New Coronavirus News from 14 May 2022

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

by Peter Aldhous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Michael Martin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by JUNNOSUKE KOBARA

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

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

The country had long said it had zero cases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Alia Shoaib

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Coronavirus News from 15 May 2022

Over 1 million North Koreans mobilized to fight COVID-19 as outbreak continues [NK News, 15 May 2022]

by Ifang Bremer

'Fever' cases in the hundreds of thousands as Kim Jong Un attends funeral for Pyongyang elite Yang Hyong Sop

Fifteen more North Koreans have died after suffering from “fever,” state media reported on Sunday, while another 260,000 are afflicted by fever symptoms as the country battles a nationwide COVID-19 outbreak.

North Korea does not likely have the testing capacity to confirm positive COVID cases at a nationwide level, and appears to be using “fever” as a euphemism.

Over three dozen deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases have been attributed to fever since state media said last week that the omicron strain of COVID-19 spread from Pyongyang in late April.

The Rodong Sinmun reported on Sunday that some 1.3 million North Koreans have been mobilized to fight the spread of the virus, while the Korean Central News Agency said that “epidemic prevention posts” have been erected to “totally check the inroads and spread of the malignant virus.”

State media also continued to suggest that most deaths since the omicron outbreak began were not due to the virus but “careless” drug use due to “lack of knowledge and understanding of stealth omicron variant virus infection disease and its correct treatment method.”

The DPRK’s healthy ministry has started to compile “treatment guidelines, methods and tactics,” according to the state newspaper, while emergency meetings were held in Okryu Children’s Hospital and the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

Party officials have reportedly started donating “spare medicine” amid efforts to supply all parts of the country with sufficient medication. North Korea likely lacks the medical supplies to treat its population for COVID-19 symptoms, particularly after two and a half years of austere trade restrictions.

The Rodong Sinmun did not make any mention of a vaccine drive in the country, however, even though no North Koreans in the country are known to be vaccinated. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has offered to help the North procure vaccines and other medical supplies.

North Korea first reported the outbreak of COVID-19 on May 12, after the highly contagious omicron variant had been detected a few days before.

Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited the bier of Yang Hyong Sop, one of the oldest members of the North Korean elite who died at the age of 96. State media did not mention COVID-19 in his obituary, but claimed the former vice president of the presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly died of a stroke on May 13.

In a single photo carried by the Rodong Sinmun, Kim can be seen wearing what appears to be a black, 3D style mask of a seemingly higher grade than the mask he wore during a politburo meeting earlier this week.

What we know (and don't know) about North Korea's Covid outbreak [CNN, 15 May 2022]

By Nectar Gan, Gawon Bae and Helen Regan

(CNN)North Korea's first-reported Covid-19 outbreak is the "greatest turmoil" to befall the country since its founding more than 70 years ago, according to its leader Kim Jong Un, as the isolated and impoverished nation scrambles to curb the spread of a highly transmissible virus that risks causing a major humanitarian crisis.

North Korea reported 15 more deaths and 296,180 new "fever cases" between Friday and Saturday evening, according to state media KCNA, though it did not specify how many of the deaths and cases were linked to Covid, likely due to the country's extremely limited testing capacity.

The climbing death toll and surging "fever cases" come after North Korea said Thursday it had identified its first ever case of Covid-19 -- an alarming development for a country with one of the world's most fragile public health systems and a largely unvaccinated population.

But given the opaque nature of the regime and the country's isolation from the world -- a trend that has only exacerbated since the pandemic -- it is extremely difficult to assess the real situation on the ground.

Foreign diplomats and aid workers had fled North Korea en masse in 2021 due to shortages of goods and "unprecedented" restrictions on daily life, making it all the more impossible to obtain information from the country other than through official state media.

But North Korean state media reports have been vague, and many important questions remain unanswered, including the country's vaccine coverage and the lockdown's impact on the livelihood of its 25 million people.

Here is what we know, and what we don't know about the outbreak:
How did the outbreak emerge?

North Korean authorities have not announced the cause of the outbreak.

North Korea's borders have been tightly sealed since January 2020 to keep the virus at bay, making the so-called "hermit nation" even more isolated from the world. It even declined invitations to send teams to compete at the Tokyo and Beijing Olympics, citing the threat of Covid-19.

And as new variants began to emerge, it stepped-up those efforts, cutting off nearly all trade with China -- the country's biggest trading partner and economic lifeline for the Kim regime -- with imports from Beijing dropping 99% from September to October 2020.

It remains unclear how the virus slipped through the country's tightly-sealed borders.
When KCNA reported on the first identification of Covid-19 in the country on Thursday, it did not even specify how many infections had been defected. It simply said samples collected from a group of people experiencing fevers on May 8 had tested positive for the highly contagious Omicron variant.

By Friday, KCNA was reporting that 18,000 new "fever cases" and six deaths were recorded on Thursday, including one who tested positive for the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron.

"A fever whose cause couldn't be identified explosively spread nationwide since late April," the newspaper said. "As of now up to 187,800 people are being isolated."

On Saturday, KCNA said a total of 524,440 people had reported "fever" symptoms between late April and May 13. Among them, 280,810 people were still being treated in quarantine, while the rest had recovered.

Can North Korea cope with a large-scale outbreak?
An outbreak of Covid-19 could prove disastrous for North Korea. The country's dilapidated health care infrastructure and lack of testing equipment is unlikely to be up to the task of treating a large number of patients with a highly infectious disease.

North Korea's lack of transparency and unwillingness to share information also poses a challenge.

North Korea has never formally acknowledged how many died during a devastating famine in the 1990s that experts suggest killed as many as 2 million. Those who fled the country at the time shared horrific stories of death and survival, and a country in chaos.

"North Korea has such a limited supply of basic medicine that public health officials need to focus on preventative medicine. They would be ill-equipped to deal with any kind of epidemic," Jean Lee, director off the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center, told CNN at the outset of the pandemic.

Doctors who have defected in recent years often speak of poor working conditions and shortages of everything from medicine to basic healthcare supplies.

Choi Jung-hun, a former physician in North Korea who fled the country in 2011, said when he was helping to combat a measles outbreak in 2006 to 2007, North Korea did not have the resources to operate round-the-clock quarantine and isolation facilities.

He recalled that after identifying suspicious cases, manuals for doctors said patients were supposed to be transferred to a hospital or a quarantine facility for monitoring.

"The problem in North Korea is that manuals are not followed. When there wasn't enough food provided for the people at hospitals and quarantine facilities, people escaped to look for food," Choi said during an interview with CNN in 2020.

How is North Korea responding so far?
North Korean state media declared the situation a "major national emergency" upon admitting the first officially reported Covid infection.

On Thursday, Kim placed all cities into lockdown and ordered "people with fever or abnormal symptoms" into quarantine; he also directed the distribution of medical supplies the government had reportedly stocked in case of a Covid emergency, according to KCNA.

Kim later chaired a meeting of the country's powerful politburo, which agreed to implement "maximum" emergency anti-epidemic measures. The measures include isolating work units and pro-actively conducting medical checkups to find and isolate people with "fever and abnormal symptoms," the KCNA reported Friday.

"Practical measures are being taken to keep the production going at a high rate in the major sectors of the national economy and to stabilize the life of the people to the maximum," KCNA said.

According to KCNA, the politburo criticized the country's anti-epidemic sector for "carelessness, laxity, irresponsibility and incompetence," saying it "failed to respond sensitively" to increasing Covid-19 cases across the world, including in neighboring regions.

A reporter for Chinese state media CGTN released a rare video from Pyongyang on Friday, recounting his experience on the ground.

"As far as we know, not many people in Pyongyang have been vaccinated, and the medical and epidemic prevention facilities are in short supply," reporter Zang Qing said in a Weibo post.

"Because the capital is in lockdown, the food I have at home is only enough for a week. We are still awaiting what policy the government will announce next."

At a meeting Saturday, Kim inspected the country's emergency epidemic measures and medical supplies. He also urged North Korean officials to learn from China's "advanced and rich quarantine results and experience they have already achieved in their fight against the malicious infectious disease," according to KCNA.

What about North Korea's vaccine coverage?
North Korea is not known to have imported any coronavirus vaccines -- despite being eligible for the global Covid-19 vaccine sharing program, Covax.

Assuming most North Koreans are unvaccinated, an outbreak in the country -- which has limited testing capabilities, inadequate medical infrastructure and which has isolated itself from the outside world -- could quickly become deadly.

Calls are mounting on the country's leadership to provide access to vaccines.

"There is no evidence to show that North Korea has access to enough vaccines to protect its population from Covid-19. Yet, it has rejected millions of doses of AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines offered by the WHO-led Covax program," said Amnesty International's East Asia researcher Boram Jang, in a statement.

"With the first official news of a Covid-19 outbreak in the country, continuing on this path could cost many lives and would be an unconscionable dereliction of upholding the right to health."

In February, Covax reportedly scaled back the number of doses allocated to North Korea because the country failed to arrange for any shipments, according to Reuters.

A spokesperson for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said Covax has moved to "needs-based vaccine allocations" and "has currently not committed any volume" for North Korea.

"In case the country decides to start a Covid-19 immunization program, vaccines could be made available based on criteria of Covax objectives and technical considerations to enable the country to catch up with international immunization targets," the spokesperson said.