DNI/Grenell Gives Adam Schiff Ultimatum

Posted on May 6, 2020May 6, 2020 by Denise Simon

Hey Adam….the transcripts are ready….are you? Release the documents.

Transcripts of closed-door interviews from Russia probe ... source

EXCLUSIVE — DNI TO SCHIFF: THE TRANSCRIPTS ARE READY TO RELEASE. A big development in the fight over 53 secret interviews the House Intelligence Committee conducted during its Trump-Russia investigation. Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has sent a letter to chairman Adam Schiff notifying him that transcripts of all 53 interviews, over 6,000 pages in all, have been cleared for public release. “All of the transcripts, with our required redactions, can be released to the public without any concerns of disclosing classified material,” Grenell wrote to Schiff in a letter dated May 4.

The Intel Committee did the first probe into Russia’s 2016 campaign interference and allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. Even today, its findings make up most of what we know about the affair. As part of that investigation — it was run by then-majority Republicans — the committee interviewed some key witnesses in the Trump-Russia matter: Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Michael Cohen, Hope Hicks, and many more.

The interviews were conducted in secret. But by September 2018, with the committee’s report long finished and made public, the Republicans who still controlled the committee decided the interview transcripts should be released to the public. In a rare moment of comity, Democrats agreed, and on September 26, 2018, the committee voted unanimously to release the transcripts. But there was a catch: The documents would have to first be checked for classified information by the Intelligence Community. So off they went to the IC — never to be seen again.

Now, in May 2020, they’re still secret. Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal editorial board reported that the IC had finished its review of 43 of the transcripts, but Schiff was refusing to release them. The paper said Schiff was also preventing declassification of the remaining ten transcripts.

In the letter, Grenell revealed that the 43 transcripts have been finished since June 2019. Schiff has been sitting on them all that time. Grenell said the final ten have just been finished as well. “I urge you to honor your previous public statements, and your committee’s unanimous vote on this matter, to release all 53 cleared transcripts to Members of Congress and the American public as soon as possible,” Grenell said. Just in case Schiff is still not interested, Grenell added, “I am also willing to release the transcripts directly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as to ensure we comply with the unanimous and bipartisan vote to release the transcripts.”

One more thing. In March 2019 — that was when Democrats were newly in charge of the House and considering impeaching President Trump over the Russia matter — Schiff requested that the DNI “under no circumstances…share House Intelligence Committee transcripts with the White House, President Trump, or any persons associated with the White House or President.” Some Republicans viewed that as a dubious request, since some of the witnesses came from the White House. Nevertheless, Grenell complied. “Pursuant to your guidance, these transcripts have not been shared with the White House,” he wrote to Schiff.

The next move is up to Schiff. The chairman has shown no hesitation to keep secrets even when they involve non-classified information of great national interest. For example, Schiff is still concealing the committee’s impeachment inquiry interview with Michael Atkinson, at the time the Intelligence Community Inspector General, in the Ukraine matter. As for the Trump-Russia interviews, Republicans remember when Schiff claimed he had “direct evidence” of collusion — a charge special counsel Robert Mueller was never able to establish. Some GOP lawmakers believe the transcripts will help show that Schiff was making it up all along. It’s time for the public to learn that, too.

***

When Schiff continues to lie —> update: Schiff is moving to release them but not without trying to place blame.

Schiff accused the White House of “hijacking” the process during an interview with Politico in September. The outlet reported at the time that “Schiff still intends to release the bulk of the Russia transcripts in the near future.” Nearly a year later, he had not done so.

“All of the transcripts, with required redactions can be released to the public without any concerns of disclosing classified material,” Grenell’s letter said. “In the interests of transparency and accountability, I urge you to honor your previous public statements, and your Committee’s unanimous vote on this matter, to release all 53 cleared transcripts to all Members of Congress and the American public as soon as possible.”

The acting spy chief added: “I am also willing to release the transcripts directly from the ODNI, as to ensure we comply with the unanimous and bipartisan vote to release the transcripts.”

The declassification process by the ODNI was expected to take just a few weeks or months. Nearly two years later, GOP lawmakers and Trump administration officials blamed Schiff for the delay.

“Adam Schiff is thwarting the will of the House Intelligence Committee as expressed in the bipartisan vote in September 2018 to make these transcripts public,” one senior intelligence official told the Washington Examiner late last month. “He has appointed himself arbiter of what the public should see and has refused to allow the White House to review its own equities, making declassification of 10 of the transcripts impossible. It’s difficult to imagine any motive other than Schiff is still trying to control the narrative on Russia collusion.”

Schiff’s spokesperson said Wednesday, “We are now reviewing the proposed redactions from ODNI based on classification, law enforcement sensitivity, or items ODNI requests be for official-use only.” The official also cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the redactions, claiming that, “given the overtly political role now played by the Acting DNI, including the leak of his letter, this committee and the public can have little confidence that his determinations are made on the merits.”

The spokesperson added: “Our review of ODNI’s newly proposed redactions will be as expeditious as possible given the constraints of the pandemic, and we look forward to releasing these transcripts, which relate to misconduct by the Trump campaign and the president himself.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report, released in April 2019, said his investigation found the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but that it “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, 27 GOP lawmakers said in a Tuesday letter that the delay was Schiff’s fault.

“We understand now that Chairman Schiff is blocking the release of these transcripts. This news, if accurate, is disturbing — especially in light of Chairman Schiff’s cries in 2019 for transparency regarding allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia,” the congressmen said.

The 10 transcripts that Schiff successfully blocked the White House from viewing are from interviews of Trump son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, former chief executive for the Trump campaign Steve Bannon, former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, former White House deputy assistant Keith Schiller, and Mary McCord, a former assistant attorney general for national security who was involved in the FBI’s Russia investigation.

Among the 43 other witness interviews was testimony by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Donald Trump Jr., White House adviser Hope Hicks, longtime Trump friend and recently convicted “fixer” Roger Stone, former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Perkins Coie lawyers Michael Sussman, a former DOJ lawyer who passed along alleged details about Russian interference to former FBI general counsel James Baker, and Marc Elias, the chairman who was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel and who hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the campaign, were also among them.

A Deeper Dive on the World Health Organization

Posted on April 15, 2020April 15, 2020 by Denise Simon

Hold on…it is gonna be a rough ride….President Trump must not only investigate but for sure suspend funding….the reasons go way beyond the recent scandalous headlines.

Given the tight relationship between Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the Director and the Chinese Communist Party, it is a certainty that WHO is in possession of the report noted below:

Chinese researchers initially pointed to the possibility of a lab accident in a study published in February on ResearchGate. “The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan,” wrote researchers — although they also raised the possibility of natural transmission. “Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories,” continued Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao of Guangxhou’s South China University of Technology.

and then there is this –> The possibility that the virus leaked during a lab accident “is being seriously considered” within the U.S. government, according to another recently retired senior national security official, who pointed to the State Department’s 2019 compliance report on arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament. The report notes that Chinese officials have failed to reassure inspectors they are obeying the Biological Weapons Convention, including by not providing information about research on “numerous toxins with potential dual-use application.” More here.

From my friend Adam Andrzejewski with his Forbes piece on funding the WHO…the money that flowed in recent years to WHO is remarkable.

With his recent vow to halt and reassess all aid to the World Health Organization (WHO), President Trump legitimized critics who allege that the agency shielded information from the world about the lethality of the coronavirus and its ability to spread by human-to-human contact.

The WHO delegation highly appreciated the actions China has implemented in response to the outbreak, its speed in identifying the virus and openness to sharing information with WHO and other countries.

World Health Organization | January 28, 2020 | Beijing

The most likely presidential policy response will be to re-purpose all or most federal money from the WHO. If done in this manner, the president must notify Congress, but has the executive power to reallocate the monies to other organizations. Therefore, legitimate programs will continue to help humanity.

Responding to our request for comment, the White House, Office of Management and Budget provided a fact sheet detailing the WHO’s “corruption and abuse.”

The W.H.O. really blew it. We will be giving that a good look.

President Donald J. Trump

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed all disclosed grants by federal agencies to the WHO since 2010 and found that $3.5 billion in taxpayer money funded the WHO during this period.

What’s more, only $611.1 million of that funding came from “assessed dues” required by participating countries. The U.S. government voluntarily sent the WHO roughly $2.9 billion more than their required contribution. It’s no surprise that, annually, the United States is the largest funder of the WHO.

We also found that federal funding of the WHO remained strong during the Trump era. We compared the first three years of the Trump administration (FY2017-FY2019) to the first three years during the second term of President Barack Obama’s administration (FY2013-FY2015).

The WHO received more money under Trump than Obama (inflation adjusted): $1.4 billion versus $1.1 billion.

U.S. funding of the WHO year by year since 2010.

OpenTheBooks.com

Since 2010, the Agency for International Development (USAID) has led all federal agencies with $1.5 billion in grants to the WHO. Roughly half the USAID grant money funded three programs: humanitarian programs ($345.7 million); polio eradication efforts ($307.8 million); and efforts to eliminate tuberculosis ($116.6 million).

Other programs include efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Pakistan and included gender-based anti-violence initiatives; life-saving healthcare services to vulnerable populations; and assistance in floods, emergencies, and to war-torn communities.

USAID efforts through the WHO and other international humanitarian aid agencies were singled out in a blistering USAID Inspector General report in 2018, Insufficient Oversight of Public International Organizations Puts U.S. Foreign Assistance Programs at Risk.

As of January 2018, Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigations in the region have resulted in the suspension or debarment of several dozen individuals and organizations, 20 personnel actions, and the suspension of $239 million in program funds under investigation.

USAID Office of Inspector General

The U.S. Department of State gave $820 million to the WHO since 2010. The largest portion of the money consisted of “assessments” or dues to the organization which amounted to $611.1 million. In addition, the State Department funded programs for “general assistance” ($95 million); “refugee” health ($17.3 million); “peacekeeping” ($15.9 million); and emergency vaccines ($2 million).

U.S. federal agencies funding the World Health Organization since 2010

OpenTheBooks.com

Here’s an overview of programs funded by other U.S. federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ($1 billion), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ($30 million), National Institutes of Health (NIH) ($13.5 million), Department of Defense ($10 million) and the Environmental Protection Agency ($3.2 million) at the WHO since 2010:

Immunizations, Research, Demonstration, and Public Education/Information: $524.1 million — Through the Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control, this funding was spent on WHO programs for the eradication of polio around the world. These grants were centralized through WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

Global AIDS: $134.8 million — The Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease control funded support services and the strengthening of public health guidelines around the world to mitigate global AIDS.

Ebola virus: $73.5 million — In July 2019 and January 2020, the Congo received $15 million in Ebola eradication grants from the Trump administration specifically earmarked for the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri. The rest of the funding flowed through WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, with the majority of the funding between the fiscal years 2015 and 2017.

Biomedical research: $37.9 million — The National Institutes for Health (NIH) collaborated with the WHO on biomedical research. These programs included research on allergies, infectious diseases, and immunology. The transactions show that most funding was for “accelerated public health and biomedical research in priority public health objectives.”

The coronavirus pandemic is testing the World Health Organization. Just like any other health care body, every aspect of their operation will receive scrutiny during these times of insecurity and crisis.

Our analysis of WHO funding by U.S. federal agencies shows that taxpayers have been generous and deserve to know how their money is being spent.

Until recently, American commitments remained strong.

Note: All federal government funded delineated in this piece was disclosed through the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, co-sponsors Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Barack Obama (D-IL). (Public Law 109-282, 109th Congress)

Then there is the matter of the CDC…we will cover that another time.

GWB was Obsessed with Pandemic Preparations in 2005

Posted on April 5, 2020April 5, 2020 by Denise Simon

The efforts of the Bush administration was intense over the ensuing three years, including exercises where cabinet officials gamed out their responses, but it was not sustained. Large swaths of the ambitious plan were either not fully realized or entirely shelved as other priorities and crises took hold.

“There was a realization that it’s no longer fantastical to raise scenarios about planes falling from the sky, or anthrax arriving in the mail,” said Tom Bossert, who worked in the Bush White House and went on to serve as a homeland security adviser in the Trump administration. “It was not a novel. It was the world we were living.”

According to Bossert, who is now an ABC News contributor, Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it.

“He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen,” Bossert said. In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail — describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time.

“If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain,” he said.

Bush set out to spend $7 billion building out his plan. His cabinet secretaries urged their staffs to take preparations seriously. The government launched a website, www.pandemicflu.gov, that is still in use today. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to justify the continued funding, staffing and attention, Bossert said.

“You need to have annual budget commitment. You need to have institutions that can survive any one administration. And you need to have leadership experience,” Bossert said. “All three of those can be effected by our wonderful and unique form of government in which you transfer power every four years.”

***

Then in 2006, enter Senator Burr:

The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (PAHPAI) is legislation introduced and passed by the U.S. Congress in 2019 that aims to improve the nation’s preparation and response to public health threats, including both natural threats and deliberate man-made threats.^[1]

A previous bill (with a near-identical name), the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), was signed into law in 2006 and reauthorized in 2013 in order to create a system that prepares for, and responds to, public health threats that could turn into emergencies.

The 2019 bill (PAHPAI) was introduced by U.S. Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Bob Casey (D-PA), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Patty Murray (D-WA).^[1] Congress passed the bill and sent it to President Trump for his signature in June 2019. (The bill number is S. 1379).

What went on at the State level during all this time? Well in recent years, there was an exercise called Crimson Contagion.

Crimson Contagion 2019 was/is a Functional Exercise, a national level exercise series conducted to detect gaps in mechanisms, capabilities, plans, policies, and procedures in the event of a pandemic influenza. Current strategies include the Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans (2018), Pandemic Influenza Plan (2017 Update), Pandemic Crisis Action Plan Version 2.0, and CDC’s Pandemic Influenza Appendix to the Biological Incident Annex of the CDC All-Hazard Plan (December 2017). These plans, updated over the last few years, were tested by the functional exercise with emphasis on the examination of strategic priorities set by the NSC. Specifically, examined priorities include operational coordination and communications, stabilization and restoration of critical lifelines, national security emergencies, public health emergencies, and continuity. The Crimson Contagion 2019 Functional Exercise included participation of almost 300 entities – 19 federal departments and agencies, 12 states, 15 tribal nations and pueblos, 74 local health departments and coalition regions, 87 hospitals, 40 private sector organizations, and 35 active operations centers. The scenario was a large-scale outbreak of H7N9 avian influenza, originating in China but swiftly spreading to the contiguous US with the first case detected in Chicago, Illinois. Continuous human-to-human transmission of the H7N9 virus encourages its spread across the country and, unfortunately, the stockpiles of H7N9 vaccines are not a match for the outbreak’s strain; however, those vaccines are serviceable as a priming dose. Also, the strain of virus is susceptible to Relenza and Tamiflu antiviral medications. The exercise was intended to deal with a virus outbreak that starts overseas and migrates to the US with scant allocated resources for outbreak response and management, thereby forcing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to include other agencies in the response. To do so, the exercise began 47 days after the identification of the first US case of H7N9 in Chicago, otherwise known as STARTEX conditions. Then, the HHS declared the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency (PHE), the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic, and the President of the United States declared a National Emergency under the National Emergencies Act. As was the case in the 1918 Great Influenza, transmissibility is high and cases are severe. At STARTEX, there are 2.1 million illnesses and 100 million forecasted illnesses as well as over half a million forecasted deaths. As the pandemic progresses along the epidemiological curve, the overarching foci of the federal-level response adjusts across four phases:

Operational coordination with public messaging and risk communication

Situational awareness, information sharing, and reporting

Financing

Continuity of operations

The outcome of the Crimson Contagion is that vaccine development is the silver bullet to such an outbreak, but there are complications beyond its formulation. Namely, the minimization of outbreak impact prior to vaccine development and dispersal, strategy for efficient dissemination of the vaccine across the country, allocation of personal protective equipment (PPE), and high expense of vaccine development and PPE acquisitions. The exercise concluded that HHS requires about $10 billion in additional funding immediately following the identification of a novel strain of pandemic influenza. The low inventory levels of PPE and other countermeasures are a result of insufficient domestic manufacturing in the US and a lack of raw materials maintained within US borders. Additionally, the exercise revealed six key findings:

Existing statutory authorities, policies, and funding of HHS are insufficient for a federal response to an influenza pandemic

Current planning fails to outline the organizational structure of the federal government response when HHS is the designated lead agency; planning also varies across local, state, territorial, tribal, and federal entities

There is a lack of clarity in operational coordination regarding the roles and responsibility of agencies as well as in the coordination of information, guidance, and actions of federal agencies, state agencies, and the health sector

Situation assessment is inefficient and incomplete due to the lack of clear guidance on the information required and confusion in the distribution of recommended protocols and products

The medical countermeasures supply chain and production capacity are currently insufficient to meet the needs of the country in the event of pandemic influenza

There is clear dissemination of public health and responder information from the CDC, but confusion about school closures remains.

A few years go, DHS published the National Response Framework Second Edition May 2013 and later, FEMA published a 143 page report known as the Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans Final – January 2017

as a follow up to the work that began in 2008.

Many things certainly were going on that otherwise have not received media attention and the above is by no means a full accounting. The above is only referenced for perspective and context.

So while so many are working to find a single solution to Covid 19, there is not one cure but more in the realm of hundreds or perhaps thousands. Furthermore, while so many want to place blame, that too is misguided to point to U.S. politicians and medical experts. When it comes to Dr. Fauci or Bill Gates and his Event 201, understand that every medical counter-measure to pandemics call for growing viruses in laboratories and getting patents for the work each does including pharmaceutical companies and universities. We of course have the bureaucracy of clinical trials and they do take lots of time to launch and process.

Slow down readers, stop with the blame games, stop with finding fault, let’s deal with the here and now to get this behind us, never to repeat. If anything, blame the Communist Party of China, begin and end there and re-examine national policy with Beijing.

Vendors Return in Wuhan as China Prepares COVID-19 ... source

While Pelosi and Schiff have a new oversight commission led by Congressman Clyburn, which was in the $2T stimulus bill, so what? You say it is just another plot to go for another impeachment of President Trump? Nah…it is only the Democrats and media’s plot and wont happen. A full investigation of all things Covid 19 would hardly be completed by 2024.

Oh yeah, for those of you angry at Senator Burr for selling stock, we dont know how many in congress did sell stock. Remember, Senator Burr authored that pandemic bill in 2006….and it was signed into law.

Senators did receive a closed-door briefing on the virus on Jan. 24, which was public knowledge. A separate briefing was held Feb. 12 by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Burr is a member of. It’s unclear if he attended either session.

One must ask if the Senate Intelligence Committee received the briefing, who gave the briefing and did that same briefing happen in the House? That is always the policy. If so, how come the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, you know, Adam Schiff never said a thing about it. Inquiring minds want to know.

Meanwhile….

Just follow hygiene rules and let’s get America into full restoration mode…FAST.

The Reason for the WH and Dr. Birx Chilling New Probability Report

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Denise Simon

Primer: We all seem to guess this except for Jim Acosta/CNN and the others at MSNBC. Media continues to blame the Trump White House for the slow response to address COVID-19, while Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci explained what they did not know very early on. Now we know.

Now some real questions and new policy towards China must be considered. We can start with the $1.8 T in U.S. debt that China holds. The next is challenging American telecommunications companies to squelch China’s advances of 5G. Then there is the next phase of the U.S. trade agreement with China. Add in the mission to stop China’s power agenda across the globe as it is clear, China is fine with killing people and economies across the world.

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said. The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

Communications staff at the White House and Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism of China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.

Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.

Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said Tuesday that China’s public reporting influenced assumptions elsewhere in the world about the nature of the virus.

source

“The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”

China is not the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially North Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks. He has repeatedly accused China of covering up the extent of the problem and being slow to share information, especially in the weeks after the virus first emerged, and blocking offers of help from American experts.

“This data set matters,” he said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he said.

“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information,” he said. “We’re doing that.”

The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

source

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak containment strategies in China based on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) appear to be effective. Quantitative research is still needed however to assess the efficacy of different candidate NPIs and their timings to guide ongoing and future responses to epidemics of this emerging disease across the World. Methods: We built a travel network-based susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed (SEIR) model to simulate the outbreak across cities in mainland China. We used epidemiological parameters estimated for the early stage of outbreak in Wuhan to parameterise the transmission before NPIs were implemented. To quantify the relative effect of various NPIs, daily changes of delay from illness onset to the first reported case in each county were used as a proxy for the improvement of case identification and isolation across the outbreak. Historical and near-real time human movement data, obtained from Baidu location-based service, were used to derive the intensity of travel restrictions and contact reductions across China. The model and outputs were validated using daily reported case numbers, with a series of sensitivity analyses conducted. Results: We estimated that there were a total of 114,325 COVID-19 cases (interquartile range [IQR] 76,776 – 164,576) in mainland China as of February 29, 2020, and these were highly correlated (p<0.001, R2=0.86) with reported incidence. Without NPIs, the number of COVID-19 cases would likely have shown a 67-fold increase (IQR: 44 – 94), with the effectiveness of different interventions varying. The early detection and isolation of cases was estimated to prevent more infections than travel restrictions and contact reductions, but integrated NPIs would achieve the strongest and most rapid effect. If NPIs could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier in China, cases could have been reduced by 66%, 86%, and 95%, respectively, together with significantly reducing the number of affected areas. However, if NPIs were conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks later, the number of cases could have shown a 3-fold, 7-fold, and 18-fold increase across China, respectively. Results also suggest that the social distancing intervention should be continued for the next few months in China to prevent case numbers increasing again after travel restrictions were lifted on February 17, 2020. Conclusion: The NPIs deployed in China appear to be effectively containing the COVID-19 outbreak, but the efficacy of the different interventions varied, with the early case detection and contact reduction being the most effective. Moreover, deploying the NPIs early is also important to prevent further spread. Early and integrated NPI strategies should be prepared, adopted and adjusted to minimize health, social and economic impacts in affected regions around the World.

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

Posted on March 25, 2020March 25, 2020 by Denise Simon

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.

***

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.

source

“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.

***

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.

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

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.

More here.

Hat tip to the Trump White House