Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

IBM’s Watson Leading the Super Computer Charge on COVID-19

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Most missed the Trump White House announcement that on March 11th, the leaders of several tech companies met with the Trump team to discuss ways that super computers can process and speed up solutions for eradicating COVID-19 with treatment discoveries. On tap for the meeting, Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft. The White House Chief Technology Officer, Michael Kratsios also enlisted the help of NASA, IBM, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy, Argonne National Lab, Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Los Alamos National Laboratory, The National Science Foundation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and several others.

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium will bring significant computing power, 16 systems with over 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, and 34,000 GPUs to help researchers understand COVID-19 potential treatments and cures. “These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling,” Dario Gil, director of IBM Research said in the announcement. “These experiments would take years to complete if worked by hand, or months if handled on slower, traditional computing platforms.”

“Since the start of COVID-19 pandemic we have been working closely with governments in the US and worldwide to find all available options to put our technology and expertise to work to help organizations be resilient and adapt to the consequences of the pandemic, and to accelerate the process of discovery and enable the scientific and medical community to develop treatments and ultimately a cure,” Gil said.

Powerful supercomputer and training program, IBM’s Summit, previously enabled researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee to screen nearly 8,000 compounds to uncover, which are most likely to bind to the main “spike” of the coronavirus, making it unable to reproduce and infect other cells.

The organizations were able to recommend 77 promising small-molecule drug compounds that could be experimentally tested.  IBM will continue to work with different partners to evaluate proposals and provide access to supercomputing capacity to tackle to global pandemic.

“I am proud to be working with my IBM colleagues and the extended scientific community to help kick-start this effort. What began just two days ago with one conversation with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has solidified quickly into an unprecedented effort that can make a real difference,” Gil stressed.

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The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (one member of the consortium) is using its supercomputers to look for compounds already on the market that might foil the virus.

Oak Ridge’s approach involves what’s called computational structure-based drug discovery. Basically, that means they use a computer to calculate how drugs might work against germs like viruses.

Why Hoarding Of Hydroxychloroquine Needs To Stop

“We could get these calculations done in one day on the supercomputer, whereas a normal computer, it would take a month,” says Jeremy Smith, director of the Center for Molecular biophysics at Oak Ridge.

To run the calculations, you need to know the physical properties of the proteins a virus makes — what they’re made of and what their shape is.

One key viral protein of the coronavirus is called the spike protein. Information about what it looks like came out in mid-January, so Smith asked people in his lab if they wanted to start looking through databases of existing drugs that would block it.

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Summit, IBM’s supercomputer equipped with the “brain of AI,” ran thousands of simulations to analyze which drug compounds might effectively stop the virus from infecting host cells.
The supercomputer identified 77 of them. It’s a promising step toward creating the most effective treatment.
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory published their findings in the journal ChemRxiv.

Summit was built to solve the world’s problems

Summit was commissioned by the US Department of Energy in 2014 for the purpose it’s serving now — solving the world’s problems.
It’s got the power of 200 petaflops, which means it has the computing speed of 200 quadrillion calculations per second, aka: It’s 1 million times more powerful than the fastest laptop.Summit, the world's most powerful supercomputer, modeled how different drug compounds might prevent the coronavirus from spreading to other cells.

Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, modeled how different drug compounds might prevent the coronavirus from spreading to other cells.
At its station in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Summit has identified patterns in cellular systems that precede Alzheimer’s, analyzed genes that contribute to traits like opioid addiction and predicted extreme weather based on climate simulations.

How Summit fights coronavirus

Viruses infect host cells by injecting them with a “spike” of genetic material. Summit’s job is to find drug compounds that could bind to that spike and potentially stop the spread.
Here's a list of articles explaining the coronavirus pandemic

Here’s a list of articles explaining the coronavirus pandemic
Oak Ridge researcher Micholas Smith created a model of the coronavirus spike based on research published in January. With Summit, he simulated how the atoms and particles in the viral protein would react to different compounds.
The supercomputer ran simulations of over 8,000 compounds that could bind to the spike protein of the virus, which could limit its ability to spread to host cells. Summit identified 77 of them and ranked them based on how likely they were to bind to the spike.

What’s next

The team will run the simulations on Summit again, using a more accurate model of the coronavirus’ spike that was published this month.Why these volunteers chose to participate in a coronavirus vaccine trial

More here.
Hat tip to the Trump White House

 

(PanCAP)SynchronizationMatrix-COVID-19 Plan

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The Defense Production Act. Read it here.

The president invoked the act Wednesday during a White House news briefing with members of the Coronavirus Task Force.

“It can do a lot of good things if we need it,” the president told reporters.

Image result for defense production act source

 

The 1950 act was periodically used during both the Korean War and throughout the Cold War, and was last invoked in June 2017 by Trump to provide technology in the space industrial base.

This is not about what the Federal government can provide, but rather the Federal government authorizing and hiring private business to produce products and service to fulfill the needs for the good of the nation. That is where innovation and capitalism works.

President Trump is pulling all the levers of government and plowing his way through regulations and bureaucracy. It is big and messy mostly because of Obamacare which installed 23000 pages of regulations. The PANCAP plan is found here in full. Additional levers are being created to stop the economic and financial damage the the nation.

Meanwhile, media has attacked President Trump for using the term ‘China virus’ and he defended that use, rightly so. The medical community uses several variations of the same phrase. It is about China and has been for decades. World leaders have challenged China for countless years over their reckless laws and lack of food, people, animal and health protections. I have seen it personally myself being in mainland China many years ago. I visited those wet markets where the food supply and lack of safety is not only disgusting but deadly. Truth be told, trafficking and breeding animals for food in China is estimated to be a $76 billion industry.

For perspective, this short video is a must watch.

Relations between the West and China has taken on a new attitude and approach and rightly so. The discussions should begin with China paying trillions in reparations to nations affected by not only the Covid-19 virus but even previous virus outbreaks as well. China holds an estimated $1.7 trillion of U.S. debt. China should forgive that debt today.

From an article written by Michael Auslin in part mentions:

Those concerned with global health issues may wonder why it is that China is wracked regularly by viral epidemics in addition to coronavirus, such as SARS, African Swine Fever, and avian flu (another outbreak is happening right now). Others may begin to look more carefully at China’s environmental devastation and the hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year from air and water pollution.

On the trade side, many foreign corporations already have been reconsidering their operations in China, due to rampant intellectual property theft and rising production costs; now, they may seriously question how safe it is to continue to do business in China. Not only is the health of their employees at risk, but they no longer can be assured that China will be a stable supplier. If coronavirus becomes a seasonal phenomenon, as some experts predict, then even with a vaccine, new strains of the pathogen will always raise the specter of another out-of-control epidemic overwhelming the party-state’s capabilities and infecting the rest of the world.

China has a plan to be the world’s dominant power, what better way to achieve that mission than to infect the globe with a pandemic causing financial collapse? To prevent the China mission, Western nations must reassert nationalism including manufacturing and install policy that never allows vulnerabilities to health and national security, this includes 5G. China and Russia cannot be allowed to win much less have any kind of advantage over other nations.

U.S. citizens are very crafty, innovative and resourceful and given these skills and spirit, this will pass quickly.

 

First Covid-19 Vaccine code-named mRNA-1273 Shot Given

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At a news conference, President Donald Trump praised how quickly the research had progressed. Fauci noted that 65 days have passed since Chinese scientists shared the virus’ genetic sequence. He said he believed that was a record for developing a vaccine to test.

Seattle: This vaccine candidate, code-named mRNA-1273, was developed by the NIH and Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected because the shots do not contain the coronavirus itself.

It’s not the only potential vaccine in the pipeline. Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine against COVID-19. Another candidate, made by Inovio Pharmaceuticals, is expected to begin its own safety study next month in the U.S., China and South Korea.

The Seattle experiment got underway days after the World Health Organization declared the new virus outbreak a pandemic because of its rapid global spread, which has infected more than 169,000 people and killed more than 6,500. AP reporter(s) witnessed the first human trial on Monday.

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Other medical procedures are underway in hundreds of forms to combat the Covid-19 outbreak.

A very old drug developed by a scientist in 1934 for Bayer discovered chloroquine for malaria. It was widely used during World War ll and has been extensively used for SARS with excellent results. Its history goes back to Peru (South America), where the indigenous people extracted the bark of the Cinchona trees and used the extract (Chinchona officinalis) to fight chills and fever in the seventeenth century. In 1633 this herbal medicine was introduced in Europe, where it was given the same use and also began to be used against malaria.

We report on chloroquine, a 4-amino-quinoline, as an effective inhibitor of the replication of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in vitro. Chloroquine is a clinically approved drug effective against malaria.

It was reported a few weeks ago that officials in China were not cooperating with other nations at the outset of Covid-19. That is only partially true. The U.S. has collaborated with scientists and medical experts in China since SARS and continues to do so with very positive results.

Data from the drug’s studies showed ‘certain curative effect’ with ‘fairly good efficacy’.

According to Sun, patients treated with chloroquine demonstrated a better drop in fever, improvement of lung CT images, and required a shorter time to recover compared to parallel groups.

The percentage of patients with negative viral nucleic acid tests was also higher with the anti-malarial drug.

Chloroquine has so far showed no obvious serious adverse reactions in the more than 100 participants in the trials.

The China National Center for Biotechnology Development head Zhang Xinmin said that chloroquine is one of the three drugs that have a promising profile against the new coronavirus, reported China Daily.

The remaining two drugs are anti-flu medicine favipiravir and Gilead’s investigational anti-viral candidate remdesivir.

Favipiravir is currently in a 70-patient trial in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, while remdesivir is under evaluation at more than ten medical institutions in Wuhan.

In trials conducted in China, chloroquine appears to be useful for coronavirus disease 2019. Another form is Hydroxychloroquine.

Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate (Watson Laboratories, Inc ...

Hydroxychloroquine is also presecribed for HIV, arthritis as well as advanced malaria and strains of coronavirus. It is a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD).It regulates the activity of the immune system, which may be overactive in some conditions.

A small 40 cents, that is $.40 a dose to make and is generally sold for $5.00 per dose.

 

China Says Immoral of US Officials to Blame China for Virus

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FNC: If you listened to Chinese state-run media, you’d think President Trump went to China and released vials of COVID-19 on groups of unsuspecting men, women and children.

Beijing has been bending over backward trying to convince the world that the United States is the real culprit behind the quickly spreading virus that’s already claimed more than 4,600 lives across the globe.

It’s a high-stakes strategy for the Asian nation fighting to keep its superpower status amid a national lockdown and palpable anger over claims that Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus, at first covered it up, triggering a worldwide health and economic crisis.

The Chinese government has already published a book in English — with translations in the works in French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic — touting its handling of the deadly disease.

“A Battle Against Epidemic: China Combatting COVID-19 in 2020” is a mishmash of glowing state media reports on the accomplishments of President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party and the dominance of the Chinese system in fighting the crisis.

biosafety-level-IV (P4) opened in 2017 in Wuhan

At best, China’s aggressive new campaign can be chalked up to ambitious propaganda.  At its worst, it’s a reckless display from a country that has actively misled the world while working overtime to save its own skin, foreign affairs expert Gordon G. Chang told Fox News.

Chang believes Beijing has been laying the groundwork for a PR attack against the United States for more than a month, first by throwing doubt on the origin of COVID-19 and second, by slamming America’s handling of previous diseases like the swine flu, which decimated China’s pork industry.

On Sunday, Lin Songtian, China’s ambassador to South Africa, said: “Although the epidemic first broke out in China, it did not necessarily mean that the virus is originated from China, let alone ‘made in China.’

 

Vague and misleading statements like the one from Lin are ripped right out of China’s propaganda playbook and attempt to sow doubt about the global crisis.

Chinese officials have also pushed back on the expression “Wuhan coronavirus” — saying the name used frequently by U.S. conservative commentators unfairly stigmatizes the world’s most populous country.

Chang said it’s just another tactic in China’s playbook, carefully choreographed to make Americans look petty and racist.

“This an all-out assault on the United States,” Chang said.

In December, when the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, many media around the world began referring to it as the “Wuhan virus.” But last month, the World Health Organization renamed the illness COVID-19 so as not to link it to a specific location or group of people.

The name change didn’t stop some, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who blew past warnings and deliberately referred to it as the “Wuhan virus” after China’s foreign ministry called it “highly irresponsible” to do so.

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, went even further Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien said at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington. “There’s lots of open-source reporting from China, from Chinese nationals, that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation, or that sort of thing, so that the word of this virus could not get out. It probably cost the world community two months.”

O’Brien said if experts would have had those two months to get ahead of the spread of the virus, “I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what’s now happening across the world.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the Communist Party is pointing the finger at the U.S. so it can dampen discontent back home.

“The Chinese military portal Xilu.com recently published an article baselessly claiming that the virus is ‘a biochemical weapon produced by the U.S. to target China,’” Rubio said.

Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, has frequently used the term “Wuhan virus” on the Senate floor.

Earlier this week, several social media users took House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to task when he referred to it as “the Chinese coronavirus.”

Instead of backing down, Chang believes officials should keep calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” and push back on accusations of racism.

“This isn’t a Republican thing. We all need to unite and for people to say, ‘this is racist’ is irresponsible,” Chang said. “There is no race known as Wuhanese.”

Chang also said calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” keeps pressure on the Chinese government and forces it to be held accountable by the rest of the world for its initial response to the global crisis, which was widely regarded as abysmal.

China, though, is using everything in its arsenal to paint itself as a global hero, rewriting history and going so far as to demand a thank you for containing the virus as long as it did.

“We should say righteously that the U.S. owes China an apology, the world owes China a thank you,” an editorial on state news agency Xinhua read.

Also peculiar is that Beijing — which is normally quick to censor news — has refused to step in as a wave of anti-American conspiracy theories flood the internet. Among the rumors is that the U.S. created the coronavirus to make China look bad as well as one that accuses the government of covering up thousands of deaths by classifying them as the regular flu.

“It’s more than just some disinformation or an official narrative,” Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Schools of Information, told The Washington Post. “It’s an orchestrated, all-out campaign by the Chinese government through every channel at a level you rarely see. It’s a counteroffensive.”

Govt Report on Prevention of Nationwide Cyber Catastrophe

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A good first step for sure, however there needs to be a government-wide decision on cyber attacks being an act of war and how to respond.

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The Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s proposes a strategy of layered cyber deterrence. Our report consists of over 80 recommendations to implement the strategy. These recommendations are organized into 6 pillars:
  1. Reform the U.S. Government’s Structure and Organization for Cyberspace.
  2. Strengthen Norms and Non-Military Tools.
  3. Promote National Resilience.
  4. Reshape the Cyber Ecosystem.
  5. Operationalize Cybersecurity Collaboration with the Private Sector.
  6. Preserve and Employ the Military Instrument of National Power.

Click here to download the full report.

A much-anticipated government report aimed at defending the nation against cyber threats in the years to come opens with a bleak preview of what could happen if critical systems were brought down.

“The water in the Potomac still has that red tint from where the treatment plants upstream were hacked, their automated systems tricked into flushing out the wrong mix of chemicals,” the Cyberspace Solarium Commission wrote in the opening lines of its report.

“By comparison, the water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has a purple glint to it. They’ve pumped out the floodwaters that covered Washington’s low-lying areas after the region’s reservoirs were hit in a cascade of sensor hacks,” it continues.

So begins the report two years in the making from a congressionally mandated commission made up of lawmakers and top Trump administration officials, pointing to the vulnerabilities involved with critical systems being hooked up to the internet.

The report, which includes more than 75 recommendations for how to prevent the cyber doomsday it spells out, and the commission that made it were both mandated by the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The commissioners, who include co-chairmen Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), highlight a range of issues to address, but zero in on election security as “priority.”

“The American people still do not have the assurance that our election systems are secure from foreign manipulation,” King and Gallagher wrote in the report. “If we don’t get election security right, deterrence will fail and future generations will look back with longing and regret on the once powerful American Republic and wonder how we screwed the whole thing up.”

The focus on shoring up election security, and the agreed-upon recommendations for how to do this, sets the report apart from the approach to the subject on Capitol Hill, where it has been a major issue of contention between Republicans and Democrats since Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Beyond election security, the commissioners call for overarching government reform to address cyber vulnerabilities. Chief among these is calling on the White House to issue an updated national strategy to address cyber threats and to establish a national cybersecurity director position to coordinate efforts.

In terms of congressional action, commissioners recommend that Congress create cybersecurity committees in both the House and Senate, establish a Bureau of Cybersecurity Statistics, and establish an assistant secretary position at the State Department to lead international efforts around cybersecurity.

“While cyberspace has transformed the American economy and society, the government has not kept up,” commissioners wrote in calling for reforms.

The commission also zeroed in on “imposing costs” to adversaries who attempt to attack the U.S. online. In order to do so, it recommended that the Department of Defense conduct vulnerability assessments of its weapons systems, including nuclear control systems, and that it make cybersecurity preparedness a necessity.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber agency, would be empowered as the “lead agency” at the federal level.

The report’s recommendations were debated on and pinpointed by a group of high-ranking commissioners who also included FBI Director Christopher Wray, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist, Transportation Security Administration Administrator David Pekoske, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and Rep. James Langevin (D-R.I.).

Langevin said in a statement on Wednesday that the report is intended to shore up the nation’s cyber “resiliency for years to come.”

“Our charge in drafting this report was to prevent a cyber event of significant national consequence, and we know that the short- and long-term recommendations we crafted will better position us to realize the promise of the Internet, while avoiding its perils,” Langevin said. “The sooner our recommendations are implemented, the better positioned the country will be to prevent and respond to incidents that can disrupt the American way of life.”

The report’s recommendations may soon have real-world consequences on Capitol Hill.

Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee’s cyber panel, told The Hill this week that there “definitely will be some legislation” stemming from the report’s recommendations, and that hearings would likely be held.

Katko noted that he had talked with Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) about the Senate also taking action around the report.

“This report screams of the need for bipartisan action on this, and I hope that we can leave the politics out of it, and I hope we can attack these problems quickly and effectively,” Katko said.

Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), the cyber subcommittee’s chairman, opened a hearing on Wednesday by praising the report’s recommendations and saying he looked forward to working to “codifying” the ideas alongside House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.).

Industry groups also reacted positively to the report’s recommendations. Tom Gann, the chief public policy officer of cybersecurity firm McAfee, told The Hill in a statement that he agreed with most of the report’s findings and hoped that they are “acted upon with speed.”

Protect Our Power, a nonprofit with the goal of protecting the electric grid, also praised the report.

“These are compelling recommendations, echoing issues we have highlighted for several years now, and action is long overdue,” Jim Cunningham, executive director of the group, said in a statement. “Without a reliable supply of electricity before, during and following a disabling cyberattack, none of our critical infrastructure can function.”

While there may be legislative action soon – and praise from industry groups – both Gallagher and King emphasized in the report that their main aim was for it to open the eyes of Americans to the dangers posed by cyberattacks on critical systems.

“The status quo is inviting attacks on America every second of every day,” the co-chairmen wrote. “We all want that to stop. So please do us, and your fellow Americans, a favor. Read this report and then demand that your government and the private sector act with speed and agility to secure our cyber future.”