In the end, you have to trust the government when it comes to the vaccine, don’t you?
I intend to get vaccinated because it’s the right thing to do. As an old codger, I owe it to the younger generation to set a good example.
Phil Kadner
“I’m ready to roll up my sleeve and say ‘I still believe’ in this country,” writes Phil Kadner. “Just tell me where and when to show up.” Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times.
Do you trust the government with your life? That’s what this comes down to.
I am trying very hard to answer “Yes” to that question, although everything in my life’s experience says, “Are you crazy?”
I am speaking about the COVID-19 vaccine.
I have decided I will get the vaccinations — two shots — when they become available to me. I think. Ask me again tomorrow and I may not be so sure.
But right now, I intend to get vaccinated because it is the right thing to do. As an old codger, I owe it to the younger generation to set a good example and I have always wanted to be the fellow in the disaster movie who says, “Leave me behind. You get to safety youngsters. I’ll hold them off.”
Okay. That might not be the right quote here. But I think you understand my intent.
Just tell me where to show up for the big moment.
That’s the thing that’s bugging me. No one seems to know how this is going to work. Once the medical people get their shots and the people in nursing homes get theirs, and the first responders, and the teachers, what’s the plan exactly?
As an old guy with some medical conditions that put me at high risk, I should be pretty high up on the list to get vaccinated. But is someone going to call me on the phone and say, “Get your sleeve rolled up, stand away from the door, we’re coming in,” or what?
Will I get an email saying, “Congratulations, you have won a free COVID-19 shot, all you have to do is agree to the five pages of terms and conditions and your vaccine will arrive in the mail?”
Just tell me what’s next.
Are we all going to get in our cars and form a line at the vehicle emissions testing site? I’m willing to do that, but there must be many toilet facilities nearby because old codgers need to make frequent pit stops, if you know what I mean? In fact, watching those miles-long car lines for vaccinations in Florida, I could think of little else.
I keep hearing that COVID vaccine shipments are getting lost and vials are being taken out of the freezer and forgotten, which I find worrisome. I don’t want to get a dose of the vaccine that has lost its potency.
Speaking of potency, I heard on the TV news that someone is thinking of diluting the doses, splitting them in half, so more people can be vaccinated. Did anyone actually test this stuff or are people at the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control just playing games with us?
I can’t help thinking that rich people, public figures, celebrities and other folks of influence are going to end up getting the vaccine before the rest of us.
Hearing that NFL and NBA players are getting tested repeatedly for COVID-19 before games while millions of other Americans are told testing is unavailable may have something to do with that.
I mean, there’s always somebody happy to use the road shoulder to cut around the rest of the traffic in a construction zone. Special rules for special people.
We have to trust the government here. But the incompetence, the finger-pointing between state and national governments, the lack of accountability, are troubling.
It’s not easy, even for someone who has been an advocate of national health care for many years, to say this will all work out in the end. I mean, the end has arrived for hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them trusted the government. Many of them died because they did not.
I’m ready to roll up my sleeve and say “I still believe” in this country. Just tell me where and when to show up. As for you youngsters out there who are afraid, just stand behind me. It’s going to be all right.
Biden to yank Keystone XL permit on first day of presidency
Lauren Gardner and Ben Lefebvre January 17, 2021
President-elect Joe Biden will rescind the cross-border permit for TC Energy’s Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, three sources confirm to POLITICO.
The move is billed as one of Biden’s Day One climate change actions, according to a presentation circulating among Washington trade groups and lobbyists, a portion of which was seen by POLITICO. The decision was not included in incoming chief of staff Ron Klain’s Saturday memo outlining Biden’s planned executive actions during the first days of his presidency.
Two lobbyists confirmed that Biden plans to yank the project’s permit on Inauguration Day, a development first reported by CBC News. It’s the latest development in a decade-long fight over the controversial pipeline and solidifies a campaign promise the Canadian government had hoped was negotiable.
“The only question has always been whether labor can stave off the death sentence,” said one oil and gas lobbyist who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “And they never had a chance.”
A Biden transition spokesperson declined to comment.
Canada’s ambassador to Washington Kirsten Hillman would not confirm reports. “The Government of Canada continues to support the Keystone XL project,” she said in a statement to POLITICO on Sunday evening. “Keystone XL fits within Canada’s climate plan. It will also contribute to U.S. energy security and economic competitiveness.”
Rescinding Keystone XL would negate one of President Donald Trump’s own first actions in office and kill a project that had become a political totem in the fight between climate activists and the oil industry. Despite many analysts saying the boom in U.S. shale oil made new sources of Canadian crude less important, TC Energy has fought years of legal challenges against it obtaining the needed state permits that would all it to build the pipeline.
The reaction: TC Energy announced Sunday that Keystone XL would achieve net-zero emissions across operations once it begins running in 2023. A spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment on Biden’s executive order plans.
Environmentalists applauded the decision. “President-elect Biden is showing courage and empathy to the farmers, ranchers and tribal nations who have dealt with an ongoing threat that disrupted their lives for over a decade,” said Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska, a grassroots group focused on scuttling the project.
Canada-U.S. relations: TC Energy first proposed the $8 billion pipeline in 2008, saying the 1,200-mile project was crucial to deliver crude from Western Canada to refineries in the Midwest. The Obama administration in 2015 denied a cross-border permit for the pipeline, however, saying the oil it would deliver would exacerbate climate change.
Keystone XL was one of the few issues on which Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed. The Liberal government had planned to continue to advocate for the pipeline.
During a congratulatory call with Biden on November 9th, Trudeau told the incoming president he looked forward to joining forces to fight climate change while co-operating on energy projects like the Keystone XL.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney bet Biden would not cancel a project already under construction when he announced in March that his government had taken a $1.1 billion stake in Keystone XL. Preliminary construction started last fall in Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota.
The provincial government openly mulled a legal intervention last year into a court case that had put pipeline construction on hold and reportedly hired American lobbyists to make its case in Washington.
Stef Feldman, a policy director for Biden’s campaign, told POLITICO in May that the Democrat would “proudly stand in the Roosevelt Room again as President and stop it for good.”
What’s next: In a statement Sunday night, Kenney vowed to work with TC Energy “to use all legal avenues available to protect” Alberta’s interest in the pipeline.
New Yorker reporter’s footage provides ‘clearest view yet’ of Capitol rioters inside Senate chamber
Tim O’Donnell January 17, 2021
Luke Mogelson, a veteran war correspondent and contributing writer for The New Yorker, captured what appears to be the “clearest” footage yet of the deadly riot at the United States Capitol earlier this month.
Mogelson attended (in a journalistic capacity) President Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, which preceded the pro-Trump mob’s march to and breach of the capitol. He followed the rioters into the building and filmed a group that entered the empty Senate chamber. They began taking photos of documents in the room as part of a self-declared “information operation.” One man said he was attempting to find something that he could “use against these scumbags,” while another said he thought Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) “would want us to do this.”
In a later scene, Mogelson witnessed Jake Angeli, otherwise known as Q Shaman, sitting in Vice President Mike Pence’s chair, as a lone Capitol Police officer tried unsuccessfully to get him to move. He also gathered footage from outside the Capitol, including a large crowd aggressively forcing its way into the building, as well as a man telling people around him to “start making a list, put all those names down” and “start hunting them down one by one.”
The New Yorker notes that although the footage was “not originally intended for publication, it documents a historic event and serves as a visceral complement to Mogelson’s probing, illuminating” written feature. Read the full report here and watch the complete footage here.
Woman arrested in Capitol attack: ‘I listen to my president’
DALLAS (AP) — A Dallas-area real estate agent who is facing charges for allegedly being part of the pro-President Donald Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol last week said she’s a “normal person” who listened to her president.
Jenna Ryan, 50, is accused of “knowingly” entering or remaining in the restricted building or grounds without lawful authority and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, according to a criminal complaint filed by the FBI in a Washington federal court.
Matt DeSarno, special agent in charge of the FBI Dallas office, confirmed that Ryan had turned herself in and that her Carrollton apartment was searched Friday. No personal telephone for Ryan was available, and court records didn’t list a lawyer for her as of Friday.
Ryan shared photos and videos on social media, including a video in which she says, “We’re gonna go down and storm the Capitol,” in front of a bathroom mirror, according to the FBI criminal complaint.
The agent who signed the complaint also noted that Ryan live-streamed a 21-minute Facebook video of her and a group walking toward the Capitol.
“We are going to (expletive) go in here,” Ryan said in the video as she approached the top of the stairs on the west side of the Capitol building. “Life or death, it doesn’t matter. Here we go.”
She then turned the camera to expose her face, the complaint noted, and said, “Y’all know who to hire for your Realtor, Jenna Ryan for your Realtor.” Nearly halfway through, Ryan appears to have made it to the front door, chanting, “USA, USA” and “Here we are, in the name of Jesus.”
“I just want people to know I’m a normal person, that I listen to my president who told me to go to the Capitol, that I was displaying my patriotism while I was there and I was just protesting and I wasn’t trying to do anything violent and I didn’t realize there was actually violence,” Ryan said.
Ryan is the third person in FBI’s Dallas region of northern, northeastern and near western Texas to be named in criminal complaints, DeSarno said.
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Larry Rendall Jr. of Grand Prairie, another Dallas suburb, was released to home confinement Thursday after a prosecutor alleged the former fighter pilot had zip-tie handcuffs on the Senate floor because he planned to take hostages.
Troy Anthony Smocks, 58, of Dallas, was arrested Friday after a criminal complaint was filed in Washington accusing him of “knowingly and willfully transmitting threats in interstate commerce.”
Court documents allege that Smocks used social media to post threats on Jan. 6-7 regarding the riots. The threats included that he and others would return to the U.S. Capitol Tuesday with weapons and form a mass so large that no army could match them. He threatened they would “hunt these cowards down like the Traitors that each of them are,” specifically threatening Republicans not allied with them, Democrats and “and Tech Execs,” according to a court affidavit.
Smocks could not be reached for comment, and no attorney for him is listed in court records.
Also Friday, the first Houston-area resident to be accused of participating in the riot was arrested. In a criminal complaint filed in Washington, the FBI accuses Joshua Lollar, 39, of Spring, of being the spearhead of a group trying unsuccessfully to break through a line of Washington Metropolitan police officers into the Capitol.
Lollar was charged with violent entry, unauthorized presence in a restricted area and impeding law enforcement during a civil disorder. He remains in federal custody pending a Tuesday detention hearing. No attorney for him is listed in court records.
The post-Trump Republican Party has been gutted in almost every way imaginable
Jim VandeHei January 15, 2021
Republicans will emerge from the Trump era gutted financially, institutionally and structurally.
The big picture: The losses are stark and substantial.
They lost their congressional power.
Their two leaders, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, are hamstrung by corporate blacklisting of their election-denying members.
The GOP brand is radioactive for a huge chunk of America.
The corporate bans on giving to the 147 House and Senate Republicans who voted against election certification are growing and virtually certain to hold.
The RNC is a shell of its former self and run by a Trump loyalist.
Democrats crushed them in fundraising when they were out of power. Imagine their edge with it.
Sheldon Adelson, the party’s biggest donor, died Monday.
The NRA is weaker than it has ever been, after massive leadership scandals.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, once controlled by rock-ribbed Republicans, also gave to Democrats in 2020.
Rank-and-file Republicans are now scattered on encrypted channels like Signal and fearful of Big Tech platforms.
What to watch: Conservatives hold power in the courts and state legislatures, two foundational pieces to rebuilding their party. But they likely will face a raging internal war over policies and political leaders as they grapple with a post-Trump world — whenever that might be.
Biden, labor secretary nominee vow to boost union membership
By Reuters Staff January 15, 2021
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President-elect Joe Biden said his labor secretary nominee, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, understands that unions built the American middle class and will encourage unionization.
“Marty understands, like I do, that the middle class built this country and unions built the middle class,” Biden said. “He sees how union workers have been holding this country together during this crisis.”
Biden said he had considered nominating former Democratic presidential rival Senator Bernie Sanders to the post but they both agreed it was important to maintain control of the U.S. Senate.
Walsh, 53, who was elected mayor of Boston in 2013, has backed both a $15 minimum wage and paid family leave.
A past president of the Laborers’ Union Local 223, which he joined at 21, and the Boston Metropolitan District Building Trades Council, Walsh told reporters he saw opportunities to expand workers’ rights and union membership.
“We can defend workers rights, we can strengthen collective bargaining. We can grow union membership. We can create millions of good paying jobs with investments in infrastructure, clean energy, and in high-tech manufacturing, along with the workforce training to help get those people into those good jobs,” he said.
Union membership in the United States has been declining for decades. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 7.1 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union in 2019, compared with 7.5 million workers in the private sector. The union membership rate declined over the year in the private sector by 0.2 percentage point to 6.2%, compared to around 20% in 1983.
Bitter Cold Means Chaos as Global Energy Systems Show Strain
Rachel Morison January 15, 2021
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(Bloomberg) — Freezing weather that’s sweeping the northern hemisphere is causing chaos in energy markets and damaging infrastructure with households from Japan to Pakistan and France being asked to curb their electricity use.
In Asia, extreme cold prompted record-high power demand and a scramble for natural gas to keep the lights on in China, Japan and South Korea. In Sweden, a utility is paying for hotels for its customers after heavy snow brought down sections of the power grid cutting supplies while French households were advised to delay doing their laundry to save energy.
The extreme, widespread cold took markets by surprise. The spikes in energy demand during the bitter winter, coupled with weak wind generation, power plant closures and liquefied natural gas tanker delays highlighted the shortcomings of global energy systems in weather conditions that are only set to get more volatile.
There could be more to come. A relatively rare weather phenomenon with the potential to disrupt the polar vortex — the winds that usually keep cold air contained in the far north — is threatening to send an Arctic blast across North America, Europe and Asia from late January.
“The distortion of the polar vortex appears to be prolonging the severe winter conditions in some northerly areas and potentially Europe,” said David Thomas, independent adviser and former head of LNG at Vitol Group. “It may not be over just yet. Several companies are feeling the pain and the elevated power prices must be hurting large consumers.”
The extreme conditions left some energy traders and utilities flat-footed, sending prices for electricity, fuel and vessels to record highs.
In Asia, LNG spot rates jumped 18-fold from last year’s lows and helped send European gas prices to a 12-year peak. Britain’s national grid was forced to issue numerous appeals for generators to increase output as low wind generation coincided with the cold snap and pushed wholesale electricity prices for peak periods to more than 1,000 pounds ($1,367) a megawatt hour.
European gas markets like the U.K. and Spain, which don’t have large amounts of gas storage, and are more dependent on the “incredibly tight global LNG market are more exposed if below normal temperatures are sustained,” said James Huckstepp, manager for EMEA gas analytics at S&P Global Platts.
Lights Out
China is struggling to keep the lights on after some of the lowest temperatures since 1966 boosted domestic demand just as manufacturing ramped up after the pandemic. Ice is also wreaking havoc on grid infrastructure, while the frigid weather disrupted transport and delayed LNG tankers at Qingdao.
Big industrial users are first in line to have electricity supplies cut, followed by commercial buildings, in order to keep supply safe for residential consumers.
Meanwhile in Japan, its utilities have asked consumers to conserve electricity, and the government has ordered independent producers to boost output to maximum capacity.
Tohoku Electric Power Co. bought several cargoes of low-sulfur fuel oil for oil-fired power plants that are utilized only when gas-fed facilities have been maximized. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has begun speaking to refiners and urged them to help supply local utilities with LSFO supplies.
Wrap Up Warm
Earlier this week, the French grid operator issued a red alert for high power demand and appealed to households to put on a jumper rather than turn the heating up. Electricite de France SA advised customers to delay doing their laundry while power demand was high.
Parts of northeastern Sweden got the biggest snow dump since 2012, with 60 centimeters in just one day, according to the nation’s Meteorological and Hydrological Institute. The storm overwhelmed grids and has left many thousands of customers without power this week.
EON SE is paying for hotel rooms for Swedish customers as it struggles to restore power supplies that have been down since Jan. 11. Vattenfall AB, the Nordic region’s biggest utility, hired a helicopter to clear snow and ice from power lines, using a long pole to shake snow off cables or a grip claw to lift trees from the line.
In Spain, the government is considering ways to intervene in the electricity market when there are sharp price increases, as happened when demand surged during the cold spell that blanketed Madrid in a rare snowfall. Some consumer bills in the regulated market are linked to wholesale prices that are at the highest in a decade.
With natural gas shortages, power plants in Iran are burning low-grade fuel oils that create toxic smog, or switching off entirely, triggering blackouts.
Pakistan is facing a gas shortage, too, despite running its two LNG terminals at full capacity in January. The Asian nation has cut gas supplies to industries and limited flows to compressed natural gas stations to a few days a week as residential demand more than doubled compared to the summer and was higher than in previous winters.
How cold the rest of the winter gets is likely to be the key driver for whether higher energy prices will be sustained.
Even if temperatures ease, the impact of tighter LNG supplies is likely to be felt into the summer and to feed into other markets. As north Asia, the biggest consumer of LNG, restocks supplies that demand will support price benchmarks throughout 2021. What was expected to be a finely balanced summer just a month ago, is now looking increasingly tight, according to Wood Mackenzie Ltd.
Shocking footage shows Serbian lake completely covered in garbage
Isabella O’Malley January 12, 2021
Shocking footage shows Serbian lake completely covered in garbage
While pollution is an omnipresent issue that is impacting essentially every ecosystem on Earth, the problem is not always visible to the naked eye. However, footage of Serbia’s Potpecko Lake depicts a jarring scene — several thousand cubic metres of plastic containers floating on top of the water.
The footage was first published online on January 4, 2021 and environmental activist, Sinisa Lakovic, says that the extent of the plastic pollution is due to decades of accumulating trash at “unsanitary landfills,” as reported by Reuters. Marko Karadzic, a local resident, described the situation to Reuters as “an ecological disaster.”
Several landfills are located upstream from the lake along the Lim River. Potpecko Lake is connected to the waterbody that the dam at the Višegrad Hydroelectric Power Plant uses, and officials are concerned that it could become clogged with garbage.
Serbia’s Environment Minister, Irena Vujovic, said a clean-up would soon commence and stated that several landfalls that contributed to the pollution in Potpecko Lake have been invited to develop a solution that would have long-term benefits.
AQUATIC POLLUTION, NOT JUST AN OCEAN PROBLEM
Images of ocean animals entangled in plastic pollution are the most common impacts that many people think of when considering how the waste we generate impacts aquatic ecosystems. Given that oceans cover more than 70 per cent of Earth’s surface, it is understandable that the spotlight lands on these marine ecosystems, but some experts say that plastic pollution in freshwater lakes and rivers is a topic that is often neglected in research.
lake pollution Credit: Justin Wilkens via Unsplash. A discarded beer can in Eagle Lake, Mississippi, USA. Credit: Justin Wilkens via Unsplash
A 2019 survey conducted by scientists Martín C. M. Blettler and Karl M. Wantzen reviewed 171 published studies that analyzed animal plastic entanglement and found that over 98 per cent focused solely on oceanic environments. Blettler and Wantzen stated while ocean plastic pollution remains a considerable concern, they emphasize the importance of the limited insight we have about freshwater pollution.
In freshwater environments, researchers have documented an increasing trend of plastic becoming part of birds’ nests, which can reduce the survival rates of both the parents and chicks. Microplastics are also being consumed by fish in growing amounts leading to adverse effects. The researchers say that the effects of plastic pollution in water bodies inland are important to study because the waste that is dumped in lakes and rivers ultimately travels to the oceans.
Deal reached on project to protect lakes from invasive fish
In this June 13, 2012, file photo, Asian carp, jolted by an electric current from a research boat, jump from the Illinois River near Havana, Ill. Illinois, Michigan and a federal agency have agreed on funding the next phase of an initiative to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes by upgrading defenses on a Chicago-area waterway, officials said Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/John Flesher, File)
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Michigan, Illinois and a federal agency have agreed on funding the next phase of an initiative to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes by strengthening defenses on a Chicago-area waterway, officials said Thursday.
The two states and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will share pre-construction engineering and design costs for the $858 million project at Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet, Illinois. The structure on the Des Plaines River is a choke point between the Illinois River, which is infested with the invasive carp, and Lake Michigan.
A plan approved by the Corps in 2019 calls for installing a gantlet of technologies to deter approaching fish, including electric barriers and underwater speakers that would blast loud noises, plus an “air bubble curtain.” A specially designed “flushing lock” would wash away carp that might be floating on the water as vessels pass through.
The next step is developing design and engineering specifications, expected to take three to four years and cost about $28.8 million.
Under the new agreement, the Corps will pay $18 million and Michigan $8 million. Illinois will chip in $2.5 million and serve as the “non-federal sponsor” required for such projects.
The federal share of the design and engineering funds still needs to be provided through annual Corps work plans, said Col. Steven M. Sattinger, commander of the Corps’ district office in Rock Island, Illinois.
Both states will collaborate with the Corps as it designs the complex mechanism, which will require thousands of pages of drawings.
Extensive research is still needed for some features, which never have been built to the scale that will be required at Brandon Road, Sattinger said.
“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” he said during an online news conference.
Four species of carp were imported from Asia in the 1960s and 1970s to clear algae from Deep South sewage ponds and fish farms. They escaped into the Mississippi River and have moved north into dozens of tributaries in Middle America.
Government agencies, advocacy groups and others have long debated how to prevent them from reaching the Great Lakes, where scientists say they could out-compete native species for food and habitat. The lakes region has a fishing industry valued at $7 billion.
“If Asian carp invade the Great Lakes, they would have a devastating impact on our fisheries, tourism and outdoor recreation economies, and way of life across the region,” said Marc Smith, policy director for the National Wildlife Federation.
A shipping canal that forms part of the link between the Mississippi and Lake Michigan has a network of fish-repelling barriers, which the Corps says is effective but critics consider inadequate. The Brandon Road project will provide another layer of protection further downstream.
“Long in planning, we’re pleased to finally put these agreements into action, allowing us to move the project to its next steps – planning and design – and, ultimately, construction,” said Colleen Callahan, director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
Once design is complete, building the system will take six to eight years, Sattinger said.
The deal between states that have sometimes quarreled over how to stop the carp is “a model of partnership that we hope to see more of in the future as we work toward a common goal of securing the health and longevity of our states’ greatest natural resource,” said Molly Flanagan, chief operating officer of the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
Elizabeth Weise and Karen Weintraub, January 16, 2021
The coronavirus that conquered the world came from a thumb-sized bat tucked inside a remote Chinese cave. Of this much, scientists are convinced.
Exactly how and when it fled the bat to begin its devastating flight across the globe remain open questions.
In just one year, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has infected 100 million people and killed 2 million, 400,000 of them in the U.S. Answers could stop such a calamity from happening again.
Researchers in China, under government scrutiny, have been investigating since January. This week, a World Health Organization delegation of scientists from 10 different nations finally was allowed in the country to explore the virus’ origins.
“This is important not just for COVID-19, but for the future of global health security and to manage emerging disease threats with pandemic potential,” Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, said just after the team left for China.
A worker in protective coverings directs members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team on their arrival at the airport in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021. A global team of researchers came to the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic was first detected to conduct a politically sensitive investigation into its origins amid uncertainty about whether Beijing might try to prevent embarrassing discoveries.
It’s not clear how much evidence will remain a year later, and what the team will be able to learn. The Wuhan fish market, seen as a likely breeding ground for the virus, has been scrubbed and shuttered.
But the effort is worth it, infectious disease experts say. Understanding the journey of SARS-CoV-2 may provide insights into how the relationship between humans and animals led to the pandemic, as well as other disease outbreaks including Ebola, Zika and many strains of flu.
A member of the World Health Organization team is screened on arriving at the airport in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021. The global team of researchers arrived Thursday in the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic was first detected to conduct a politically sensitive investigation into its origins amid uncertainty about whether Beijing might try to prevent embarrassing discoveries.
“These are emerging diseases that breach the barrier between animals and humans and cause devastation in human populations,” the WHO’s Mike Ryan said at a Monday news conference. “It is an absolute requirement that we understand that interface and what is driving that dynamic and what specific issues resulted in diseases breaching that barrier.”
The international team is not looking to assign blame, said Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme. If it were, there would be plenty to go around.
“We can blame climate change. We can blame policy decisions made 30 years ago regarding everything from urbanization to the way we exploit the forest,” he said. “You can find people to blame in every level of what we’re doing on this planet.”
Beginnings in a cave
The chain of events that led to the worst global pandemic in a century started with a tiny, insect-eating mammal with the mundane name, Intermediate Horseshoe bat.
The species is part of a family of bats that act as natural reservoirs for coronaviruses, notorious for how easily they mutate and how well they can be transmitted from species to species. The bats aren’t bothered by the viruses. The animals they pass them onto aren’t always so lucky.
Humans are one of those animals.
This happens all the time – a virus harmlessly infects one creature then finds its way to another, mutates and becomes something new. The newly mutated virus can be insignificant but annoying (think common colds, some of which are caused by coronaviruses) or devastating and deadly (think smallpox.)
SARS-CoV-2 is a little of both.
A Horseshoe bat hangs from a net inside an abandoned Israeli army outpost next to the Jordan River in the occupied West Bank, on July 7, 2019.
As many as 40% of those who test positive for COVID-19 have no symptoms at all but 2% of people who get sick die. It’s especially deadly in the elderly. COVID-19 has killed 1 of every 66 Americans older than 85. Among those infected, some percentage — we don’t yet know how many — cope with crippling long-term symptoms that plague them for months. Future health impacts remain unknown.
The group of related coronaviruses giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has existed for decades in bats and likely originated more than 40 years ago, said Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor and expert in viral genomics at the University of California, San Francisco.
SARS-CoV-2 shares 96% of its genetic material with a sample of coronavirus taken in 2013 in Intermediate Horseshoe bats from Yunnan province in China, which suggests the Yunnan virus is its ancestor. How the virus traveled the 1,200 miles from Yunnan to Wuhan remains unknown.
Because the 2013 sample is the only one available, scientists had to undertake genetic analysis to estimate when the bat strain and the strain now circulating among humans diverged. They put the split sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, said Maciej Boni, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, who spent almost a decade working in Asia.
“There’s really not a clear tree where we have forensic evidence to point to exactly where it came from,” said John Connor, a virologist at Boston University who studies emerging infectious diseases. “It looks like it’s a bat-derived virus, and there’s a big question mark after that.”
Scientists simply don’t do enough surveillance of bats and coronavirus to tell.
“We just don’t know because we don’t have any data — we weren’t looking,” said Boni. “Over the last 20 years we haven’t been doing enough sampling.”
Boni is among those who think the virus most likely came directly from bats, possibly infecting miners who work in bat-infested caves or people exposed to bat feces. Others say it more likely spent some time infecting another animal species before leaping to humans.
The original SARS virus, identified in China in 2003, is believed to have passed through civets – a type of nocturnal mammal native to Asia and Africa – though other animals may have been involved.
SARS underwent only a few genetic changes between bats and people, which made its animal roots easier to trace, while SARS-CoV-2 has changed a lot more, Connor said.
With SARS-CoV-2, a suspect is the frequently trafficked scaly anteater, also known as a pangolin. Other possibilities include civets or ferrets or even cats.
“SARS-CoV-2 may originate from live animal markets, but it may also have emerged from any setting in which people come into contact with animals, including farms, pets, or zoos,” Chiu said.
Whatever its path, sometime before November 2019 it became a virus that could easily – far too easily – infect humans.
Not Made in China
Despite a persistent conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a lab, perhaps an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, there’s no evidence to support the claim and plenty to counter it.
In March, a group of researchers found the virus most closely resembled existing bat viruses and was not man-made.
No new details have emerged since to change the author minds, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, one of the co-authors and a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
“Can we exclude the possibility that there was a virus that was present in this lab that somehow got out into either animals or people? No, we can’t do that,” he said. “The only thing we can say is that there’s no evidence that suggests it was deliberately engineered through some sort of gain-of-function experiments.”
Connor said he’s also dubious the virus originated in a lab rather than in nature.
The Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where a number of people related to the market fell ill with a virus, sits closed in Wuhan, China, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.
“What laboratory people are really good at doing is making viruses weaker,” said Connor, who is also an investigator at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories.
Viruses, especially RNA viruses like coronaviruses, make tiny mistakes as they reproduce. One person’s nose might contain 10 to a 100,000 copies of the virus, and with so many replications and so many mistakes, it’s plausible chance mutations led to SARS-CoV-2, he said.
“I don’t think we need to look for man-made. I think we see the viruses that we know assaulting us all the time,” Connor said. “We look back to Zika. That wasn’t man-made. Neither was Ebola. Flu keeps coming after us.”
It’s possible to bioengineer a virus, but it’s extremely hard. Anyone doing so would have used a pre-existing virus as the template. The virus that’s now killing millions has novel mutations, many of them, said Chiu.
“We barely know how to manipulate even a few base pairs in a single viral gene,” he said. “The difference between Chinese bat coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 is more than 3,000 base pairs.”
In some ways, it doesn’t matter where the virus came from, said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. What matters is how we deal with the current situation, which is at a crisis state in the United States.
“When the house is burning down is not the time to start looking for where the matches were,” he said.
Investigation and prevention
If SARS-Cov-2 had been a type of bird flu instead of a coronavirus, the world would have been alerted within days of the first infections. A global surveillance system was established in the 1990s and has been expanded and strengthened, Boni said.
“If a single poultry farmer in Southeast Asia comes down with severe respiratory symptoms, samples are taken and sequenced. That week you know which avian influenza virus it is,” he said. “Farms in neighboring regions are immediately quarantined and the birds may be depopulated. It takes days.”
Setting up something similar for bats and coronaviruses would cost several billion a year globally, said Boni. “It’s not expensive for the benefit we’d get.”
To track SARS-COV-2 as it transferred among species requires analyzing blood collected from the animals, as well as samples from their airways.
Distinguishing between closely related viruses isn’t always so easy.
“We have a special test that can do this if we could get samples out of China,” said Lipkin. He’s been trying for months to do so, and when he attempted to send his own sampling tools into the country the U.S wouldn’t allow it.
“We now have obstruction on both sides,” said Lipkin, who’s been working to get into China himself since early in the outbreak. “I don’t know when that’s going to let up. I’m hoping the Biden administration will feel differently.”
Lipkin’s March paper explored key features of the new virus but nothing more has been learned since about SARS-CoV-2’s earliest days, he said.
Staff move bio-waste containers past the entrance of the Wuhan Medical Treatment Center, where some infected with a new virus are being treated, in Wuhan, China, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020.
“We still haven’t had a full post-mortem on what went wrong in China,” said Lipkin, who caught COVID-19 in March in New York and was recently vaccinated.
The U.S. has a very good system of reporting outbreaks, and rapidly publishes information in the CDC’s journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly. The Chinese are not as transparent at reporting their public health information.
Increased transparency is one of several changes Lipkin recommends to avoid a repeat of the 2020 disaster.
Wild animal markets and consumption of wildlife continue to pose dangers, he said.
And the world needs to have the ability to respond faster to novel viruses like SARS-CoV-2. Global surveillance would help, as would drugs that can treat a wide spectrum of viruses – maybe one that can address all coronaviruses and another to tackle influenzas.
“These drugs might not be ideal but we should think of them as a finger in the dike,” Lipkin said, so outbreaks won’t get out of hand, the way this one did.
Connor, at Boston University, agrees that effective and transparent public health systems around the world are essential for detecting and preventing outbreaks like COVID-19.
In this Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020 file photo, people wearing face masks walk down a deserted street in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province.
While Wuhan may have had a good health care system, that was not the case in West Africa, where a 2014-2016 epidemic of Ebola infected more than 28,000, killed over 11,000 and terrified the world.
“It would be nice for all people to have good health care, not just because it would be nice for them … but for everybody else,” Connor said. “It would be nice to be able to identify: Oh, all of a sudden, five people in one area got sick with something we didn’t know what it was.”
Connor said it’s pointless to try to predict all the ways in which a virus now infecting animals could make the leap to humans. A much better approach, he said, is to focus on the viruses that do emerge.
“What matters is how good we are at responding quickly,” he said.
The race is now between the speed of mutations and the speed of vaccination, said Chiu.
Even for a typically slow Sunday afternoon Grand Central Terminal in New York City was quieter than usual March 15, 2020 as Coronavirus concerns kept travelers and tourists off the streets and away from popular destinations in the city.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says it may take up to 85% of Americans being vaccinated to protect the population. Reaching those numbers will be challenging considering pervasive vaccine hesitancy and a slow, complicated roll out.
In the meantime, public health measures to stop the spread – masking, social distancing and handwashing – are essential, experts repeat.
“We have to reduce the number of infections before the virus has a chance to mutate in such a way that it can evade drugs and vaccines,” said Chiu. “That’s what keeps me up at night.”
Contact Elizabeth Weise at eweise@usatoday.com and Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
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