A few articles of interest.

Biden to extend U.S. national emergency due to COVID-19 health risk Feb 18, 2022 Reuters

President Joe Biden said on Friday the U.S. national emergency declared in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic will be extended beyond March 1 due to the ongoing risk to public health posed by the coronavirus.

Biden said the deaths of more than 900,000 Americans from COVID-19 emphasized the need to respond to the pandemic with "the full capacity" of the federal government.

Former President Donald Trump had declared a national emergency almost two years ago to free up $50 billion in federal aid.

"There remains a need to continue this national emergency," Biden said in a letter on Friday to the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president of the Senate.

The letter was released by the White House.

The emergency would have been automatically terminated unless, within 90 days prior to the anniversary date of its declaration, the president sent a notice to the Congress stating it is to continue beyond the anniversary date.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, joins CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on a panel at Germany’s annual Munich Security Conference to discuss what action needs to be taken to bring an end to the pandemic.

[video:https://youtu.be/U70Q9WqbMFM?t=422]

It appears Bill lumps together in his mind an infection and a vaccination as being similar types of a physical event for a body. If he does not truly understand the difference, it is a bit scary.

Moderator: "Where would you access where we are today in beating COVID-19?"

Bill Gates: Sadly the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicoron is a type of vaccine. That is it creates both B-cell and T cell immunity and it's one a better job of getting our to the world population than we have with the vaccine. If you do serum survey in African countries you get well over 80% of people have been exposed to the vaccine or two various variants. So you know what that does is it means the chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly or having obesity or diabetes, Those risk are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure.

You know it is sad we didn't do a great job on therapeutics. You know only here two years in do we have good therapeutic vaccines. It took us two years to be in oversupply. Today there is more vaccines that the world demand for vaccines and you know that was not true. Next time we should try and make it instead of two years we should make it more like 6 months.
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continued

Why is his opinion important? Remember last year?
The World Loses Under Bill Gates’ Vaccine Colonialism May 19, 2021 Wired

Global health czar Bill Gates had other thoughts. Maintaining his steadfast commitment to intellectual property rights, Gates pushed for a plan that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding. Given the enormous influence Gates has in the global public health world, his vision ultimately won out in the Covax program—which enshrines monopoly patent rights and relies on the charitable whims of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to provide vaccines to most of the world.
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Last October, recognizing that monopoly vaccine patents would be the norm and countries would have to compete against each other to purchase doses, a coalition of countries led by India and South Africa brought a patent waiver proposal to the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) council. As recently as a couple weeks ago, Bill Gates has continued to speak out against this proposal.

Gates’ argument about the TRIPS waiver—and the one being vociferously lobbied by pharmaceutical companies—is that waiving patent rights would not help poor countries scale up manufacturing and would instead eliminate incentives for future research.

Estimated 73% of US now immune to omicron: Is that enough? AP News February 17, 2022

Millions of individual Americans’ immune systems now recognize the virus and are primed to fight it off if they encounter omicron, or even another variant.

About half of eligible Americans have received booster shots, there have been nearly 80 million confirmed infections overall and many more infections have never been reported. One influential model uses those factors and others to estimate that 73% of Americans are, for now, immune to omicron, the dominant variant, and that could rise to 80% by mid-March.

This will prevent or shorten new illnesses in protected people and reduce the amount of virus circulating overall, likely tamping down new waves. Hospitals will get a break from overwhelmed ICUs, experts agree.

The coronavirus — the current variant or future ones that are sure to pop up — remains a dangerous germ. It is still infecting more than 130,000 Americans and killing more than 2,000 every day. Tens of millions of people remain vulnerable.
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Still, while the population is better protected, many individuals are not. Even by the most optimistic estimates for population immunity, 80 million or so Americans are still vulnerable. That’s about the same as the total number of confirmed infections in the U.S. during the pandemic.

“The 26% who could still get omicron right now have to be very careful,” Mokdad said.

There is sentence study which is fairly interesting. It appears someone has been testing SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) in white-tailed deer.

Multiple spillovers from humans and onward transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in white-tailed deer Feb 8, 2022 PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

White-tailed deer, the predominant cervid in North America, are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and experimentally infected fawns can transmit the virus. To test the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 is circulating in deer, 283 retropharyngeal lymph node (RPLN) samples collected from 151 free-living and 132 captive deer in Iowa from April 2020 through January of 2021 were assayed for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA.
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Concluding Comments and Future Directions.
White-tailed deer are the most abundant wild cervid species in the United States, with an estimated 25 million individuals, and deer hunting is the most popular form of hunting in the United States, contributing over $20 billion to the US GDP and supporting more than 300,000 jobs in 2016 (34). In addition to the abundance, social relevance, and economic importance of deer to the US economy, the discovery of sylvatic and enzootic transmission in a substantial fraction of free-living deer has important implications for the natural ecology and long-term persistence of SARS-CoV-2, including through spillover to other free-living or captive animals and potential for spillback to humans.

In this context, there are several important questions that require urgent attention. For instance, it is important to understand whether the observed widespread SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission among white-tailed deer will result in virus adaptation to cervids similar to what has been observed in other species such as the mustelids. Previously, a high similarity in the white-tailed deer ACE-2 sequence was shown relative to human ACE-2, and the changes within the domains that bind the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein are at residues D30E, L79M, M82T, and E329D (5, 35). Therefore, it is not altogether surprising that the deer ACE-2 receptors enable efficient binding by the Spike protein for viral entry, perhaps even slightly better than humans (35), that will allow the highly efficient transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in deer. Hence, it is tempting to predict that, unlike the observed rapid adaptions in Spike in mustelids with a restricted ACE-2 receptor, any adaptations of SARS-CoV-2 in deer during the initial waves of infection are more likely to occur in regions outside of the Spike protein.

US anti-Asian violence spiked during the pandemic February 18, 2022 Asia Times

My collaborators and I looked more specifically at violent attacks against Asian Americans or their property from 1990 to 2021. In the 30 years before the pandemic, we identified public reports of 210 anti-Asian violent attacks in total, an average of 8.1 per year. But during 2020 and 2021, there were 163 attacks, averaging out to 81.5 a year – or more than 11 times the previous average.
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Our data found that before 2020, the average number of Asian Americans killed or injured in anti-Asian attacks was just over eight per year. In 2020 and 2021, however, 49 were physically harmed, an average of almost 25 per year.

We found that almost half of the anti-Asian attacks in 2020 and 2021 were motivated, at least partially, by anger and animosity associated with Covid-19, a disease first identified in Asia. For instance, in June 2020, an Asian restaurant in New Jersey was vandalized with graffiti reading “coronavirus” and “Covid-19.” And in February 2021, Denny Kim, a 27-year-old Korean American veteran of the USAir Force, was beaten by two men who shouted anti-Asian slurs at him and called him “Chinese virus.”
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Most anti-Asian violence, both before and during the pandemic, happened in urban and suburban areas in typically progressive states.