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The health secretary sets out a strategy to achieve a "significant" increase in testing following criticism of the government. The "five-pillar" plan involves: * Swab testing at Public Health England and NHS labs; * Using commercial partners, including universities and private businesses, to establish more swab testing; * Introducing antibody blood tests to determine whether people have had COVID-19; * Surveillance to determine the rate of infection and how it is spreading across the country; * Build an "at-scale" diagnostics industry to reach 100,000 tests by the end of April. The promise comes after it was confirmed that another 569...

Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, admitted on Wednesday that he had only just learned that asymptomatic individuals can still spread coronavirus — even though health experts had warned about the possibility as early as January. Kemp, in a press conference on Wednesday said the fact that he’d just learned that information contributed to him issuing a statewide shelter-in-place order in Georgia. Kemp, said that he had, in just the last 24 hours, learned “that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs.”

PITTSBURGH — Researchers from UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh on Thursday discussed a potential vaccine for COVID-19. Louis Falo, professor and chair of dermatology, Pitt School of Medicine and UPMC, said a bandage-like patch with micro needles would release a vaccine into the body and produce adequate antibodies to neutralize the virus. "Less vaccine is needed than a traditional shot," he said and added that the vaccine would be relatively inexpensive and not require refrigeration. The vaccine would deliver low doses of an antigen and be effective for all age groups, Falo said. The vaccine has been tested on...

The vaccine is delivered into the skin through a fingertip-sized patch of microscopic needles. Credit: UPMC ________________________________________________________________________________ University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists today announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. When tested in mice, the vaccine, delivered through a fingertip-sized patch, produces antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 at quantities thought to be sufficient for neutralizing the virus. The paper appeared today in EBioMedicine, which is published by The Lancet, and is the first study to be published after critique from fellow scientists at outside institutions that describes a candidate vaccine for COVID-19. The...

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus. The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave chloroquine and its next-generation derivative, hydroxychloroquine, emergency-use authorization Monday for treating the novel coronavirus, although the drug was already being used off-label by some doctors and hospitals for COVID-19...

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has told security forces they should shoot dead anyone causing "trouble" in areas locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic. About half the country's roughly 110 million people are currently under quarantine -- including millions in deep poverty, left jobless by tough restrictions on movement. Hours before Duterte gave the order in a speech late Wednesday, nearly two dozen people from a slum community in the capital Manila were arrested for holding a protest that accused the government of failing to provide food aid to the poor. "My orders are to the police and military, also...

WeWork founder Adam Neumann won't be getting nearly $1billion to walk away from his company after Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group pulled its $3billion bailout offer for the troubled office-sharing startup that is now in legal and financial turmoil. SoftBank said it has terminated its tender offer for additional WeWork shares agreed last year with shareholders, drawing threats of legal action and plunging the floundering office space company further into crisis. The tech investment giant said in statement that given its duty to its shareholders it could no longer proceed with the deal, citing criminal and civil probes into the...

Guest Piece by Gregg Updike I am prefacing this with the acknowledgement that I am not a medical professional or expert. I am just trying to apply some common sense to what we see happening in this current Wuhan Virus pandemic. Just six or so months ago that there was a huge debate about how a large anti-virus movement was coming to the forefront where a significant percentage of the population was virulently against government mandating vaccinating their children for the standard diseases like measles and other largely eradicated diseases like polio and whooping cough. The debate was raging back...

A fascist leftist snowflake in action.

President Donald Trump, in daily news conferences at the White House and in interviews, has made a number of false or misleading claims about the coronavirus and U.S. efforts to combat it, including some that put him at odds with health experts and that prompted clarifications from his own top health and science officials. NBC News is fact-checking some of his statements, made or repeated at various points during the ongoing global crisis, and updating this article. Claim: The U.S. implemented a travel ban "way ahead of anybody else." This is false. Italy had already done so by Jan. 31...

Not an April Fools joke but funny. The Venezuelan ship appears to have been trying to seize the cruise ship, which is designed to safely sail through icy waters. This Venezuelan Navy offshore patrol repeatedly rammed This cruise ship until the Venezuelan Navy offshore patrol sank

The great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, in his classic Inferno described and classified the sins that the eternally damned perpetrate. One of the lowest circles in Dante’s Lower Hell – for those who pervert reason – is reserved for the hypocrites, who accuse others of deceit while guilty themselves. He describes the leaden coats they wear in the style of a monk’s habit... The stark image comes to mind with the constant Washington Post “news” reports detailing the supposed thousands of lies told by President Trump in his first three years. So let’s fact-check The Washington Post’s “fact-check”...

Attributed to Martin Luther regarding the plague: "I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated...

Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping's regime concealed the extent and origins of the coronavirus outbreak, reports say. A classified report submitted to the White House states that China intentionally lowered its reported number of coronavirus cases, Bloomberg reported on April 1, citing three officials familiar with the matter. The report came one day after Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, suggested that the U.S. response to the pandemic may not have been as effective as possible due to “missing” data from China. “The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as, this was serious, but...

If this government-ordered shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine. This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009. Much of the world economy has shuddered to a halt. In the United States alone, a record 3.3 million people filed for unemployment benefits in late March. President Donald Trump once mused about lifting pandemic restrictions by mid-April to...

Women who breastfeed their children may reduce risk for ovarian cancer later in life by as much as 24 percent, a new study has found. The research, published Thursday by JAMA Oncology, also demonstrated that the longer women breastfeed, the more they can reduce their risk. In fact, breastfeeding children for 12 or more months was associated with a 34 percent reduction in risk for disease, the authors noted. "Breastfeeding any child, even for as little as one to three months can help reduce ovarian cancer risk," study co-author Dr. Naoko Sasamoto, a research fellow in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive...

VIDEO Many people are still scratching their heads over the recent rantings by Michigan Congresswoman Haley Stevens on the floor of Congress. However, this video reveals the probable cause of her antics: Demonic Possession. The good news for the Congresswoman is that the devil can be removed from her troubled soul via exorcism. Of course, a certificate of clean soul health will need to be provided by the exorcist performing her exorcism to assure her constituents that she is mentally and spiritually competent to seek another term in office.

Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was abducted and beheaded in Karachi. A video of Pearl’s decapitation was delivered to the US consulate there. Sheikh was sentenced to death in 2002. A report released by the Pearl Project at Georgetown University has claimed that the wrong men were convicted for Pearl’s murder. Instead, the investigation says Pearl was murdered by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Governments in the United States are restricting freedoms to unprecedented degrees in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. As dangerous as this expansion of power is, in some ways, federal, state and local governments are also reducing their intrusions into our lives by cutting many regulations. This deregulation falls into three categories: help people deal with the virus (including those who are confined to their homes with children who need to be home-schooled); help businesses stay open and cater to their consumers under these unusual circumstances; and free the private health care sector to better respond to the...

Yesterday was April Fools’ Day. Looks like a prominent liberal business outlet did not get that memo and fell prey to a major climate change prank. MarketWatch ran a story on April Fools’ Day originally headlined “Google will no longer pay lobbyists that deny climate change, pledges zero emissions by 2025.” The problem? The source for that story came from a parody account, according to a MarketWatch update. MarketWatch had to eat crow and updated its headline to apparently divert blame away from themselves towards the parody account: “An April Fools climate hoax in the middle of a pandemic.”