EU: China, Russia Waging Broad Pandemic Disinformation Campaign to Deepen Crisis

The European Union, in an unusually blunt language, has accused Russia and China of a running a broad, sustained, and “targeted” disinformation campaign inside the European Union, aiming to deepen and lengthen the coronavirus pandemic crisis and its negative medical, economic, and social effects. The EU has criticized Russia in the past for its sophisticated disinformation campaign aiming to weaken the West and undermine liberal democracies, but the direct criticism of China is a break from the EU recent approach, which saw it tiptoeing around China’s many transgressions.   

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New Identification of Genetic Basis of COVID-19 Susceptibility Will Aid Treatment and Prevention

The clinical presentation of COVID-19 varies from patient to patient and understanding individual genetic susceptibility to the disease is therefore vital to prognosis, prevention, and the development of new treatments. The European Society of Human Genetics reports that for the first time, Italian scientists have been able to identify the genetic and molecular basis of this susceptibility to infection as well as to the possibility of contracting a more severe form of the disease.

Biomedical Sciences Researchers Provide Methods to Inactivate and Safely Study SARS-CoV-2

Detailed methods on how to perform research on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, including procedures that effectively inactivate the virus to enable safe study of infected cells have been identified by virologists in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

Two Cats Are First U.S. Pets to Be Sickened with COVID-19

The first documented cases of U.S. household cats infected with COVID-19 have emerged in New York state, a new government report shows. Health Day reports that two cats—one in Nassau County, the other in Orange County—appear to have contracted COVID-19 from the humans with whom they lived, a team of veterinarians reported online June 8 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Satellite Images of Wuhan May Suggest Coronavirus Was Spreading as Early as August

Satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as internet search trends, show the coronavirus may have been spreading in China as early as last August, according to a new study from Harvard Medical School. Shelby Lin Erdman writes for CNN that the study, which has not yet been peer-viewed, found a significantly higher number of cars in parking lots at five Wuhan hospitals in the late summer and fall of 2019 compared to a year earlier; and an uptick in searches of keywords associated with an infectious disease on China’s Baidu search engine.

Shutdowns Through Early April Prevented about 60 Million U.S. Coronavirus Infections, Study Says

If large-scale shutdown policies — such as ordering people to stay home and closing schools — were not implemented after the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, there would be roughly 60 million more coronavirus infections across the nation, a new modeling study suggests. Jacqueline Howard writes for CNNthat the study, published Monday in the scientific journal Nature, involved a modeling technique typically used for estimating economic growth to measure the effect of shutdown policies across six countries: China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States. Overall, the study suggests that emergency Covid-19 policies prevented more than 500 million total coronavirus infections across all six countries.

Was COVID-19 Created in a Lab? China Has Some Urgent Questions to Answer

In an interview with  The Telegraph’s Allison Pearsonon Thursday, Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, said it was likely that coronavirus was the result of a Chinese lab accidental release. Charles Moore writes in The Telegraph that Sir Richard’s interview chiefly concerned a new learned paper about the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, written by distinguished scientists, the vaccinologist, Birger Sorensen, and the immunologist, Angus Dalgleish, in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery.