@Lily O Lady

[comment:body]

@CB

The massive war games in Europe on still on

Now, the drills' plan is cracking at the seams and it is increasingly unclear if the large-scale war games will take place at all. The US European Command already said earlier this week it would scale down America's participation in the exercise and modify it accordingly. The news comes on the heels of another drill cancellation, with Norway calling off another NATO exercise, all because of the fears of the pandemic.

Let's be clear: NATO has not yet canceled Defender Europe 2020. Nor has the US pulled back from the event, for now at least. Yet this might well happen, analysts and former military officials told RT. "I would not be surprised if those exercises are postponed for several months," former Pentagon official Michael Maloof said, while a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski believed the drills could be either delayed or even canceled altogether.

And the Western nations might have good reasons for such a move, since, according to Kwiatkowski, soldiers might be needed at home, where they could help with cordoning off large quarantine areas or implementing martial law and controlling domestic population movements as part of the state of emergency.

Governments have fallen and collapsed on far less than what this pandemic has already delivered. And that fear is very likely the primary fear of governments, including the US government, and why no one wants their national troops in an overseas exercise at this time."

Apart from that, soldiers returning from overseas drills could themselves be a health risk, particularly if they come back from epidemic-stricken areas. "What we are trying to do is to keep everybody frozen to a place so we will try to keep rotations to a minimum. That is another reason why you are going to see minimal exercises, because all this moving people around will have a potential of spreading the virus," Maloof explains, adding that if any US personnel were sent to Europe for an exercise, they would have to "go through a mandatory two weeks" of quarantine.

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Sending troops to supposedly disease-plagued areas for no real reason could also very well turn out a PR disaster for the Western leaders. "In our modern, peaceful times, an idea of deliberately putting soldiers' health and even lives at risk would hardly be welcomed," Mikhail Khodarenok, a retired colonel in the Russian Air Defense Forces and former General Staff officer, told RT. "The public both in the West and in the East would hardly understand and accept it," he warned

20,000 US troops will play with their guns along with 10,000 defenders from other countries. One article I read on this said that no one had been given masks.

But then the military has already failed big time for when they took the quarantined folks off the cruise ship after they had been separated in their rooms there they loaded them all on buses and then they sat on them for hours. And people took off their masks to eat and drink. Well done.

EDIT: Maybe I shouldn't have posted this in this diary. Should I delete it?
EDIT 2: I published a diary with this info.

National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien spouts lies and misconceptions about how China has handled the COVID-19 outbreak.

I'm so pissed at this asshole I'd like to give him a hard kick in the ass to dislodge his head.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENxG80iLdpE&t=19m30s]

Read the following timeline on Wiki. All the events occurring in China were publicly available. The WHO was involved almost from the very beginning.

If you watch O'Brien's talk from the beginning of that video, he speaks about the necessity of expanding and increasing the Defense Budget to counter new threats to American hegemonic world power. The US is the greatest threat to human health and existence on the face of the earth.

The following is the gist of O'Brien's talk. But you should really watch the video because he praises Trump, Pence and Pompeo for getting a firm handle on the problem.

National security adviser says China "covered up" coronavirus, delaying global response
By Melissa Quinn
March 11, 2020

Washington — National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien suggested Wednesday that China "covered up" the initial outbreak of the coronavirus, delaying an effective global response by two months.
...
"Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up," O'Brien said. "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."

As a result of those actions by the Chinese government, "it probably cost the world community two months to respond," as health officials from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could have been on the ground sooner, he said.

"I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened, both in China and what's now happening across the world," O'Brien added.
...

I'm looking forward to the US version of China's response to COVID-19

@earthling1 They would test to see the level of antibodies against the coronavirus that you produce after getting the vaccination. They wouldn't expose you to the virus.

if I understand this right.
I'm to take the vaccine and then expose myself to the virus to see if it works?
Hmmm.
Uh, no.

@innatimm @innatimm I'm a molecular biologist and did not know of Moderna's technology. My initial thought was: injecting mRNA? Yeah, no. that won't work. How do you get it to move inside the cells? How do you keep it from being degraded in a few seconds by enzymes inside and outside the cell? How do you make sure that it is robustly translated? i.e. Proper Kozak sequences etc.
So that's pretty cool that their approach could work.

I wonder as well though what the failure/success rate is on their vaccine trials. I would imagine that any vaccine candidate would have already gone through a lot of testing, along with hundreds of others, to make sure that cells in tissue culture exposed to the "mRNA" take up and express the protein fragment they are meant to at high levels, that the bit of viral protein they "express" is found in an exposed part of the virus and that antibodies targeted to that region of a protein will result in virus infected cells being dutifully killed.

But, trust me, there is a bit of an art to protein sequence "gazing" such that regions of a protein are chosen that work well for a vaccine. There are no algorithms that work well to find regions that are both highly expressed in the cell *and* make a protein that will prove to be antigenic *and* protective. It is, in my experience, a best guess scenario and some folks seem to have a serendipitous knack and others don't.

Either way, yeah I'd probably be OK with testing the vaccine. I would like to know what else is in the sample being injected (adjuvant etc?). But, I think bad outcomes from this type of test would be really rare.

As an aside, a few folks near the top commented that they would not risk the injection because they are in a "high risk" group. I think the assumption is that there is the possibility they might get the disease itself from the vaccine. This is not the case. We are talking about injecting a tiny part of the virus. We are past the days that attenuated (e.g. heat "killed") or any other such formulation that might contain some "live" virus would be a formulation that would be used for vaccines.

Edit: deleted a "not" that changed the meaning of a sentence...

Moderna's vaccine is an mRNA based vaccine that, when injected, will make a small fragment of coronavirus protein that hopefully will be recognized by the immune system and start the production of antibodies to prevent an infection. There would be no chance to get the COVID-19 disease from the vaccination as it wouldn't contain all of the components necessary to generate an live virus. I think that historically, vaccine making has been one of the most safe and effective methods of combating infectious diseases. We are now living through a time with this pandemic that used to be much more common in human history. Vaccines have made it so we don't often think about polio, measles, whooping cough and many other common illnesses that used to worry all parents raising young kids. Vaccines have even eliminated smallpox, the most deadly viral pathogen known to mankind. Relative to any other medical intervention, vaccine development has been incredibly safe, even in the early days when live virus was commonly used. This coronavirus is going to stick around until a good vaccine is developed and I would be happy to be a guinea pig since this testing will save lives in the very near future