02/June/21

 

On Wednesday, President Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to find out where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus originated, giving them 90 days to examine two theories: that the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab in China or that it was first transmitted from animal to humans outside a lab. Experts and officials on Sunday called on China to provide greater transparency and speed inquiries into whether the pandemic began with a leak from a lab. “There’s going to be Covid-26 and Covid-32 unless we fully understand the origins of Covid-19,” Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said. New York Times

 

 

Emails from and to Dr Anthony Fauci obtained via Freedom of Information requests have been published. They show that experts who definitively dismissed the lab leak origin theory of SARS-CoV-2 thought there were suspicious aspects of the virus. In an email to Fauci, researcher Kristian Andersen, first author of a Nature Medicine paper that argues for a zoonosis origin (natural transmission from animals to humans), says: "(We) all find the [virus] genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory" (i.e. evolutionary adaptation from animal to human) and "some of the features (potentially) look engineered". @GMWatch on Twitter

 

 

If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how COVID-19 began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way, writes US political analyst and historian Thomas Frank. The Guardian

 

 

In Brazil, glyphosate contamination of water, driven by expanded GM soy production, leads to a large increase in infant mortality, as well as a higher probability of low birth weight and a higher probability of premature births, according to a study. The study found that the spraying of glyphosate on GM soybean crops led to a 5% increase in infant mortality in municipalities that receive water from soybean regions. This represents a total of 503 more infant deaths per year associated with the use of glyphosate in soy production. GMWatch

 

 

Like citizens of an underground city that never sleeps, tens of thousands of subterranean species of invertebrates, nematodes, bacteria and fungi are constantly filtering our water, recycling nutrients and helping to regulate the earth’s temperature. But beneath fields covered in tightly knit rows of corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops, a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is wreaking havoc, according to our newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science. Scientific American

 

 

A farmer describes the benefits of using sheep and cover crops to control weeds in a low-till organic arable system. There's no need to use toxic glyphosate if you want to reduce tillage. John Pawsey @hanslope on Twitter