Seemorerocks: "Immunity passports" for Brits

Wednesday, 10 June 2020

"Immunity passports" for Brits

UK MINISTER TOUTS

‘IMMUNITY PASSPORTS’

FOR BRITS

Home Secretary Priti Patel Says They Can Travel The World Without Having To Endure 14-Day Quarantines.

Trunews,

9 June, 2020

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel is pushing for “immunity passports” for fellow Britons that document what vaccines they have received, eliminating the need to endure days-long quarantines when they travel abroad.

Speaking to the House of Commons, she said her office has ben “working across government” to produce the new measures that would be required to develop the passports and “digitalize the response at the border.” She added that 14-day isolation orders for travelers would be lifted once “the degree to which antibody and other methods of testing prove effective in minimizing the health risk.”

The Sun newspaper in London reports a source at Whitehall—headquarters of the Home Office—said that immunity passports are just one of numerous policies being explored:

“So elements of immunity would come under parts of what the Home Secretary said last week and the policy is still at a very early stage and is being led outside the Home Office. We are thinking it will be like when you have yellow fever jabs—that sort of stuff—but we can only do it when the science says it’s right.”

The Sun also cited a Downing Street source, who said Prime Minister Boris Johnson is happy with the two-week quarantine, because asymptomatic coronavirus patients can spread the disease. But, now, the World Health Organization says that’s not necessarily true.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who is leading the WHO’s response to COVID-19, told reporters Monday that new research shows that person-to-person spread of the disease by asymptomatic patients is “very rare.” She added:

“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare—and much of that is not published in the literature.”

Van Kerkhove advised governments to prioritize detecting and isolating infected people who have symptoms, then tracking anyone who may have had contact with him or here.

At the same time, the evidence that COVID-19 is not a respiratory disease continues to grow. New research shows the blood cancer drug Calquence helped patients who were placed on supplemental oxygen or ventilators.

Calquence—pharmacological name acalabrutinib—is believed to prevent the human body’s immune response from attacking its own cells and tissues while fighting off the coronavirus, a condition called a “cytokine storm.” This overreaction to the disease is believed to have caused a large percentage of COVID-19 deaths.

A majority of those given the drug during the Center for Cancer Research/National Cancer Institute study. Only two patients died during the course of the study. The caveat: only 19 hospitalized coronavirus patients took part in the “first-phase” trial.

The National Institutes of Health issued the following statement:

“Early data from a clinical study suggest that blocking the Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) protein provided clinical benefit to a small group of patients with severe COVID-19. Researchers observed that the off-label use of the cancer drug acalabrutinib, a BTK inhibitor that is approved to treat several blood cancers, was associated with reduced respiratory distress and a reduction in the overactive immune response in most of the treated patients …

“These findings should not be considered clinical advice but are being shared to assist the public health response to COVID-19. While BTK inhibitors are approved to treat certain cancers, they are not approved as a treatment for COVID-19. This strategy must be tested in a randomized, controlled clinical trial in order to understand the best and safest treatment options for patients with severe COVID-19.”

Researchers at the Imperial College London say now that the apparent Kawasaki disease cases among child COVID-19 patients is rather a new disease that is being caused by the coronavirus. Their study found children with coronavirus tend to be older than those who typically develop Kawasaki disease, and they’re more likely to develop heart and blood vessel problems that can be life threatening.

This new disease has been dubbed Pediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome – Temporally Associated with SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19). It’s been given the nickname “PIMS-TS.” Another study at the Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York suggested PIMS-TS is a pediatric version of a cytokine storm.

Meanwhile, a team of researchers from Norway and the UK have published their findings that COVID-19 was absolutely manmade. Their two main conclusions:

the mutations that would normally be seen in the course of animal to human transmission have no occurred in the coronavirus, indicated that it was fully “pre-adapted” for human infection and transmission; and

the coronavirus has insertions in its protein sequence that have never been detected in nature and contribute to its ability to cause infection and disease.

The researchers said the global pandemic is beginning to reveal neurological, hematologic, and immunological reactions to COVID-19 that cannot be explained solely by infection through ACE2 receptors in the human body. They also state that creating an effective vaccine is next to impossible without “an objective analysis of the structure of [COVID-19], its mode of action, and its origin”—all information being withheld or obfuscated by China.

And now, a new report about the amount of traffic surrounding hospitals in Wuhan strongly suggests the disease was already running rampant there late last summer—not in early winter, as Beijing has been telling the rest of the world. Using commercially available satellite imagery, a team of researchers from Harvard say a “dramatic increase” in traffic occurred outside five major Wuhan hospitals beginning in August of last year.

ABC News further reported this surge in auto traffic coincided with a sudden rise in the number of Internet searches for terms “closely associated with the coronavirus.”