December 10, 2020 - 11:56am
The New York Times recently reported that, in the early months of the pandemic, a particular genetic strain of Covid-19 known as D14G was shown to be more prevalent in Italy than any Asian countries. This may have helped explain why the disease spread so fast in that country, and elsewhere in Europe and America.
Freddie Sayers spoke to David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona, who has been investigating this idea. His view is that there is now “really compelling evidence” that this strain replicates faster than earlier strains, which “likely” came out of China and through to Europe. “It’s really quickly dominated all of the other strains that were seen in Europe at the time, it became the predominant strain that came into the Americas, spread throughout the United States and is now spread to pretty much every corner of the planet”.
In his own state of Arizona, Engelthaler witnessed several of the early introductions to Arizona, coming from the Pacific coast straight from China, but fizzled out quickly, with less effective transmission. “And then all of a sudden we started having explosive outbreaks. When we go back and look genomically, the vast majority of those cases where we had very large outbreaks were being driven by the strains that were coming from the East Coast out of Europe, which all seemed to have this particular mutation in the spike protein.”
This doesn’t mean that the mutation is more deadly, simply that it may be more faster at transmitting, and therefore it harder to “get our arms around the virus”. As such, Engelthaler argues that trying to eliminate the virus was not the right approach and instead we should have been trying to slow its spread: “What we’re really seeing is a SARS-like infection that spreads like the common cold. And with there’s no way that we could put in mitigation strategies to stop the common cold”.
So were uniform national lockdowns the right solution with this newer mutation that potentially spread more effectively? “As an epidemiologist I think they have has just been devastating in a way that we haven’t even properly appropriately characterised yet”. He says that the “vast majority” of at-risk people “could have been prevented if the focus was on protecting them, rather than on trying to prevent any spread of this virus, which is pretty much is un-containable”.
Engelthaler is also one of the few epidemiologists to have publicly spoken out against school closures, for which there is “no scientific evidence”. “Privately, behind closed doors, there’s definitely been a lot of discussion from the very beginning that there’s no scientific evidence that shutting down schools actually helps to stop a pandemic…Epidemiologists knew that from the beginning, but that was not a popular opinion to take publicly and seems to have been kind of left to the side”.
Ultimately, Engelthaler believes that human agency in the midst of a pandemic has been overemphasised: “I do think that one thing that does seem to get lost in all of this is that there’s a really important factor in this pandemic, and it’s the virus, it’s not just people’s policies and people’s behaviours”. That is especially true when there are “different strains that are acting differently in different parts of the world, leading to different outcomes, at least in some part because of that virus, not just based off of public policies in response, no matter what you do”.
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SubscribeSo in effect then , Covid is behaving like a very bad flu and, as with the flu ‘family’ will need to be fought every year with vaccines for the vulnerable plus anyone else who so chooses. So the collateral damage of the lockdowns – especially the economic ones- is going to cause major global deaths and hardship and was way out of proportion and should have been much more focussed on protecting the vulnerable and taking reasonable measures to contain the spread whilst maintaining societal functioning. IE just as many ‘other’ experts were saying 6plus months ago – but did not get a fair hearing. Every year many sick/elderly have to get through the flu/pneumonia season and it appears that the Covid season has joined this struggle – but isnt this just part of life ?? Why are we soooo freaked out by death per se – when 1% of the population dies every year ie 80,000,000 per annum. I would bet that most people would be shocked to know that (obvious) statistic and probably believe that not much actual ‘death’ even happens. I think we are living in a era of profound ignorance and profound lack of any spiritual (in the broadest sense) endeavour – and are therefore fated to panic rather easily – and to therefore make unwise decisions that function to make our situation WORSE.
I think you are probably right but we only know this in hindsight.
Ridiculous that a virus that kills such a small percentage of the population breeds this sort of “new normal forever” narrative.
NO to this pharmaceutical authoritarianism. We choose to NOT pursue this dystopia!
It’s all about the jab! Of course this is this guest’s perspective but not everyone will be taking it. Right to choose needs to stay in place.
Great interview…….as usual.
Mainstream media turns people into panicking idiots
Finally someone speaks up, one might be tempted to say, except that it seems a bit late…
Suspicion that the opportunity for containment had already past was already brought up by experts in January, an example from a rapid online search https://www.statnews.com/20… .
Next step ‘delay to gain time’ was met by a mix of corruption, negligence in respect to pandemic preparedness and sheer incompetence, if there is only an inkling of truth in a report aired by the Italian TV RAI 3 (at https://www.youtube.com/wat…, which might well explain the devastating impact observed in Italy.
From there ‘contagion’ of the absurd measures, – yes, talking about lockdown and bringing the economy to a standstill -, to other countries was almost immediate, and set the world on the way to a real catastrophe.
No pretence from my side of being an ‘expert’. Nevertheless I have had enough immersion as a medical resource person in the organisation, for which I was working, in discussions about WHO’s pandemic plan (issued in 2005) and about ‘business continuity’ during some 2-3 years after publication of the pandemic plan to still remember a thing or two.
I was left speechless when observing how the pandemic was (mis-)handled!
Summing up cryptically what I had learned during the mentioned discussions, one, forget about containing a virus when it has already managed to spread to several regions and a multitude of countries in an almost unnoticed manner, two, be ready to resist to calls for border closures, to bring everyday life to a standstill and what not, because it will cause more damage than it will do good.
It was not for nothing that WHO’s pandemic plan had as the overarching goal for the pandemic period, phase 6 “Minimise the impact of the pandemic”, and this included, besides “minimising morbidity and mortality, preserving health-care effectiveness, MINIMISE SOCIAL DISRUPTION and MINIMISE THE ECONOMIC IMPACT of a pandemic”.
Let me end my comment by adding an illustrative quote from a recently published report analysing the fallout of the pandemic response “Polypandemic – Special Edition of the Munich Security Report on Development, Fragility, and Conflict in the Era of Covid-19″ (https://securityconference…. ) : “In this regard, wealthier states’ pandemic responses are a continuation of a pre-pandemic trend: one of underinvestment in the safety and well-being of the world’s most vulnerable places. “
We do not identify a single recurrent mutation in this set convincingly associated with increased viral transmission. Instead, recurrent mutations currently in circulation appear to be evolutionary neutral and primarily induced by the human immune system via RNA editing, rather than being signatures of adaptation. At this stage we find no evidence for significantly more transmissible lineages of SARS-CoV-2 due to recurrent mutations.
https://www.nature.com/arti…
Perhaps Freddy could put this to his interviewee as it could be an important rebuttal. The Nature article is highly technical and even goes into the specific case of the 614G mutation. I get the impression that the negative conclusion about transmissible lineages rests on a somewhat malleable choice of a categorisation process suggesting that a different result could be obtained with a different statistical scheme.
Right. But Yurkovetskiy et al. showed a strong case for the structural effects of this mutation in allowing for more binding at the level of ACE2 receptors on host cells (https://www.sciencedirect.c…. Also, almost 100% of 614G are also concurrent with another mutation (P323L) in nsp12/RdRp, a mutation which probably alters viral amplification. It is unfortunate that none of this was discussed in this interview or the NYT article.
Another critical argument that was missing is the trade-off between transmissibility and virulence, i.e. a virus that spreads quickly need not evolve to be more virulent. CoVs are also not so efficient in mutating, compared to influenza. Remember, WHO announced 10% of world population was infected early October (based on seroprevalence data), a figure 20x higher than confirmed PCR tests. So yes, it is too late to contain SARS-CoV-2, it was always too late – hence the pan-demic.
If everyone can get access to the vaccine and then choose if they want live with or eliminate(largely) the covid risk, surely it is that individuals choice. No risk is hardly ever 100% eliminated. We need to live with some risks. This Engelthaler guy seem to suggest that society should seek to eliminate this risk somehow. Why? At stage it must be more important thing for governments to focus on than reducing a tiny amount of covid deaths to an even tinier amount. As always, lack of perspective…..
As one who has been seriously flooded and then reflooded, you can slow it, you can temporarily divert it, but you can’t stay dry when the dark rains come. Maybe we’re entering a new age of pandemics. Let’s recognize this one was just a passing thunder cloud that happily inoculates against what is yet to come
No, just a new age of even more corrupted “science” as per book Experts Catastrophe.
I’m not sure what Engelthaler means by “What we’re really seeing is a SARS-like infection,” but SARS-CoV-1 & 2 infections have some crucial differences. S-C-1 infections were infectious for just a few hours before the onset of severe symptoms, while S-C-2 has many asymptomatic infections that can still be infectious, along with a pretty protracted incubation period for those with symptoms.
Fascinating. This lends a possible explanation to the peculiarly un-virulent spread through various west coast USA areas, which I noted back in April, first cases in January – a few deaths in Feb, no lockdowns etc until March but it didn’t take off and the lockdown when it came was after the initial impact. What the numbers indicated then was that there were unaccounted for factors which were unknown. It seems the first genetic strain is what hit at the beginning of the year and the other what’s running through now. Note that even if this is an explanatory factor, it may not be the only one that we’re missing.
PS: Still not enough focus on immune systems and protecting people through a sustained public health initiative.
Pleased that public information has finally caught up with what was revealed (in august) regarding outdoors and ventilation
How does China version of CV19 mutated to totaly different Italian just in few months?
Or they both evolved in bat?
How does Wuhan market virus become skiers virus in Bergamo? No direct flights, no Asian skyiers there.
Any investigations on bioterrorism?