The true Covid lab leak scandal is how easily our politicians and scientists dismissed it ✒️ ianbirrell for ipaperviews
over the strange nature of the deadly new disease – most notably, how it was the only one of more than 200 known Sars-like coronaviruses with a “furin cleavage site”, which allows its spike protein to bind effectively to cells in many human tissues. It seemed, in the words of one early study, “uniquely adapted to infect humans.
Now finally, more than three years later, there is grudging acceptance that both theories for the pandemic origins are valid. “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident,” admitted its director Christopher Wray last week. One other US intelligence agency agrees; others remain undecided or back natural origin after being asked to examine. In Britain, by contrast, there is just a thundering silence from our political leaders and spooks. There remains no conclusive proof for either theory, despite strenuous efforts to find an intermediate animal species that might have “amplified” a bat virus for spillover into humans.
Behind this question lies a second issue of huge importance, one that reflects badly on the overlapping worlds of politics, journalism and science. For a small group of prominent scientists, marshalled by the powerful chiefs of funding bodies in Britain and the United States, deliberately stifled this debate over birth of the biggest public health crisis for a century – despite their own concerns over research in Wuhan and the virus’s unusual properties.
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Ethnic disparities in COVID-19 outcomes: a multinational cohort study of 20 million individuals from England and Canada - BMC Public HealthBackground Heterogeneous studies have demonstrated ethnic inequalities in the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and adverse COVID-19 outcomes. This study evaluates the association between ethnicity and COVID-19 outcomes in two large population-based cohorts from England and Canada and investigates potential explanatory factors for ethnic patterning of severe outcomes. Methods We identified adults aged 18 to 99 years in the QResearch primary care (England) and Ontario (Canada) healthcare administrative population-based datasets (start of follow-up: 24th and 25th Jan 2020 in England and Canada, respectively; end of follow-up: 31st Oct and 30th Sept 2020, respectively). We harmonised the definitions and the design of two cohorts to investigate associations between ethnicity and COVID-19-related death, hospitalisation, and intensive care (ICU) admission, adjusted for confounders, and combined the estimates obtained from survival analyses. We calculated the ‘percentage of excess risk mediated’ by these risk factors in the QResearch cohort. Results There were 9.83 million adults in the QResearch cohort (11,597 deaths; 21,917 hospitalisations; 2932 ICU admissions) and 10.27 million adults in the Ontario cohort (951 deaths; 5132 hospitalisations; 1191 ICU admissions). Compared to the general population, pooled random-effects estimates showed that South Asian ethnicity was associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 death (hazard ratio: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.09-2.44), hospitalisation (1.53; 1.32-1.76), and ICU admission (1.67; 1.23-2.28). Associations with ethnic groups were consistent across levels of deprivation. In QResearch, sociodemographic, lifestyle, and clinical factors accounted for 42.9% (South Asian) and 39.4% (Black) of the excess risk of COVID-19 death. Conclusion International population-level analyses demonstrate clear ethnic inequalities in COVID-19 risks. Policymakers should be cognisant of the increased risks in some ethnic populations and design equitable health po
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