“China eats weird animals disease”

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Financial Times) — The chief executive of Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective at tackling omicron than earlier strains of Covid-19 and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies can manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale.

Stephane Bancel said the high number of omicron mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa, suggested the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year.

“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level … we had with delta,” Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It’s been almost two years since COVID-19 struck, and the origin of the virus remains a mystery. Did the virus jump from animals to humans in a natural spillover event, or was it the result of a laboratory leak? A new book explores these and other questions on the source of the coronavirus that has killed more than 5 million people worldwide to date.

“We don’t come to a conclusion, but we do lean towards the lab leak being slightly more likely at this stage,” said UK science writer Matt Ridley, who co-authored “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” with Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in gene-therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.

Back in March, the president of Tanzania, John Magufuli, died, very likely due to complications from COVID-19. Ironically, the autocratic ruler of the east African nation had been a staunch COVID-19 denier, refusing to vaccinate his country’s population and instead recommending traditional cures and prayer.

It’s a problem many Toronto-area car dealerships don’t appear willing to talk about.

With new car lots becoming more sparse by the week, dealerships contacted by th e Toronto Sun over the past several days either declined comment or refused to return phone calls when asked about inventory shortages.

Got my snow tires on Saturday. The dealer lot had a fairly wide selection of used cars, very little new of anything else, half a dozen pickups, a couple of Vettes in the showroom. A couple of months prior I was in for an oil change and it was pretty much the same. They love my little car, relatively new at 3 years, very low pandemic mileage, keep asking me to sell it to them.

With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet ministers now banning flights from seven African countries in a bid to control the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, will they finally admit those who called for banning flights from China at the start of the pandemic were right and they were wrong?