MI6

(1) The former head of MI6 (the UK’s foreign intelligence service — its CIA if you like), Richard Dearlove, says flat-out COVID-19 was engineered in a Chinese lab but escaped from there.

He continues:

Although he did not believe that the Chinese released the virus intentionally, Sir Richard told the Telegraph that the Chinese regime handled the outbreak very differently from the way a Western government might have dealt with it, and that the incident should be a wake-up call for the rest of the world on underestimating the scope of Chinese global ambitions.
“Look at the stories… of the attempts by the leadership to lockdown any debate about the origins of the pandemic and the way that people have been arrested or silenced,” he said. “I mean, we shouldn’t really have any doubt any longer about what we’re dealing with.
“Of course, the Chinese must have felt, well, if they’ve got to suffer a pandemic maybe we shouldn’t try too hard to stop, as it were, our competitors suffering the same disadvantages we’ve got.
“Look, the Chinese understand us extremely well. They have made a study of us over the last decade or longer, particularly through attending our universities. We understand the Chinese very poorly. It’s an imbalanced relationship in that respect.”
Australia has been taking the lead on pushing for an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” of the global response to COVID-19, an ambition which was agreed to by the World Health Organization in late May. China launched cyberattacks and trade restrictions against the Antipodean state in response.
“I think it’s very courageous of the Australians to take China on,” Sir Richard said. “I mean, there’s an obvious, huge imbalance in terms of power, both economic and military and political, but they are showing the way. You have to have a critical relationship with China.”
He urged the British authorities to do the same, calling for the government to scrap plans to place the construction of Britain’s new 5G network in the hands of Chinese telecoms firm Huawei, and to reduce reliance on Chinese-made personal protective equipment for health workers.
“We need to go into reverse,” he said. “It’s important that we do not put any of our critical infrastructure in the hands of Chinese interests. So telecommunications, Huawei, nuclear power stations, and then things that, you know, we require and need in a crisis, like PPE.”
“We have allowed China so much rope that we are now suffering the consequences, and it’s time to pull the rope in and to tighten the way we do business. It’s very, very important that we keep a keen eye on this and do not allow the Chinese to, as it were, benefit strategically from this situation that has been imposed on all of us.”

Wow.

(2) Die Welt (in German) continues to pour withering criticism on the Swedish sonderweg. They call it “chaos disguised as strategy” (Chaos getarnt als Strategie). Private corporations are now stepping up with immunity testing for pay. Due to high demand, they had to limit their offerings to Sweden’s two largest cities, Stockholm (by far hardest hit) and Göteborg, but other companies are looking to fill the void.

Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Prof. Anders Tegnell, gave a remarkably self-critical interview on Swedish radio: “Too many have died too soon”. He regrets not having been more proactive to protect the most vulnerable. My translation (2nd hand via German): “I believe there is definite room for improvement in what we ‘ve been doing in Sweden, of course., And it would have been good if we’d known more precisely what to close to prevent infection spread.” Also, he said, if we’d encountered the same epidemic but with the knowledge we have today, then the correct course in his opinion lay intermediate between the road Sweden took and what the rest of the world did. “Unambiguously, we could have done better in Sweden, I believe.”

(3) Operation Warp Speed, an initiative of the White House, selected a shortlist of five vaccine candidates for mass manufacturing in the US

The five vaccines include Moderna’s mRNA1273, currently in phase 2 trials; AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s AZD1222, now in clinical trials at multiple UK sites; a candidate from Johnson & Johnson; a Merck vaccine based on that company’s successful Ebola vaccine; and Pfizer and BioNTech‘s BNT162.

The accelerated programs are funded through $10 billion from Congress and $3 billion directed for National Institutes of Health (NIH) research.

Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he was confident more than one COVID-19 vaccine would prove effective in a reasonable period of time.

Francis Collins, MD, NIH director, said some vaccine candidates will be ready for large-scale testing as soon as the beginning of July. The phase 3 trials would involve as many as 30,000 volunteers for each candidate vaccine, with half the volunteers receiving a placebo, Collins told National Public Radio.

If successful, this will be the most rapid vaccine development program in history.

ADDENDUM: GenomeWeb reports that another Surgiscape-sourced paper, in the New England Journal of Medicine, has now been retracted.

The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have retracted two COVID-19 papers because of questions regarding the data used in the studies. The papers were both previously the subject of expressions of concern.

The now-retracted Lancet paper had reported that the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine may increase the risk of death among COVID-19 patients, while the now-retracted NEJM paper noted that though cardiovascular disease increases someone’s risk of dying from COVID-19, ACE inhibitors did not increase that risk.

Both studies relied on a database run by Surgisphere, which said it had detailed data on about 100,000 COVID-19 patients from 1,200 hospitals around the world, but as the New York Times noted earlier this week, clinicians and medical researchers have raised concerns about the data it houses.

The authors of the Lancet study who were not associated with Surgisphere noted in the expression of concern that they would be seeking an independent audit of the data. However, in the retraction notice, they wrote that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset to its independent reviewers, citing client agreements and confidentiality. Because of this, the Lancet notes in a statement that three of the four authors — the fourth author being Surgisphere chief executive Sapan Desai — said they “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.”

The NEJM retraction notice similarly says that the authors, this time including Desai, could not “validate the primary data sources” and requested a retraction.