General

An article in the Dec. 3 China Briefing, titled “China’s COVID-19 Vaccine Development and Availability,” names four of China’s vaccine-producers: the Tianjin-based CanSino; the Wuhan-based China National Biotech Group (CNBG), the Beijing-based Sinovac, and ZLongkema, based in Anhui province. These pharma companies have arrangements to carry out testing and distribution of vaccines in 14 developing sector countries, primarily in Ibero-America and Southwest Asia. Recently, China’s Sinovac licensed Brazil’s respected Butantan Institute to get raw materials to manufacture millions of doses of its COVID vaccine inside Brazil. China has the scientific knowledge, manpower, strong Hamiltonian finances, and production engineering skills capabilities to teach other countries to set up vaccine production factories within their borders, to the effect, perhaps, of expanding vaccine production by 1 to 2 billion doses.

The United States has strong capabilities. Were the U.S. to apply the Defense Production Act of 1950 to expand vaccine-manufacturing facilities, it could greatly add to this process, under HHS’s Operation Warp Speed.

The international organization COVAX was formed decades ago, as a joint fund for equitable distribution of vaccines, joining with an organization named Gavi, a funder of vaccines for low-income countries based in Geneva, Switzerland. On Dec. 18, COVAX announced that through contributions, it has pledged that at least 1.3 billion donor-funded vaccine doses will be made available to 92 low- and middle-income economies that are eligible. This valuable immunization initiative would fund only approximately enough vaccine to vaccinate a targeted 20% of the population.

These nations cannot wait until 2023-24 to get sufficient COVID-19 vaccine. The production facilities must be constructed so that the vaccine is available to a considerable share of those nations’ population by the first quarter of 2021. This will require not only vaccines per se, but also the refrigeration chains and other basic infrastructure required to deliver the doses to the targeted population. The method to address this was outlined in the LaRouche plan “Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.”

Excerpts from Panel 1 of the September 5-6 Schiller Institute conference.

Watch the whole panel here: https://youtu.be/np673ypliKM

Speakers include:

Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute
Greetings and Opening Remarks

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. (1922-2019)
Speech delivered to the 2000 Labor Day Schiller Institute conference

Andrey Kortunov
Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council
The Strategic Implications of the Russia-United States Bilateral Relationship

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko
Doctor of Economics, Chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine
Irreconcilable Problems Are Pushing the World Towards Catastrophe

Colonel Richard H. Black (USA, Ret.)
Former head of the Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon; former State Senator, Virginia
Do We Risk a Military Coup?

J. Kirk Wiebe
Former Senior National Security Agency (NSA) analyst
The Unnecessary Tragedy of 9/11

William Binney
Former technical director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis and Reporting section of the National Security Agency (NSA)
Defend the Constitution from the Surveillance State

A great increase in vaccine-making production capacity is needed globally, if billions of people in Ibero-America, Africa, and Asia are to have access to COVID-19 vaccines in a timely fashion to save tens of millions of lives—and if those populations are not to be made into a petri dish for breeding new mutations and new viruses to reinfect nations who survived the first round.

The following is a preliminary look at existing production capacity for COVID-19 vaccines, and what emergency measures and new construction would be needed to ensure success.

In a Dec. 8 interview with Bloomberg television, Rasmus Bech Hansen, founder and CEO of Airfinity, a life-sciences analytics firm that is currently focusing on SAR-CoV-2 virus, said that 6 billion of the world’s present 7.8 billion people would need to be vaccinated in order for COVID-19 to be defeated. This involves mass vaccination for about 75% of the world’s population.

But that is not occurring; the developing sector is, for the most part, being left out of plans for immediate or near-term vaccination. This means death for them, and continuing danger of contagion for the entire human race. A Nov. 30 article in Nature magazine, entitled, “How COVID Vaccines Are Being Divvied Up Around the World,” reports that vaccine-makers specializing in COVID vaccines, “can make sufficient doses for more than one-third of the world’s population by the end of 2021. But many people in low-income countries might have to wait until 2023 or 2024 for vaccination, according to estimates from the Duke Global Health Innovation Center in Durham, North Carolina.”

Nature further reports that “27 members of the European Union, together with five rich countries, have pre-ordered about half [of vaccine doses]. The countries account for only around 13% of the global population.”

To gain a sense of overall production capacity, the estimated capacity for 2021 for the major vaccine-makers, in billions of doses, is: AstraZeneca, 3 billion; Pfizer/BioNTech, 1.3 billion; Moderna, 1 billion; Russia’s Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology (which makes Russia’s Sputnik V), 800 million.

Other vaccine-makers, including Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Novanax, and others, may have the combined capacity to produce another 1.5 billion doses, bringing the total doses to 7.6 billion. But these figures may be overstated. For example, Russia does not have sufficient vaccine-making capacity inside Russia to make the vaccines it has committed to for foreign countries. Many pharma companies make projections of what they would like to produce, but do not reach them, and so forth.

As Xinhua notes today, “China is making steady progress from a follower to a leader in transport technology“ referencing a new white paper released in Beijing today. China possesses self-developed core technologies, and has made major breakthroughs in transport infrastructure and equipment, according to the white paper titled “Sustainable Development of Transport in China”. The following are some world-leading mega-projects and technologies listed by the white paper:

-— China leads the world in technology for railways at high altitudes and in extremely low temperatures, and for high-speed and heavy-haul railways.

-— It has solved the most challenging technical problems confronting highway construction in difficult geological conditions such as plateau permafrost, expansive soil, and desert. It also leads in core technologies for building deep-water offshore ports, improving massive estuary and long waterways, and building large airports.

-— By the end of 2019, the total length of high-speed railway lines across the country exceeded 35,000 km, making up more than two thirds of the world’s total.

-— The Beijing-Guangzhou High-speed Railway, the longest high-speed rail line in the world, has been completed. The Harbin-Dalian High-speed Railway, the world’s first high-speed rail line operating at low temperatures in winter is open to traffic. The Datong-Qinhuangdao Heavy-haul Railway ranks top in the world in terms of annual transport volume.

-— China leads the world in the total length and number of highway bridges and tunnels in service and under construction. It has seven of the ten longest cable-stayed bridges, six of the ten longest suspension bridges, six of the ten longest cross-sea bridges, and eight of the ten highest bridges in the world.

-— The Fuxing electric multiple units trains have been running at 350 km/h – the highest operating speed in the world – on the Beijing-Shanghai Highspeed Rail, the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Rail and the Beijing-Zhangjiakou High-speed Rail.

-— China became the first in the world to realize autopilot on trains running at a speed of 350 km/h. 

Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, has written an open letter to President Trump asking him to grant a pardon to Julian Assange.

His letter reads:

“Mr. President, Today, I respectfully request that you pardon Mr. Julian Assange. Mr. Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his liberty for the past ten years. This is a high price to pay for the courage to publish true information about government misconduct throughout the world. I visited Mr. Assange in Belmarsh High Security Prison in London, with two independent medical doctors, and I can attest to the fact that his health has seriously deteriorated, to the point where his life is now in danger. Critically, Mr. Assange suffers from a documented respiratory condition which renders him extremely vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic that has recently broken out in the prison where he is being held. I ask you to pardon Mr. Assange, because he is not, and has never been, an enemy of the American people. His organization, WikiLeaks, fights secrecy and corruption throughout the world and, therefore, acts in the public interest both of the American people and of humanity as a whole.

“I ask because Mr. Assange has never published false information. The cause for any reputational harm that may have resulted from his publications is not to be found in any misconduct on his part, but in the very misconduct which he exposed.

“I ask because Mr. Assange has not hacked or stolen any of the information he published. He has obtained it from authentic documents and sources in the same way as any other serious and independent investigative journalists conduct their work. While we may personally agree or disagree with their publications, they clearly cannot be regarded as crimes.

“I ask because prosecuting Mr. Assange for publishing true information about serious official misconduct, whether in America or elsewhere, would amount to `shooting the messenger’ rather than correcting the problem he exposed. This would be incompatible with the core values of justice, rule of law and press freedom, as reflected in the American Constitution and international human rights instruments ratified by the United States.

“I ask because you have vowed, Mr. President, to pursue an agenda of fighting government corruption and misconduct; and because allowing the prosecution of Mr. Assange to continue would mean that, under your legacy, telling the truth about such corruption and misconduct has become a crime.

“In pardoning Mr Assange, Mr. President, you would send a clear message of justice, truth and humanity to the American people and to the world.

“You would rehabilitate a courageous man who has suffered injustice, persecution and humiliation for more than a decade, simply for telling the truth.

“Last but not least, you would give back to Mr. Assange’s two young sons the loving father they need and look up to. You would also reassure these children, and through them all children of the world, that there is nothing wrong with telling the truth, but that it is the right thing to do; that it is honourable to fight for justice and, indeed, that these are the values America and the world stand for.”

“For these reasons, I respectfully appeal to you to pardon Julian Assange. Whatever our personal views and sympathies may be, I believe that, after a decade of persecution, this man’s unjust suffering must end now. Please, use your power of pardon to right the wrongs inflicted on Julian Assange, to end his unjust ordeal and reunite him with his family!

“I respectfully thank you for considering this appeal with foresight, generosity and compassion. Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration.”

Register for Sept. 5-6 Schiller Institute Conference

This week’s webcast is an abbreviated promotional for this weekend’s Schiller Institute conference. Helga discusses why this conference is necessary, given the strategic tensions and dangers which are growing. In the last days, there have been numerous “near misses” of U.S. aircraft with Russian planes, near collisions at sea with Chinese vessels, and an escalation of war talk coming from U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Esper.

By bringing together representatives of major governments, the conference will be a crucial opportunity to show that dialogue, rather than threats and troop movements, represents the way forward out of the present dangerous paradigm. In the webcast, Helga reviews what will be presented in the four panels and appeals to viewers to join us in the mobilization to succeed in an urgently needed paradigm shift.

Californians for decades have been taught to live in fear of “the big one” – the likelihood of a major earthquake originating in the San Andreas Fault that will cause untold damage and loss of life. It would appear that the state is now experiencing that “big one” – only it is the COVID pandemic, and not an earthquake.

Populous Los Angeles County appears to be the epicenter; as of this weekend all of Southern California and the 12-county San Joaquin Valley to the north had exhausted their regular intensive care unit capacity. Some hospitals are now using “surge” space, although the greater shortage is reportedly of skilled medical personnel, and not space per se.

AP reports that the city of Los Angeles on Saturday had nearly 17,400 people “hospitalized with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infections — more than double the previous peak reached in July — and a state model that uses current data to forecast future trends shows the number could reach an unfathomable 75,000 by mid-January. More than 3,600 confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients were in intensive care units. Some areas of California are `just right at that cusp of getting overrun,’ Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, said during an event organized by the California State University system.”

In total, California’s remaining ICU capacity this weekend stood at just 3%, with the Southern California region already at zero, the San Joaquin Valley region at .7% and the Greater Sacramento region at 11.3%. The Bay Area is now also being hit: “COVID-19 cases are surging in San Francisco and across the country. Hospitals in the Bay Area are close to being overwhelmed,” said Mayor Breed in a news release.

Various forms of triage are already being implemented. In Fresno and three neighboring counties, paramedics are being sent on emergency calls to determine if patients should be taken to the emergency room, or if “they could go to an urgent care facility or wait a few days to talk to their doctors,” local medical authorities report. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We are getting crushed,” said Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. “And it isn’t just COVID patients,” he said. “It’s car accidents and heart attacks and victims of violence. They need a place to go to receive critical care.”

AP reports: “Many hospitals are preparing for the possibility of rationing care. A document recently circulated among doctors at the four hospitals run by Los Angeles County asking them to shift strategy: instead of trying everything to save a life, their goal during the crisis is to save as many patients as possible. `Some compromise of standard of care is unavoidable; it is not that an entity, system, or locale chooses to limit resources, it is that the resources are clearly not available to provide care in a regular manner,’ the document obtained by the Los Angeles Times reads.”

The chief executive of the Corona Regional Medical Center of southeast of Los Angeles, Mark Uffer, stated: “Whatever’s coming, I don’t think any of us are going to be able to manage it. You have a dam that’s about to break, and you’ve got to stop putting water into the dam.”

Speaking to China Daily after his press conference on December 19, Wu Yunhua, the Vice Administrator of the China National Space Agency, also mooted the possibility that the next Chang’e mission could be a sample retrieval from the far side of the Moon. At the press conference he had indicated that Chang’e-6 would land on the south pole of the Moon. Here he said: “But if the Queqiao (relay satellite) still functions real well, we may also consider sending it to the far side to take some samples there. This is because there has never been a mission to return samples from the far side, and if we do so…that will be very meaningful for scientists around the world.” He also added that Chang’e 7 and 8 will be tasked with, among things, exploring the technological feasibility of international cooperation on jointly  building a robotic scientific research outpost on the Moon.