Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)

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      We Were Badly Misled About Covid

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      Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization. So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles or the evolving bird flu, right?Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Grieving Covid Losses, Five Years Later

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      <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>More than 1.2 million Americans died in the coronavirus pandemic. For their grieving families, the fifth anniversary of the pandemic’s beginning is an aching reminder of what they have lost.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> […] More

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      How Covid Changed the Lives of These 29 Americans

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      Five years ago, Covid took hold and the world transformed almost overnight. As routines and rituals evaporated, often replaced by grief, fear and isolation, many of us wondered: When will things go back to normal? Could they ever? Today, for many, the coronavirus pandemic seems far away and foggy, while for others it’s as visceral […] More

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      30 Charts That Show How Everything Changed in March 2020

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      We left a world we might not get back to. Many things that we took for granted never returned to their former levels, with no guarantee they ever will. The pandemic took a hammer to society and left us struggling to climb back from shutdowns, from fear and from illness. It can be easy, in […] More

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      U.S. Judge Finds China Liable for Covid Missteps, Imposes $24 Billion Penalty

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      The judgment was issued in a case brought by the Missouri attorney general. The Chinese government did not respond to the claims in court.A federal judge in Missouri found the Chinese government responsible for covering up the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and hoarding protective equipment in a ruling on Friday. He entered a judgment of more than $24 billion that Missouri officials vowed to enforce by seizing Chinese assets.The lawsuit, filed by the Missouri attorney general’s office in April 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, accused the Chinese government of withholding information about the existence and spread of the virus and then of cutting off the supply of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., from the rest of the world. China did not respond to the allegations in court, and officials at the country’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.In his ruling, Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. wrote that “China was misleading the world about the dangers and scope of the Covid-19 pandemic” and had “engaged in monopolistic actions to hoard P.P.E.” Those actions, he said, hampered the early response to the pandemic in the United States and made it impossible to purchase enough equipment for medical providers responding to the virus.Judge Limbaugh, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, imposed the judgment against China, its governing Communist Party, local governments in China, as well as a health agency and a laboratory in the country.Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, said in a statement that the ruling held China accountable for its actions.“China refused to show up to court, but that doesn’t mean they get away with causing untold suffering and economic devastation,” said Mr. Bailey, a Republican. “We intend to collect every penny by seizing Chinese-owned assets, including Missouri farmland.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      German Court Convicts Five Over Plot to Kidnap Health Official and Spread Chaos

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      The defendants, part of a group known as “United Patriots,” aimed to reinstate a 19th-century Constitution by giving power to an all-powerful Kaiser.Five people have been sentenced to prison over what the authorities in Germany described as a plot to kidnap the country’s health minister on live television in 2022 in an attempt to destabilize the German state.After a nearly two-year trial, a court found on Thursday that the five, under a group billed as the “United Patriots,” had planned to create a widespread weekslong power outage and then use the chaos to reinstate a 19th-century Constitution ceding power to an all-powerful Kaiser.They were convicted of founding or joining a terrorist group, of treason and in some cases of owning illegal guns, rifles and explosives.Jörn Müller, a spokesman for the court, in Koblenz in western Germany, said the trial had “shown that a democratic constitutional state is capable of dealing with its alleged opponents on the basis of law and order in a fair and independent trial.”The court sentenced a 46-year-old man whom it had determined to be the group’s central figure to eight years in prison. A 77-year-old woman who holds a Ph.D. in theology and frequently interrupted the court hearings with antisemitic and conspiracy-theory-laced diatribes was handed a sentence of seven years and nine months. Three other men, all in their 50s, received sentences ranging from six and a half years to two years and 10 months.In accordance with German privacy laws, the court identified the defendants only by their initials.The five were part of the Reichsbürger scene, a loosely affiliated antisemitic far-right grouping that does not accept the legitimacy of the modern German state. Their planned overthrow was not directly related to a far more complex, and far more dangerous, plot surrounding a disgruntled prince that is currently being tried in three separate courts in Germany.After meeting and radicalizing on a Telegram chat group during the pandemic, members of the plot tried to buy and hoard weapons and other tools for their plans, according to the case brought by the prosecutors. Police searches after their arrest in 2022 yielded 52 packets of low-grade explosives, with which the authorities said the group hoped to use to disable large parts of the power grid.Members of the group were arrested while trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles, mines and bulletproof vests. The seller was an undercover police officer and the exchange was a setup.The five convicted on Thursday had focused their ire on Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, a medical doctor and former professor who has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. During the pandemic, he was an outspoken proponent of vaccination rules, often appearing on television panel shows to explain the medical science behind the spread of the coronavirus.On Thursday, he thanked the German police for keeping him safe. “The state has shown that it can defend itself against violent conspiracy theorists,” he said on social media. More

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      Trump’s Nominee for N.I.H. Chief Faces Questions From Senators

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      Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist who came to prominence crusading against lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, faced questioning from the Senate health committee on Wednesday morning as President Trump’s nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health.The agency, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, has been rocked lately by the Trump administration’s efforts to block government spending and shrink the federal work force. Hours before Wednesday’s hearing, the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting group led by Elon Musk, trumpeted the cancellation of N.I.H. grants.Dr. Bhattacharya, who has a medical degree and is a professor of medicine but has never practiced, has expressed an interest in restructuring the agency and reducing the power of “scientific bureaucrats” who he has said end up “dominating a field for a very long time.”His views on medicine and public health have at times put Dr. Bhattacharya at odds with many of the scientists whose research the N.I.H. oversees.While he has defended vaccines and has said he was dubious that they caused autism, Dr. Bhattacharya told an interviewer last year that he could not rule out a link. “I don’t know that for a fact,” he said. Extensive evidence shows no link between immunizations and autism.Dr. Bhattacharya became a go-to witness in court cases challenging Covid policies, including mask mandates. In several cases, judges said he was disregarding facts or was untrustworthy. His detractors note that while he has published studies on health policy issues — like drug prices and the link between different types of health insurance and H.I.V. deaths — he is not a scientist conducting biomedical research, the core mission of the agency.But supporters have said that Dr. Bhattacharya could bring needed reform to the N.I.H. and have defended some of his contrarian views on Covid.Dr. Bhattacharya burst into the news at the height of the pandemic in October 2020, when he co-wrote an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, that argued for “focused protection” — a strategy that would focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.The nation’s medical leadership, including Dr. Francis S. Collins and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denounced the plan. Referring to Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors as “fringe epidemiologists,” Dr. Collins wrote in an email that “there needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises.”Dr. Collins, who later stepped down as the N.I.H. director to pursue his laboratory research, retired last week in anticipation of Dr. Bhattacharya’s arrival. More