Tuesday, May 18, 2021


Australian team develop antiviral treatment that could reduce virus by 99.99 per cent

A team of Queensland scientists has co-developed a “gene-silencing” antiviral treatment that could effectively kill COVID-19, in what’s been dubbed an “important missing piece” in the arsenal against the virus.

Nigel McMillan and his team from the Menzies Health Institute at Griffith University, alongside scientists from City of Hope research centre in the US, say the “next-generation” antiviral approach could stop the virus from replicating in the lungs.

Professor McMillan said stage one clinical trials revealed the antiviral treatment reduced the viral load in mice lungs by 99.99 per cent.

The antiviral treatment reduces viral load in the lungs by 99.99 per cent, according to the Queensland-led team.
The antiviral treatment reduces viral load in the lungs by 99.99 per cent, according to the Queensland-led team.
While traditional antivirals, such as Tamiflu and remdesivir, reduce symptoms and help people recover earlier, this new technology uses small-interfering RNA to attack the virus’s genome directly, stopping the virus from replicating.

Lipid nanoparticles, designed at Griffith University and City of Hope, will be used as the drug delivery vehicle to deliver the siRNA to the lungs.

Professor McMillan said the treatment had proved incredibly effective in mice trials.

“Treatment with virus-specific siRNA reduces viral load by 99.99 per cent,” he said.

“These stealth nanoparticles can be delivered to a wide range of lung cells and silence viral genes.”

The treatment can work on all betacoronavirus, including the original SARS virus, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes COVID-19), and any new variants that could arise in the future, because it “targets ultra-conserved regions in the virus’s genome”.

“We have also shown that these nanoparticles are stable at 4C for 12 months, and at room temperature for greater than one month, meaning this agent could be used in low-resource settings to treat infected patients,” Professor McMillan said.

The team is hoping to progress to the next stage of trials by the end of the year, and if proven effective, could be made available commercially by 2022.

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What the Left Ignores About Anti-Asian Hate Crime

Data shows that blacks are the primary perpetrators of violent crimes against Asians.

In his speech before a few joint members of Congress last month, Joe Biden insisted that the greatest terrorist threat our nation faces is “white supremacy.” Then, after asserting that George Floyd’s death presented an opportunity to address the country’s “systemic racism,” Biden praised the Senate for passing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act “to protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from the vicious hate crimes we’ve seen this past year.” The message is clear: According to Biden and his fellow Democrats, the root problem plaguing the nation is white racism.

However, despite all the pontification and accusations regarding “white supremacy” being the supposed source for the rising number of hate crimes against Asian Americans, neither the media nor Democrat politicians care to genuinely examine the facts or report them. The facts not only fail to support the “white supremacy” narrative, they contradict it.

Ying Ma, author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, notes, “Political leaders, activists, and the media have widely attributed the rise in hate crimes to former President Donald Trump’s controversial use of the terms ‘China virus’ or ‘kung flu’ … [but the] racially motivated violence [is] in heavily Democratic areas and from demographic groups that overwhelmingly opposed him.”

Ying Ma observes that the problem of anti-Asian hate crimes predates Trump. She reports, “A survey conducted by the San Francisco Police Department in 2008 revealed that 85% of the city’s violent crimes were black-on-Asian, a figure officials in this notoriously liberal city confronted with ‘squeamishness.’” The officials’ “squeamishness” was likely due to the data not supporting the Left’s white supremacy narrative that sees racism as a whites-only problem.

And it’s not just San Francisco witnessing this same race dynamic. Other major urban areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle have seen the same.

In an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Ying Ma noticed something about those most often engaged in attacks against Asian Americans. “They don’t quite look like white supremacists,” she said. “They don’t look like white voters or Trump voters. In fact, many of these attacks have occurred in heavily Democratic cities where they did not vote for Trump in 2020 or 2016.” She adds, “What the Democrats or the far left have done, actually quite effectively, in the past year or so, is to libel former President Trump for something that the Democrats themselves actually are very much guilty of. And what is that? That is their silence and their cowardice before black-on-Asian attacks that often occur in America’s urban areas.”

Finally, Ying Ma rightly contends, “America must not only inquire but engage in a long overdue, honest conversation about the prevalence of black crime and the existence of racism among nonwhite Americans. The goal is not to vilify an entire race for the crimes of individuals, nor is it to absolve individuals of other races who commit racist acts.”

Individuals need to be held accountable for their actions, not the ethnic group from which they come. A high or low melanin count is not a metric for measuring morality.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

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://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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