Now BIDEN'S ex-Covid advisor admits pandemic may have been caused by a Wuhan lab leak - and warns there's a 50% chance of another pandemic by 2050
President Joe Biden's former Covid advisor has admitted the pandemic may have been borne out of a laboratory leak in Wuhan.
Speaking at a New York City health conference this week, Dr Raj Panjabi, former Special Assistant to the President, described the lab leak theory as 'plausible' and called on Governments around the world to 'do more to keep labs safe.’
Biden called former President Donald Trump 'nakedly xenophobic’ in May 2020, for suggesting Covid was the result of Chinese experiments gone wrong.
But now the FBI, Department of Energy and many scientists and US government officials believe it is the most likely origin of the pandemic.
However, the official line from Biden's White House is that the origin of Covid remains uncertain — a view echoed by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who said there is 'no definitive answer' to the question.
But ex-Covid adviser Dr Panjabi appeared to veer away from the party line this week saying: ‘It is plausible that Covid originated in a lab accident in Wuhan...we have got to do more to keep labs safe.’
He also issued a chilling prediction: There's a 50/50 chance of another pandemic happening by 2050.
'The risk of a pandemic is only growing in the modern world,' Dr Punjabi said in a speech at the Forbes Healthcare Summit 2023 earlier this week.
'There is a 50 percent risk one will happen in the next 25 years. This is because of globalization, or what I call the three Ps.
‘These are: Pathogen spillover [when diseases jump from animals to humans]... planes [global travel], and poor public health systems that are shattered and lack investment.’
Dr Panjabi is a physician specializing in infectious disease and epidemiology. He has also been named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine.
Panjabi worked for the Biden administration from 2021 to late 2023, playing a key role in two public health crises: the Covid-19 pandemic and the monkeypox outbreak that began in the Spring of 2022.
He also led the White House strategy for boosting Covid vaccine uptake in the US and abroad — a program that saw 1.1billion shots distributed to third-world countries.
Safety practices in US scientific laboratories are gaining increasing attention from Government officials, in a bid to prevent future pandemics.
Congress is currently considering tighter regulation of labs, with the House Energy and Commerce Committee currently holding hearings on the subject.
In September, Republicans escalated their Covid origins investigation, demanding the Biden administration and other politicians comply with their requests — or face being subpoenaed.
In a letter sent to HHS Sec. Xavier Becerra first obtained by DailyMail.com, the Republicans wrote they 'expect full and timely compliance' with their requests, which have gone unanswered since they launched the probe in February.
And Dr Anthony Fauci has finally agreed to testify to Congress on his involvement in the public cover up of Covid's origins.
The onetime White House doctor will be grilled on his former department's funding of dangerous experiments in Wuhan, as well as the stark difference between his public and private comments about the lab leak theory.
He is due to speak in front of the House in January, which will be the first time he has testified under oath since his infamous showdown in front of the Senate in July 2021.
The lab leak theory of Covid was dismissed as a conspiracy in the early days of the pandemic by leading figures including Dr Fauci.
Dr Panjabi is just the latest high ranking official to give credence to the lab leak theory, after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former top health official Dr Robert Kadlec and former national security director John Ratcliffe all came out in support of it.
Speaking to Sky News last month, Dr Ratcliffe said: ‘It’s more than just a possibility, it’s certainly a probability and it’s probably a certainty.’
Dr Rober Kadlec, who initially worked with Dr Fauci to hush the lab leak theory, has suggested in a report that Covid likely escaped during the work of scientist Dr Zhou Yusen at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
He filed a patent for a Covid vaccine in February 2020, which suggested he had been working on it for months.
Countless reports have revealed lax practices at US labs - including a military research facility Fort Detrik, in Maryland.
The lab is accused of leaking Ebola and Anthrax into local water supplies in May 2018 after a tank holding wastewater from labs became over-pressurized and sprayed infectious waste for three hours.
There are also suggestions that pandemics have been caused by lab leaks before, including the 2004 and 2005 influenza outbreak.
Researchers said the strain that caused it bore a remarkable resemblance to one that had been spreading decades earlier.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12828911/biden-covid-advisor-lab-leak-Dr-panjabi.html
*******************************************Children With Respiratory Illnesses at Pediatric Centers More Likely to Be Hospitalized if Vaccinated: CDC Study
Children who reported to pediatric center emergency departments with respiratory illness and were hospitalized were more likely to have taken COVID-19 vaccines, according to a new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
More than half of vaccinated children included in the study were admitted to hospitals as inpatients, compared to less than half of unvaccinated children.
The study examined children aged 6 months to 4 years who went to emergency departments at one of seven pediatric medical centers, including Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and Seattle Children's Hospital. Some of the children were admitted to hospitals. The encounters happened as early as July 1, 2022, and as late as Sept. 30, 2023.
The children needed to have one or more symptoms indicating acute respiratory illness, such as fever, cough, or shortness of breath.
The overwhelming majority of the young children in the study never received a dose of a vaccine. That group of 6,377 far outnumbered the 281 children who received one dose and the 776 children who received at least two doses. Across the United States, most young children are unvaccinated.
Of the unvaccinated children in the study, 44 percent were hospitalized. Of the vaccinated, 55 percent were hospitalized.
"This means that upon visiting hospital emergency departments, compared to unvaccinated children, vaccinated children had *increased* risks of inpatient hospitalization, very statistically significantly so," Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Vaccinated children were also more likely to receive intensive care, need supplemental oxygen, and die, according to the paper, though just three deaths were recorded among the study population and some of the differences were not statistically significant.
The CDC's media office, which promoted the study, told The Epoch Times in an email: "Although proportionally more hospitalized children had received a COVID-19 vaccine than children enrolled in the emergency department (ED), this does not mean that vaccinated children were more likely to be hospitalized."
The CDC also said the paper showed that vaccination was "effective at reducing emergency department visits and hospitalizations in children."
Dr. Eyal Shahar, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona who reviewed the study, noted that the vaccinated children had worse underlying health. "That largely explains worse outcomes," Dr. Shahar told The Epoch Times via email. "We cannot attribute the outcomes to vaccination."
The CDC published the paper in its quasi-journal. Papers published by the journal are typically not peer-reviewed but are shaped to align with CDC policy. The CDC currently recommends COVID-19 vaccination for nearly all Americans, regardless of prior infection or underlying health.
The study's authors, some of whom work for the CDC, said the study showed that "receipt of ≥2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine doses was 40% effective ... in preventing emergency department visits and hospitalization," referring to the Pfizer and Moderna modified messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.
The authors reached that conclusion after separating out patients who tested positive for COVID-19. There were 387, with 94 percent unvaccinated. The unvaccinated were only 85 percent of the study population, indicating they were at higher risk of visiting an emergency department with respiratory illness and then testing positive for COVID-19.
"No one cares whether the vaccines reduce COVID-associated hospitalization if at the same time they increase non-COVID-associated hospitalization," Dr. Risch said.
The researchers estimated that the effectiveness of one vaccine dose against emergency department presentation or hospitalization was 31 percent, increasing to 40 percent for at least two doses.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, an epidemiologist in California who reviewed the paper, said that the authors inappropriately inferred causality despite the study being observational.
"They should have said 'was associated with lower rate of...' rather than 'was effective in preventing,'" Dr. Hoeg told The Epoch Times via email.
The researchers did not present separate estimates for protection against hospitalization and emergency department visits, nor did they track how the effectiveness estimates changed over time. Vaccine effectiveness has been shown to drop over time in other studies.
Regarding effectiveness, the authors referred to an earlier CDC-published study that estimated vaccination provided from 7 percent to 80 percent protection against COVID-19-associated urgent care counters and emergency department visits. A third CDC-published study estimated protection against symptomatic COVID-19 infection among young children was typically under 50 percent.
Vaccines are supposed to provide at least 50 percent protection, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and World Health Organization guidance.
Dr. Heidi Klein, who works for the CDC, and Dr. Eileen Klein, an emergency medicine doctor at Seattle Children's Hospital, did not respond to requests for comment. They were listed as the new study's senior authors.
The conflicts of interest described were lengthy, with three authors reporting funding from Pfizer.
Limitations of the paper, the authors said, included the low number of vaccinated children.
"This appears to be another substandard observational study of vaccine efficacy in children published without peer review by the CDC. The list of limitations is a mile long and understates the study's methodological limitations," Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University who reviewed the study, told The Epoch Times via email. "If the CDC wants to answer the question of COVID vaccine benefits and harms to children, it should commission a large, rigorous, randomized trial with meaningful clinical endpoints like prevention of hospitalization and death."
More on Methods
Researchers collected data for the study through interviews with parents, chart reviews, and immunization records.
All children included had signs of acute respiratory illness.
Children who tested positive for COVID-19 were considered case patients while controls were children who tested negative for COVID-19.
Exclusions included children whose illness lasted more than 10 days, children without verified vaccination status, and children with inconclusive COVID-19 test results.
Ninety-five percent of the children tested negative for COVID-19. Many tested positive for other viruses, such as rhinovirus. Out of 7,434 children, just 387 tested positive for COVID-19.
Those children fared worse by many measures than those who did not, including having a higher probability of needing supplemental oxygen.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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