It feels like months since there’s been any positive news. But amid a backdrop of continuing economic decimation at the hand of coronavirus, an infection rate that’s nearing two million and productivity-sapping global lockdowns, some green shots of hope emerged this week.
While it’s well known that there is an unprecedented number of vaccine candidates being tested, Gordon Watts reports that China may be closer than anyone thought to winning the race to immunize the world.
Watts writes that a team led by Qin Chuan at China’s National Institutes for Food and Drug Control in Beijing had started human testing in Xuzhou, a major city in Jiangsu province.
“Preclinical tests on non-human primates found that when given at a sufficient dose, the vaccine could provide protection against Sars-CoV-2, [which causes Covid-19],” a preliminary paper said after being released by the research group.
“Safety checks on the first day after the vaccinations have been completed and preliminary results show the vaccine is safe,” Gong Xuejie, from project partners Sinovac Biotech, was reported as saying.
If an Israeli scientist is proven correct, there may not even be a need for a vaccine.
Professor Yitzhak Ben-Israel, who is also a retired Air Force Major General does not believe the global approach of enforcing a lockdown to contain the coronavirus is the right solution, based on virus infection data he has analyzed.
His finding suggest that the coronavirus spread peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days, a result that is at variance with health professionals in many countries, including the United States. Stephen Bryen reports.
That would be especially good news for two cities that had been earlier praised for managing to restrict the virus’ spread but are now experiencing new infections.
Thorny Crown: Deciphering fact from fiction about the coronavirus crisis is quickly becoming as complex as the race to find a Covid-19 vaccine.
Singapore’s low-wage foreign laborers are falling ill with the coronavirus in their thousands after being quarantined en masse, a development that experts say could put unprecedented strain on the wealthy city-state’s healthcare services as its Covid-19 case numbers surge.
Nile Bowie writes that the island-nation of 5.7 million this week became the state with the highest number of officially confirmed Covid-19 cases in Southeast Asia.
Further east, Hong Kong’s most expensive shopping precinct is losing its bling factor as luxury brands shut their glitzy boutiques after seeing business plummet due to social unrest and the pandemic, reports Frank Chen.
Meanwhile, the search for a coronavirus scapegoat that’s drawn in everyone from President Trump to the world’s conspiracy theorists, now has a new participant – a Nobel-prize winning professor.
Luc Montagnier — a co-discoverer of the AIDS virus who is also mocked by some colleagues for some outrageous theories — said coronavirus is the result of an attempt to manufacture a vaccine against AIDS. Dave Makichuk reports.
As Gordon Watts reports in a piece that shines a light on China’s reporting of its own infection numbers, deciphering fact from fiction about the coronavirus crisis is quickly becoming as complex as the race to find a Covid-19 vaccine.
In an opinion piece by Allen Yu argues, however, that one measure would do much to filter out disinformation: stop listening to Donald Trump.
The US president is making the fight against the virus harder by launching personal vendettas against China, the World Health Organization and anyone on the media who disagrees with him. It’s time America changes, Yu argues, for everyone’s sake.
Read the full stories in Asia Times
Breakthrough hopes rise in virus vaccine trials
Israeli professor offers alternate coronavirus prediction
Covid-19 exposes Singapore’s vulnerabilities
How Singapore lost its grip on Covid-19
Big brands shutting shops in Hong Kong
French prof sparks furor with lab leak claim
How China hid ‘tens of thousands’ of virus deaths
Americans need to wake up on Trump’s Covid-19 response
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