Cancelled Games and Empty Stadiums Might Move Trumps Big Ass Off the Pot!

WSJ  |   The NCAA tournament. Major League Baseball opening day. The Masters golf tournament. The NFL draft, the NBA and NHL playoffs, the Boston Marathon and Olympic qualifiers all over the U.S.

The busiest time of the American sports calendar is coming—if the coronavirus doesn’t come first.

As the global economy braces for the potentially devastating effects of a novel coronavirus that is spreading around the world, few businesses are at greater risk of being impacted than sports. 

This is a multibillion-dollar industry built on live entertainment, easy travel and mass gatherings, and that makes it especially vulnerable if major cities begin to embrace social distancing, as they have in countries where the virus has already disrupted everyday life. The problem is that there is no work-from-home in sports. The NBA season can’t be played on Slack. 

Should games be canceled? Can they be delayed? Will they be played in empty arenas? These are the questions that leagues and governing bodies are scrambling to answer as they size up potentially the biggest disruption to the sports calendar since World War II, and they are constrained by uncertainty as they make contingency plans to keep up with this mysterious pathogen. Their behavior will be dictated by the virus’s. 

“It will give March Madness a new meaning,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University. 

                                              

The Trump-Pence Protocol for SARS-CoV2 Pandemic Mismangement

ourfiniteworld |  The world economy may become very different, simply because of COVID-19. The new virus doesn’t even need to directly affect the rest of the world very much to create a problem. The United States, Europe, and the rest of the world are very much dependent on the continued operation of China. The world economy has effectively put way too many eggs in one basket, and this basket is not now functioning as expected.

If China is barely producing anything for world markets, the rest of the world will suddenly discover that long supply chains weren’t such a good idea. There will be a big scramble to try to fill in the missing pieces of supply chains, but many goods are likely to be less available. We may discover quickly how much we depend upon China for everything from shoes to automobiles to furniture to electronics. World carbon dioxide emissions are likely to fall dramatically because of China’s problems, but will the accompanying issues be ones that the world economy can tolerate?

The thing that is ironic is that it is possible that the West’s fear of the new coronavirus may be overblown–we really won’t know what the impact will be with respect to people of European or of African descent until we have had a better chance to examine how the virus affects different populations. The next few weeks and months are likely to be quite instructive. For example, how will the Americans and Australians who caught COVID-19 on the cruise ships fare? What will the health outcomes be of non-Asians being brought back from Wuhan to their native countries on special planes?

Wuhan Institute of Virology: HATERS HURT'N MY FEELINGS! I DINDU NUFFIN!!!

SCMP |  A Chinese research institute in the city of Wuhan – ground zero of the coronavirus outbreak

– has again dismissed rumours suggesting it is linked to the public health crisis, saying it has been “badly hurt” by conspiracy theories circulating online.

 

“The rumours … have caused severe damage to our researchers who have been dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing during the epidemic,” the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.

Those rumours included that the new virus strain was “man-made”, “leaked from the WIV lab”, that “the WIV was taken over by the military”, “a WIV researcher died from the leaked virus”, “a WIV student is patient zero”, and “a WIV researcher reported to authorities that the WIV chief was responsible” for the epidemic, the statement posted on its website on Wednesday said.

The institute runs the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, the only facility in China equipped to diagnose and research easily transmitted pathogens at the highest biosafety level of four.

“Looking back on our hard work over the past month, we have nothing to be ashamed of or to regret,” the statement said.

A prominent virologist with the institute has also been targeted by the rumours. Shi Zhengli’s exploration of caves in Yunnan province discovered that another deadly coronavirus – which caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, epidemic in 2002-03 – had originated in bats. Her database of viruses found in bats provided evidence for the theory that the coronavirus at the centre of the ongoing epidemic was also linked to bats. The new virus strain was found to be 96 per cent identical to one found in bats.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I'm not a virologist and don't pretend to be. But I can read a fugging manual with the best of them, and understand what I've read. That said, slowly reread the nature paper from 2015 yourself. 

Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats¹—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo, and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV. Together, the strategy translates metagenomics data to help predict and prepare for future emergent viruses.

Shi Zhengli - you know you done f'd up....,

 

You See, What Happened Wuz..., Isht Just Up and Mutated and Whatnot!

SCMP |  The new coronavirus has an HIV-like mutation that means its ability to bind with human cells could be up to 1,000 times as strong as the Sars virus, according to new research by scientists in China and Europe.

The discovery could help to explain not only how the infection has spread but also where it came from and how best to fight it.

Scientists showed that Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) entered the human body by binding with a receptor protein called ACE2 on a cell membrane. And some early studies suggested that the new coronavirus, which shares about 80 per cent of the genetic structure of Sars, might follow a similar path.

But the ACE2 protein does not exist in large quantities in healthy people, and this partly helped to limit the scale of the Sars outbreak of 2002-03, in which infected about 8,000 people around the world.

Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions.

When looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola.

“This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV [the new coronavirus] may be significantly different from the Sars coronavirus in the infection pathway,” the scientists said in a paper published this month on Chinaxiv.org, a platform used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to release scientific research papers before they have been peer-reviewed.

“This virus may use the packing mechanisms of other viruses such as HIV.”

According to the study, the mutation can generate a structure known as a cleavage site in the new coronavirus’ spike protein.

The virus uses the outreaching spike protein to hook on to the host cell, but normally this protein is inactive. The cleavage site structure’s job is to trick the human furin protein, so it will cut and activate the spike protein and cause a “direct fusion” of the viral and cellular membranes.

Compared to the Sars’ way of entry, this binding method is “100 to 1,000 times” as efficient, according to the study.

Just two weeks after its release, the paper is already the most viewed ever on Chinarxiv.

We Made The Coronavirus Epidemic: NYTimes Called Out Shi Zhengli A Month Ago

NYTimes |  Despite the new virus’s name, though, and as the people who christened it well know, nCoV-2019 isn’t as novel as you might think.

Something very much like it was found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, a province roughly a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, by a team of perspicacious researchers, who noted its existence with concern. The fast spread of nCoV-2019 — more than 4,500 confirmed cases, including at least 106 deaths, as of Tuesday morning, and the figures will have risen by the time you read this — is startling but not unforeseeable. That the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a bat, and possibly after passing through another creature, may seem spooky, yet it is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study these things.

One such scientist is Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a senior author of the draft paper (not yet peer reviewed and so far available only in preprint) that gave nCoV-2019 its identity and name. It was Ms. Shi and her collaborators who, back in 2005, showed that the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people. Ms. Shi and colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human pandemics.

In a 2017 paper, they set out how, after nearly five years of collecting fecal samples from bats in the Yunnan cave, they had found coronaviruses in multiple individuals of four different species of bats, including one called the intermediate horseshoe bat, because of the half-oval flap of skin protruding like a saucer around its nostrils. The genome of that virus, Ms. Shi and her colleagues have now announced, is 96 percent identical to the Wuhan virus that has recently been found in humans. And those two constitute a pair distinct from all other known coronaviruses, including the one that causes SARS. In this sense, nCoV-2019 is novel — and possibly even more dangerous to humans than the other coronaviruses.

KC Can't Fix Potholes - In a Pandemic, We're Wholly On Our Own!!!

nextdoor | City Communications Office, City Manager's OfficeAGENCY

"Ready in 3" Community Guide to Help Educate and Prepare for Pandemic Flu

Check out the "Ready in 3" community guide to help educate & prepare you for pandemic flu. LEARN more about influenza, PLAN how to respond to the next major flu pandemic, & find the best ways to PROTECT yourself against this serious health threat here http://bit.ly/2PGm1Vj.

HEALTH.MO.GOV

New2 hr ago · Subscribers of City Manager's Office

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Discussion closed 2 hr ago. Learn more »

Stacey Abrams Stayed Grinning, But Real Negroes Turned Their Backs On Bloomberg

independent |  Churchgoers in Alabama turned their backs on Michael Bloomberg as the billionaire former mayor of New York and presidential hopeful joined Democrats vying for the party's nomination in Selma, where memorial events have been commemorating the 55th anniversary of a landmark moment of political violence in the Civil Rights movement.

Mr Bloomberg has faced mounting criticism for a range of controversies while in office and as a company chief, from sexual harassment allegations and settlements to his continued defence for his police department's practice of racially profiling through "stop and frisk" measures, which he only publicly apologised for as he entered the presidential race.

He failed to satisfy his critics and other Democratic opponents during his first-ever debate appearance last month, when he fumbled his explanation for allowing the policy in the first place.

During a church service in Alabama on Sunday, a group of black worshippers inside the historic Brown Chapel AME Church silently stood and turned their backs on Mr Bloomberg as he delivered his remarks recognising "Bloody Sunday", when white police brutally attacked hundreds of voting rights activists marching through town at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement on 7 March 1965.

SARS-CoV2 Timeline: All Kinds of Mad Dot-Connecting in Full Effect

SARS-CoV2: What About the Children?

harvard |  LIPSITCH: One of the most important unanswered questions is what role do children play in transmission? The go-to intervention in flu pandemic planning is closing schools, and that may be very effective or it may be totally ineffective. It’s a costly and disruptive thing to do, especially in the United States, because many people rely on school breakfast and lunch for nutrition. So we really need evidence that closing schools would help. We need detailed studies in households of children who are exposed to an infected person. We need to find out if the children get infected, if they shed virus, and if that virus is infectious. The second issue that we should be trying to get ahead of is the extent of infection in communities and in places that aren’t doing extensive testing.

GAZETTE: What do we know about for sure about how children are affected by this virus?

LIPSITCH: We know that the cases of children sick enough to get tested is much lower per capita than those of adults. And we also know that, in China outside of Hubei province, the difference between children and adults is smaller. Children are still underrepresented, but they’re a larger part of the total than inside Hubei province. That would suggest that part of the equation is that they are getting infected but they’re not that sick — it’s easier to identify less-severe cases in a system that’s not overwhelmed as it is in Hubei. But we don’t know whether they’re infected and not as sick or whether there are a lot of kids that aren’t getting infected even when they’re exposed.

Broke N****s and SARS-CoV2

guardian |  Like 27.5 million other Americans, I don’t have health insurance. It’s not for a lack of trying – I make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to buy a private health insurance plan on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Since I can’t afford to see a doctor, my healthcare strategy as a 32-year-old uninsured American has been simply to sleep eight hours, eat vegetables, and get daily exercise. But now that there are confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States, the deadly virus could spread rapidly, thanks to others like me who have no feasible way to get the care we need if we start exhibiting symptoms.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are confirmed coronavirus cases in at least 50 countries on six continents, and more than 2,800 patients have died from the virus. This certainly qualifies as a pandemic under the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of the term, which, under a typical presidency, should necessitate a swift response from US health officials. However, the Trump administration appears to still be prioritizing the profit margin of the healthcare industry over preventing the spread of a deadly pandemic.

Earlier this week, the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, (a former senior executive at pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly) refused to commit to implementing price controls on a coronavirus vaccine “because we need the private sector to invest … price controls won’t get us there”. Even the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, notably didn’t use the word “free” when referring to a coronavirus vaccine, and instead used the word “affordable”. What may be considered affordable for the third-most powerful person in the US government with an estimated net worth of $16m may not be affordable for someone who can’t afford a basic private health insurance plan that still requires a patient to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket.

Given the high cost of healthcare in the US, I haven’t seen a doctor since 2013, when I visited an emergency room after being run off the road while riding my bike. After waiting for four hours, the doctor put my arm in a sling, prescribed pain medication and sent me home. That visit cost more than $4,000, and the unpaid balance eventually went to collections and still haunts my credit to this day, making it needlessly difficult to rent an apartment or buy a car. But even a low-premium bronze plan on the exchange comes with a sky-high deductible in the thousands of dollars, meaning even if I was insured, I’d have still paid for that ER visit entirely out of pocket.

Yet Another Reason Donny and Mike So Tight-Lipped About SARS-CoV2?

The acronym for the day is NDMS. Once (if?) the President declares a public health emergency, Uncle Sam is on the hook for out-of-pocket medical costs via the National Disaster Medical System. https://t.co/rVfYOf26FY pic.twitter.com/2PPwerteuQ

— Carlos Mucha (@mucha_carlos) February 29, 2020

Center for Strategic and International Studies Gamed Out SARS-CoV2 Last October

Download a locked  pdf here. Fist tap my man John. Accept no substitutes...,

Remember Americans - Body Count Doesn't Matter Until/Unless It Effects the Economy

China took and is taking massive economic hits in its drastic martial/medieval response to the SARS-CoV2 outbreak. 

China reacted to this like it was a bio-weapons attack. (not saying that it was, but we've established to an acceptable level of confidence that it was at the very least a "gain of function" accident.)

Neither wing of the one party American system is psychologically capable of conceiving the kinds of measures the situation may demand. The U.S. is grossly under prepared on any level to deal with either an objective biological threat, or, the mass hysterical infodemic threat that SARS-CoV2 has already clearly demonstrated itself to be.

Ensuring profit is the one and only goal of any response American governance is capable of mustering. So what it comes down to is this. American political leadership MUST pretend that this outbreak is nothing worse than a bad strain of the cold or flu, period. 

Now, we've already established in Washington state and in Illinois - that community spread with no known travel is underway. So it's here and it's propagating. 

Knowing America as you do, do you expect American infection rates to mirror cruise ship levels ~20% or Korean Tard levels ~80% infection rates?

If you get 50% of the population infected all at once, we're done.

We don't have the means to do bulk testing.

We have limited capacity to treat people who go past flu-like symptoms.

If you try and force everybody to stay at home you may as well just switch off the lights. The real problem - however - will be the number of poor people still well enough to crawl to work.

For tens of millions it is show up for work or sleep in the car. 

Not to mention the ones who show up for work everyday but are still forced to sleep in the car. 

If the most severe aspects of the outbreak run like wildfire through the elderly, poor, and homeless demographics - American elites will consider this an unanticipated windfall and begin proclaiming their exceptionalism. 

It would be too sweet if the rich, elderly attendees of an elite cocktail/dinner party came in contact with servant peasants infected with SARS-CoV2  and they spread it around to all the sleek party attendees.  A fair number of the rich and affluent getting sick and/or dying might shake things up a bit.

So the trick now is to try and draw out the process.

Though it will be a hard slog, if you can keep the infection rate below 5% - you may have the resources to manage care rationing and prevent more massive outbreak and economic disruption.

We shall all soon see. The chickens have surely come home to roost!

Ironically Black Death Also Arose in Hubei Thence to Iran and Italy

wired |  Nearly 750 years ago, Marco Polo famously undertook several voyages from Venice across the Mediterranean Sea, overland through Persia and Central Asia to the court of the great Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and founder of the Yuan dynasty, which presided over perhaps the largest empire in world history. The Mongols nurtured the Silk Roads of commerce that spanned the medieval world from China to Italy—until the Black Death spread along them in the same direction, wiping out nearly half the world’s population.

It is, of course, far too soon to make such dire predictions about Covid-19. But a striking overlap exists between the path of today's viral spread and the path that emerged in the 1300s. These parallels tell us something crucial about the present state of geopolitics. Trade routes and infrastructure expand imperial influence; interruptions along them heighten awareness of our vulnerabilities. If we’re smart, we respond by creating sensible frictions to avoid being dominated by a single hegemon.

The 14th-century plague is said to have originated in northwestern China, with bacteria contracted from marmots. Hebei Province bore the brunt of China’s plague fatalities, with 5 million of its residents perishing in the 1330s. Making its way westward via Silk Road merchants and caravans, the plague took several years to reach Persia, where it killed the Khan overlord Abu Said as well as half the population. In 1347, it entered Europe via Italy’s port of Genoa.

Now compare that to what we’re seeing today with Covid-19. This time around, the source of illness may have been pangolins or bats instead of marmots. It started in Wuhan, which just happens to be Hebei's capital. The coronavirus reached Iran in a couple of weeks, and so far has infected hundreds of people, even the country’s deputy health minister. Next to Iran, the next worst outbreak is in Italy, with more than 300 cases and rising quickly—and likely spreading through Europe exactly as the plague did centuries ago.

It is, perhaps no coincidence that, in the past two decades, China has been the origin of SARS, the swine flu, and now the Covid-19 coronavirus. Nor should we be surprised that Iran and Italy have emerged, once more, as waypoints for pandemic spread. What do Iran and Italy have in common today? They are two major anchors of China’s Belt and Road Initiative—also known as the 21st century’s new Silk Roads.

We Built a Chimeric Virus Encoding a Novel, Zoonotic CoV Spike Protein

I'm not a virologist and don't pretend to be. But I can read a fugging manual with the best of them, and understand what I've read. That said, slowly reread the nature paper from 2015 yourself. 

Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats¹—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo, and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV. Together, the strategy translates metagenomics data to help predict and prepare for future emergent viruses.

Shi Zhengli - you know you done f'd up...., 

Mebbe what I'm watching from other "gain of function" virologists is a poster-child instance of the Weinstein's Distributed Information Suppression Complex?

The Proximal Origin of SARS-C0V2

virological |   Since the first reports of a novel pneumonia (COVID-19) in Wuhan city, Hubei province, China there has been considerable discussion and uncertainty over the origin of the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2. Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread in China, with cases in every province. As of 14 February 2020, 64,473 such cases have been confirmed, with 1,384 deaths attributed to the virus. These official case numbers are likely an underestimate because of limited reporting of mild and asymptomatic cases, and the virus is clearly capable of efficient human-to-human transmission. Based on the possibility of spread to countries with weaker healthcare systems, the World Health Organization has declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). There are currently neither vaccines nor specific treatments for this disease.

SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh member of the Coronaviridae known to infect humans. Three of these viruses, SARS CoV-1, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2, can cause severe disease; four, HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E, are associated with mild respiratory symptoms. Herein, we review what can be deduced about the origin and early evolution of SARS-CoV-2 from the comparative analysis of available genome sequence data. In particular, we offer a perspective on the notable features in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which these features could have arisen. Importantly, this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus.

Say What?

The genomic comparison of both alpha- and betacoronaviruses (family Coronaviridae ) described below identifies two notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome: (i) based on structural modelling and early biochemical experiments, SARS-CoV-2 appears to be optimized for binding to the human ACE2 receptor; (ii) the highly variable spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2 has a polybasic (furin) cleavage site at the S1 and S2 boundary via the insertion of twelve nucleotides. Additionally, this event led to the acquisition of three predicted O-linked glycans around the polybasic cleavage site.

Almost Like It Was Optimized to Clip Tards...., (sarc)

In Daegu, 1900 Shincheonji Church members have been tested for coronavirus.

1300 had symptoms & 600 did not.

Among those 1300 with symptoms, 87.5% were confirmed with the virus .

BUT out of the 600 WITHOUT symptoms, 70% were confirmed with coronavirus.

— Laura Bicker (@BBCLBicker) February 29, 2020

Put another way:

Out of a population of 1,900
1,300 were symptomatic
600 asymptomatic

420 tested positive but asymptomatic
1,131 tested positive and symptomatic

= 1,551 infections out of 1,900 = 81%

— Jay Reynolds (@jaycreynolds) February 29, 2020

Insane attack rate

Where is this thing from

— Ani in the coronapocalypse🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@anabellebf) February 29, 2020

What a Difference a Death Day Makes...., (Community Spread/No Known Travel)

FoxNews |  "Yes, we are thinking about [the] southern border, we have received a lot of power on the southern border over the last couple of years from the courts but we are looking at that very strongly," Trump said at the press conference.

The rare appearance in the White House press briefing room came shortly after news of the first death in the United States from the new virus and a terrible week on the stock market over fears of the outbreak.

"There's no reason to panic at all. This is something that is being handled professionally," Trump assured, while also acknowledging more cases in the U.S. are "likely."

The president said there are 22 patients in the United States who have coronavirus.

"Unfortunately, one person passed away overnight," Trump said, speaking to a case in Washington state.

“She was a wonderful woman, a medically high-risk patient in her late 50s. Four others are very ill. Thankfully 15 are either recovered fully or they're well on their way to recovery. And in all cases, they've been let go in their home.”

Shortly before Trump spoke, Washington state health officials confirmed one person had died from the new virus; the first person to die from the disease in the United States. She was not infected by travel abroad, officials said.

Trump also said Saturday that most healthy people would be able to pull through should they contract coronavirus: "Additional cases in the United States are likely. But healthy individuals should be able to fully recover.”

Not Good When The Peasants Realize They're Being Bent-Over

newyork.cbslocal |  With the coronavirus outbreak affecting at least 40 countries, many travelers are concerned about what’s being done to contain the virus. At JFK Airport, jetlagged passengers typically in a rush to clear immigration are now appalled by a lack of screening, especially compared to procedures in the countries they just left.

Emily Ferrara and Blair Haworth just returned from Florence, Italy, where their study abroad program was canceled because of the virus. There are more than 300 cases there, one of the largest outbreaks outside China.

Yet, the students told CBS2’s Christina Fan they weren’t asked a single question about potential symptoms once they landed in New York City.

“We didn’t even get checked. Like we’re used to being in Florence where you get your temperature checked. Here they didn’t do anything, which is kind of crazy,” Ferrara said. “Considering, like, how much the cases have spread so fast, like, they should definitely be taking more precautions here.”

Currently, the United States is only conducting health screenings for passengers who are flying in from China.

Some, including Mayor Bill de Blasio this week, called for the screenings to be extended to flights from Italy, South Korea and Japan.

But Dr. Teresa Amato, the chair of emergency medicine at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills, says the idea may not be effective. 

“I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult given that people are infected with no symptoms and travel areas are becoming more and more widespread with the virus,” she said.

In addition to airport screenings, some passengers believe there should be more travel restrictions from countries other than China. President Donald Trump weighed in on the idea at a press conference Wednesday.

“At a right time, we might do that. Right now, it’s not the right time,” he said.

Remember This Peasants: Your Government Valued Somebody Else's Revenues/Profits Over Your Safety

SMH |  Was Australia about to put the cash flow of its universities ahead of the peoples' health in the middle of a pandemic? Was the Morrison government about to bungle the coronavirus response as badly as it did the bushfires?

As MPs and senators returned to Canberra this week for a parliamentary sitting, it was a topic of lively concern. Government members knew that the universities had been agitating behind the scenes for the China travel ban to be relaxed as soon as possible. Some 100,000 of their Chinese students are caught by the ban and the unis want them back in Australia. Paying fees.

The Chinese government had been complaining about the ban for weeks, too. Australia had been "discriminatory", according to the Chinese embassy in Canberra. In multiple meetings across the government, every week with the politicians who have let them in, China's officials have been pressing their case hard.

The travel ban was decided immediately after the US made the same call. Beijing instantly lashed both the US and Australia on that occasion – the Chinese Communist Party's official mouthpiece, People's Daily, calling it "racist".

But, of course, that decision now looks very wise, more so with each passing day. The WHO followed suit 10 days later. When Morrison announced the China travel ban four weeks ago, there were about 7000 infections disclosed by Beijing.

By Thursday this week that number had ballooned to 78,000. The number of countries announcing travel bans has grown proportionately, and mostly they have acted too late.

The political capture of the WHO means, in effect, that it's every country for itself. It also underlines the central importance of keeping politics and other extraneous pressures out of the decision-making processes on a medical matter. Likewise, China's early political cover-ups and bungling wasted precious weeks in containing the virus.

The Australian system for dealing with communicable diseases is less prone to politics. Morrison hid from the bushfires; he had no such option on the coronavirus. The Chief Medical Officer, Murphy, does not need the government's permission to invoke the Biosecurity Act. He informed Health Minister Greg Hunt on January 20 that he was triggering the act, automatically setting in train a pre-ordained process of monitoring and advice.

CCP General Chi Haotian Got Nothing on Sir Winston Churchill

greatgameindia |  For those who may not know, The Integrity Initiative is an anti-Russian propaganda outfit funded to the tune of $140 million by the British Foreign office. Throughout 2019, leaks have been released featuring documents dated to the early period of Trump’s election, demonstrating that this organization, already active across Europe promoting anti-Russian PR and smearing nationalist leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn, was intent on spreading deeply into the State Department and setting up “clusters” of anti-Trump operatives. The documents reveal high level meetings that Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly had with former Trump Advisor Sebastien Gorka, McCain Foundation director Kurt Volker, Pentagon PR guru John Rendon among many others.

The exposure of the British hand behind the scenes affords us a unique glimpse into the real historical forces undermining America’s true constitutional tradition throughout the 20^th century, as Mueller/the Five Eyes/Integrity Initiative are not new phenomena but actually follow a modus operandi set down for already more than a century. One of the biggest obstacles to seeing this modus operandi run by the British Empire is located in the belief in a mythology which has become embedded in the global psyche for over half a century and which we should do our best to free ourselves of.

Myth of the “American Empire

While there has been a long-standing narrative promoted for over 70 years that the British Empire disappeared after World War II having been replaced by the “American Empire”, it is the furthest thing from the truth. America, as constitutionally represented by its greatest presidents (who can unfortunately be identified by their early deaths while serving in office), were never colonialist and were always in favor of reining in British Institutions at home while fighting British colonial thinking abroad.

Franklin Roosevelt’s thirteen year-long battle with the Deep State, which he referred to as the “economic royalists who should have left America in 1776″, was defined in clear terms by his patriotic Vice-President Henry Wallace who warned of the emergence of a new Anglo-American fascism in 1944 when he said:

“Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”

The fact is that already in 1944, a policy of Anglo-Saxon imperialism had been promoted subversively by British-run think tanks known as the Round Table Movement and Fabian Society, and the seeds had already been laid for the anti-Russian cold war by those British-run American fascists. It is not a coincidence that this fascist Cold War policy was announced in a March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri by none other than Round Table-follower and the butcher of Bengal, Winston Churchill.