to monitor the latest developments.

People can be infected with various influenza viruses circulating in animals, such as avian influenza (Bird Flu) virus subtypes A(H5N1) and A(H9N2) and swine influenza virus subtypes A(H1N1) and (H3N2), says the WHO.

However, travelers to the Mainland or other affected areas must avoid visiting wet markets, live poultry markets, or farms. And they should be alert to the presence of backyard poultry when visiting relatives and friends. They should also avoid purchasing live or freshly slaughtered poultry and avoid touching poultry/birds or their droppings. They should strictly observe personal and hand hygiene when visiting any place with live poultry.

Moreover, travelers returning from affected areas should consult a doctor promptly if influenza-like symptoms develop. This will enable the doctor to assess the possibility of avian influenza and arrange necessary investigations and appropriate treatment in a timely manner, says the CHP.

Even though Zoonotic influenza viruses are found in humans, these animal viruses are distinct from human influenza viruses. And the annual 'flu shot' does not prevent zoonotic influenza infections, says the U.S. CDC.

The CDC considers the risk to the U.S. public’s health from HPAI H5 or H7 virus outbreaks in wild birds or poultry in the United States to be low

11-year-old boy dies of bird flu, PETA blames meat industry for spread of zoonotic diseases [India Today, 7 Aug 2021]

An 11-year-old boy has died of bird flu in Gurugram, prompting PETA to point fingers at meat industry for the spread of zoonotic diseases.

T he death of an 11-year-old boy due to bird flu has prompted PETA India to put up a billboard holding the meat industry responsible for the spread of zoonotic diseases.

In an official statement, PETA India said the lives of not only chickens, but of children can also be lost due to zoonotic diseases, while reiterating that vegetarian diets must be fully embraced.

"An 11-year-old Gurgaon child has died from H5N1 bird flu and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India warns the public that the lives of not only chickens, but also children's lives can be lost as long as vegetarian diets are not fully embraced.

"PETA India has just placed a billboard near the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the hospital where the child was taken, holding the meat industry accountable for the spread of zoonotic diseases, including the deadly H1N1 swine flu, which humans contracted after it developed from viruses in farmed pigs, and COVID-19, believed by most scientists to have spread from a live-animal market, as well as other poor health outcomes," it said.

The H5N1 virus is fatal to 60 per cent of humans who contract it, PETA India said.
It said human infections with various forms of avian influenza have also been reported in poultry farm workers in Russia and in China earlier this year, and the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed over five crore people worldwide, is believed to have originated from an animal farm in the United States.

"The World Health Organization (WHO) warns that handling diseased or dead birds and improper cooking can risk infections and that eggs can contain H5N1 virus both on the outside (shell) and the inside (whites and yolk)," it said.

Live poultry markets such as those all over India are believed to be a major source of the H5N1 infection in humans and it is common to see sick chickens at such places, it added.

"The development and outbreaks of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, bird flu and swine flu are as horrifying as they are preventable," said Dr Kiran Ahuja, PETA India Vegan Foods and Nutrition Specialist.

"PETA India reminds everyone that you won't be supporting disease-prone factory farms and live-animal markets if you eat vegan foods," she added.

More than 700 human infections with Asian H5N1 viruses have been reported to WHO since November 2003, PETA India said.

New bird-flu vaccine developed | Agriculture | montgomerynews.com [Montgomery Newspapers, 3 Aug 2021]

A new poultry influenza vaccine has been developed by researchers at The Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom. The vaccine triggers a rapid immune response to protect chickens against signs of disease and reduces the level of virus they could transfer. The vaccine also would be easier and less costly to produce than other vaccines made in chicken eggs, according to the institute.

New methods in recent years have been developed to enhance the immune responses that vaccines produce and reduce the amount of virus shed by birds into the environment. One of the techniques involves tagging flu-virus proteins with a marker that makes them easier for antigen-presenting cells to capture. The immune cells can efficiently process the tagged proteins resulting in long-lasting antiviral responses in chickens, the institute stated.
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Pirbright researchers have shown that tagging the flu virus haemagglutinin protein and directing it to target a specific protein on the chicken antigen-presenting cells called CD83, generates fast and strong immune responses against the H9N2 bird flu strain. Birds produced antibody responses as early as six days after vaccination and shed significantly less flu virus when challenged with a natural flu strain. That indicates the birds would be less likely to spread infection. Elevated levels of protective antibodies were produced even when birds were given a reduced dose, the institute stated.

The tagged flu virus haemagglutinin protein can be produced in a laboratory culture of insect cells instead of using eggs to grow live-vaccine viruses. The Pirbright team is currently investigating the vaccine’s potential for commercial production and use in the field. The study recently was published in "npj Vaccines." Visit nature.com and search for “selectively targeting haemagglutinin antigen” for more information.

New Coronavirus News from 27 Sep 2021

Leaked DARPA docs reveal plans for risky research with Wuhan lab [Taiwan News, 27 Sep 2021]

By Keoni Everington

Plan included work on humanized and 'batified' mice, adding furin cleavage sites, and 'vaccinating' wild bats

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Leaked documents from a scuttled research grant proposal calling for collaboration between labs in Wuhan and the U.S. military are raising concerns about the dangerous nature of the experiments on coronaviruses possibly conducted prior to the start of the pandemic

On Sept. 21, Drastic Research, an international network of scientists investigating the origins of the pandemic, exposed a grant proposal presented to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by U.S.-based research organization EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) and headed by British zoologist Peter Daszak. The documents, which were leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, detail a US$14 million proposal dubbed “Project DEFUSE" that sought to identify the spillover risk of coronaviruses to "US warfighters" but was ultimately rejected due to potential gain of function (GoF) and DURC (dual use research of concern) research elements.

The proposal for the US$14 million grant, titled DEFUS (Defusing the Threat of Bat-Borne Coronaviruses), was submitted in 2018 and would have run from that year until 2022. EHA was requesting US$14,209,245 in funding and would have allocated US$1,182,877 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), with much of the rest subcontracted to the University of North Carolina, National University Singapore, United States Geological Survey Wildlife Health Center, and Palo Alto Research Center.

Among the more controversial proposed experiments presented in the application were the creation of bat coronavirus chimeras that would contain human-specific furin cleavage sites (FCS), the introduction of these viruses into humanized and "batified" mice, and a grandiose plan to "vaccinate" wild bats in caves against coronaviruses.

The mention of inserting FCS is significant because scientists consider the presence of these on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 to be one of the reasons why the virus is able to easily infect humans. Within the betacoronaviruses of sarbecovirus lineage B, the polybasic furin cleavage site is unique to SARS-CoV-2, according to News Medical Life Sciences.

Scientists who favor the lab-leak hypothesis point to the unusual presence of the FCS as an indication of manipulation in a laboratory. Advocates of the natural origin hypothesis argue that although the FCS is not documented in other sarbecoviruses, it does appear in other distant relatives such as MERS.

"Humanized mice" describes mice that have been genetically modified to express the human ACE2 protein, and in this proposal, WIV lead researcher Shi Zhengli (石正麗) — also known as "Bat Woman," would oversee work on these rodents. "Batified mice" refers to mice that have been irradiated and injected with the bone marrow of bats to simulate the response of bats to viruses and treatments.

The most ambitious phase of the project was to vaccinate wild bats using aerosolized viruses. This was to include both broadscale immune boosting with "immune modulators" and targeted immune boosting with "novel chimeric polyvalent recombinant spike proteins."

In one of the most controversial segments, the authors of the project proposed synthesizing spike glycoproteins, which bind to human cell receptors, and inserting them into SARSr-CoV backbones to assess whether they could cause SARS-like disease while declaring that it would not constitute GoF or DURC." However, in his summary sheet of the grant proposal, James Gimlett, program manager of DARPA's Biotechnical Technolgies Office, wrote that the team had failed to "mention or assess the potential risks" of GoF or DURC.

Gimlett then stated that the team's approach of synthesizing spike proteins and inserting them into the backbones of SARS-related coronaviruses "does potentially involve GoF/DURC research" and that if the project was approved, an "appropriate DURC risk mitigation plan should be incorporated" into the documentation. His conclusion was to deny funding for the proposal due to lack of "data, statistical analyses, model development," doubts about the efficacy of the bat inoculation program, and concerns over GoF/DURC.

As for similar projects that successfully secured funding, The Intercept on Sept. 6 released 900 pages of documents detailing work that EHA engaged with the WIV with funding from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH). One of the grants was a 5-year project slated to run from 2014 to 2019 titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence," which provided EHA with a total of US$3.1 million, including US$599,000 allocated to the WIV.

In the grant notice, EHA stated that it had generated a chimeric virus with a spike protein with a 10% divergence from SARS-CoV. The notice added that the chimera had "replicated in primary human airway epithelium, using the human ACE2 receptor to enter into cells" in the transgenic mice.

In 2019, just before the known start of the pandemic, WIV assistant researcher Hu Ben (胡犇) began his work on a project titled "Pathogenicity of 2 new bat SARS-related covs to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2." No information about this research has been released to the public since the start of the pandemic, including data on the eight chimeric viruses the WIV had been infecting the mice with.

Stuart Neil, a professor of virology at King's College London, conceded on Twitter that the DARPA documents reveal "GoF however you want to cut it." Neil said that he was "troubled" that the information is only being released at this late date and that there are "aspects of this proposal that are concerning from a DURC and GoF point of view."

Jamie Metzl, a WHO committee member, said on Twitter that given the revelation of Daszak's "undisclosed conflicts of interest & material nondisclosure" of the DARPA grant application, the time has come for the WHO to begin an official investigation into his participation in the study of COVID's origins and to "retract its deeply flawed report." Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright wrote that the EHA application "outlines several risky research projects" that included the introduction of human-specific cleavage sties into SARS-like viruses.

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, reacted on Twitter to the leaked DARPA documents by remarking that such information would have been invaluable at the start of the pandemic: "Imagine if the public had this info in Jan 2020."

Chan noted that while scientists such as Neil have pointed out that the proposal was not successful, it does not mean such work was not already underway at the time of the proposal.
"When you see this level of detail, there's a good chance some preliminary work has been done."

Some scientists might argue that the proposal was not successful - DARPA did not fund it. But it doesn't mean it wasn't already ongoing even at the time of proposal. When you see this level of detail, there's a good chance some preliminary work has been done.

House Intel GOP demand Biden instruct top spy office to reveal scientists who helped with COVID-19 origins report [Yahoo News, 27 Sep 2021]

By Jerry Dunleavy

House Intelligence Committee Republicans accused the Biden administration's top intelligence office of "stonewalling" congressional overseers from learning about outside doctors and scientists whom U.S. spy agencies relied upon to put together a report assessing the origins of COVID-19.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member on the panel, was joined by nine fellow GOP members who said they had no confidence in the origins assessment because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence personnel who briefed them had declined to identify which scientists were consulted during the investigation, which did not provide a definitive conclusion on whether the virus was transmitted to humans naturally or through a lab leak in China.

"This is fundamental oversight of the IC’s work. We need this information to determine whether there was any selection bias in choosing the outside scientists to consult. We also need it to determine whether any of the scientists had conflicts of interest that should affect the weight given their analyses," the Republicans wrote in a letter to Biden dated Friday.

Nunes, a California Republican, revealed the letter during an appearance on Sunday Morning Futures on Fox News.

“It looks like there needs to be an entire new report that needs to be written, because Republican members on the committee have basically had enough of this. It just looks like this is another attempt to obfuscate and protect China once again by the Biden administration," he told host Maria Bartiromo.

The interview took place shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported that a panel of scientists investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus had disbanded, citing concerns about its links to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit group that had used U.S. funds for research on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who dismissed the lab leak hypothesis in March, recused himself from the investigation over the summer.

A letter signed by 27 scientists, including Daszak, was published in Lancet in February 2020, dismissing the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. Numerous outlets pointed to the letter and to Daszak, who had recruited scientists to sign the letter, to shut down the debate over COVID-19’s origins.

Dr. Anthony Fauci quietly worked behind the scenes to cast doubt on the lab leak hypothesis in 2020, and he and Daszak were in communication at the time, emails show.

Daszak was also a key member of the World Health Organization-China joint study team earlier this year. The WHO-China report was widely considered a failure, partly due to the lack of access to key data and Chinese influence over the investigation.

The WHO-China study deemed the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely,” and meeting minutes with the Wuhan lab dismissed it as a “conspiracy theory.”

In July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there was a "premature push" to dismiss the lab theory, but the Chinese government shot down the suggestion of a second investigation.

In their new letter, the House Intelligence Republicans claimed ODNI staff did not respect the oversight role the panel has over the U.S. intelligence community.

“Shockingly, ODNI has repeatedly refused to tell the Committee which scientists the IC consulted. When pressed on the basis for this refusal during our hearing, ODNI staff acknowledged there is no law or regulation prohibiting them from revealing these names to us. Instead, they simply refused again in a hostile manner, claiming it is their ‘policy’ to do so,” the GOP group said.

After Biden called on the intelligence community to “redouble” its origins investigation in May and gave it a 90-day clock, an unclassified report was released by ODNI last month.

The assessment stated that one U.S. intelligence agency assesses with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe with “low confidence” COVID-19 most likely has a natural origin. Other parts of the U.S. intelligence community remain on the fence.

The one unnamed spy agency leaning toward the Wuhan lab theory with "moderate confidence" assessed that "the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling" by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The four unnamed spy agencies, along with the NIC, with "low confidence" in the natural origin hypothesis assessed "the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus.”

The Republicans argued in their letter that the intelligence community failed to live up to Biden's own words when he said on May 26, “I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work," and urged him to crack down.

“Outside doctors and scientists who were consulted for their technical analyses of COVID’s potential origins are not clandestine sources or spies. They are consultants and there is no basis for stonewalling the Committee about their identities … I respectfully ask that you rectify this situation by instructing the ODNI to cease stonewalling Congressional oversight and to immediately disclose to the Committee the full list of all outside doctors and scientists consulted in the investigation of COVID’s origins," Nunes and his fellow Republicans wrote.

Nunes also stressed that what ODNI presented in the summer did not match what he demanded in the spring.

“In May, I wrote to you requesting that you initiate a whole-of-government effort to identify the origins of the virus. However, you opted for a much narrower review solely by the Intelligence Community,” Nunes and his fellow Republicans told Biden. “The Committee has reviewed the resulting IC report and received a briefing from Office of the Director of National Intelligence personnel. Based on the IC’s appalling lack of transparency and the ODNI staff’s hostile response to simple questions, we have little confidence in the DNI’s report.”

The Washington Examiner reached out to ODNI for comment.

The Lancet Gives Up On COVID-19 Origins [National Review, 27 Sep 2021]

By JIM GERAGHTY

On the menu today: The Lancet medical journal abruptly disbands its investigation into the origins of COVID-19; the World Health Organization inches toward a new COVID investigation; the U.S. government is mum about any further COVID investigation on its part; a 2018 grant proposal shows that Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance lied from the start; President Biden takes it easy; President Trump only wants to talk about one thing; and South Carolina senator Tim Scott makes an important point about minority communities and the police.

Apparently, Investigating the Origins of COVID-19 Is Just Too Hard for Scientific Journals
Back in June 2020, the medical journal The Lancet formed a commission to investigate and offer guidance on all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a pledge to create a task force focusing on “the nature, origin, and prevention of zoonotic diseases.” The Lancet named Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University, one of the world’s most celebrated experts on international development and an adviser to the United Nations, as chairman of the commission.

By November 2020, the commission had formed the task force on COVID-19’s origins and selected Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, to chair it. You didn’t have to be a wide-eyed conspiracy theorist to find a problem with a man who had extensive financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology being the one in charge of investigating whether a global pandemic started from an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak is the favorite American COVID-19 expert of Chinese-state-run media. What’s more, in an interview with the state-run Global Times in February 2021, Daszak echoed the supremely implausible claim of the Chinese government that SARS-CoV-2 originated in another country and was somehow imported into Wuhan. Daszak stated that EcoHealth Alliance was focusing its own investigation into the origins of COVID-19 by examining similar viruses in Thailand, Japan, and Cambodia. After being the only American whom the Chinese government would allow to visit Wuhan as part of the World Health Organization team, Daszak said in a March interview with CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that, “It wasn’t our task to find out if China had covered up the origin issue.”
Daszak said he took his Chinese colleagues at their word that there was no reason to suspect a lab leak.

In June, Daszak recused himself from the COVID-19 commission established by The Lancet — not over his public embrace of China’s implausible blame-shifting theories but because of complaints that he didn’t disclose past conflicts of interest in his contributions to that journal.

The good news is that Sachs has realized that the conflict of interest goes beyond Daszak, concluding that other members of the task force had collaborated with Dr. Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on various projects. The bad news is that Sachs has disbanded the entire commission investigating the origin of COVID-19, and instead the commission will “continue studying the origins for a report to be published in mid-2022 but broaden its scope to include input from other experts on biosafety concerns including government oversight and transparency regarding risky laboratory research,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Lancet’s investigation has ceased; apparently it is just too hard to find qualified scientific minds who don’t have some past tie to Daszak or EcoHealth.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is launching a new investigation: “A new team of about 20 scientists — including specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from nature — is being assembled with a mandate to hunt for new evidence in China and elsewhere.” This represents a modest win for the Biden administration, as “officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have pressed WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus publicly and privately to renew the inquiry, which is likely to include at least one American.”

It is unclear how intensely the U.S. government is still investigating the origins of a pandemic that has killed at least 4.7 million people worldwide (some estimates put it much higher), infected 232 million, briefly shut down the world, disrupted the education of hundreds of millions of children, and set off a global economic slowdown.

Back on May 26, President Biden announced that he had “asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days. As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China. I have also asked that this effort include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence Community’s efforts. And I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.”

Three months later, the U.S. intelligence community came back with a report that was useless, offering almost nothing new to what was publicly known about the start of the pandemic. The publicly released summary of its investigation is barely a page and a half, and offered less information than most lengthy magazine pieces, offering the obvious and unhelpful conclusion that “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and laboratory-associated incident.”

Neither the intelligence community nor the Biden administration ever shared any specific questions for China. We never heard any details about any work by the National Labs.
Whatever the intelligence community did find out in those three months, the Biden administration and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines have no interest in sharing it with the American people or the world. No one in the administration has said anything about the origins of COVID-19 since the intelligence community’s report arrived.

One aspect of the ongoing debate that is particularly frustrating is that nearly two years after the pandemic started, some (possibly disingenuous) voices still insist that any evidence of a zoonotic origin — that is, evidence that the virus jumped from a bat or other animal — is ipso facto evidence that the pandemic could not be caused by a lab leak. But the Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats within its walls, a verified fact that Daszak initially denied. We know that in the past, Chinese researchers and EcoHealth Alliance researchers collected bats in the wild without protective equipment. And we know visiting American researchers concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology suffered from “a shortage of the highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a [Biosafety Level] 4 laboratory and lack of clarity in related Chinese government policies and guidelines.”

We also know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats — that is, taking existing novel coronaviruses found in bats and figuring out ways to make them more virulent and more contagious. And in a point that cannot be emphasized enough, the pandemic began on the metaphorical doorstep of one of three institutions in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses in bats.

As Dr. Richard Ebright, a board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, summarized it to Vanity Fair, “It’s not a dozen cities. It’s three places.”

The independent investigative group DRASTIC found a March 2018 grant proposal from EcoHealth to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposing an effort to “introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses; in other words, to take existing bat viruses and make them more likely to infect human beings. The proposal declared that “Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology will conduct viral testing on all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse work.” This is Shi Zhengli, nicknamed “Bat Woman,” who said in a March 2020 interview with Scientific American that when she first heard of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, one of her first questions was, “Could they have come from our lab?” She vehemently denies that the WIV is the source of the virus.

Over at The Atlantic, Daniel Engber and Adam Federman examined the EcoHealth proposal to DARPA; the headline concludes that, “The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier,” which is a painfully obfuscatory summary. (Engber and Federman may not have written the headline.)
Their piece ends with a not-very-messy conclusion:
In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said.

The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government.

What’s fascinating is that we have a new virus whose genetic code is most similar to those found in samples taken from a mineshaft in southern China and taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for additional study, a Chinese government that lied at every step of the opening weeks of the pandemic, and a U.S. virus-research bureaucracy that has deliberately withheld, covered up, lied, and obscured relevant information . . . and some people still dismiss all of this as a “conspiracy theory.”

Presidential-Schedule Watch
President Biden has had two public events in the past four days, both around the middle of the day on Friday. As of this writing, there are no public events on his schedule for Monday.

Trumpian Monomania
Almost everyone thinks Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024, and many people inside and outside of the Republican Party think the GOP nomination is his for the taking. But Americans see Trump differently than they did in 2016, and he may even be considerably different than he was on the campaign trail in 2020. Have you bothered to look at Trump’s online public-statement archive, the de facto substitute for his Twitter account? About 90-some percent of the former president’s comments focus on his unhinged belief that he’s the real winner of the 2020 election. “Massive fraud was found in the Arizona Forensic Audit, sometimes referred to as ‘Fraudit.’ The numbers are Election Changing!” “The Fake News Media refuses to write the facts, thereby being complicit in the Crime of the Century. They are so dishonest, but Patriots know the truth! Arizona must immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results.” “Hopefully the Unselect Committee will be calling witnesses on the Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, which is the primary reason that hundreds of thousands of people went to Washington, D.C. in the first place.”

If President Trump thinks about anything besides nutty conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, he hides it well. He doesn’t talk about Americans left in Afghanistan. He doesn’t talk about inflation. He has little interest in the giant spending bills being negotiated in Congress. He barely mentions China, and certainly doesn’t comment on it in depth. He doesn’t even talk about the border much anymore.

Trump’s favorite topic is himself. But his political success was driven in large part by his willingness to talk about issues that affected other people — immigration and trade, but also taxes, regulation, judicial selections, crime, and bombing-the-you-know-what out of ISIS, etc. If the Donald Trump of the 2024 cycle goes on the campaign trail and focuses obsessively about audits and rigged elections and re-litigating 2020, it is fair to wonder how many people will still be thinking about the previous presidential election — particularly in contrast to candidates who are talking about the road ahead, instead of what’s in the rear-view mirror.

ADDENDUM: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, writing in the most recent issue of NATIONAL REVIEW: “For too long the liberal media have convinced folks that there is a binary choice between the police and communities of color. It’s clear that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. An investment in bettering our police is an investment in the communities they serve. You have to help one to help the other.”

New Coronavirus News from 26 Sep 2021

The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier [The Atlantic, 26 Sep 2021]

By Daniel Engber and Adam Federman

A new leaked document is stirring up another frenzy over the pandemic’s origins. What does it really tell us?

As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that in the likeliest scenario SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.

The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

The document seems almost tailor-made to buttress one specific theory of a laboratory origin: that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t simply brought into a lab by scientists and then released by accident, but rather pieced together in a deliberate fashion. In fact, the work described in the proposal fits so well into that narrative of a “gain-of-function experiment gone wrong” that some wondered if it might be too good to be true. Central figures in the coronavirus-origins debate were involved: Among Daszak’s listed partners on the grant were Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an American virologist known for doing coronavirus gain-of-function studies in his lab, and Shi Zhengli, the renowned virus hunter from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Shi Zhengli has not responded to a request for comment. A UNC spokesperson responded on behalf of Baric, noting that “the grant applicant and DARPA are best positioned to explain the proposal.”)

There is good reason to believe the document is genuine. The Atlantic has confirmed that a grant proposal with the same identifying number and co-investigators was submitted to DARPA in 2018. The proposal that circulated online includes an ambitious scheme to inoculate wild bats against coronaviruses, carried out in concert with the National Wildlife Health Center, a research lab in Wisconsin. A spokesperson for the U.S. Geological Survey, which oversees the center, acknowledged this connection and affirmed the identifying number and co-investigators, noting that the agency’s involvement in the project ended with DARPA’s rejection of the grant proposal. “This is the proposal that was not funded,” USGS Acting Public Affairs Chief Rachel Pawlitz said after reviewing the PDF. She could not, however, vouch for the document in its entirety.

Jared Adams, DARPA’s chief of communications, said in an emailed statement that the agency was not at liberty to discuss proposals submitted as part of its emerging-pathogenic-threat program, which was launched in January 2018, and that DARPA has never funded “any activity or researcher associated with EcoHealth Alliance or Wuhan Institute of Virology.” An article about the proposal published yesterday in The Intercept points to a tweet by Daszak last weekend, before the PDF was widely shared, that refers obliquely to the release of unfunded grant proposals.

For anyone looking for the great, final vindication of the lab-leak hypothesis, this document will leave you wanting. Does the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have an unnatural origin? The answer hasn’t changed: probably not. But we have learned something quite disturbing in the past few days, simply from how and when this information came to light.

The pandemic-origins debate is a big, confusing mess—but it’s an important mess, so bear with us. The hottest news in the leaked proposal concerns the researcher’s plan to sift through a large trove of genomic-sequence data drawn from samples of bat blood, feces, and other fluids, in search of (among other things) new kinds of “furin cleavage sites.” When these are encoded into just the right spot on the spike protein of a coronavirus, they allow that spike to be opened up by an enzyme found in human cells. According to the proposal, “high-risk” versions of these sites, once identified, would then be introduced via genetic engineering into SARS-like coronaviruses.

Daniel Engber: Don’t fall for these lab-leak traps
Why does this matter? We’ve long known that the presence of such a site in SARS-CoV-2 increased its pathogenic power, and we also know that similar features have not been found in any other SARS-like coronavirus (though we may find them in the future). For lab-leak proponents, these facts—combined with certain details of the furin cleavage site’s structure—strongly hint at human intervention. As the science journalist Nicholas Wade argued in an influential lab-leak-theory brief last spring, this genetic insertion “lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.” The virologist David Baltimore even told Wade that the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” (Baltimore later walked back his claim.)

As many scientists have since pointed out, the mere presence of the furin cleavage site is not dispositive of a Frankenstein experiment gone wrong. For example, the same genetic feature has come about, quite naturally and independently, in plenty of other, more distantly related coronaviruses, including those that cause the common cold. According to a “critical review” co-authored by 21 experts on viruses and viral evolution that was posted as a preprint in July, “simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain” the site’s presence in SARS-CoV-2, and “there is no logical reason” why it would look the way it does if it had been engineered inside a lab. “Further,” the authors wrote, “there is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”

But the apparent DARPA grant proposal complicates these arguments, at the very least. The engineering work that it describes would indeed involve such an artificial insertion. We don’t know whether that work was ever carried out—remember, DARPA rejected this proposal. Even if it had been, several experts told us, the genetic engineering would have happened at Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, about 8,000 miles away from where the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started. Yet now we know that the idea of inserting these sites was very much of interest to these research groups in the lead-up to the pandemic. “This is the first time they reveal that they are looking for these sites,” said Alina Chan, a scientist in Boston and a co-author of the forthcoming book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.

Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah and one of the co-authors of the pandemic-origins critical review, considers it “unlikely” that any such work would have gone forward in Wuhan. It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States, he told us. Another co-author of the critical review, the Johns Hopkins University microbiology postdoc Alex Crits-Christoph, interprets the proposal as stating that any novel cleavage sites would be inserted into a SARS-CoV-1-like coronavirus. Unless the Wuhan lab had already isolated a SARS-CoV-2-like virus that could carry this insertion—which Crits-Christoph doubts, given that it is not mentioned in the proposal—researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have had enough time between early 2018 and the fall of 2019 to construct (and then mistakenly release) the virus at the root of the pandemic.

Still, these scientists agree that the very fact that these experiments were even on the radar raises significant concerns. “I recognize this revelation opens up legitimate lines of questioning that are serious and need to be addressed by the people involved,” Goldstein told us via email. Crits-Christoph told us that it pushed the existing evidence “one step closer to the lab-engineering hypothesis”—but added that, given the improbable timeline, it moved things “one step further as well.”

With discussions of the lab-leak hypothesis being how they are, other scientists took a different point of view—one less skeptical of the idea that the experiments could have been carried out in China. Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and expert in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, calls the timeline “plausible … certainly possible.” Chan points to other recent reports that the team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already been sampling very close relatives to SARS-CoV-2, and that it was testing, in humanized mice, genetically engineered SARS-like coronaviruses that were more infectious than natural strains. “WIV was fully outfitted to run all these experiments themselves,” she says.

Like we said before, this is all a big, confusing mess. Even if it is authentic, as it appears to be, the DARPA proposal does not prove the lab-leak hypothesis, nor does it come close to changing the consensus view that the pandemic probably started from a natural source.
Instead, what this week’s news really points to is how things got so messy in the first place—and it reminds us that things didn’t need to be this way. Why did this proposal have to be leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, in the form of a wonky PDF, to a group of amateur sleuths?

In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said.

The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government. (These experiments could not have led directly to the pandemic. A spokesperson for the NIH told The Intercept that the agency had reviewed data from the experiments and determined that they were not dangerous.) In June, Bloom, the Seattle computational biologist, discovered that several hundred genetic sequences drawn from very early COVID-19 patients had been mysteriously deleted from a public database. (They’ve since been restored.) Other facts that could be relevant to the origins debate have trickled out from obscure student work and other surprising sources.

Even as a natural origin remains the most plausible explanation, these discoveries, taken as a whole, demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that good-faith investigations of these matters have proceeded in the face of a toxic shroud of secrecy. Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.”

“I find it disappointing and disturbing that something like this is coming out in the form of a leak,” Bloom said. “If there’s information that is relevant or informative to this discussion—anything that people could conceivably think is relevant—it needs to be made available.”

Until that happens, or unless that happens, the mess will only spread.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) since 14 Sep 2021 till 12 Jan 2023

Swiss company that counts Microsoft as a customer says it's removed CO2 from the air and put it in the ground [CNBC, 12 Jan 2023]

By Catherine Clifford

Swiss company Climeworks announced Thursday that it has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the air and put it in the ground where it will eventually turn into rock in a process that has been verified by an independent third-party auditor. It the first time a company has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, put it underground to be locked away permanently and delivered that permanent carbon removal to a paying customer.

The development has been a long time coming. Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher co-founded Climeworks in 2009 as a spinoff of ETH Zürich, the main technical university in Switzerland’s largest city. They have been scaling the technology for direct carbon removal, wherein machines vacuum greenhouse gasses out of the air.

Over the last couple of years, Microsoft, Stripe and Shopifyhave all bought future carbon removal services from Climeworks in a bid to help kick-start the nascent industry. Now Climeworks is actually removing the carbon dioxide and putting it underground in a process that has been certified by DNV, an independent auditor.

The cost of carbon dioxide removal and storage for these corporate clients is confidential and depends on what quantity of carbon dioxide the companies want to have removed and over what period of time. But the general price for carbon removal runs to several hundred dollars per ton. Individuals can also payto Climeworks to remove carbon dioxide to offset their personal emissions.

In addition to getting corporate clients to pay for future removals, Climeworks has raised more than $780 million to scale up from a wide variety of investors including venture capitalist John Doerr and insurance company Swiss Re.

Climeworks’ largest carbon dioxide removal facility is located in Iceland, where it partners with CarbFix, which stores the gas underground. CarbFix dissolves carbon dioxide in water then intermingles that mixture with basalt rock formations. Natural processes convert the material to solid carbonate minerals in about two years.

In June, Climeworks announced it had begun construction of its second commercial-sized plant in Iceland that will capture and store 36,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Even when complete, that will amount to a tiny percentage of the total global emissions of carbon dioxide released into the air each year: In 2021, they hit a record high of 36.3 billion metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency.

Georgia Tech College of Engineering How Does Carbon Capture and Utilization Work? [CarbonCredits.com, 10 Jan 2023]

By Jennifer L.

Carbon capture and utilization technology is not only useful, but a necessary strategy to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, and stall an increase in global temperatures in the near future. It works to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide, and either reuse it or permanently store it.

There are a myriad of technologies and methods to achieve this, ranging from direct air capture to forestry.

Carbon Sequestration Definition
Carbon capture, or carbon sequestration is the process which captures atmospheric carbon dioxide that is often released by emissions-heavy industries such as energy, construction, manufacturing and transport.

What happens after carbon dioxide is removed and then captured is called carbon utilization. It could be recycled and resold as an economically valuable product to industries. They would then convert this into end products to be sold, such as new materials or fuels.

Carbon fixation refers to the process in which the captured carbon dioxide is stored permanently in the earth, away from the atmosphere. The most common example of this in nature is the way plants convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic compounds (e.g. starch).

However, there are also emerging artificial carbon fixation technologies, such as the Orca carbon capture project. The plant pumps water and the captured carbon dioxide deep underground, where it will be permanently stored in rocks.

Collectively, all these processes are known as Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS).

Why is Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Critical Right Now?

Carbon capture, utilization and storage technology has been around for a really long time. However, interest in this area has increased exponentially in the past few years, due to the urgent climate targets that need to be met in coming years.

During the Paris Agreement and COP27, the consensus was that time is running out to tackle climate change without drastic changes in the coming years. The agreement was to limit the increase in average global temperatures to 2C and ideally, to 1.5C with respect to pre-industrial levels. An increase above these values would lead to irreversible damage to the planet.

In order to achieve this, the world would need to remove 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2025. While carbon negative renewable energy sources and planting trees can remove CO2 from the atmosphere, they are not sufficient to meet these climate targets. This is where the significant need for carbon capture and storage technology lies.

The Basic Steps of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage

In CCUS, there are four main steps involved:

1. Sequestering CO2 at stationary sources such as power plants and industrial sites.
2. Transporting the captured CO2 to storage sites (this involves compressing or liquefying the gas)
3. Utilizing the captured carbon in various applications (e.g. carbonated beverages, gas injection for enhanced oil recovery)
4. Permanently storing the CO2

In this article, we are mainly focusing on the first step, which is carbon capture or carbon sequestration.

Carbon Capture Methods
There are four main categories to which carbon capture methods belong to:
• Pre-combustion carbon capture methods

This process removes carbon dioxide before the fossil fuels are burned. In this process, the fossil fuel undergoes a gasification process which turns it into a mixture of hydrogen and CO2.

The hydrogen can be burned as a ‘clean’ fuel which does not produce CO2 as a waste product.

The CO2 captured can then be compressed, transported and stored for other industrial uses. This method is one of the ways of producing ‘blue’ hydrogen fuel.

Since the CO2 produced in pre-combustion carbon capture methods is higher in concentration, CO2 removal is easier and more efficient compared to post-combustion carbon capture. However, the capital costs related to gasification are quite expensive, especially if it is retrofitted into existing facilities instead of new ones.
• Post-combustion carbon capture methods
Post-combustion carbon capture and utilization methods remove carbon dioxide gas after the fuel undergoes combustion. It is the most widely used across industries for carbon capture.

This is typically done at the exhaust where CO2 is emitted. It uses specially designed filters or liquid solvents to separate the CO2 from the exhaust stream.

The first stage will be the absorption phase, where the solvent absorbs the CO2. The second phase will be the ‘desorption’ phase, where a change in temperature will cause the CO2 to be released from the solvent, and thereby separating the CO2.

Another example of a post-combustion carbon capture technology in development is using lime to remove CO2. The byproduct will be limestone, which can be heated to separate the CO2.
• Oxyfuel combustion methods

Oxyfuel combustion processes use pure oxygen instead of air to burn fuel. This will eliminate other impurities such as sulfur dioxide. The byproduct in this case would then only be water vapor and CO2 gas, which can easily be separated.
• Direct Air Capture

Direct Air Capture (DAC) is another novel carbon capture method. It removes CO2 from ambient air instead of only at stationary points of CO2 emission such as power plants.

The difference here is that with DAC, even CO2 emitted in the past can be removed. This would allow more CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere, reducing the overall CO2 levels in the air.

With post-combustion carbon capture, you are only removing the CO2 that is being emitted at that time. Hence, it prevents a further increase in CO2 levels.

Due to the urgency of climate action that needs to be taken, DAC is increasingly gaining interest. One of the leading carbon sequestration companies in this area is Swiss-based Climeworks. It has launched the world’s largest direct air carbon capture facility in Iceland, called the Orca carbon capture project.

The carbon capture plant would have an annual capacity to capture 4,000 tons of CO2.

The Future of Carbon Capture
With more development of such carbon capture plants, the goal is to lower the cost of carbon capture and sequestration. One of the biggest hurdles in the large-scale implementation of carbon capture and storage technology is the cost.

Since emitting carbon is cheap, there is little economic incentive to employ carbon capture technology on an industrial scale. However, things are improving, with more interest from investors, governments and scientists in recent years.

What Is Direct Air Capture And Why Should We Pay Attention? [Forbes, 31 Dec 2022]

By Marianne Lehnis

Direct air capture is a technology that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air. It involves using specialised equipment to filter the air and extract CO2, which can then be stored or converted and used for commercial purposes. Direct air capture technologies will be a crucial component of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

Enhanced tax credits through the IRA is expected to give carbon capture projects a boost in coming years; the IRA offers tax credits of up to $180 per metric ton, up from the $50 per metric ton that was previously offered.

The IEA reports that there are currently 18 direct air capture plants in operation worldwide, “capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year, and a 1 Mt CO2/year capture plant is in advanced development in the United States.” However, in the “Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, direct air capture is scaled up to capture almost 60 Mt CO2/year by 2030. This level of deployment is within reach, but will require several more large-scale demonstration plants to refine the technology and reduce capture costs.”

PROMOTED
There are several different approaches to direct air capture, and the specific design and operation of the technology can vary. However, most systems involve the use of a filter or absorbent material that captures CO2 from the air as it passes through. The CO2 can then be separated from the filter or absorbent material and stored or used for other purposes.

Direct air capture uses chemical reactions to pull carbon dioxide out of air. When air moves over these chemicals, they react with and trap CO2, while allowing other components of air to pass through. Today’s leading systems use common chemicals such as liquid solvents or solid sorbents that are already in use for other applications today such as water filtration.

Direct air capture is still an emerging technology, and it remains expensive compared to other methods of carbon capture and storage. However, it has the potential to play an important role in reducing atmospheric CO2 levels and combating climate change.

Some leading carbon capture companies with potential to make a significant dent in removing carbon from the atmosphere in coming decades include:
Carbon Engineering
This is a Canadian company that has developed a direct air capture technology that captures CO2 from the air and converts it for commercial use. Carbon Engineering’s aim is to “deploy Direct Air Capture facilities that can capture one million tons of CO2 per year each – which is equivalent to the carbon removal work of approx. 40 million trees.”

Climeworks
This is a Swiss company that has developed a direct air capture technology that captures CO2 from the air and converts it into concentrated forms that can be used for various industrial purposes or stored underground. Climeworks launched the world’s first large-scale carbon removal plant in September 2021 and has 15 machines in operation. Climeworks has developed a ‘mineralisation’ process for CO2 in which carbon dioxide is trapped and injected in the pores of rock formations deep underground. It’s a safe, permanent carbon storage solution that accelerates a natural process of geological carbon storage.

Carbon Clean Solutions
This is an Indian company that specialises in point-source carbon capture, which captures carbon pollution at the source. It focuses on helping to decarbonise heavy industry: “our next-generation CCUS applications are designed specifically for hard-to-abate industries, including steel, cement, refinery, energy from waste and bio gas.”

Carbon Clean has created a modular carbon capture solution that can reduce the overall cost of carbon capture by up to 50%.

There are also a number of research institutions and government agencies that are studying and investing in direct air capture technology, including the Department of Energy in the United States and the European Commission.

Is Carbon Capture Another Fossil Fuel Industry Con? [Forbes, 25 Sep 2021]

By James Morris

With COP26 looming and a global gas shortage in full force, the bumpy road towards a sustainable energy future is front and center in the news. In the UK, right-leaning politicians are blaming over-reliance on renewable energy. But another “solution” has been on the lips of many of all pollical persuasions: hydrogen. The latest ruse is that carbon capture will enable this new savior of our climate. But the reality is not as green as proponents claim.

It’s surprising to hear so many namedrop hydrogen in discussions of the current gas shortage issues, when nearly all current hydrogen is made from natural gas. So it’s not going to help with that problem at all. As I’ve argued in the past, hydrogen is currently not very green. The vast majority is “grey” or even “black”, which means it has been made from natural gas or even coal. The hydrogen itself may be zero-emissions when used, but its production will have created as much CO2 as fossil fuels before that. This is because grey and black hydrogen ARE fossil fuels, or at least created using them. Every ton of H2 produced generates 9-12 tons of CO2.

Enter Blue Hydrogen
This is where the blue hydrogen idea comes in. This is a process whereby the CO2 produced when generating hydrogen is captured and buried, or even used for something else. There are huge debates about this going on at the moment, starting with whether it really works at all considering the failures of some of the biggest projects such as Chevron’s Gorgon project in Western Australia, the largest one in the world. This was supposed to bury 80% of the CO2 from gas wells in Western Australia over 5 years, but hasn’t even achieved half that, and doesn’t do anything for the gases burnt to liquify output for export.

Even if the Chevron project had managed 80% capture, BloombergNEF founder Michael Liebreich has argued it isn’t enough, and neither would 90% be either. At a 90% capture rate, every ton of blue hydrogen would still produce about a ton of CO2. Translating this into accessible car terms, the world record for “hypermiling” a Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell EV is 623 miles from 5.6kg of hydrogen. That is 111 miles per kg. With 90% capture blue hydrogen, that equates to a very impressive 5.6g/km of CO2, 15 times less than a Toyota Yaris hybrid (although that doesn’t take into account the CO2 produced when creating its fossil fuel).

There are a couple of problems with blue hydrogen, though. The first is “fugitive emissions”, where some of the natural gas (methane) escapes into the air, and methane is 84 times worse for the greenhouse effect than CO2. The second one is the inefficiency of the capture process itself, although there are ways this could be better. The 90% figure is not zero emissions, whereas anything running on pure electricity could still achieve that with an entirely renewable grid.

Of course, until that 100% renewable grid arrives, battery-electric vehicles have their own “well to wheel” problems as well. Let’s put aside the vehicle production emissions for another time, and just consider the energy production used by propulsion. While a BEV is itself zero emissions, of course the electricity you put into it won’t be. The CO2 emissions of grids vary a lot, even within countries, with Vermont in the USA using much more renewable energy than Texas, for example. China’s grid is particularly polluting. So blue hydrogen would be a marked emissions improvement there as a source of energy for transportation.

Who Gains Most From Carbon Capture? But you do have to ask who really would benefit from blue hydrogen in the long run. For existing hydrogen use cases, it’s clearly better than grey or black hydrogen. As an alternative for things where electricity can be used directly, it’s much more questionable, even in China, which could invest in renewable electricity generation and a greener grid rather than carbon capture. Overall, beyond replacing “dirty” grey and black hydrogen, the benefits appear to be more for the incumbent fossil fuel companies that produce the raw gases used to make blue hydrogen, rather than the environment. The truly green version of hydrogen, produced via electrolysis, cuts the oil and gas industry out of the picture as much as battery-electric vehicles, so they are pushing the cost benefits of blue hydrogen instead.

It’s easy to fall into the territory of conspiracy theories in this age of ubiquitous social media, but it would also not be an exaggeration to argue that vested interests in the fossil fuel industry are waging an increasingly vicious battle against electric vehicles, with blue hydrogen their latest counter argument. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth has even declared we should just plant trees to combat the climate crisis, and some are arguing for “direct air capture of CO2” as a way to allow the continued use of fossil fuels. After all, if trees can do it, why can’t we? But with current technology, this would consume almost as much energy to achieve as that produced by all the fossil fuel power generation it is meant to clean up.

However, BP in contrast is investing hugely in transitioning itself to an renewables company, presumably seeing that fighting for the continued dominance of fossil fuels will be a losing battle. BP also owns the largest charging network in the UK, although it has come under some criticism for the patchy reliability of that network. Shell has invested heavily in charging network ownership too, buying the NewMotion network in 2017 and Ubitricity in the UK at the beginning of 2021.

It’s very dangerous to propose just one technology to solve the climate crisis. We need a blend. Blue and green hydrogen have their places, but they are not a panacea that fixes all problems just as battery-electric vehicles won’t solve every transportation need either. What we really need, though, is politicians who understand the technology adequately to focus investment on the right technologies for the right applications. Otherwise, we will see money wasted on wild goose chases that don’t have the results we need to save the environment. Carbon capture could easily be one of those goose chases, when a greater number of more diverse renewable energy sources, with a concomitant reduction in fossil fuel use, could be a much more effective – and real – route to reduced carbon emissions.

Climate crisis: do we need millions of machines sucking CO2 from the air? [The Guardian, 24 Sep 2021]

By Damian Carrington

From turning CO2 into rock to capturing the breath of office workers, a growing number of companies think the answer is yes

Does the world need millions of machines sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the air to beat the climate crisis? There is a fast-growing number of companies that believe the answer is yes and that are deploying their first devices into the real world.

From turning CO2 into rock in Iceland, to capturing the breath of office workers, to “putting oil back underground”, their aim is to scale up rapidly and some have already sold their CO2 removal services to buyers including Bill Gates, Swiss Re, Shopify and Audi. Prices, however, are sky high – $600 (£440) per tonne and more. Given that humans emit about 36bn tonnes a year, that is problematic.

Direct air capture (Dac), as the technology is known, is challenging in more ways than just financially. Despite its potent climate heating properties, CO2 makes up just 0.04% of air and so trapping a tonne of the gas means processing a volume of air equivalent to 800 Olympic swimming pools.

“It is not super intuitive,” says Jan Wurzbacher at Climeworks, which just opened the world’s biggest Dac plant in Iceland and recently hosted a conference for the Dac industry. “But that doesn’t mean it is hard. There is no physical reason it can’t be done for $100/tonne in the next 10-20 years.”

The Dac industry is still young and there is a proliferation of technologies and business models, though most use modular machines that should be easier to manufacture and stack.

Gauges, valves and pipes for water, heating and CO2 at the Gebr Meier greenhouse in Hinwil outside Zurich. The heating and the CO2 is sourced from the local waste incinerator, where the CO2 is collected by the Swiss company Climeworks. Photograph: Orjan Ellingvag/Alamy
Climeworks’ units use fans to pass air over a solid material that absorbs CO2. When the material is saturated, it is heated to 100C (212F) and releases a stream of pure CO2. Its Orca plant in Iceland uses renewable geothermal energy.

The CO2 is then taken by a partner company, Carbfix, and put underground with water, where it solidifies into rock in two years. About 4,000 tonnes a year will be captured and the company is also working on projects in Oman and Norway.

Canadian firm Carbon Engineering takes a similar approach to CO2 capture but is looking to bury the CO2 in depleted oil and gas reservoirs in the US and the North Sea off Scotland, effectively reversing the flow in existing pipes. “Rather than the transportation of gas in, it’s the transportation of CO2 out,” says Amy Ruddock, the company’s European head.

“Importantly, there is a huge overlap between the skill sets required to do Dac and traditional oil and gas, so it really supports the green transition,” she says. The company aims to bury 1m tonnes a year in the US in 2025, at about $300/tonne. The company also wants to use its technology to provide CO2 as a feedstock for producing low-CO2 jet fuel. “That’s the largest market we’re seeing at the moment,” Ruddock says.

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial, has an even more striking pitch: “We put oil back underground.” The company takes agricultural and forestry waste that would otherwise rot – emitting CO2 – and heats it to create “bio-oil” that is then pumped back into empty oil reservoirs.

The first injection took place in Oklahoma in January and the equivalent of 1,400 tonnes of CO2 has been buried this year, at a cost of $600/tonne. “Obviously there is a long way to go – it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem,” Reinhardt says. But if 500,000 machines are deployed, he says, a billion tonnes could be buried at $50/tonne.

CarbonCapture Inc, a US firm, is using “molecular sieves” called zeolites to capture the CO2. Handily, zeolites are already produced in huge volumes for use in laundry detergents, oil refineries and sewage plants. In the Netherlands, Carbyon hopes using thin-film technology will make its machines faster at separating the CO2 from the air.

Rendering showing what will be the world’s largest Dac plant, currently being engineered by Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive. Photograph: Carbon Engineering Ltd
Energy use is a big concern if Dac is to be deployed at massive scale and Mission Zero Technologies uses electrochemical processes to release the captured CO2, which it says means 3-5 times less power is needed than for heat-based processes.

Another firm, Heirloom, does away with fans and allows heat-treated rocks to passively absorb CO2 over a couple of weeks, before more heating liberates the gas. “We are trying to turn this Dac problem from a chemical engineering problem into an industrial automation problem,” says Shashank Samala. “Imagine white powder on cookie trays in cafeteria tray racks – it’s pretty simple.”

There are also other business models. Soletair Power’s approach is to turn buildings into CO2-capturing machines. The CO2 in exhaled breath makes offices stuffy and can reduce worker productivity, says CEO Petri Laakso. “Basically people are more stupid indoors and that means thousands of dollars of loss for companies in offices,” he says. “We have a different business logic: we sell fresh indoor air as a service.” The company’s current office unit can capture a kilogram of CO2 every 8 hours.

A lack of commercial CO2 supply recently hit the UK, and AirCapture, based in California, is developing onsite machines that suck CO2 from the air to produce streams for businesses such as drinks companies. Most CO2 today is produced from fossil fuels and has to be trucked to sites.

But can these systems really play a significant part in beating the climate crisis?

The biggest and most urgent task in beating the climate emergency is to slash the burning of fossil fuels to as close to zero as possible. The problem is that some sectors are very hard to decarbonise, such as farming, aviation and certain industrial processes, and these emissions have to be mopped up to stop global heating.

It is also likely, given that CO2 emissions are actually still rising, that the world will overshoot the carbon budget for the internationally agreed 1.5C target. This also means CO2 is going to have to be pulled from the air. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2018 that billions of tonnes of CO2 a year may need to be captured and buried after 2050.

“Unless affordable and environmentally and socially acceptable CO2 removal becomes feasible and available at scale well before 2050, 1.5C-consistent pathways will be difficult to realise, especially in overshoot scenarios,” the IPCC said. “Roughly, we need to take care of 10 billion tonnes of CO2 each year in mid-century,” says Wurzbacher.

Dac, however, is not the only option. Growing crops, burning them to produce power, and burying the emissions also removes CO2, but scientists worry about the huge land and water requirements. Growing trees – the original CO2 removal machines – is also an option, but also requires a lot of land, takes time and the forests then have to be protected for decades or the CO2 goes up in smoke.

Prof Thomas Crowther, an ecologist at ETH Zurich and prominent backer of reforestation, says: “We cannot simply plant a blanket of trees across the planet and hope to save the world – nature isn’t going to do this alone. We are undoubtedly going to need thousands of solutions.” He says technology for drawing down CO2 has immense potential.

Christoph Gebald at Climeworks is bullish about his company’s technology: “We are very confident we can achieve million-tonne [per year] capacity in the second half of this decade, and billion-tonne capacity by 2050.”

Businesses are increasingly buying offsets to claim carbon neutrality, often via schemes that claim to protect forests, plant trees or install renewable energy. But many offset schemes are criticised as smoke and mirrors. Gebald argues that, by contrast, Dac with underground burial offers immediate, permanent and easily measurable CO2 disposal.

Right now, direct air capture is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropper
Robert Rohde, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth

Will the financials add up? For all these companies, scaling up to crush the cost of their technologies is critical. Hans De Neve, founder of Carbyon, says solar panels were originally extremely expensive but have plummeted in price, falling by 80% in the last decade alone: “I see no fundamental reason why this can’t happen for the Dac industry.”

Gebald says Dac will need a subsidy phase. “Solar PV in the 2000s was receiving subsidies well north of $500 per tonne of CO2, and with the support of billions of dollars annually over 10 years, this really helped the industry to scale and drive down costs.” Ruddock highlights the cost of unchecked global heating: “The benchmark I would throw out there is what is the cost of going above 1.5C or 2C?”

The other critical factor for large-scale Dac is the creation of a market for CO2 disposal. Jet fuel and clean office air might raise some funds in the near term, but not enough to get to removing billions of tonnes of CO2 a year.

“If there’s no price on CO2, it’s going to be extremely difficult to establish these technologies,” says Prof Reto Knutti, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich. “So I think that governments have to say, yes, there is a price for CO2, and then the private sector can come up with fancy innovative solutions.” Negotiations over rules for an international CO2 market will be one of the main issues at the Cop26 summit in November, and the backers of Dac will be hoping for success.

Early adopters of Dac, like Microsoft, are already pushing funding into the sector, and both Elon Musk and the UK government have launched technology competitions worth $100m and £100m respectively. There are also some early offset customers, such as insurance giant Swiss Re, which has signed a 10-year deal with Climeworks, and Shopify, both attracted by the certainty of removal.

Jens Burchardt of Boston Consulting Group, another customer, says: “We think it’s something that the world undoubtedly needs to get to net zero and we are one of not-so-many companies in the world who can afford to give this a push at a time when its economics are not yet where they need to be.”

Climate campaigners, such as Greenpeace, have argued that Dac could be a dangerous distraction. “We simply can’t wait until tech like Dac is finally affordable or widely available if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change,” says Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at Greenpeace UK. “If overhyping Dac encourages delay and dithering on the necessary action to cut emissions then it will make the situation worse, not better.”

Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University and author of The New Climate War, says: “Of all of the geoengineering schemes, Dac seems the safest and most efficacious. It could, along with natural reforestation, be an important component of broader efforts to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, a strategy that arguably belongs in any comprehensive climate abatement program. But since we’re only talking about capturing 10%, at most, of current carbon emissions, this obviously cannot be a primary strategy for cutting emissions.”
“Dac would be an amazing weapon in the fight against climate change,” says Robert Rohde, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. “However, it remains very small-scale and high cost. Current global capacity for Dac is about 12,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Each year, human activities release 40bn tonnes. So, right now, Dac is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropper.”

“The industry needs to find a way to rapidly grow many thousands of times larger, and cut costs by about 80%, if they are going to have a real hope of making a tangible impact in the fight against global warming,” says Rohde. “It will be great if they can make it work, but I am not optimistic, and most of the world’s attention should be focused on reducing emissions because we don’t have time to wait.”

Scaling up rapidly will require huge investment, but Adrian Corless, CEO at CarbonCapture, points out that many trillions of dollars have been invested in oil and gas infrastructure, which is the source of much of the climate crisis. “I don’t think it should scare or surprise anyone that to solve the climate problem it will need an industry on the scale of the oil and gas industry,” he says.

“Support direct air capture like Germany supported wind and solar” - Climeworks [Clean Energy Wire, 24 Sep 2021]

Their goal is to create an entirely new industry, one that will become as important as today’s oil and gas giants, because the world will be in desperate need of removing carbon to mitigate climate change. Swiss company Climeworks has launched the world’s first and largest direct air capture (DAC) and storage plant. It will capture 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year which will be stored in Icelandic underground rock formations. Quickly scaling this technology is the key to its future, Climeworks Head of Climate Policy Christoph Beuttler told Clean Energy Wire. This will require government support, similar to the feed-in payments that Germany used to expand wind and solar PV, he adds. Without it, the budding sector will thrive elsewhere and Europe could be out of the picture.

Clean Energy Wire: What’s your impression of how carbon removal technologies are perceived and treated in Europe? Is there enough support to bring new technologies to scale?

Christoph Beuttler: Overall, a lot has happened in the past three years since the European Commission in 2018 first talked about direct air capture in the net-zero 2050 vision. The picture that we see emerging in the Commission gives us reason for hope, but there is a lot of work to do.

On an EU level we have the EU innovation fund as a vehicle which is a good first start but the methodology is biased towards CCS. Also, Ursula von der Leyen and Bill Gates have announced an EU catalyst programme, which is in the region of 800 million euros and the money goes to four different technologies, one of them is direct air capture and that is 200 million euros. And that’s great. But the direct air capture plant “Orca” that we just launched and which is the largest in the world, captures 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year and cost around 10 million euros to build. The next one we’re building captures 40,000 tonnes – well that’s not going to cost ten times as much but a lot more. And the next one is 400,000 tonnes and then you are in the billions relatively quickly and 200 million euros here and there is not enough to buy the technology down. So what’s needed is something like what Germany did with wind and solar, carbon contracts for difference, government buy-downs. And that’s not there yet.

Instead, policy makers and especially stakeholders from polluting industries often like to talk about the need for a global carbon tax. Yes, of course we need a global carbon tax, but they also know that that isn’t going to happen. Advocating for shorter term, quick mechanisms, that we can actually achieve like a carbon removal fund in the European Emission Trading System (EU ETS) that diverts funds to all of these new carbon removal technologies – those are things that work and are also achievable.

Looking at the interest from private businesses and investors in Climeworks, are you confident that you can scale the technology and have a working business model, without state support?

That’s the argument of the European Commission, which says there is enough demand for direct air capture as it is. And yes, if you calculate the size of our company and how much we raised - we just made a 10-million-dollar deal with Swiss RE - you can say demand is there. But the whole bottleneck for direct air capture is: This needs to get to gigatons scale within three decades. It needs to become one of the largest industries there is, in the order of today’s oil and gas industry, so the world can stay under 1.5 or below 2 degrees Celsius of warming.
Currently we try to grow in niche markets, bubbles for drinks, voluntary carbon removal markets. Our goal is not to foremost make money, our goal is to become climate relevant. If we continue to grow like this, our investors will be happy and our founders will be wealthy but we won’t save the planet. If we want to reach 1.5 degrees, we need to get a move on and speed up our growth.

"In a very short time, it almost won’t matter how much direct air capture costs, because the shortage is on the supply side not on the demand side." Christoph Beuttler, Climeworks

Is Germany doing enough to help scaling carbon removal technologies?

The good thing is: the topic is in the programmes of some parties. We haven’t been contacted too much by them and the way it is talked about we see that the knowledge level is still at an early stage in places.

What about other regions of the world - is there more support for the carbon removal industry there?

Actually, I wouldn’t call us an industry yet. We are a collection of start-ups, now about 20, who are pursuing direct air capture. Examples are the UK, where there is now a big government programme for scaling up negative emissions and direct air capture. The same in the U.S. – obviously with the change in the administration – all of a sudden there is support. If I were to say, where is the best location with the best government mechanisms for supporting direct air capture now, I would say it’s the U.S. This can obviously change.

German politicians like to portrait the country as a frontrunner when it comes to industrial innovation – is the country in danger of being left behind in the development of this new technology?

The country that is leading the charge in direct air capture is Switzerland, because Climeworks is the leading company and we are based in Switzerland. Clearly, if the German government doesn’t get a move on, it’s going to end like it did for the solar industry. Europe will lose the advantage relatively quickly, for example to the U.S, and we would hate to see that happening.
You’ve said there are about 20 direct air capture start-ups around the world – do you perceive any of them as your competition?

We always say we don’t have competition, because the problem is so big that we need every company. Also when you look at the carbon removal markets that are now springing up, the biggest problem is the lack of certificates to trade. So we don’t see them as competition, we are happy that there are more players because it means that everything moves forward quicker and also we at Climeworks have quite a big head start. Obviously, it’s about supply and demand. But soon, we won’t only be able to sell at cost but also according to demand.

The price for DAC is still very high, by when will it become competitive with other removal options?

If you speak to carbon offset traders, they say we have certificates for 18 months left, so there is a demand. Factor in recent climate court rulings like the one of the German constitutional court and Shell in the Netherlands. Shell alone would deplete the world’s certificates for existing carbon offsets. But in this market, 96 percent of what’s traded is avoided emissions, only four percent is afforestation, which you could classify as removal, and it’s not even permanent. Comparing that to all the net-zero pledges - 68 percent of all the world’s economy have net-zero targets, plus a lot of countries – in these net zero scenarios you cannot trade avoided emissions. You either have emissions or you have a removal. In a very short time, it almost won’t matter how much direct air capture costs, because the shortage is on the supply side not on the demand side.

"Although in many climate scenarios removal options fall from the sky once the price for carbon starts rising, in reality you need time to build up such an industry. "
Christoph Beuttler, Climeworks

Say a company could clearly do more to avoid emissions, but instead finds it easier to buy carbon removal certificates from Climeworks – would that be okay?

Let me put it this way: It is super easy to tap into a big oil field and suck out the hydro carbons, burn them and blow the CO2 in the air. It is a lot harder and therefore expensive to take it back out again. All of these companies would be much better off to realise that – and I think they do – and reduce emissions wherever possible. For example, make alternative fuels from CO2 from the atmosphere and green hydrogen to replace fossil fuels. But there are some parts of industry where you cannot get rid of the emissions, for example when making aluminium where point capture of CO2 isn’t possible so it’s better to take it out of the air instead. There carbon removal is needed.

The current voluntary market for CO2 emission offsets is often considered as “greenwashing” and difficult to standardise – what kind of market for removed carbon would you like to see in the future?

We should split what is known as “CO2 offsets” into two markets. One is the offset market for trading avoided emissions. And the other is the carbon removal market. Offset markets need to die and will die at the net-zero point. At net-zero, there’s nothing more to offset. There’s only to emit or to remove. So that business model is already finite. Then you have to build platforms that only trade carbon removals, of which there are not yet many in the world.
There’s going to be a commodity market for carbon removal in 15 to 20 years. It is likely going to start voluntary, then be a compliance and then become a commodity. For this market there will need to be standards and regulations and we need them to be very good, otherwise there will be a race to the bottom and the same greenwashing allegations like there are today over the voluntary offset market could happen which would of course damage much needed progress in this space.

When European politicians and researchers talk about carbon dioxide removal, they stress the mitigation hierarchy, i.e. CO2 emissions should be avoided first and, only where this is absolutely not possible, should they be removed from the atmosphere or at the source and be stored. What do you make of this approach and do you consider it a stumbling block for your future business model?

I would completely agree. That’s the whole moral hazard discussion “does carbon capture and carbon storage give the oil and gas industry a ticket to continue polluting”? The reality is, we will also need fossil point source capture (CCS) in addition to atmospheric carbon removal (CDR). For example, in a net-zero scenario you can’t make cement – at least economically – without CCS. And there’s an easy solution for the moral hazard: Split the net-zero goal into a reduction pathway – Germany is suggesting 95 percent which is very ambitious – and for the remaining five percent you scale up removal. This is the speed of thinking we need to have. Or to be on the safer side, a 95 percent reduction goal and 15 percent removal so that we have a 10 percent margin. I think this is the way to go and we don’t need a ten-year-long discussion for it. We need to start scaling this now – in addition to more aggressive emissions reductions.
And although in many climate scenarios these removal options fall from the sky once the price for carbon starts rising, in reality you need time to build up such an industry. And this is our last chance to get it right.

The dream of carbon air capture edges toward reality in Iceland [PBS NewsHour, 21 Sep 2021]

By Jon Gertner

In early September, at an industrial facility located about 25 miles southeast of Reykjavik, Iceland, the Swiss company Climeworks will mark the opening of a new project named “Orca.”

At least in a conventional sense, Orca doesn’t actually make anything. It is comprised of eight elongated boxes that resemble wood-clad tanks. Each of these boxes — known as “collectors” — is roughly the size of a tractor trailer, and each is festooned with 12 whirring fans that draw a stream of air inside. Within the collectors, a chemical agent known as a sorbent will capture CO2 contained in the air wafting through. Periodically, the surface of the sorbent will fill up.

And at that point the CO2 trapped within it will need to be released. At Orca, this task is accomplished with a blast of heat, which is sourced from a nearby hydrothermal vent. The extracted CO2 will then be piped from the collector boxes to a nearby processing facility, where it will be mixed with water and diverted to a deep underground well.

And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.

Climeworks maintains that Orca, once it’s running around the clock, will remove up to 4,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. And there isn’t much reason to doubt the facility can achieve this feat. For one thing, the technology for the plant, known as direct air capture, or DAC, is a variation on ideas that have been utilized over the course of half a century in submarines and spacecraft: Employ chemical agents to “scrub” the excess CO2 out of the air; dispose of it; then repeat. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that Climeworks has already built smaller, less sophisticated plants in mainland Europe, which have in turn pulled hundreds of tons of CO2 per year from ambient air.

What seems most significant about Orca, then, is how it represents the possibility that direct air capture has moved closer to something resembling a commercial business. Climeworks now has dozens of customers — individual consumers who have purchased carbon removal services directly from the company, as well as corporations, like the insurance giant Swiss Re — who will pay for the permanent carbon offsets that will be buried underneath Icelandic soil.

What’s more, the Orca facility will be the largest functioning direct air capture plant in the world to date — by the company’s estimation, it represents a “scale-up” of its carbon removal efforts by about eighty-fold over the course of four years.

And yet, Climeworks and Orca will likely soon be eclipsed. Plans for even larger DAC plants — one in the U.S. Southwest, slated for completion at the end of 2024; another in Scotland, to be finished about a year after the American project — will be built by a competitor, Carbon Engineering, of British Columbia. Employing a somewhat different technology, Carbon Engineering’s facilities, as initially planned, will be powered by renewable energy and will eventually each remove, on net, about a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere.

“In our view, this will decisively answer the question: Is direct air capture feasible at large scale and affordable cost,” Steve Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, told me recently. “As I see it, we are out of academic research and feasibility and now into engineering reality.”

One way to consider the global value of these efforts is to place them within the humbling math of climate change. In the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a number of models were used to chart possible future emissions scenarios, and to make sense of how we might experience a rise of, say, 1.8 degrees C or 2.5 degrees C (3.2 degrees F to 4.5 degrees F) by the year 2100. Last year, about 31 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere. Probably that number will rise even higher this year, as the global economy begins to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. But to have a chance at limiting warming to 2 degrees C we would have to effectively bring our emissions near to zero by around the middle part of this century.

Without question, the best way to begin doing so is to drastically transform our electrical, transportation, and industrial systems to emissions-free energy sources and processes.

However, we may need to actively compensate for economic sectors — air travel, for instance, or steel production — that prove too hard to rapidly decarbonize. This would mean we would have to actively take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the same time. Our carbon removal efforts could involve natural means, such as sequestering atmospheric CO2 in soil or new forests. But we could also utilize more technological approaches, such as DAC or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage — known by the acronym BECCS—which involves growing plants, burning or fermenting them for energy, and then capturing the CO2 emissions and burying them.

And here the numbers get daunting. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth involved in charting possible emission pathways for the IPCC report, told me that in one of the most optimistic scenarios, which limits temperature rises to 1.5 degrees C by 2100, the conditions require massive mitigation efforts as well as about 17 gigatons — that’s billions of tons — of CO2 removal per year by the end of the century. And as much as planting trees might seem an ideal solution to help us reach such a goal, new forests are likely not a sufficient or durable carbon removal solution, especially in the wake of huge wildfires in Siberia and the American West. “Natural ways of removing CO2 are generally less desirable than long-term geologic storage through BECCS or DAC,” Hausfather says, adding that this is because storing carbon above ground in biomass is most likely temporary.

Whether DAC can make a meaningful contribution to carbon removal goals remains a lingering question. But the new Climeworks and Carbon Engineering plants suggest significant progress, not just hype. “You’ve got these two companies that are ready to go today,” Jennifer Wilcox, an official at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and an expert in carbon capture technologies, told me. “But the question is, how do they get from thousands of tons to millions of tons?’”

After that, of course, comes an even bigger question: Could they actually get to billions?

In several instances over the past few years, in the course of reporting on climate solutions and carbon removal strategies, I’ve been told by venture capitalists — investors I respect for their grasp of technology, and who have a deep understanding of climate change — that direct air capture could turn out to be among the world’s biggest industries by midcentury. I would not be shocked if this turns out to be true. On the other hand, even modest growth of the DAC industry seems entirely conditional. Reducing emissions — a Herculean task for the world’s governments and industries as they begin to phase out fossil fuels — remains the primary challenge. And beyond that, whether DAC “scales up” and makes a significant climate impact depends mainly on its expense. Or to put it another way: How much will it ultimately cost to separate a metric of ton of CO2 from the air and put it into the ground, or into a long-lasting product like concrete or carbon fiber? It seems a matter of consensus that if it can get nearer to $100 per ton, direct air capture might become an essential and useful technology.

But we’re still not sure. A few years ago, Climeworks executives told me their cost of direct air capture was somewhere between $500 and $600 per ton. The company is not publicly estimating — and indeed may not yet know — how much the Orca plant will improve on that measurement. Still, there are physical and thermodynamic limits, according to the DOE’s Wilcox, that can help serve as a lower bound. Wilcox surmises that scientific constraints may make it difficult for Climeworks or Carbon Engineering plants to get much below $100 per ton to remove carbon from the air. And this may remain the case no matter how hard engineers work in the future to bring down expenses through cheaper materials and assembly-line industrialization. A recent analysis of the industry, authored by scientists at Carbon Engineering, predicts a similar outcome: An eventual cost range for DAC of between $94 and $232 per ton. That could be decades away — or it may never come to pass.

The point of new plants like Orca or Carbon Engineering’s mammoth project in the Southwest, however, isn’t to perfect the carbon removal process. The point is to take a large technological and commercial step forward. We can only speculate on what DAC technology may achieve next based on the future targets of executives at carbon removal companies. But if costs reach, say, $400 or $350 per ton in the next few years, it would suggest this remains a promising tool in need of further refinement. It may indicate this could prove to be a viable option for companies like airlines, say, or fertilizer manufacturers (or even for government entities) that may eventually be compelled to buy offsets so as to compensate for their carbon emissions.

It’s probably best to interpret the opening of the new plants as the start of a complex, multi-decade, global deployment process that follows years of research and development. “We’re confident our costs will continue to fall,” Oldham, the Carbon Engineering CEO said. “But only if we deploy. If you never deploy, your costs never go down.”

Oldham’s view, moreover, is that the world might, through epic efforts at mitigation, be able to eliminate 70 to 80 percent of emissions by 2050. “But that would leave about 20 to 30 percent of the carbon footprint we’re going to have to remove,” he says — probably the equivalent of about 10 to 12 billion tons per year of CO2. As a thought experiment, that would require 10,000 Carbon Engineering plants like the ones the company is now planning. “I think if the world sets its mind to it, we can produce many of these plants,” he said. “And we’ve done this in the past. Look at the way we scrambled for COVID vaccines. Or look at the way we scrambled for wars and got into the mass production of planes.”

One concern is that DAC might prove increasingly controversial if it erodes global efforts at mitigation. If carbon can effectively and affordably be removed from the air, in other words, it may slow the rush to eliminate fossil fuels. For now, at least, that remains a hypothetical risk.

And Oldham and colleagues in his field told me they believe new state and government policies are moving his industry in the right direction. A U.S. tax credit for companies called 45Q, for instance, is helping to subsidize some of the high costs of carbon capture and sequestration. The possible passage of a federal infrastructure bill in the coming months may likewise allocate as much as $3.5 billion to help construct large DAC plants. Meanwhile, a push from the private sector has been a boon to fledgling DAC firms. A slew of tech companies interested in becoming carbon neutral or carbon negative — Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify are the most prominent — have invested substantial sums in Climeworks and Carbon Engineering.

Their commitments have, in turn, helped the companies move forward with planning and construction.

At the same time, investment dollars are beginning to flow into “next generation” DAC ideas.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently invested more than $12 million in a slew of early-stage approaches and component technologies. A number of venture firms, notably Breakthrough Energy and LowerCarbon Capital, have placed tens of millions more into startups. One new firm, San Francisco-based Noya, utilizes existing power plant cooling towers to create a “distributed” system of direct air capture stations that the company hopes will prove cheaper than building DAC plants from scratch; another, a Detroit-based startup known as Remora, fits carbon-capturing sorbent technology on trucking rigs to vacuum up CO2 on long hauls. As a sweetener, a new $100 million X-prize, sponsored by Elon Musk, involves a four-year global competition that will reward the most promising young carbon removal firms for ideas that can be scaled up to gigatons per year.

So within the industry, there is plenty of money and plenty of enthusiasm. What is in short abundance, in light of the hottest month on record and near-term projections for future global temperatures, is plenty of time.

At this stage in DAC’s evolution, it’s worth recalling that it can be notoriously hard to predict how long it takes for technologies to mature. In the mid-1950s, just after the first practical photovoltaic solar cell was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey, one of its inventors, Daryl Chapin, calculated it would cost around $1.5 million to deploy the devices as an electricity source on a typical American house. Nowadays, you can outfit a home with solar panels for around $20,000, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association — and that investment pays off over time through the benefit of cheaper electric bills. In some locations, solar PV is now the cheapest source of energy on the planet.

The future challenge for direct air capture technologies — the uncertain, downward arc of its cost — is therefore a familiar one. One possible future is that the DAC industry will continue to reduce expenses but may not get near enough to a price structure, such as $100 per ton, that makes it economically appealing as an offset. To Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in the direct air capture field who runs the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University, an essential question is whether DAC, as it evolves, mimics the astonishing cost declines of solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, or whether it remains a boutique technology that crashes into inherent economic limits.

“My opinion is that if it behaves like many other mass manufactured technologies, it is not unreasonable to assume that by growing roughly 300-fold, we should be skirting $100 per ton for carbon removal,” Lackner says. “Beyond that, my crystal ball is a little cloudy. But if this keeps growing a thousand-fold, we should be at $50, or maybe $70 or $80 per ton.”

Lackner believes that DAC may actually be at a better stage than solar photovoltaics were during, say, the 1970s, when prices were prohibitively expensive. For widespread adoption, solar technology needed to reduce costs by about 100 times, he says. DAC needs only to reduce costs by 10 times to make it desirable. He acknowledges there is no guarantee that DAC will succeed in the same way as it scales up. And he warns that even if direct air capture costs drop dramatically, the world will still need a regulatory framework for its application, so as to make a significant impact on the climate. As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up.

In light of this, the next few years should be telling. We may soon know whether DAC is a go—or whether the technology, often viewed by its critics as quixotic, will hit a wall of inefficiency. If it’s the former, we will have a useful tool in the climate toolbox. But if it’s the latter, it will almost certainly make the goal of achieving a livable world more complicated. The work ahead of us, already monumental in its political, technological, and economic challenges, would become even more difficult.

Carbon capture and storage, a false solution | Opinion | dailyitem.com [Sunbury Daily Item, 18 Sep 2021]

By Dr. Karen Elias

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just told us we need to reduce our carbon emissions as quickly as possible to forestall the worst of climate change. So, what could be wrong with a technology that promises to capture carbon dioxide as a way to bring those emissions under control?

Plenty.

When we hear the term “carbon capture and storage,” (CCS) many of us imagine an enormous vacuum cleaner that will extract carbon directly from the atmosphere. The realities of direct air capture (DAC) are far from simple and are difficult to realize. Developing direct air capture quickly and on the large scale needed to impact emissions levels is not economically feasible.
Total investments in large-scale removal would range between $100 and $500 billion per year.
Studies have found that direct air capture technology does not meet expectations. A plant operating on natural gas, built to capture CO2 directly from the air, only captured 10% of the emissions produced, averaged over 20 years. To calculate total carbon output, upstream emissions must also be considered, including leaks that come from transporting and storing natural gas. Once those calculations are included, the enormous sums needed to develop DAC are an unwise investment.

The carbon capture technology that’s most often discussed operates as an adjunct to individual facilities with major CO2 emissions, capturing emissions from flue stacks and using them to enhance further gas production or transporting them for storage underground.

There has been experimentation with CCS technology for decades. During that time, [How about: Over several decades of experimentation, 68 projects have ended because they were prohibitively expensive. Now, only 28 carbon capture plants are in operation globally, capturing only 0.1% of annual fossil fuel emissions. The technology is inefficient at carbon reduction, technically difficult, less economical than renewables, and risky over the long term.

Plants with this technology require extra energy to capture carbon emissions. At a gas-fired power plant, this can increase costs as much as 22%, requiring more fuel to operate and ultimately creating more environmental problems resulting from increased methane emissions.
Because carbon capture facilities run on natural gas they, like DAC, capture just a fragment of the emissions they were designed to eliminate. The best solution is to use renewables like wind or solar to produce electricity. Renewables eliminate pollution and health problems, and significantly reduce climate impact.

The technology was developed to render greenhouse gases harmless by storing them underground. In fact a majority (81%) of captured carbon is pumped into existing wells to extract more oil. If the intent is to reduce emissions, using captured carbon to produce more fossil fuels is not a reasonable solution.

Transporting carbon to storage facilities, such as underground rock formations or saline caverns, will necessitate further build-up of our pipeline infrastructure. Besides requiring huge financial investment, pipelines transporting CO2 under high pressure may corrode and rupture, presenting asphyxiation hazards to nearby human and animal populations. Also, there are few long-term studies assessing the environmental impact that large-scale carbon storage might have. Problems could include leakage, underground spread, contamination of drinking water, and tectonic activity. Already there are low-impact earthquake events associated with fracking’s operations. These could be replaced by more destructive earthquakes as we store enormous amounts of carbon underground.

Therefore, CCS technology is currently technically infeasible. Carbon capture and storage is not right for our area. It is not right for the planet.

The largest carbon sequestration facility in the world has declared its failure to capture its promised emissions of four million tons of CO2 per year. CCS is an expensive failure. After decades of CCS research and billions of dollars of investment, there is little to show for it.

The conclusion is unmistakable: Direct Air Capture and Carbon Capture and Storage are efforts to distract from renewables and extend the life of fossil fuels indefinitely. We need to transition away from burning coal, oil and gas and instead power our economy with renewables.

'The amount of energy required by direct air carbon capture proves it is an exercise in futility' | Recharge [Recharge, 14 Sep 2021]

By Leigh Collins

Capturing CO2 emissions using direct-air-capture (DAC) technology requires almost as much energy as that contained in the fossil fuels that produced the carbon dioxide in the first place, according to new analysis.

In 2020, the world used 462 exajoules (EJ) of energy from fossil fuels, which resulted in 32 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions. Capturing that carbon dioxide through DAC — which sucks the greenhouse gas out of the air — would require 448EJ, according to calculations by Australian maths-as-a-service company Keynumbers.

That 448EJ is the equivalent of 124,444TWh — more than five times the annual global electricity consumption in 2020 (23,177TWh, according to Enerdata). And that doesn’t even include the energy that would be required to then transport and store the captured CO2.

“The world would need just as much energy to clean up the energy it made a mess with in the first place,” said Keynumbers founder John Poljak. “Not quite what the circular economy had in mind.”

Generally speaking, DAC technology works by using giant fans to draw in air, with the CO2 (roughly 0.04% of the content of air) bonding to chemicals known as sorbents. When the sorbent is saturated, it is heated to 80-100C to release the captured carbon dioxide.

The world’s largest DAC facility, Climeworks’ $10m-15m Orca plant, was opened in Iceland last week, and is due to capture 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air every year — the equivalent to the emissions from about 870 cars. The captured CO2 is then mixed with water and injected into basalt rock 1km underground, where it slowly turns into a solid carbonate mineral over a two-year power.

So, theoretically, eight million such plants would be needed to capture the world’s annual carbon emissions, at a cost of $80trn-120trn.

Of course, Orca is just a pilot project and costs would inevitably fall with economies of scale and technology development.

Indeed, Climeworks’ rival, US-based Carbon Engineering, believes it will require 8.8GJ per tonne of captured CO2, rather than the 14GJ-per-tonne figure used in Keynumbers’ calculations.
With this lower number, the world would need a mere 284EJ (78,888 TWh) per year to capture global annual carbon emissions.

It has also been stated that nature (trees, plants, soils and oceans) absorbs about half of the planet’s annual carbon emissions. So, at best, using current technology, the world would need 142EJ (39,444 TWh) each year — almost double the annual global electricity production — to suck all our carbon emissions from the air.

No-one is suggesting that the world should capture all its greenhouse gas emissions using DAC, but the amount of energy required does raise questions about whether the technology makes any sense. After all, the world needs to rapidly decarbonise its existing energy usage — not add to the load required.

And with major oil & gas producers such as Chevron and ExxonMobil ploughing millions of dollars into DAC — rather than investing in clean energy — it is difficult to argue that current direct-air-capture technology is little more than greenwashing, a poor excuse to keep emissions high on the promise that they can be plucked from the air at a later date.

While economies of scale and efficiency improvements would undoubtedly help, it seems more likely that a massive technology breakthrough would be needed to reduce the energy required by DAC to an acceptable level.

FEATURE-Firms sucking carbon from air see boost from 'code red' climate crisis [Thomson Reuters Foundation, 14 Sep 2021]

by Alister Doyle

Three leading “direct air capture” companies say interest from governments and investors is rising, despite high costs and opposition from some green groups

OSLO, Sept 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Companies that suck planet-heating emissions from thin air - a process often decried as too costly and little more than science fiction - say they are gaining wider interest from governments and investors to help fix a "code red" climate change crisis.

Three top "direct air capture" firms – Climeworks, Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat – said they are increasingly hopeful governments could provide incentives to develop the fledgling industry, modelled on subsidies for solar power or electric cars.

Swiss-based Climeworks opened the world's largest direct-air-capture plant in early September in Iceland.

Called Orca, it will extract 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year with banks of giant fans equipped with filters, with the captured carbon pumped deep underground where chemical reactions turn it to stone.

A second, far bigger plant in Iceland, is also planned.

Last month, Climeworks also won a $10 million deal to sell carbon credits to Swiss Re over 10 years to help the reinsurance giant reach net zero emissions, the biggest such contract to date.

Climeworks also has carbon accords with companies such as Microsoft, Stripe and Audi.

"When we started in 2009, many people were against, or recommended not to proceed, with direct air capture. It's a stark contrast with now," said Christoph Gebald, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks.

But the technology is costly. Sucking carbon dioxide out of the air costs Climeworks about $600 to $800 a tonne, though the company's goal is to cut the price to $200-$300 by 2030, Gebald said.

Even that lower cost is more than the world's highest current fee charged to emit carbon, which is Sweden's at $140 a tonne in 2021, according to the World Bank.

But the need to remove carbon already in the air to try to limit damage from climate change is becoming increasingly clear.

'CODE RED FOR HUMANITY'
A frank report by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in August said the world is likely to have to reduce carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere to limit rising temperatures.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the IPCC report constituted a "code red for humanity".

The report, endorsed by governments, suggests "large scale and long-term experiments and assessments" to figure out the feasibility of such "carbon dioxide removal", which ranges from capturing carbon from air to planting forests which soak it up as they grow.

So far, direct air capture plants, which capture thousands of tonnes a year, are a pinprick compared to global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions that totalled 31.5 billion tonnes in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency.

Backers of the technologies say they need subsidies or other government support to scale up fast.

"In order to go big, to replicate what solar photovoltaics, wind and electric vehicles are doing, we need government mechanisms," Gebald said.

Amy Ruddock, vice president Europe for Carbon Engineering, which is based in Canada, said companies were learning fast from deploying technologies but "you need somebody to say, 'We have to clean up the skies.'"

"That is the role of governments," she said.

Nicholas Eisenberger, senior adviser to the board of U.S. Global Thermostat, said scaling up carbon removals "has to be an all-hands-on-deck effort" involving players from governments to investors.

He said the IPCC report had boosted awareness of the need to look at new technologies to counter worsening floods, heatwaves and droughts, and more powerful storms.

The direct-air-capture companies will take part in a Sept. 14-15 meeting to review progress, hosted by Climeworks.

NEW CASH
U.S. President Joe Biden has proposed spending $3.5 billion on four U.S. direct-air-capture hubs as part of an infrastructure bill.

Tesla founder Elon Musk also launched a $100 million prize this year to spur technologies to remove carbon dioxode from the air or the oceans.

Many environmental groups say the priority in slowing global warming must be to cut emissions from coal, oil and gas use rather than develop costly technologies like direct air capture to suck back emissions after fossil fuels are burned.

Besides being expensive, capturing carbon from the air itself uses large amounts of energy that would need to be supplied from still-scarce renewable sources to avoid spurring more climate change.

Carbon dioxide also makes up just 0.04% of the air, making it hard to trap no matter how much money is invested.

The Climate Action Network, a group of more than 1,300 organisations in 120 nations, says direct air capture "has no place in decarbonisation scenarios focusing on early and steep carbon dioxide emissions reductions."

"Direct air capture is definitely a costly distraction," said Lili Fuhr, head of the international environmental policy division of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, which has close ties with the German Green Party.

Apart from being buried underground, captured carbon dioxide can be used to make fuels, as an airborne fertiliser, to put the fizz in drinks or to make a small but growing range of other products.

Despite the hefty pricetag for carbon removal, projects are spreading, driven in part by expected demand as a raft of governments and companies make net-zero-emissions commitments.

In July, Kansas-based engineering firm Black & Veatch won $2.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy for research and development of a project using Global Thermostat's technology to capture 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year.

No start-up date has been set for the carbon capture facility.

Carbon Engineering is working on a facility to capture a million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air every year from 2025, to be stored underground in the Permian Basin in the southwestern United States.

The company has also begun engineering work with British firm Storegga on a plant in Scotland that could capture between 500,000 tonnes and a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Direct air capture companies note that the costs of many renewable energies that could power their technology have plunged, with most wind, solar and other renewable projects underway in 2020 undercutting the cheapest fossil fuels, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Iceland's Prime Minister Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir hailed last week's opening of Climeworks' Orca plant in Iceland, run in partnership with Iceland's Carbfix, as "an important step towards net zero emissions".

"This almost sounds like a science fiction story," she added.

New Coronavirus News from 24 Sep 2021

Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus [The New York Times, 24 Sep 2021]

By Gina Kolata

She grew up in Hungary, daughter of a butcher. She decided she wanted to be a scientist, although she had never met one. She moved to the United States in her 20s, but for decades never found a permanent position, instead clinging to the fringes of academia.

Now Katalin Kariko, 66, known to colleagues as Kati, has emerged as one of the heroes of Covid-19 vaccine development. Her work, with her close collaborator, Dr. Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, laid the foundation for the stunningly successful vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on messenger RNA, or mRNA — the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery. She was convinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.

But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year.

By all accounts intense and single-minded, Dr. Kariko lives for “the bench” — the spot in the lab where she works. She cares little for fame. “The bench is there, the science is good,” she shrugged in a recent interview. “Who cares?”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and infectious Diseases, knows Dr. Kariko’s work. “She was, in a positive sense, kind of obsessed with the concept of messenger RNA,” he said.

Dr. Kariko’s struggles to stay afloat in academia have a familiar ring to scientists. She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful. She did not get them, even as more mundane research was rewarded.

“When your idea is against the conventional wisdom that makes sense to the star chamber, it is very hard to break out,” said Dr. David Langer, a neurosurgeon who has worked with Dr. Kariko.
Dr. Kariko’s ideas about mRNA were definitely unorthodox. Increasingly, they also seem to have been prescient.

“It’s going to be transforming,” Dr. Fauci said of mRNA research. “It is already transforming for Covid-19, but also for other vaccines. H.I.V. — people in the field are already excited. Influenza, malaria.”

‘I Felt Like a God’
For Dr. Kariko, most every day was a day in the lab. “You are not going to work — you are going to have fun,” her husband, Bela Francia, manager of an apartment complex, used to tell her as she dashed back to the office on evenings and weekends. He once calculated that her endless workdays meant she was earning about a dollar an hour.

For many scientists, a new discovery is followed by a plan to make money, to form a company and get a patent. But not for Dr. Kariko. “That’s the furthest thing from Kate’s mind,” Dr. Langer said.

She grew up in the small Hungarian town of Kisujszallas. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Szeged and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at its Biological Research Center.

In 1985, when the university’s research program ran out of money, Dr. Kariko, her husband, and 2-year-old daughter, Susan, moved to Philadelphia for a job as a postdoctoral student at Temple University. Because the Hungarian government only allowed them to take $100 out of the country, she and her husband sewed £900 (roughly $1,246 today) into Susan’s teddy bear.
(Susan grew up to be a two-time Olympic gold medal winner in rowing.)

When Dr. Kariko started, it was early days in the mRNA field. Even the most basic tasks were difficult, if not impossible. How do you make RNA molecules in a lab? How do you get mRNA into cells of the body?

In 1989, she landed a job with Dr. Elliot Barnathan, then a cardiologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a low-level position, research assistant professor, and never meant to lead to a permanent tenured position. She was supposed to be supported by grant money, but none came in.

She and Dr. Barnathan planned to insert mRNA into cells, inducing them to make new proteins. In one of the first experiments, they hoped to use the strategy to instruct cells to make a protein called the urokinase receptor. If the experiment worked, they would detect the new protein with a radioactive molecule that would be drawn to the receptor.

“Most people laughed at us,” Dr. Barnathan said.

One fateful day, the two scientists hovered over a dot-matrix printer in a narrow room at the end of a long hall. A gamma counter, needed to track the radioactive molecule, was attached to a printer. It began to spew data.

Their detector had found new proteins produced by cells that were never supposed to make them — suggesting that mRNA could be used to direct any cell to make any protein, at will.
“I felt like a god,” Dr. Kariko recalled.

She and Dr. Barnathan were on fire with ideas. Maybe they could use mRNA to improve blood vessels for heart bypass surgery. Perhaps they could even use the procedure to extend the life span of human cells.

Dr. Barnathan, though, soon left the university, accepting a position at a biotech firm, and Dr. Kariko was left without a lab or financial support. She could stay at Penn only if she found another lab to take her on. “They expected I would quit,” she said.

Universities only support low-level Ph.D.s for a limited amount of time, Dr. Langer said: “If they don’t get a grant, they will let them go.” Dr. Kariko “was not a great grant writer,” and at that point “mRNA was more of an idea,” he said.

But Dr. Langer knew Dr. Kariko from his days as a medical resident, when he had worked in Dr. Barnathan’s lab. Dr. Langer urged the head of the neurosurgery department to give Dr. Kariko’s research a chance. “He saved me,” she said.

Dr. Langer thinks it was Dr. Kariko who saved him — from the kind of thinking that dooms so many scientists.

Working with her, he realized that one key to real scientific understanding is to design experiments that always tell you something, even if it is something you don’t want to hear. The crucial data often come from the control, he learned — the part of the experiment that involves a dummy substance for comparison.

“There’s a tendency when scientists are looking at data to try to validate their own idea,” Dr. Langer said. “The best scientists try to prove themselves wrong. Kate’s genius was a willingness to accept failure and keep trying, and her ability to answer questions people were not smart enough to ask.”

Dr. Langer hoped to use mRNA to treat patients who developed blood clots following brain surgery, often resulting in strokes. His idea was to get cells in blood vessels to make nitric oxide, a substance that dilates blood vessels, but has a half-life of milliseconds. Doctors can’t just inject patients with it.

He and Dr. Kariko tried their mRNA on isolated blood vessels used to study strokes. It failed. They trudged through snow in Buffalo, N.Y., to try it in a laboratory with rabbits prone to strokes. Failure again.

And then Dr. Langer left the university, and the department chairman said he was leaving as well. Dr. Kariko again was without a lab and without funds for research.

A meeting at a photocopying machine changed that. Dr. Weissman happened by, and she struck up a conversation. “I said, ‘I am an RNA scientist — I can make anything with mRNA,’” Dr. Kariko recalled.

Dr. Weissman told her he wanted to make a vaccine against H.I.V. “I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I can do it,’” Dr. Kariko said.

Despite her bravado, her research on mRNA had stalled. She could make mRNA molecules that instructed cells in petri dishes to make the protein of her choice. But the mRNA did not work in living mice.

“Nobody knew why,” Dr. Weissman said. “All we knew was that the mice got sick. Their fur got ruffled, they hunched up, they stopped eating, they stopped running.”

It turned out that the immune system recognizes invading microbes by detecting their mRNA and responding with inflammation. The scientists’ mRNA injections looked to the immune system like an invasion of pathogens.

But with that answer came another puzzle. Every cell in every person’s body makes mRNA, and the immune system turns a blind eye. “Why is the mRNA I made different?” Dr. Kariko wondered.

A control in an experiment finally provided a clue. Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman noticed their mRNA caused an immune overreaction. But the control molecules, another form of RNA in the human body — so-called transfer RNA, or tRNA — did not.

A molecule called pseudouridine in tRNA allowed it to evade the immune response. As it turned out, naturally occurring human mRNA also contains the molecule.

Added to the mRNA made by Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman, the molecule did the same — and also made the mRNA much more powerful, directing the synthesis of 10 times as much protein in each cell.

The idea that adding pseudouridine to mRNA protected it from the body’s immune system was a basic scientific discovery with a wide range of thrilling applications. It meant that mRNA could be used to alter the functions of cells without prompting an immune system attack.

“We both started writing grants,” Dr. Weissman said. “We didn’t get most of them. People were not interested in mRNA. The people who reviewed the grants said mRNA will not be a good therapeutic, so don’t bother.’”

Leading scientific journals rejected their work. When the research finally was published, in Immunity, it got little attention.

Dr. Weissman and Dr. Kariko then showed they could induce an animal — a monkey — to make a protein they had selected. In this case, they injected monkeys with mRNA for erythropoietin, a protein that stimulates the body to make red blood cells. The animals’ red blood cell counts soared.
The scientists thought the same method could be used to prompt the body to make any protein drug, like insulin or other hormones or some of the new diabetes drugs. Crucially, mRNA also could be used to make vaccines unlike any seen before.
Instead of injecting a piece of a virus into the body, doctors could inject mRNA tha
t would instruct cells to briefly make that part of the virus.

“We talked to pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists. No one cared,” Dr. Weissman said. “We were screaming a lot, but no one would listen.”

Eventually, though, two biotech companies took notice of the work: Moderna, in the United States, and BioNTech, in Germany. Pfizer partnered with BioNTech, and the two now help fund Dr. Weissman’s lab.

‘Oh, It Works’
Soon clinical trials of an mRNA flu vaccine were underway, and there were efforts to build new vaccines against cytomegalovirus and the Zika virus, among others. Then came the coronavirus.

Researchers had known for 20 years that the crucial feature of any coronavirus is the spike protein sitting on its surface, which allows the virus to inject itself into human cells. It was a fat target for an mRNA vaccine.

Chinese scientists posted the genetic sequence of the virus ravaging Wuhan in January 2020, and researchers everywhere went to work. BioNTech designed its mRNA vaccine in hours; Moderna designed its in two days.

The idea for both vaccines was to introduce mRNA into the body that would briefly instruct human cells to produce the coronavirus’s spike protein. The immune system would see the protein, recognize it as alien, and learn to attack the coronavirus if it ever appeared in the body.

The vaccines, though, needed a lipid bubble to encase the mRNA and carry it to the cells that it would enter. The vehicle came quickly, based on 25 years of work by multiple scientists, including Pieter Cullis of the University of British Columbia.

Scientists also needed to isolate the virus’s spike protein from the bounty of genetic data provided by Chinese researchers. Dr. Barney Graham, of the National Institutes of Health, and Jason McClellan, of the University of Texas at Austin, solved that problem in short order.

Testing the quickly designed vaccines required a monumental effort by companies and the National Institutes of Health. But Dr. Kariko had no doubts.

On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”

To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself.

Dr. Weissman celebrated with his family, ordering takeout dinner from an Italian restaurant, “with wine,” he said. Deep down, he was awed.

“My dream was always that we develop something in the lab that helps people,” Dr. Weissman said. “I’ve satisfied my life’s dream.”

Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman were vaccinated on Dec. 18 at the University of Pennsylvania. Their inoculations turned into a press event, and as the cameras flashed, she began to feel uncharacteristically overwhelmed.

A senior administrator told the doctors and nurses rolling up their sleeves for shots that the scientists whose research made the vaccine possible were present, and they all clapped. Dr. Kariko wept.

Things could have gone so differently, for the scientists and for the world, Dr. Langer said.
“There are probably many people like her who failed,” he said.

Penn mRNA Scientists Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó Receive 2021 Lasker Award, America's Top Biomedical Research Prize [Penn Medicine, 24 Sep 2021]

Weissman and Karikó’s mRNA technology is recognized for enabling rapid development of highly effective COVID-19 vaccines
PHILADELPHIA – As mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are deployed to protect hundreds of millions of people across the world and point the way to end the deadly global COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Pennsylvania scientists whose prescient discovery science effort laid the foundation for swift vaccine development have been awarded the 2021 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.

Messenger RNA innovators Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, and Katalin Karikó, PhD, an adjunct professor of Neurosurgery at Penn and a senior vice president at BioNTech, are honored with what is widely regarded as America's top biomedical research prize for the discovery of a therapeutic technology based on the modification of mRNA that makes it remarkably safe and effective.

The global impact and recognition of Weissman and Karikó's work has its roots in their years of research together at the University of Pennsylvania investigating mRNA as a potential therapeutic. Their groundbreaking study published in 2005 found that their concept—which brought fresh hope to a field beset by skepticism and false starts—could be a reality: that mRNA could be altered and then delivered effectively into the body to initiate a protective immune response. Their method to turn cells into factories that can temporarily produce proteins that serve as therapeutic compounds or stimulate the body's immune system to attack a specific pathogen also minimizes harmful inflammatory responses.

This platform set the stage for the rapid development and deployment of mRNA vaccines to combat COVID-19 when the virus exploded across the world in early 2020. Both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have licensed University of Pennsylvania technology that is used in their COVID-19 vaccines, a combined 370 million doses of which have been administered in the U.S. alone. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is being deployed in 126 countries, and 71 countries are using the Moderna vaccine.

“Dr. Weissman and Dr. Kariko's visionary research and persistence in unlocking the power of mRNA as a therapeutic platform have established both Penn and Philadelphia as the birthplace of mRNA vaccines, and provided us with the blueprint for a future in which we can fight infectious diseases, and incurable genetic diseases, from herpes and malaria to sickle-cell anemia and cancer,” said J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System and dean of the Perelman School of Medicine. “From the challenges and losses sown by the COVID-19 pandemic, their breakthrough discoveries have emerged and allow us to see a brighter future for so many fields of medicine.”

For 75 years, the Lasker Awards have recognized the contributions of leaders who make major advances in the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevention of human disease.
Weissman and Karikó's awards, which carry an honorarium of $250,000 between them, were announced today in a virtual ceremony by the Lasker Foundation. Past Lasker Award honorees include Jonas E. Salk for the invention of the polio vaccine and Anthony Fauci for designing government programs to tackle the issues of HIV and biodefense. Weissman completed his fellowship in immunology in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, serving in Fauci's lab.

The have been seven previous Penn Medicine faculty members who have received Lasker awards, for achievements including development of cognitive behavioral therapy, vaccines for pneumonia and meningitis, and the first discovery of a genetic cause of cancer, the so-called Philadelphia chromosome.

“As a physician-scientist, you hope your work will someday have a positive impact on real people, and it was beyond exciting to see that happen,” Weissman said. “But now, I'm most excited to be teaming up with colleagues to explore all that mRNA vaccines can do. We're working on malaria with people across the U.S. and in Africa and on leptospirosis with people in Southeast Asia. We're working on vaccines for peanut allergies. All of this is through collaboration. We find the best people in the world and ask them, ‘Do you want to collaborate on making this vaccine?'”

Karikó, too, is collaborating with fellow scientists on new discoveries, likening the research to the thrill of watching an intricate detective story unfold. “So many enigmatic things about RNA I find very, very exciting,” Karikó said. “And I am so glad that it eventually helped humanity.” On her collaborations with Weissman, she added, “Sometimes, we asked a question and made an experiment. And of course, instead of the answer, we got 100 more questions. It was very enjoyable. I would like to emphasize that to be a scientist is a joy.”

Weissman and Karikó have been recognized this year with multiple national and international commendations, including the Princess of Asturias Award, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, and the Breakthrough Prize.

Editor's Note: The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines both use licensed University of Pennsylvania technology. As a result of these licensing relationships, Penn, Dr. Weissman and Dr. Karikó have received and may continue to receive significant financial benefits in the future based on the sale of these products. BioNTech provides funding for Dr. Weissman's research into the development of additional infectious disease vaccines.

Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research [The Intercept, 24 Sep 2021]

By Sharon Lerner, Maia Hibbett

The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.

The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity.

Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.

The furin cleavage site enables the virus to more efficiently bind to and release its genetic material into a human cell and is one of the reasons that the virus is so easily transmissible and harmful. But scientists are divided over how this particular site wound up in the virus, and the cleavage site became a major focus of the heated debate over the origins of the pandemic.

Many who believe that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a laboratory have pointed out that it is unlikely that the particular sequence of amino acids that make up the furin cleavage site would have occurred naturally.

Adherents of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a natural spillover from animal hosts have argued that it could have evolved naturally from an as-yet undiscovered virus. Further, they argued, scientists were unlikely to have engineered the feature.

“There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” 23 scientists wrote earlier this month in an article in the journal Cell. “There is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”

But the proposal describes the process of looking for novel furin cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses the scientists had sampled and inserting them into the spikes of SARS-related viruses in the laboratory.

“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.

The new proposal, which also described a plan to mass vaccinate bats in caves, does not provide conclusive evidence that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a lab. And virus experts remain sharply divided over its origins. But several scientists who work with coronaviruses told The Intercept that they felt that the proposal shifted the terrain of the debate.

Tipping the Scales
“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.

“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”

“A possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”

Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”

But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China. “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

Other scientists contacted by The Intercept noted that there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China. “The mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried on to filter paper that scientists routinely send each other,” said Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana.

NIH Documents Provide New Evidence U.S. Funded Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan

Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email. He said he believed that the research being proposed had the potential to fall in the category of gain-of-function research of concern, as did an experiment that was detailed in another grant proposal recently obtained by The Intercept. The government funds such research, in which scientists intentionally make viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, only in a narrow range of circumstances.
And DARPA rejected the proposal at least in part because of concerns that it involved such research.

While Racaniello acknowledged that the research in the DARPA proposal entailed some danger, he said “the benefits far, far outweigh the risk.” He also said the fact that the viruses described in the proposal were not known pathogens mitigated the concern. “This is not SARS,” he said, referring to SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused a 2003 outbreak. “It’s SARS-related.”

But SARS-CoV-2 is not a direct descendant of that virus — it’s a relative.

In fact, the viruses described in the grant proposal, which was first posted online by the research group DRASTIC, were not known pathogens. And the authors of the grant proposal make the case that because the scientists would be using SARS-related bat viruses, as opposed to the SARS virus that was known to infect humans, the research was exempt from “gain-of-function concerns.” But according to several scientists interviewed by The Intercept, the viruses presented a threat nevertheless.

“The work describes generating full-length bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are thought to pose a risk of human spillover. And that’s the type of work that people could plausibly postulate could have led to a lab-associated origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Jesse Bloom, a professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and director of the Bloom Lab, which studies the evolution of viruses. Bloom pointed out that the scientists acknowledge the risk to humans in their proposal. “It’s an explicit goal of the grant to identify the bat SARS-related coronaviruses that they think pose the highest risk.”

Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology who directs the developmental biology laboratory at New York Medical College, also said the fact that the viruses weren’t known to be dangerous didn’t preclude the possibility that they might become so. “That’s really disingenuous,” Newman said of the argument. “The people that are claiming natural emergence say that it begins with a bat virus that evolved to be compatible with humans. If you use that logic, then this virus could be a threat because it could also make that transition.” Newman, a longtime critic of gain-of-function research and founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said that the proposal confirmed some of his worst fears. “This is not like slightly stepping over the line,” said Newman. “This is doing everything that people say is going to cause a pandemic if you do it.”
While the grant proposal does not provide the smoking gun that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, for some scientists it adds to the evidence that it might have. “Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have,” said Nunberg, of Montana Biotechnology Center. “Once you make an unnatural virus, you’re basically setting it up in an unstable evolutionary place. The virus is going to undergo a whole bunch of changes to try and cope with its imperfections. So who knows what will come of it.” The risks of such research are profound and irreversible, he said. “You can’t call back the virus once you release it into the environment.”

DARPA, a division of the Department of Defense, said regulations prevented it from confirming that it had reviewed the proposal. “Since EcoHealth Alliance may or may not be the direct source of the material in question, and we are precluded by Federal Acquisition Regulations from divulging bidders or any associated proposal details, we recommend that you reach out to them to confirm the document’s authenticity,” a DARPA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. The British Daily Telegraph reported that it had confirmed the document’s legitimacy with a former member of the Trump administration.

The Telegraph story erroneously reported that the scientists proposed to inoculate bats with live viruses. In fact, they hoped to inoculate them with chimeric S proteins, which were proposed to be developed through a subcontract in the grant in Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not in Wuhan. Baric did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Conflict of Interest
Many questions remain about the proposal, including whether any of the research described in it was completed. Even without the DARPA funding, there were many other potential ways to pay for the experiments. And scientists interviewed for this article agreed that often researchers do some of the science they describe in proposals before or after they submit them.

“This was a highly funded group of researchers that wouldn’t let one rejection halt their work,” said Chan, the “Viral” author.

Perhaps the most troubling question about the proposal is why, within the small group of scientists who have been searching for information that could shed light on the origins of the pandemic, there has apparently been so little awareness of the planned work until now. Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it.

Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance president, has actively sought to quash interest in the idea that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab. In February 2020, as the pandemic began to grip major cities in the U.S., he began organizing scientists to write an open letter that was published in the Lancet addressing the origins of the virus. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” read the statement signed by Daszak and 26 co-authors. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Daszak directed and gathered signatures for the letter, all the while suggesting that he and his collaborators on the proposed DARPA project, Baric and Wang, distance themselves from the effort.

“I spoke with Linfa [Wang] last night about the statement we sent round. He thinks, and I agree with him, that you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote to Baric in February 2020, just weeks before it appeared in the journal, according to an email surfaced a year later by public health investigative research group U.S. Right to Know. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” Ultimately, Daszak did sign the letter.

“I also think this is a good decision,” Baric replied. “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”

Baric and Wang — a professor in the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore — did not respond to inquiries from The Intercept about their decision not to sign the letter in the Lancet.

Daszak was also a member of the joint team the World Health Organization sent to China in February 2020 to investigate the origins of the pandemic, which concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had been released from a laboratory. (In March, WHO called for further investigation of the origins of the virus and stated that “all hypotheses remain open.”)

“I find it really disappointing that one of the members of the joint WHO-China team, which is essentially the group of scientists that were tasked as representatives of both the scientific community and the World Health Organization of investigating this, are actually on this proposal, knew that this line of research was at least under consideration, and didn’t mention it all,” said Bloom, of Fred Hutch. “Whatever information that relates to help people think about this just needs to be made transparently available and explained.”

Correction: September 24, 2021
A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that the EcoHealth Alliance proposal had been featured on Sky News Australia.

Correction: September 23, 2021, 3:30 p.m.
A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that Linfa Wang was a member of the WHO-China team.

Gallagher Addresses New Documents Supporting Lab-Leak Hypothesis [Congressman Mike Gallagher, 24 Sep 2021]

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) today called on federal agencies to publish all data and documents related to the EcoHealth Alliance's work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology after reports from Drastic Research indicated the EcoHealth Alliance had applied for funds that would allow them to further modify coronavirus spike proteins and find potential furin cleavage sites. Furin cleavage sites are a unique component of the COVID-19 virus that allows it to more easily infect and replicate in human cells. Some researchers have pointed to this feature as evidence the virus could have been engineered in a lab.

In a video explaining the importance of the documents to the investigation into the origins of COVID-19, Rep. Gallagher said, “We already know that Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were modifying coronaviruses and their spike proteins to infect human cells under an earlier grant from Dr. Anthony Fauci's Institute at the NIH. But what we learned from this DARPA proposal is that Daszak wanted to go even further, he wanted to further modify the coronavirus spike protein to find potential, what's called furin cleavage sites, and even introduce human specific cleavage sites..."

"...Okay, so what exactly then is a furin cleavage site?...This is one of the characteristics of the virus that made some of the scientists say, hey, this looks like it could have come from a lab because, of all of the known coronaviruses that are genetically similar to the one causing COVID-19, none of them have this particular characteristic of a furin cleavage site," he continued.

Click HERE to watch Rep. Gallagher's full video, or read the text below.

Hey everybody, it's Congressman Mike Gallagher and we are about to go back down the Wuhan coronavirus rabbit hole. In recent days, an organization called Drastic Research published leaked documents about the EcoHealth Alliances' dangerous gain of function research, this time in a proposal titled DEFUSE. So what happened is in March of 2018, there was a proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, as it's known, in which Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance, proposed collecting hundreds of bat coronavirus samples, and then modifying them to test their ability to infect and replicate in human cells -- gain of function research.

Now, we already know that Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were modifying coronaviruses and their spike proteins to infect human cells under an earlier grant from Dr. Anthony Fauci's Institute at the NIH. But what we learned from this DARPA proposal is that Daszak wanted to go even further, he wanted to further modify the coronavirus spike protein to find potential, what's called furin cleavage sites, and even introduce human specific cleavage sites.

Okay, so what exactly then is a furin cleavage site? Well, by now, everyone is familiar with this distinctive image of the coronavirus with spike proteins poking out. And remember, it's the spike protein that is key to the coronavirus entering human cells. Now, if we zoom in on the spike protein itself, what we see is the furin cleavage site right in the middle of the spike protein. That's this little thing right here. But this feature is basically perfectly placed to allow the coronavirus to cleave the human cell membrane and infect the cell. It's critical to it being infectious.

This is just one of the characteristics of the virus that causes COVID-19 that made some of the scientists go look at the virus and say, hey, this looks like it could have come from a lab because, of all of the known coronaviruses that are genetically similar to the one causing COVID-19, none of them have this particular characteristic of a furin cleavage site. So the virus would have had to get extremely lucky to naturally evolve in just the right way to have a furin cleavage site that is so well adapted to being able to infect human cells. And on the other hand, adding a furin cleavage site to a virus to increase its pathogenicity is a long standing gain of function practice.

In fact, as Dr. Steven Quay has found, there are at least 11 published gain of function experiments that add a furin site to make a virus more effective, including some by Dr. Shi Zhen Li, the bat lady, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who's worked with Daszak in the past. Okay, so furin cleavage site, an indication that this may have been modified, genetically altered etc, etc.

But back to the DEFUSE program that I mentioned at the beginning. DARPA gets this proposal from Daszak and does the right thing: DARPA rejected the proposal, citing in part concerns surrounding gain of function research. But the story doesn't end there. As Alana Chan, a COVID origins investigator has noted, the detail Daszak uses in the proposal to describe how he would work on cleavage sites suggests that his team of researchers had already done preliminary work introducing cleavage sites into coronaviruses in a laboratory set.

But here's the real kicker: When COVID first emerged, and the scientific community was all hands on deck, analyzing the virus for ways to combat it, one of the things that stood out was the furin cleavage site. Again, for scientific experts, this feature right there was an obvious outlier compared to most related coronaviruses. So you have this strange new coronavirus, with a unique and typically non-naturally occurring furin site, wreaking havoc in Wuhan, China. And then you have Peter Daszak, and three other American researchers who had just two years earlier put together a proposal to play with cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses in collaboration with researchers at the Wuhan Coronavirus lab. And they didn't think that was materially relevant to the scientific discussion? Of course, they probably did. But they didn't want to speak up.

And actually, it's worse than that. Peter Daszak wasn't just silent. He didn't just sit there silent. He actively organized a letter in a scientific journal, the Lancet, to smear anyone who dared to think critically about the origins of the virus to smear them as a conspiracy monger, he was communicating with Dr. Fauci. And in so doing, he not only helped the Chinese Communist Party avoid blame for the pandemic, but he actively impeded the scientific investigation into the virus that could have helped the world better understand and combat the pandemic, and in so doing saved thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.

We keep getting all of these documents coming to light. Where's the outrage?

Enough is enough. EcoHealth and the federal agencies must release all of their data and documentation surrounding their work, we need to know everything EcoHealth was doing with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and everything they were doing with bat coronaviruses so that the larger scientific community, not just supporters of gain of function research, can determine what Peter Daszak was doing and whether it contributed to the start of this pandemic.

This means Congress needs to subpoena Peter Daszak. The fact that he has not been asked to testify under oath, given his role in the origin, this pandemic is a shame on this institution. And the fact that the democrats don't want to join us in a bipartisan investigation. Right now.

The fact that Fauci was able to testify for Congress and lie about his role in supporting gain of function research should further offend everybody and the fact that the Biden administration concluded a 90 day intelligence community review of the origins of Coronavirus and effectively said, Well, we don't know. And we're unlikely to know until we get the cooperation of the Chinese Communist Party, that is simply unacceptable, we're talking about one of the most devastating events of our entire lifetime. And based on what we know now we're talking about one of the biggest intelligence failures and potentially biggest cover ups in recent history, we need to get to the bottom of this.

New Coronavirus News from 25 Sep 2021

The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier [The Atlantic, 26 Sep 2021]

By Daniel Engber and Adam Federman

A new leaked document is stirring up another frenzy over the pandemic’s origins. What does it really tell us?

As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that in the likeliest scenario SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.

The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

The document seems almost tailor-made to buttress one specific theory of a laboratory origin: that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t simply brought into a lab by scientists and then released by accident, but rather pieced together in a deliberate fashion. In fact, the work described in the proposal fits so well into that narrative of a “gain-of-function experiment gone wrong” that some wondered if it might be too good to be true. Central figures in the coronavirus-origins debate were involved: Among Daszak’s listed partners on the grant were Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an American virologist known for doing coronavirus gain-of-function studies in his lab, and Shi Zhengli, the renowned virus hunter from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Shi Zhengli has not responded to a request for comment. A UNC spokesperson responded on behalf of Baric, noting that “the grant applicant and DARPA are best positioned to explain the proposal.”)

There is good reason to believe the document is genuine. The Atlantic has confirmed that a grant proposal with the same identifying number and co-investigators was submitted to DARPA in 2018. The proposal that circulated online includes an ambitious scheme to inoculate wild bats against coronaviruses, carried out in concert with the National Wildlife Health Center, a research lab in Wisconsin. A spokesperson for the U.S. Geological Survey, which oversees the center, acknowledged this connection and affirmed the identifying number and co-investigators, noting that the agency’s involvement in the project ended with DARPA’s rejection of the grant proposal. “This is the proposal that was not funded,” USGS Acting Public Affairs Chief Rachel Pawlitz said after reviewing the PDF. She could not, however, vouch for the document in its entirety.

Jared Adams, DARPA’s chief of communications, said in an emailed statement that the agency was not at liberty to discuss proposals submitted as part of its emerging-pathogenic-threat program, which was launched in January 2018, and that DARPA has never funded “any activity or researcher associated with EcoHealth Alliance or Wuhan Institute of Virology.” An article about the proposal published yesterday in The Intercept points to a tweet by Daszak last weekend, before the PDF was widely shared, that refers obliquely to the release of unfunded grant proposals.

For anyone looking for the great, final vindication of the lab-leak hypothesis, this document will leave you wanting. Does the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have an unnatural origin? The answer hasn’t changed: probably not. But we have learned something quite disturbing in the past few days, simply from how and when this information came to light.

The pandemic-origins debate is a big, confusing mess—but it’s an important mess, so bear with us. The hottest news in the leaked proposal concerns the researcher’s plan to sift through a large trove of genomic-sequence data drawn from samples of bat blood, feces, and other fluids, in search of (among other things) new kinds of “furin cleavage sites.” When these are encoded into just the right spot on the spike protein of a coronavirus, they allow that spike to be opened up by an enzyme found in human cells. According to the proposal, “high-risk” versions of these sites, once identified, would then be introduced via genetic engineering into SARS-like coronaviruses.

Daniel Engber: Don’t fall for these lab-leak traps
Why does this matter? We’ve long known that the presence of such a site in SARS-CoV-2 increased its pathogenic power, and we also know that similar features have not been found in any other SARS-like coronavirus (though we may find them in the future). For lab-leak proponents, these facts—combined with certain details of the furin cleavage site’s structure—strongly hint at human intervention. As the science journalist Nicholas Wade argued in an influential lab-leak-theory brief last spring, this genetic insertion “lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.” The virologist David Baltimore even told Wade that the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” (Baltimore later walked back his claim.)

As many scientists have since pointed out, the mere presence of the furin cleavage site is not dispositive of a Frankenstein experiment gone wrong. For example, the same genetic feature has come about, quite naturally and independently, in plenty of other, more distantly related coronaviruses, including those that cause the common cold. According to a “critical review” co-authored by 21 experts on viruses and viral evolution that was posted as a preprint in July, “simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain” the site’s presence in SARS-CoV-2, and “there is no logical reason” why it would look the way it does if it had been engineered inside a lab. “Further,” the authors wrote, “there is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”

But the apparent DARPA grant proposal complicates these arguments, at the very least. The engineering work that it describes would indeed involve such an artificial insertion. We don’t know whether that work was ever carried out—remember, DARPA rejected this proposal. Even if it had been, several experts told us, the genetic engineering would have happened at Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, about 8,000 miles away from where the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started. Yet now we know that the idea of inserting these sites was very much of interest to these research groups in the lead-up to the pandemic. “This is the first time they reveal that they are looking for these sites,” said Alina Chan, a scientist in Boston and a co-author of the forthcoming book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.

Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah and one of the co-authors of the pandemic-origins critical review, considers it “unlikely” that any such work would have gone forward in Wuhan. It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States, he told us. Another co-author of the critical review, the Johns Hopkins University microbiology postdoc Alex Crits-Christoph, interprets the proposal as stating that any novel cleavage sites would be inserted into a SARS-CoV-1-like coronavirus. Unless the Wuhan lab had already isolated a SARS-CoV-2-like virus that could carry this insertion—which Crits-Christoph doubts, given that it is not mentioned in the proposal—researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have had enough time between early 2018 and the fall of 2019 to construct (and then mistakenly release) the virus at the root of the pandemic.
Still, these scientists agree that the very fact that these experiments were even on the radar raises significant concerns. “I recognize this revelation opens up legitimate lines of questioning that are serious and need to be addressed by the people involved,” Goldstein told us via email. Crits-Christoph told us that it pushed the existing evidence “one step closer to the lab-engineering hypothesis”—but added that, given the improbable timeline, it moved things “one step further as well.”

With discussions of the lab-leak hypothesis being how they are, other scientists took a different point of view—one less skeptical of the idea that the experiments could have been carried out in China. Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and expert in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, calls the timeline “plausible … certainly possible.” Chan points to other recent reports that the team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already been sampling very close relatives to SARS-CoV-2, and that it was testing, in humanized mice, genetically engineered SARS-like coronaviruses that were more infectious than natural strains. “WIV was fully outfitted to run all these experiments themselves,” she says.

Like we said before, this is all a big, confusing mess. Even if it is authentic, as it appears to be, the DARPA proposal does not prove the lab-leak hypothesis, nor does it come close to changing the consensus view that the pandemic probably started from a natural source. Instead, what this week’s news really points to is how things got so messy in the first place—and it reminds us that things didn’t need to be this way. Why did this proposal have to be leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, in the form of a wonky PDF, to a group of amateur sleuths?

In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said.

The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government. (These experiments could not have led directly to the pandemic. A spokesperson for the NIH told The Intercept that the agency had reviewed data from the experiments and determined that they were not dangerous.) In June, Bloom, the Seattle computational biologist, discovered that several hundred genetic sequences drawn from very early COVID-19 patients had been mysteriously deleted from a public database. (They’ve since been restored.) Other facts that could be relevant to the origins debate have trickled out from obscure student work and other surprising sources.

Even as a natural origin remains the most plausible explanation, these discoveries, taken as a whole, demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that good-faith investigations of these matters have proceeded in the face of a toxic shroud of secrecy. Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.”

“I find it disappointing and disturbing that something like this is coming out in the form of a leak,” Bloom said. “If there’s information that is relevant or informative to this discussion—anything that people could conceivably think is relevant—it needs to be made available.”

Until that happens, or unless that happens, the mess will only spread.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) since 8 till 13 Sep 2021

Carbon capture and storage: A false solution | News, Sports, Jobs [Lock Haven Express, 13 Sep 2021]

By KAREN ELIAS

Lock Haven
The technology known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is currently being discussed in Congress as part of President Biden’s infrastructure bill. It was also mentioned recently by Senator Casey, who proposed that natural gas — fitted with CCS technologies — be used, along with renewables, to increase clean electricity. Both Republicans and Democrats are touting natural gas with CCS as the next clean energy solution, and significant funding has been earmarked for its research and development — at the expense of renewable energy projects that have proven to be cheaper and to produce fewer carbon emissions. CCS would seem to be an easy fix for our carbon woes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just told us we need to reach net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050 to forestall the worst effects of climate change. So, what could be wrong with a technology that promises to capture carbon dioxide and remove it from the atmosphere as a way to bring those emissions under control?

Plenty.

We need to be clear, first of all, about the technology itself. When we hear the term “carbon capture,” many of us imagine an enormous vacuum cleaner — sort of like an industrial-sized Mary Poppins — that goes about cheerily extracting carbon directly from the atmosphere. The realities of what is being called Direct Air Capture (DAC), however, are far from simple and are proving difficult to realize. At this time, developing DAC quickly and on the large scale needed to effectively impact emissions levels within the next decade is not economically feasible due to its high costs. The authors of a book on DAC conclude: “Deployment of direct air capture on any significant scale . . . requires significant infrastructure, energy and land.” Total investments in large-scale removal would range between $100 billion per year and $500 billion per year. The authors go on to say, “Achieving this rate and scale of CO2 removal will require substantial investments in fundamental research, demonstration, and deployment.”

In addition, recent studies conducted at Stanford University have found that DAC technology does not meet expectations. A plant operating on natural gas that was built to capture CO2 directly from the air was found to capture “the equivalent of only 10-11 percent of the emissions produced, averaged over 20 years.” To calculate its total carbon output, a plant’s upstream fugitive emissions must also be taken into consideration. These include the leaks that come from transporting and storing natural gas.

Once those calculations are included, it becomes clear that the enormous sums needed to develop DAC begin to seem like an unwise investment.

The CCS technology that’s most often discussed would operate on a smaller scale as an adjunct to individual facilities with major CO2 emissions, such as industrial manufacturing and natural gas processing plants. This equipment is designed to capture these emissions on site from flue stacks and then either use them to enhance further gas production or transport them for storage underground. Attaching CCS technology to an existing facility makes the running of that facility both more energy intensive and more expensive.

The world has been experimenting with CCS technology for several decades. During that time, 68 projects have been terminated because they were found to be prohibitively expensive. At this time, only 28 CCS plants are in operation across the world, capturing only 0.1% annually of total global fossil fuel emissions. The technology is not only proving to be inefficient at carbon reduction, but it is also technically difficult, less economical than renewables, and possibly risky over the long term.

A case in point is the Kemper Project in Mississippi. Designed originally as a model for proving the possibility of “clean coal,” the power plant was to make use of carbon capture technologies to eliminate most of the emissions of a traditional coal plant. The project was hailed by many as paving the way for coal-based power generation of the future.

If successful, this technology would – it was hoped – be used world-wide. Construction of the plant began in 2010; by 2017, the plant was still not in service and the costs had risen to $7.6 billion. In June of 2017, facing cost overruns, missed targets, legal entanglements and failed technology, the company announced that the project would abandon its plans to run on “clean coal” and burn only natural gas.

Any plant with adjunct CCS technology requires extra energy to capture its carbon emissions; at a gas-fired power plant, for example, these requirements can increase anywhere between 11% and 22%. This means the plant will require more fuel to operate and will ultimately create more environmental problems resulting, for example, from increased methane emissions.

The Stanford studies mentioned above found that – because carbon capture facilities are designed to run on natural gas — these too, like DAC, end up capturing just a small fragment of the carbon emissions they were designed to eliminate.

The best solution, these studies conclude, is to use renewables like wind or solar to produce electricity. Renewables eliminate pollution and health problems, and significantly reduce climate impact. “Not only does carbon capture hardly work at existing plants, but there’s no way it can actually improve to be better than replacing goal or gas with wind or solar directly,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, Senior Fellow at Stanford and author of the study.

Problems also arise once the emissions have been captured. While the technology was developed to render greenhouse gases harmless by storing them underground, in fact a majority (81%) of captured carbon is being pumped into existing wells to extract more oil, in a process some call “energy laundering.” If the intent is to reduce our carbon emissions, using captured carbon to produce more fossil fuels is simply not a reasonable solution.

Transporting carbon to storage facilities, such as underground rock formations or saline caverns, will necessitate further build-up of our pipeline infrastructure, a project that, in addition to requiring huge financial investment, can produce its own problems. Pipelines transporting CO2 under high pressure may corrode and leak or rupture, as happened in Mississippi in 2020, presenting asphyxiation hazards to nearby human and animal populations.

In addition, since the technology is so new, few long-term studies have been done to assess the impact that large-scale carbon storage might have on the environment. Problems could include leakage, underground spread, contamination of drinking water, and tectonic activity.

Researchers point out that current low-impact earthquake events associated with fracking’s underground injection operations could be replaced by more destructive earthquakes as we attempt to store enormous amounts of carbon underground for thousands of years. The researchers state that “Even a fault slip of a few centimeters could allow stored CO2 to reach the surface – a serious concern, since … carbon repositories need a leak rate of less than 1 percent every thousand years to be effective.”

Questions raised around Carbon Capture and Storage have now come closer to home. In assessing workable technologies for the gas-fired power plant proposed for Renovo, the Pennsylvania DEP rejected CCS. The DEP report states that several factors potentially make this technology unavailable at the present time: “CCS is not commercially available in the United States and there is no known application of this technology. Other factors also included the availability and technical complexity of reservoirs for sequestering the captured carbon dioxide which is beyond the scope of the proposed project. Therefore, CCS technology is currently technically infeasible.”

Carbon capture and storage is not right for our area. It is not right for the planet.
Just last month, we learned that the largest carbon sequestration facility in the world — the Gorgon gas facility in Australia developed by Chevron — has declared its failure to capture its promised emissions of four million tonnes of CO2 per year. (In the metric system, a tonne is equal to 1000 kg. A ton, on the other hand, translates to 910 kg.) Calling CCS “an expensive failure,” Climate Council Senior Researcher Tim Baxter said, “This result is no surprise. After decades of CCS research and billions of dollars of investment, there is little to show for it.

Over the past decade, the costs of renewable energy like wind and solar have plummeted. Over the same period, CCS has remained extremely expensive. There are still no projects operating anywhere in the world that have delivered CCS on time, on budget, or in the quantities promised.”

The conclusion is unmistakable. Though CCS technologies might be used to offset the most intractable emissions, in the production for example of cement or steel, our main focus must be on aggressive reductions of fossil fuels.

In the face of increasingly dire climate warnings, these reductions are the only way to achieve the pathways recommended by the IPCC. Far from being energy panaceas, Direct Air Capture and Carbon Capture and Storage are efforts to distract from renewables and extend the life of fossil fuels indefinitely.

In the words of Tim Baxter, “CCS is simply an attempt to prolong the life of polluting fossil fuels which are driving climate change. We need to transition away from burning coal, oil and gas and instead power our economy with renewables and storage.”

Beyer, DelBene introduce direct air capture legislation [Augusta Free Press, 13 Sep 2021]

Don Beyer (D-VA) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) have introduced the Negate Emissions to Zero (NET Zero) Act, legislation that would substantially increase tax incentives to boost the developing direct air capture industry.

Beyer and DelBene serve on the House Committee on Ways and Means, which has jurisdiction over tax policy in the House of Representatives, and which is currently writing clean energy tax incentive provisions of the Build Back Better Act.

“The climate crisis becomes more deadly and costly every year, and we are at a pivotal moment when Congress must take bold action to protect the country and the world,” said Beyer. “As a longtime member of the House Science Committee, I have heard again and again from scientists about the importance of complementing the shift to clean energy sources with the development of technology that can remove carbon pollution and other dangerous emissions directly from the air. Today I am working with my colleagues on the Ways and Means Committee to hasten that development using tax incentives, which have already proven crucial to efforts to scale up clean technologies and create green jobs. So much depends on Congress getting climate policies right, and we hope and believe direct air capture can someday make a big difference.”

“Climate change is an existential threat to our nation and our planet. Studies consistently show that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a critical step but alone cannot solve the climate crisis,” said DelBene. “We also need to expand our ability to directly remove carbon from the atmosphere. The United States has a unique opportunity to be a global leader on this technology. This legislation is key to expanding our capacity domestically and creating thousands of high-skilled American jobs.”

Direct Air Capture is a technology that that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which can then be stored deep underground or used in the production of fuels, building materials, or other products that contain carbon dioxide. The National Academies of Science estimate that even assuming very ambitious emissions-reduction efforts, globally, 10 billion tons of excess carbon dioxide will need be removed per year by 2050, and 20 billion tons annually by 2100. In the United States, about 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide must be captured and stored underground per year by 2050 to help prevent global temperatures from rising to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to a report by the Rhodium Group.

The NET Zero Act would allow a DAC to saline storage credit at $180/ton and a DAC to EOR credit at $130/ton. The legislation extends the 45Q tax credit for DAC to saline permanently while the DAC to EOR credit sunsets after 10 years. As additional DAC plants come online, the tax credits for DAC to EOR facilities can be allowed to expire and costs will decline for DAC to saline storage sites.

Can carbon capture technology save the planet? [The Week Magazine, 13 Sep 2021]

by TIM O'DONNELL

Humans have been spewing planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for years. Can emerging innovations reverse the damage done?

Scientists are calling for drastic reductions in carbon in the atmosphere if we are to avoid the worst climate outcomes in the coming decades. Could carbon-capture technology help? Here's everything you need to know.

What role does carbon dioxide play in climate change?
Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas. It's released naturally in some cases through processes like volcanic eruption, but over the last 170-plus years it has rapidly increased in abundance thanks in large part to human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. NASA notes that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are 48 percent higher than the pre-industrial levels of 1850, a faster rise than the previous 20,000 year period. That in turn has led to a dangerous increase in global temperature. A dire United Nations climate report recently warned that a drastic reduction in carbon in the atmosphere would be necessary to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees celsius by 2100 and setting off a cascade of climate catastrophes. Many experts argue that simply reducing emissions won't get us there, especially because certain industries, like air travel, will take years to fully decarbonize. Enter carbon capture, the act of removing carbon dioxide directly from the air.

How do you do that?
There are multiple processes for capturing carbon. Trees absorb carbon, and forests serve as natural carbon sinks, so reforestation efforts are part of the decarbonization plan. But mass tree-planting isn't a cure-all. Once carbon is stored in biomass like trees and vegetation, it's unclear how long it will remain there before it escapes once more, especially because forests in the American West and Siberia have become increasingly vulnerable to forest fires, another fallout from climate change. That means carbon capture technology will likely have a role to play.

Such as?
There are two main tech-based carbon capture methods. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) involves trapping the gas at its emission source — say, a smokestack or a natural gas plant — before it can be released into the atmosphere. The other method is direct air capture (DAC), which aims to suck carbon dioxide from the air, even if it was released a long time ago. Both methods have the same goal: to isolate carbon, usually underground, where it can either be stored permanently or recycled and used in other processes, such as concrete production. The advantage of DAC is that it can be deployed anywhere, and requires less water and land usage than either CCS or natural strategies. It can also be powered by renewable energies.

How common is direct air capture?
The technology is definitely still in its nascent stage, but is quickly gaining traction. There are already a few systems up and running in mainland Europe, and on Sept. 8, a major new facility known as Orca and built by the Swiss company Climeworks, which specializes in DAC technology, went online in Iceland. It's set to become the largest of its kind. Orca, mainly powered by waste heat (leftover heat from any process that uses energy), employs eight carbon "collectors" that reel in air via fans and then isolate the carbon using a highly selective filter material. The carbon then gets heated, cooled, and pumped underground. Climeworks says that the system will soon remove up to 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, and there reportedly isn't much reason to doubt its ability to meet this target. Soon, though, other projects — one in the southwestern United States and another in Scotland (which aims to remove about 1 million tons of carbon, on net, every year) — may eclipse Orca in scale.

Will removing that amount of carbon be enough to save the climate?
Definitely not. Last month's U.N. report estimated that to facilitate the most optimistic scenario of limiting the rise in global average temperatures to 1.5 degrees celsius, a whopping 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide would need to be removed annually. No one is expecting Orca or the other projects in development to carry that load on their own, so the hope among proponents of the technology is that the new projects will prove direct air capture can stand on its own as a viable commercial industry, paving the way for further facilities.

What are the chances of that happening?
Ask experts, and you'll probably get a wide range of answers. Some believe DAC will remain a niche technology, but others think demand will grow. In the end, a lot will depend on cost. A few years ago, Climeworks executives told journalist Jon Gertner that the cost of capturing one ton of carbon was roughly between $500-600. A recent analysis of the industry found that it's possible the cost range for DAC could eventually get as low as $100 per ton. That may be a long way off — many, many more plants will need to be built and engineers will likely have to continue to work to bring down production expenses by finding cheaper materials and improving assembly processes. But optimists point to other climate technologies, namely solar power, that were initially quite expensive, but eventually entered the mainstream and became not just affordable but downright cheap. If Orca can lower the price of DAC, Gertner writes, it could serve as a promising indication that scaling up is indeed feasible and convince major industries like airlines to invest in the technology to offset their emissions.

What about government investments?
Governments are also prepared to invest, including the U.S. at the federal and state level. If the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure bill passes the House this month, as expected, and heads to President Biden's desk, it will allocate as much as $3.5 billion to help construct large DAC plants.

Has carbon capture been successful so far?
It's probably too early to tell for DAC, but CCS has experienced some significant failures. One notable example is a Chevron project that sought to bury carbon under an island off Western Australia. The goal was to capture and store 80 percent of emissions from a natural gas site over the first five years, but it failed to do so.

Are environmentalists jazzed about the technology?
Not necessarily. Many think it will give the oil and gas industry an easy out without encouraging the much-needed shift away from fossil fuels. Back in July, more than 500 environmental organizations in the U.S. and Canada signed an open letter expressing concerns about government support for carbon capture technology. Their fear is that if oil and gas companies can implement their own carbon capture systems to offset emissions, they'll use that as an excuse to keep extracting fossil fuels, ultimately perpetuating the existing problem. Critics have argued that even some of the more well-intentioned efforts to build up carbon infrastructure really only serve to divert attention away from the fight against fossil fuels, which they feel should be the priority.

Is that the consensus?
Although there is a decent amount of opposition to the idea, many other environmentalists remain neutral or in favor of carbon capture technology, so long as it works in tandem with other efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. The concerns about the fossil fuel industry are real — Shuchi Talati, the chief of staff at the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy, has clarified that "avoiding emissions first is always the priority" — but there is a growing realization that carbon capture is necessary to meeting climate goals to keep temperatures down. The reverse is also true. Companies like Climeworks say they realize that their technology is not a silver bullet, and that other mitigation efforts are needed.

World's largest direct air capture and CO2 storage plant on in Iceland [ThinkGeoEnergy, 13 Sep 2021]

By Alexander Richter

Swiss Climeworks and Icelandic Carbfix launched the largest direct air capture and storage of CO2 plant at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant of ON Power in Iceland.

Last week, Swiss company Climeworks launched Orca, the world’s largest direct air capture and storage plant that permanently removes CO2 from the air. The plant is located in proximity to the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant by ON Power near Reykjavik, Iceland.

The construction of Orca started in May 2020 and is based on advanced modular technology in the form of innovative stackable container-size collector units. These units are powerful and compact with minimal physical footprint. This has made it possible for Orca to be operational in under 15 months. Compared to the previous technology generation, the use of steel in the collector units has roughly been reduced by half per output unit. Orca also supports the expansion of Climeworks, as the technology can easily be replicated at different locations worldwide and on ever larger scales, in a flexible manner wherever ample renewable energy and storage conditions are available. Strategically located adjacent to ON Power’s Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant, Orca runs fully on renewable energy.

Orca is the first-of-its-kind plant that translates the vision of industrial-scale direct air capture and storage into reality. This improved technology generation comes in an award-winning new design, which embodies the interconnection between nature and technology. For the technology generation which Orca represents, Climeworks has been able to intensify the process leading to increased CO2 capture capacity per module. This optimized process means that more carbon dioxide can be captured and stored than ever before.

Expansion is around the corner
This innovation in plant design is a key enabler to rapidly scale up this much-needed climate technology in the years to come. Since Orca is now a reality and in operation, Climeworks is on track to ramp up its capture capacity significantly – as will be required in light of the strong market demand as shown through long-term partnerships with, among others, Microsoft, Swiss Re, Shopify and commitments from over 8’000 private individuals. Climeworks inspires and supports more pioneering companies and individuals to act now and remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Partnership with Carbfix and ON Power
Strong partnerships with pioneering Icelandic companies support the excellent conditions for the scale up. ON Power, the Icelandic geothermal energy provider, supplies clean renewable energy to power the Orca plant. Our partners Carbfix, experts in rapid underground mineralization mix the air-captured CO? with water and pump it deep underground, where it is trapped in stone through a natural mineralization process that takes under two years.

It only took Carbfix and Climeworks four years to advance their direct air capture and storage concept from pilot scale to commercial scale. The Orca plant has the capacity of capturing 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is injected by Carbfix into nearby basaltic rock-formations to be permanently turned into stone.

Former President of Iceland, Mr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, opened the formal inauguration of the plant, followed by Ms. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Prime Minister og Iceland, and Dagur B. Eggertsson, Mayor of Reykjavik. Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald, the founders of Climeworks, elaborated on the incredible journey leading to realization of the station.

Our climate goals will not be met without large scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

This first-of-a-kind system marks an important milestone in the fight against the climate crisis and the Carbfix team is contribute to much needed climate action by turning CO2 into stone!

Daily briefing: Ground-breaking carbon capture plant starts up [Nature.com, 9 Sep 2021]

By Flora Graham

The largest direct-air carbon capture facility in the world is trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon — but it’s a start. Plus, a thorium-fuelled nuclear reactor to begin tests in China and why most fossil-fuel reserves must be left in the ground.

Fossil fuels must be left in the ground
Almost all economically viable global coal reserves must remain untapped if we are to have a chance of hitting internationally agreed climate-change goals. An updated model suggests that for us to have a 50% chance of remaining below 1.5 °C degrees of global warming — the more aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris agreement — the world must not emit more than 580 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide before 2100. Under this scenario, 89% of coal reserves, 58% of oil reserves and 59% of gas reserves must remain unextracted. The model also assumes substantial use of carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and storage, because if they aren’t included — or are included at a smaller scale — “that target is unfeasible”, says environmental and energy economist Dan Welsby.

How the largest direct air capture plant will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere [The Verge, 9 Sep 2021]

By Justine Calma

It’s an important test run for the new technology

The biggest industrial plant yet to suck tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide out of the air came online yesterday in southwest Iceland. Direct air capture plants like this one have been hyped up lately by world leaders and giant corporations — notably Microsoft — that are looking to erase their legacy of greenhouse gas pollution.

This particular operation is ideally located to test the emerging technology. The new plant, built by Swiss company Climeworks, is powered by renewable energy from a geothermal power plant nearby. Climeworks also plans to lock the captured CO2 away in basalt rock formations just three kilometers from the geothermal plant. It’s a storage plan that likely bypasses the need for controversial new carbon dioxide pipelines.
“It’s going to be, I think, an interesting test case,” says David Morrow, director of research at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University. “But it’s also sort of a baby step in the big scheme of things.”

Climeworks’ new direct air capture plant, called Orca for the Icelandic word for energy, will be able to draw down 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. That’s about how much 790 passenger vehicles might pump out in a year — not a huge amount, even though it’s the largest operation of its kind in the world.

The new plant is surprisingly compact. Imagine a shipping container that’s open on one side to reveal twelve giant fans. The plant is basically just eight of those containers, stacked two by two.

Climeworks uses a method called solid direct air capture to trap CO2. Here’s how it works: The fans suck in air. The air passes over a special solid sorbent filter that traps the carbon dioxide. Climeworks wouldn’t get into too much detail about how its filters work in an interview with The Verge, other than saying that it uses a base to attract CO2, which is mildly acidic. When the filter is fully saturated, it’s time for step two in the process. The unit heats up the filter to about 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), which releases the trapped carbon dioxide.

Once the CO2 has been separated out of the air, it heads through pipes to an adjacent building where it can be prepped to be permanently stored. Here, it’s mixed with a lot of water — about 27 tons of water for every ton of carbon dioxide. That slurry then travels just a few hundred meters (about a quarter of a mile) away before it is injected deep into the ground. The carbonated water reacts with basaltic rock, creating carbonate minerals. Over the course of two years, what was once a kind of sparkling water becomes solid rock.

Climeworks has partnered with the company Carbfix to keep the captured CO2 safely locked away in Iceland’s basalt rock formations. The two companies have already tried this out in a pilot project, but Orca is the pair’s first commercial-scale operation.

Climeworks’ two other commercial-scale direct air capture plants turn the carbon dioxide into a product used as fertilizer or in fizzy drinks. That CO2 escapes back into the atmosphere relatively quickly. But trapped in rock, Carbfix thinks the CO2 captured by Orca can be safely sequestered for thousands of years. While basaltic rock is relatively common around the world, volcanically active Iceland is particularly suited for storing carbon dioxide because it has relatively younger basalt. Fresh basalt is a better home for the captured CO2 because it’s more porous — giving the carbon more nooks and crannies to fill.

By siting Orca in the same remote location where the CO2 will be stored, the operation avoids one of the potential pitfalls with carbon removal: creating a new network of pipelines to transport captured carbon dioxide. There are already some pipelines that move CO2 so that it can be shot into the ground to force out oil reserves, a process called enhanced oil recovery. One such pipeline ruptured last year in Mississippi, hospitalizing residents of a small, majority-Black community.

The other advantage of the plant’s location is its proximity to a geothermal energy plant, which provides the plant with a constant supply of waste heat and renewable energy. That, paired with Climeworks’ solid direct air capture process, gives Orca an edge over other competitors. Even larger direct air capture plants are scheduled to come online in Texas and Scotland in coming years, but those use a different filtration process that requires vastly more heat and energy. As a result, they’ll likely rely on a combination of renewable energy and natural gas.
“If you’re in the business of removing CO2 from the air, you want to emit as little fossil fuel CO2 as possible. Otherwise, the process is not net negative or net removing,” says Christoph Beuttler, Climeworks’ head of climate policy.

COST IS ANOTHER HURDLE Cost is another hurdle still keeping the direct air capture industry from growing large enough to make a huge dent in global greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft, which pledged last year to capture all of its historical emissions by 2050, is both an investor and a customer of Climeworks. Microsoft and other companies can purchase captured CO2 from Climeworks for around $600 a ton, offsetting a ton of their own pollution in the process. In its 2020 fiscal year alone, Microsoft was responsible for the equivalent of 11,164,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Multiply that by $600, and Microsoft would face a bill of nearly $6.7 billion for just one year’s worth of pollution.

Unless the price can come down significantly, it might not make much financial sense to tackle climate change this way. And some environmentalists worry that focusing on building up this technology could take resources away from other climate solutions, while taking the pressure off companies to quit burning fossil fuels.

“One thing people worry about is that all these companies making that net-zero pledges will just use direct air capture instead of cutting emissions,” Morrow says. “But it strikes me as very unlikely that direct air capture would get cheap enough anytime soon for that to make sense.”

So while direct air capture might play a small role in helping the world trap some planet-heating emissions, it’s no replacement for deep cuts to fossil fuel pollution in the first place. “It is at most a supplement that can help us reduce climate change,” Morrow says. “But it can’t take the place of cutting emissions.”

$3.6 million DOE grant to support direct air carbon capture research | WSU Insider | Washington State University [WSU News, 8 Sep 2021]

By Tina Hilding

A team led by Washington State University has received a $3.6 million Department of Energy grant to tackle what can arguably be called one of humanity’s biggest challenges: how to capture carbon dioxide out of the air to mitigate climate change.

The team is conducting fundamental research in using ionic liquids, or liquid salts, to grab the carbon dioxide out of the air and catalytic processes to convert it into valuable chemicals. Led by Hongfei Lin, professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, the highly competitive, three year grant includes researchers from four national laboratories and the University of California, Riverside.

With the increasing threat of climate change and to prevent its most dangerous impacts, researchers say that, in addition to reducing manmade carbon emissions, people are going to have to figure out how to remove carbon dioxide directly from the air.

More than half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from non-point source pollution from the gas and oil burned to power homes and cars. But pulling the carbon dioxide out of the air is monumentally difficult because in spite of the gas’ big climate effect, there is actually only a miniscule amount in the air – about 417 parts per million of the air particles, according to NASA.

“A lot of people think it’s not practical, but we have an incredible team,” Lin said. “It’s not going to be solved quickly, but these are world-class scientists who are working to understand the fundamental science. I have very high expectations for this project and for this collaboration.”

Lin and the team have proposed to use ionic liquids for direct air capture of carbon dioxide and then use catalytic processes to convert the carbon dioxide with ethane into useful compounds. Ionic liquids are considered good candidates for carbon capture because they are good at attracting and then releasing pure carbon dioxide. By using ethane instead of hydrogen as the reductant, they hope to reduce the costs of converting the carbon dioxide, minimize energy consumption, and better use existing infrastructure. Ethane is an abundant and inexpensive co-product in natural gas processing facilities.

The researchers have proposed developing a catalytic process to convert the carbon dioxide and ethane to polyketones, a material that has many applications, including for car components, engine and fuel component materials, electrical and electronic components, and packaging materials.

An important key to tackling the challenge of carbon dioxide emissions is to think about the carbon dioxide as a raw material instead of a waste product, Lin said. The idea is to convert the carbon dioxide to valuable chemicals that can be sold at a profit, which could then be used to subsidize the cost of carbon storage.

“Our vision is that carbon dioxide in the air can be mitigated and even monetized,” he said. “As chemical engineers, we use our professional skills in the area of catalysis. Through the integration of novel processes, we can transform raw materials to useful end products. We aim to solve these societal challenges using our capabilities.”

The work is funded by DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences and includes researchers from Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Sandia National Laboratories, and University of California, Riverside.

World's largest direct air capture plant starts absorbing CO2 in Iceland [New Atlas, 8 Sep 2021]

By Nick Lavars

An ambitious startup looking to eat into the world's carbon emissions has just taken its biggest bite yet, flicking the switch on the largest direct air capture and CO2 storage plant on the planet. Climework's latest facility is designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it away permanently underground through a pioneering mineralization process, and features a novel modular design that will be key to the company's plans of scaling up.

Shifting away from fossil fuel use and generating less carbon dioxide in the first place is the key to preventing global temperatures from rising 1.5 ºC (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial levels.
However, there are a growing number of technologies emerging that may help us remove what is already there, and could have a part to play in helping us avoid dangerous levels of global warming.

Among those is direct air capture (DAC), which sits apart from carbon sequestration technologies that pull CO2 directly from power plants and instead seeks to collect it from the ambient air. Climeworks has been working at the forefront of this field since the startup was founded in 2009, its system using huge fans to draw ambient air through a filter that selectively captures the CO2 for use in carbonated beverages, or in greenhouses to help grow vegetables.

Traditionally, storing CO2 in underground reservoirs has carried the risk of leaks, but in 2016 a separate group of scientists working on the CarbFix project made a game-changing breakthrough. The researchers had been investigating how reactions between the gas and rocky underground materials can turn CO2 into solid minerals, a natural process that takes hundreds or even thousands of years.

This led to the discovery of a technique that significantly fast-tracks this process, shortening the time it takes to mineralize CO2 to less than two years. This drew the attention of Climeworks, which teamed up with CarbFix on a pilot project at ON Power's Hellisheidi geothermal power plant in Iceland in 2017. Here, the startup's DAC system was used to capture and safely stow away around 12.5 tons of CO2 over three months, turning it into the world's first negative-emissions power plant.

The Hellisheidi geothermal power plant is again home to the company's latest DAC facility, which is called Orca. Work began here in May 2020 relying on a modular construction method where the technology is packed inside stackable units. These units use half the steel of previous designs and also capture CO2 more efficiently, and sitting adjacent to the power plant, are powered entirely by renewable energy.

Orca began operations today and, according to Climeworks, will harvest 4,000 tons of CO2 from the air each year. As it stands this is a drop in the ocean compared to the more than 30 gigatons, or 30 billion tons, of CO2 humans pump into the air every year, but is a marked improvement on what the company was capable of capturing just a few years ago. As it expands, the company plans to scale up its removal capacity to capture millions of tons of CO2 by the second part of this decade.

”Orca, as a milestone in the direct air capture industry, has provided a scalable, flexible and replicable blueprint for Climeworks’ future expansion," says Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher. "With this success, we are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next years. Achieving global net-zero emissions is still a long way to go, but with Orca, we believe that Climeworks has taken one significant step closer to achieving that goal."

New Coronavirus News from 15 Apr 2021b

An Online Tool Could Help Researchers Predict the Next Animal-Borne Pandemic [Verywell Health, 15 Apr 2021]

By Valerie DeBenedette

You've probably heard about outbreaks of Ebola, Lassa fever, and Zika virus around the world in recent years. Before producing epidemics or pandemics, the pathogens that caused the diseases had to "spillover" from wildlife to humans.

When a virus or another infectious agent makes the jump from animals to humans, it's called a zoonotic disease or zoonosis. A zoonotic disease you've probably heard about recently is SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Although they can be bacterial, fungal, or parasitic, viral zoonotic diseases are the most serious threat.

Assessing New Viruses
COVID-19 has put infectious disease experts around the world on an even higher alert for the potential next pandemic. To aid in making predictions, researchers have created an online tool that can help others evaluate the risk of a new virus jumping (or "spilling over") from animals into humans.

The tool is called SpillOver: Viral Risk Ranking and it was sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the PREDICT project, the Global Virome Project, and the One Health Institute at UC Davis.

We need to know: how and why does a wildlife virus become zoonotic? Which viruses pose the greatest threat?
— JONNA MAZET, DVM, PHD

The online application is meant to help researchers and governments assess the risk of new viruses as they are discovered and communicate that risk to ensure that disease prioritization, prevention, and control actions are taken.

How the Tool Works
The tool evaluates a newly-discovered virus and based on the findings, creates a list of other viruses that policymakers and public health officials might want to keep an eye on.

SpillOver is designed for viruses that originate in mammals, reptiles, amphibia, and birds, as well as those in the many families of viruses that are of concern to human health. The application's design was based on a credit reporting system that is used by bankers, and it can be updated to include new data and risk factors.

An Overview of Ebola
In an article describing the tool, the authors—who are from UC Davis, the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the EcoHealth Alliance, and Metabiota, Inc.—stated that “we now live in an era in which threats posed by viral pandemics are a daily reality. A single lethal virus can emerge suddenly and spread rapidly to every household and every community without regard to national borders or to social and economic standing."1

Jonna Mazet, DVM, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and disease ecology at the University of California at Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and an author of the study introducing SpillOver, tells Verywell that because the tool is open-source, it means that researchers from around the world—including epidemiologists, wildlife veterinarians, and experts from other disciplines—will be able to crowdsource the science and contribute by adding information about new viruses as they are found.

SpillOver is open-source, which means that it will be able to grow and become more robust as new information about emerging viruses is added.

Identifying Risk Factors
To create the SpillOver application, the authors identified risk factors of the viruses, hosts, and the environment that would be most relevant to animal viruses spilling over into humans.
Scientists have only cataloged about 0.2% of global virus diversity in mammals and birds.
— SARAH OLSON, PHD

The risk factors included in the assessment tool were the number of animal hosts, where they are found geographically, and the types of environments in which they live.

The researchers then ranked the risk of 887 wildlife viruses using available data that was collected by the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT project.

The top 12 viruses on the list were already known to be human pathogens—a finding that was expected and showed that the assessment tool works.

The Lassa virus took first place, with SARS-CoV-2 coming in second. Even though it caused a pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 did not make first place because not much was known about its animal hosts.

The larger list of viruses included several newly-discovered coronaviruses that are considered high risk for moving from wildlife to humans.

What Is Lassa Fever?
Why Do Viruses Make the Jump?
Mazet says that viruses are jumping between wildlife and humans at a faster rate because humans are moving into wilderness areas at a faster rate. Usually, when humans move into wilderness areas and other isolated locations, it's because they are looking for raw materials like the rare metals needed for technology such as cell phones or to open up more land for agriculture.

“It’s not the wildlife, or even the viruses, that are jumping out and attacking or infecting us—it's our behavior that puts us at risk. And that's sometimes a bitter pill to take to recognize that,” Mazet says. “But on the other hand, that means it is within our capacity to adjust our behavior so that we reduce our risk.”

As people move into areas that were once isolated, they often bring domesticated animals with them. Viruses are then able to jump to livestock and eventually move to humans. “That provides for another opportunity for a pathogen to change and become a bit more virulent before it spills over into people,” Mazet says.

An Overview of Zika Virus
Although the SpillOver tool is for assessing viral zoonoses, there is also a risk of disease and epidemics from bacteria that can spread from animals to humans. In bacteria, Mazet says that the risk is not so much from a bacterium jumping from animal to human as it is from the genes for antimicrobial resistance spreading.

Watching For the Next Virus
“This tool is very much about understanding a yet-unknown virus—aka virus X—that can crop up at any time," says Sarah Olson, PhD, an author of the study and the associate director of epidemiology at the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx, tells Verywell. "The tool is useful to rank viruses ‘known to science’ but its other value is pointing out a list of information that is needed to improve our assessment of risk.”

It’s not the wildlife, or even the viruses, that are jumping out and attacking or infecting us—it's our behavior that puts us at risk. And that's sometimes a bitter pill to take.
— JONNA MAZET, DVM, PHD

According to Olsen, there are an estimated 1.67 million undescribed viruses in mammals and birds. About half of those are thought to be capable of spilling over into humans. “To put it another way, scientists have only cataloged about 0.2% of global virus diversity in mammals and birds," Olson says.

Mazet says that “we need to know: how and why does a wildlife virus become zoonotic? Which viruses pose the greatest threat?”

Are There Other Viruses Like Ebola?
The Threat of Coronaviruses

According to Mazet, the journal article on the SpillOver tool was mostly written before SARS-CoV-2 was fully recognized. Olson points out that the virus was not detected in wildlife before the pandemic and was already spreading globally before the threat was fully recognized.

The study authors noted that many coronaviruses may spill over into humans but go unrecognized. A lack of diagnostic capabilities and poor reporting contribute to them being overlooked. Additionally, the viruses usually only cause mild symptoms—or no symptoms at all—making them even harder to spot.

What Will It Take to Pandemic-Proof America? [The New Yorker, 15 Apr 2021]

By Dhruv Khullar

When the next virus strikes, we’ll look back on this moment as an opportunity that we either seized or squandered.

On September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman woke up with a cold. Her parents gave her some extra-strength Tylenol and, within a few hours, she had died. That same day, in a town near the family’s Chicago suburb, a twenty-seven-year-old postal worker named Adam Janus felt ill; he, too, took Tylenol and died hours later. Janus’s brother and sister-in-law gathered at his home to grieve, developed headaches, and took Tylenol from the same bottle; both died shortly thereafter. Three more mysterious deaths soon followed. State and federal investigators descended on the Chicago area. They quickly determined that the Tylenol had been laced with cyanide: someone had taken bottles off the shelf, injected the capsules with poison, and put them back into stores.

Within a week, more than ninety per cent of Americans had heard that cyanide-laced Tylenol was killing people in Chicago. Sales of the medication plummeted by four-fifths. Johnson & Johnson recalled every bottle in the country, at a cost of more than a hundred million dollars, then began working with the Food and Drug Administration to develop tamper-proof packaging. Tylenol had come in capsules, which were easy to swallow but could be opened and adulterated; the company replaced them with “caplet” pills that were much harder to contaminate, and started packaging them in foil-sealed childproof containers. Not long afterward, Congress made it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products, and the F.D.A. started requiring tamper-resistant packaging for all drugs. In the years since, there have been scattered attempts at similar crimes, but none as deadly as the Tylenol murders. Today, Americans hardly ever worry that their medications or groceries might contain poison.

Some problems we confront and eliminate. Others become part of the fabric of our society. Gun violence is an obvious example: more than a hundred Americans die of gun-related injuries each day, but we still don’t embrace the policies that could help. SARS-CoV-2 has killed one in every six hundred Americans, and future pandemics are basically unavoidable—and so, as the end of this pandemic approaches, the question is whether we’ll embrace the policies that could protect us next time. Will our path resemble the one that resulted in the near-total elimination of tainted drugs, or the one that’s led to our weary acceptance of mass shootings?

Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic.

When it arrives, the next pandemic could very well be worse than the one we’re experiencing now. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is less deadly than SARS-CoV-1, which, when it broke out, in 2002, killed eleven per cent of those it infected. SARS-CoV-2 is less transmissible than measles, which is at least ten times more communicable; it has proved easier to vaccinate against than H.I.V., for which a shot has yet to be developed. From the midst of the next pandemic, we’ll almost certainly look back on the Biden Presidency as a time when we either seized or squandered the chance to prepare for the inevitable. The moment to pandemic-proof America is now.

Some countries came into our current pandemic prepared by experience. South Korea, for example, had confronted MERS—Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, caused by another coronavirus, MERS-CoV—in the spring of 2015. That outbreak began when a businessman returned to Seoul after spending ten days in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Within a week, he developed fevers and muscle pains. He soon visited a nearby clinic, a local hospital, and a large academic medical center, where MERS was finally identified; he recovered, but during his journey through the medical system he infected more than two dozen people, including another man who travelled between hospitals, spreading the disease to at least eighty others.

As MERS spread in South Korea, testing was often slow or unavailable, and the government didn’t share what it knew about where outbreaks were occurring. The virus shuttled undetected through the medical system—nearly half of all infections would eventually be linked to hospitals—and people started avoiding medical care altogether. In the two months it took to get the virus under control, South Korea quarantined more than sixteen thousand people and recorded a hundred and eighty-six infections and thirty-eight deaths. (The coronavirus that causes MERS is twenty times as deadly as SARS-CoV-2.) The economy faltered, and seven in ten Koreans said they disapproved of the government’s response.

In the years afterward, South Korea introduced major changes to prepare itself for the next virus. It passed a law that empowered labs to use unapproved diagnostic tests in case of emergencies. It dramatically expanded the power of health officials, allowing them to close hospitals when needed and to access surveillance footage and other information for confirmed and suspected carriers. In future outbreaks, local governments would be required to alert residents to the number and location of nearby infections; the isolation of potentially infectious individuals would be mandatory, with fines for those who failed to comply. (In the U.S., during this pandemic, measures like these have been optional.) The directorship of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency was elevated to a top position within the government. A new public-health emergency-response team was established, and a special department was created to focus on risk communication. The government hired more epidemiologists, bolstered border-screening measures, and required hospitals to increase the number of negative-pressure isolation rooms. All this contributed to the fact that, beginning last year, South Korea mounted among the most effective pandemic responses in the world, recording around seventeen hundred COVID-19 deaths across a population of fifty-two million people.
In the United States, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed a specific set of systemic weaknesses that need to be addressed for next time. The country’s stockpile of emergency equipment proved inadequate, as did its test-and-trace infrastructure. Federal public-health agencies and programs and local health departments were underfunded and unprepared.
Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota and a member of President Biden’s COVID-19 transition advisory board, told me that there was a sense in which these failures were unsurprising: before the coronavirus, Americans were collectively incapable of imagining just how deadly and disruptive a wildly contagious pathogen could be. “We’ve long had this complacency, because we thought of infectious diseases as something that affected low-income countries,” he said. “We’ve had this attitude of, ‘As long as it’s over there, it’s not our problem.’ Well, now we’ve had a taste of what it means to live with a deadly virus. What are we going to do about it?”

The changes we need to make can be grouped into three broad categories. The first is disease surveillance. “We have no idea what’s out there,” Farzad Mostashari, a former assistant commissioner of New York City’s public-health department and the Obama Administration’s national coördinator of health information technology, told me. Health agencies must be able to identify and track outbreaks before they get out of control; to do so, they must collect viral samples and send them to local laboratories on a continuous basis. This requires funding, but, Mostashari said, it also demands an investment in the nation’s “public-health informatics” infrastructure. Mostashari cited his experience at New York City’s health department, from 2005 to 2009: he regularly handled fifty-nine separate data feeds—Word files, Excel files, CSV files, TXT files—from the city’s fifty-nine emergency departments, spending hours each week trying to make sense of it all. There have been improvements since then, but the basic problem persists. “What we need is a single national platform—a common set of tools—that brings in data from every state in an organized way,” he said. “There would still be local control and governance of the data, but it would be standardized and interoperable across the country.”

Funding for such a system must be not just substantial but long-term. After 9/11, hundreds of millions of dollars were sent to state and local health departments—but, Mostashari said, the money later dried up. “We need to think of public health like defense,” he said. “The systems we maintain during peacetime are the ones that allow us to succeed at war.” Mostashari told me that he thinks a set percentage of U.S. health-care spending should be earmarked for public-health efforts. Sylvia Burwell, who ran the Department of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama, concurred: she argued that the federal government should create a single strategy spanning every agency involved with public health. “This is about more than health,” she said. “It’s about our national security and our economic prosperity. We need to start acting like it.”

Early in the pandemic, widespread shortages of P.P.E., ventilators, and medications revealed deep vulnerabilities in America’s medical-supply chains. Seventy per cent of the drugs used in the U.S. are manufactured overseas; supplies were limited for twenty-nine of the forty drugs vital to the treatment of COVID-19. The Department of Defense is required by law to purchase some military equipment from U.S. companies. Similarly, federal health agencies could be required to funnel purchase orders for respirators, ventilators, and some drugs to domestic suppliers.

Another group of necessary improvements centers on vaccine development. There’s no way to say for sure which virus will cause the next pandemic; still, we know that some viruses are more dangerous than others. Viruses that use RNA for their genetic code tend to mutate faster than those that use DNA, because RNA-based viruses have less sophisticated “proofreading” machinery. Those that circulate in animals are more likely to mutate in dangerous ways while evading human detection. (Some three-quarters of new infectious diseases are thought to originate in animals.) Viruses that travel by means of respiratory droplets—as opposed to water, feces, mosquitoes, or sex—have the most explosive potential. Researchers could develop treatments and protocols in advance for viruses that combine these and other characteristics: the likely suspects include influenzas, coronaviruses, filoviruses (such as Ebola and Marburg), and paramyxoviruses (a viral family that includes measles and mumps, but also deadly pathogens for which there are no vaccines, such as Nipah virus and Hendra virus).

“We now have this incredible mRNA technology which allows us to make vaccines very quickly,” Seth Berkley, the C.E.O. of Gavi, an organization that helps vaccinate children in poor countries, told me. “And for vectored vaccines, we could partially develop them, freeze them for a time, and then complete the development process more rapidly when they’re needed.” That sort of pre-planning will require strong partnerships between universities and industry. “Academic research is critical, but professors rarely make vaccines,” Berkley explained. “The goal should be for academia to let a thousand flowers bloom and then for institutions skilled in product development to cultivate the right ones.”

Encouraging companies to develop vaccines ahead of time will require restructuring the financial incentives behind them. When I spoke with Amitabh Chandra, an economist at Harvard, he outlined three reasons that vaccines are bad investments for drug companies: pandemics are sporadic, and can end before a vaccine is finished; vaccines are targeted at specific pathogens, and so aren’t reusable (“People always get diabetes and have heart attacks—those are much surer bets”); and it’s hard to price vaccines at a level that generates large profits. “You’re probably selling your vaccine in a public-health emergency,” Chandra said. “That means you’re selling to governments and philanthropies, not private insurers that pay high prices.”

Chandra argues that a federal agency should serve as a guaranteed buyer of vaccines, therapies, tests, and emergency medical supplies for possible pandemic-causing viruses. He singles out BARDA—the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority—as a plausible candidate. Created in response to the 9/11 attacks, BARDA, which sits within the Department of Health and Human Services, is responsible for vaccine research, pandemic preparedness, and bioterrorism response; it currently has limited funding and independence. Chandra thinks that BARDA should be expanded into “an entity that promises to purchase products if they are successful—that will pay handsomely for success in specific domains and will give companies a clear sense of how much money they can expect to make.”

It’s important, Chandra argues, for the government to consistently fund the creation of vaccines and other treatments, even if they end up not being used. “When it comes to something like vaccines, you don’t want the best deal,” he said. “You don’t want to pay the minimum price. You want to overpay and attract the attention of many companies simultaneously.” This is especially true because vaccines are so hard to develop—they can look good in the lab but fail afterward. “Imagine if AstraZeneca and Merck were the only ones who had taken up the vaccine challenge,” Chandra said. “We’d be screwed.”

In a globalized age, it’s not enough for the U.S. to focus only on its own problems. A third category of improvement is our engagement with the rest of the world. As my colleague Jerome Groopman explains, in his recent review of Peter Hotez’s new book, “Preventing the Next Pandemic,” American diplomacy can play a meaningful role in fighting outbreaks: many poor countries lack the basic medical and public-health infrastructure to prevent and treat infectious diseases, which then spill across borders and over oceans. War and political instability are accelerants for the emergence and resurgence of deadly pathogens, through disruptions in sanitation, housing, and infrastructure. To the extent that the U.S. can help bring about a more peaceful, more prosperous world, it can help create a healthier one.

But the U.S. must also take some crucial steps in the specific realm of global health policy. The Biden Administration has begun that process by reëngaging with the World Health Organization; despite some stumbles early in the pandemic, the W.H.O. remains the world’s most important global-health body, performing an indispensable convening and communication function. Investing in the W.H.O. and other similar organizations is vital for the worldwide surveillance of emerging diseases, and also for influencing international policy on activities that pose a high infectious risk (including the proliferation of the wet markets that are thought to drive the “spillover” of many diseases).

The U.S. also has a vested interest in more directly insuring that people around the world have access to vaccines. In our current pandemic, countries with rampant viral spread—including the U.S.—have fuelled the emergence of coronavirus variants; the longer people go unvaccinated, the longer we live with the possibility of new and dangerous variants surfacing. In a future pandemic, with a more transmissible or lethal pathogen, the need for fast worldwide vaccination could be even more urgent.

Billions of people live in countries without the money, infrastructure, or geopolitical clout to get vaccines; they may have to wait until 2024 to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Since the start of the pandemic, Berkley, Gavi’s C.E.O., has been trying to fix this predictable problem. Last spring, Gavi, along with the W.H.O. and a Davos-based organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, launched COVAX, an ambitious global effort to promote equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccines. COVAX aims to coördinate the development, manufacturing, purchase, and global distribution of vaccines; the idea is to move the world away from bilateral deals between individual countries and companies, instead pooling global resources to distribute vaccines according to a population’s need and size. “It’s of course right for every political leader to think about his or her own constituents,” Berkley said. “But it’s foolish to think only of them in a global pandemic. You will never vaccinate one hundred per cent of your population. If there are large pockets of virus circulating around the globe, it will eventually get back to you. That has huge implications for trade, commerce, travel, and safety.”

After holding out for much of last year, the U.S. recently committed four billion dollars to COVAX; more than a hundred and ninety countries are now participating in the project, which has secured nearly two billion vaccine doses for distribution in 2021. Ninety-two of those countries—those deemed low- and middle-income—can receive vaccines at steeply discounted rates or free of charge. Most of the two billion doses will be distributed according to population size, but five per cent will be reserved for acute outbreaks. The goal is to vaccinate twenty per cent of the participating countries’ populations this year. “That would shift the character of the pandemic globally,” Berkley said. “It would protect the most vulnerable people and do a lot to reduce fear and health-system burden.” By participating in COVAX, the U.S. isn’t just helping to end this pandemic; it’s laying the groundwork for a better approach to the next one.

In October, Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Yale, published “Apollo’s Arrow,” a book about the consequences of the coronavirus crisis. According to Christakis, what’s strange about how we think about the pandemic is that we think the pandemic is strange. “We think that living under plague is so unusual,” Christakis told me. “We think it’s outrageous that people are dying and economies are being crushed. The truth is that this has been happening for thousands of years. What’s new is our ability to invent and deploy a vaccine in real time.”
Moderna shipped its vaccine to the National Institutes of Health just forty-two days after learning the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2; the first trial participant got a dose twenty-one days later. We’re lucky to live at a time when such speed is possible.

In other ways, though, the virus may have attacked our species at an unfortunate moment. “We have a thinned-out intellectual culture,” Christakis said. “We’ve lost our capacity for nuance.
Everything is black or white, you’re either with me or against me. Masks are a sign of virtue or totalitarianism.” Our pandemic response has been hampered by a sharp rise in political tribalism and a costly collapse of public leadership.

Existential threats like pandemics tend to change human behavior in predictable ways. People grow more risk-averse, abstemious, religious. “The trope ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’ turns out to be true during times of plague,” Christakis said. During this crisis, Americans have become more religious, with a quarter saying that their faith has grown; more than half say that they’ve prayed for an end to the pandemic. But, when such crises end, religiosity declines, and people seek out risky behavior. The Jazz Age arrived after the 1918 flu pandemic; the baby boom followed the Second World War. There’s reason to believe the twenties will roar again.

In this pandemic, we’ve suffered because of weaknesses in our public-health infrastructure.
But we’ve also struggled because of the words and actions of elected officials and everyday people. In some countries, people across society worked together to get new cases to zero; in America, adherence to basic public-health measures became the latest battle in an endless, destructive culture war. We were divided by masks, business closures, contact tracing, hydroxychloroquine, vaccines, herd immunity, and much else. Governors lifted restrictions even as the virus surged; states undermined cities trying to slow viral spread; crowds gathered at indoor campaign events; media outlets questioned the motives of health-care workers and the veracity of the coronavirus death toll; millions of Americans flew around the country during the holidays, infecting people in the process. During the pandemic, Americans were among the most divided people on the planet.

What can be done to insure that we’re more united when the next plague strikes? Good policy might make our health system more pandemic-proof, but technocratic solutions can do only so much to address a lack of social cohesion. Beliefs about science, freedom, individual responsibility, and collective action are profoundly influenced by one’s community and sense of identity. For some Americans, pandemic denialism has become a misguided form of patriotism.
But the story of this pandemic isn’t yet over. For all Americans, the arrival of COVID-19 was a calamity without precedent. It was the first time in generations that the country had faced such a threat. Instantly and persistently, the virus has upended how we think, act, work, and live. Looking back now, it’s hard to fathom how bizarre today’s routines would seem to our pre-pandemic selves. That fact alone suggests that transformational change is possible, and that, once it arrives, it no longer seems so unattainable.

Italy to spend €40b more to help Covid-hit economy [Malay Mail, 15, Apr 2021]

MILAN, April 15 — Italy’s government has agreed to borrow another €40 billion (RM198.1 billion) this year to help mitigate the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, a prime ministerial source said today.

The money “will be used for new measures to support businesses and the economy,” the source said after a cabinet meeting.

The move comes just three months after the last expansion of the budget deficit, by €32 billion, as Italy seeks to recover from its worst recession since the end of World War II.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi has been under pressure to offer more relief to businesses struggling with coronavirus restrictions, after protests from a wide range of groups, from entertainment workers to restaurant owners.

Today, the government also adopted new economic targets, according to the source from Draghi’s office.

It expects gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 4.5 per cent in 2021 and of 4.8 per cent in 2022, after a record fall of 8.9 per cent in last year — the biggest in postwar history.

It also projected a rise in the 2021 public deficit to 11.8 per cent of GDP, from 9.5 per cent in 2020 and 1.6 per cent in 2019 — but falling to 5.9 per cent in 2022 and 4.3 per cent in 2023.

As for public debt, which in 2020 jumped year-on-year by more than 20 percentage points, to 155.6 per cent of GDP, government forecasts see it peaking at 159.8 per cent in 2021 and falling gradually in later years.

Italy has already spent more than 130 billion euros in propping up sectors shut by Covid-19 closures since the pandemic swept across the country in early 2020, causing more than 115,500 deaths.

The latest budget correction adds to the country’s debt mountain, but in the current economic environment of ultra-low interest rates, government borrowing has become noticeably cheaper.

In addition, Italy hopes to fuel its economic recovery with EU grants and loans coming from its lion’s share of the bloc’s €750-billion fund. It is set to receive around €190 billion €, between 2021 and 2026.

The government is currently drafting a plan setting out how the money will be spent, and related structural reforms. It is due to be submitted for EU authorities’ approval by the end of the month. — AFP

Germany’s third Covid wave needs drastic measures, says health chief [The Guardian, 15, Apr 2021]

By Kate Connolly

Head of Robert Koch Institute says he supports plan for night-time curfew as some ICUs reach capacity

The head of Germany’s disease control agency has called for drastic measures to curb the country’s third wave of coronavirus infections, with intensive care beds filled to capacity in some areas.

Lothar Wieler, the director of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), said Germans needed to drastically reduce contact with each other to rein in the third wave, which he said would get worse as long as it remained out of control.

“As feared and predicted,” Wieler said, the more infectious B117 mutation, first detected in the UK, was responsible for 90% of infections. More patients would need intensive care treatment than during the second wave, which reached its peak in January, he said.

The RKI registered more than 29,000 new cases on Thursday. Most of those being infected were in the 15 to 49 age group, much younger than those in the first two waves, and increasingly younger people were being admitted to ICUs, Wieler said.

Patients were increasingly having to be transferred between regions to hospitals with more capacity, he said.

The number of cases in the over-90s is also on the rise. Death rates have levelled off over the past two or three weeks, but have not gone down. Almost 80,000 people in Germany have died of the virus.

Almost 5,000 ICU beds are taken up by Covid-19 patients, and the figure is expected to rise to 6,000 by the end of the month. Covid patients also made up 80% of those in hospital on heart and lung replacement machines to keep them alive, Wieler said.

He and the health minister, Jens Spahn, told a joint press conference in Berlin that they supported Angela Merkel’s proposal for a night-time curfew to help quell the pandemic.

Although imposed in other countries, Germany has so far not faced such a strict measure. It has been proposed as part of a controversial amendment to the federal infection protection law, which cabinet approved on Tuesday and which is intended to centralise control over measures to tackle the pandemic.

The law will enable the federal government to impose a nationwide “emergency brake” whenever the incidence rate reaches 100 cases per 100,000 for a seven-day period or more. MPs are expected to vote on the amendment next week.

Germany’s incidence rate is currently higher than 160, meaning a curfew would be imminent if the amendment passes. MPs, however, have said they will challenge it and numerous experts have described it as unconstitutional.

The country’s vaccine programme is finally gathering pace after a slow start. Between 500,000 and 700,000 jabs a day are being administered and 17.6% of Germans have received their first shot.

Compulsory testing is also being introduced in schools from next week. However, Wieler said the two measures were not enough to “break the third wave”, not least because most of the population had not been vaccinated. Contact reduction remained the most effective measure, he said.

Major companies such as BASF and VW have begun in-house vaccine programmes for their employees, and more companies are expected to do so from June. The number of GP practices in the vaccination campaign is expected to rise to 50,000 by next week.

Spahn said the government was still confident its promise that every adult would receive a vaccine appointment by the end of the summer could be delivered. He also said that if the third wave could be controlled, he was optimistic that summer holidays would be on the agenda. “Whether everyone will be able to fly to the Seychelles, I don’t know,” he said. “But the North Sea coast is certainly within reach.”

It was announced on Thursday that Merkel, 66, is to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine on Friday. The shot is only recommended for over-60s in Germany.

New Coronavirus News from 21 Sep 2021

China Planned to Infect Bats with Coronavirus before Pandemic [Novinite.com, 21 Sep 2021]

Chinese virologists requested $ 14 million for experiments to create chimera viruses that can more easily infect humans.

Wuhan virologists intended to infect the population of bats with coronaviruses in order to vaccinate them against diseases that are potentially dangerous to humans. On Tuesday, September 21, reports The Telegraph.

The publication notes that the published applications for grants indicate that this proposal was considered back in 2018.

Scientists were planning to test the coronavirus ‘new chimeric spike proteins’ on bats just 18 months before the first human case of COVID-19 was detected, according to the documents.

Virologists have also requested $ 14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for experiments to create chimera viruses that can more easily infect humans. The Telegraph writes that DARPA refused to sponsor the work of Wuhan scientists.

The publication reports that a request for comment has been sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As you know, at the beginning of the year, an international group of experts traveled to China to investigate the origin of the new coronavirus. Experts could not come to an unambiguous conclusion.

According to the final document of the mission, they consider the most likely scenario in which there was a transmission of coronavirus between animals, and then to humans, the least likely scenario is the emergence of the virus in laboratory conditions./telegraph