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Aegis Consortium funds research aimed at reducing the threat of future pandemics

The Aegis Consortium, an initiative of the University of Arizona Health Sciences, awarded approximately $650,000 in seed funding to eight pilot research…

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The Aegis Consortium, an initiative of the University of Arizona Health Sciences, awarded approximately $650,000 in seed funding to eight pilot research projects in the areas of pandemic control, prediction or preparedness; post-acute effects of pandemics on individuals and societies; and the resilience of built and natural environments.

Credit: UArizona Health Sciences

The Aegis Consortium, an initiative of the University of Arizona Health Sciences, awarded approximately $650,000 in seed funding to eight pilot research projects in the areas of pandemic control, prediction or preparedness; post-acute effects of pandemics on individuals and societies; and the resilience of built and natural environments.

“As we explore the challenges of pandemics such as COVID-19, we will continue to expand our investigative reach with domestic and international research teams to provide a range of solutions for preparedness, mitigation and recovery,” said Janko Nikolich, MD, PhD, director of the Aegis Consortium and head of the Department of Immunobiology at the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson. “Together, we will become a force that challenges future pandemics.”

The one-year funding will assist with initial costs and data collection with the end goal of strengthening applications for external funding from large national organizations. Awardees may be eligible for a second year of funding depending on progress and impact.

The following projects were funded:

  • “Development of Broadly Effective Coronavirus Diagnostics and Vaccines Using Evolution-proof Antibodies,” led by Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, professor of immunobiology in the College of Medicine – Tucson, and Michael Worobey, PhD, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the UArizona College of Science. This project aims to generate antibodies, tests and vaccines to be used as interventions early in an outbreak before a new virus has been precisely identified.
     
  • “Agent-Based and Graphical Models for Pandemics Prediction and Prevention,” led by Michael Chertkov, PhD, professor of mathematics in the College of Science, and Alon Efrat, PhD, associate professor of computer science in the College of Science. The purpose of this project is to create reliable, coherent and data-driven models to predict the spread of infectious disease at different scales.
     
  • “Predictions of Vector-borne and Zoonotic Disease Spread: A Collaborative Response Network,” led by Leigh Combrink, PhD, assistant professor of wildlife disease and conservation in the UArizona College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences, Kacey Ernst, PhD, MPH, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the UArizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, and Michael Riehle, PhD, professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences. This project seeks to equip local governments with tools to accurately predict and respond to emerging infectious diseases and guard against the threat of a vector-borne pandemic.
     
  • “BIHDS: Building Integrated Health Data Systems to Identify and Respond to the Next Pandemic,” led by Karen Lutrick, PhD, associate professor of family and community medicine in the College of Medicine—Tucson. The goal of this project is to connect different health care systems with real-world data in order to expand monitoring across all stages of medical processes.
     
  • “Broad-spectrum Inhibitors against Viral Methyltransferases,” led by Hongmin Li, PhD, professor in the UArizona R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy. This project aims to produce broad-spectrum, direct-acting antivirals for a re-emerging but neglected family of viruses for which there are no Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs.
     
  • “Genomic Epidemiology of Avian Influenza Viruses in the Southwest U.S.,” led by Matthew Scotch, PhD, MPH, assistant dean and professor in the College of Health Solutions and the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Co-investigators include Michael Worobey, PhD, department head and professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences; Craig Woods DVM, MS, MBA, director of infectious disease and biosecurity projects in the Institute For Future Health at ASU, Arvind Varsani, PhD, professor in the Biodesign Institute and the School of Life Science at ASU, and Kevin McGraw, professor and associate director of operations and facilities in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. This study will monitor the evolution and genetic variation of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the Southwest by collecting and sequencing samples from birds and the environment. Avian influenza is one of the major infectious disease risks facing the world.
     
  • “An Immersive Built Environment Intervention to Reduce Burnout Amongst Frontline Workers,” led by Esther Sternberg, MD, professor of medicine in the College of Medicine – Tucson and director of research at the college’s Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, J. Ray Runyon, PhD, assistant research professor of environmental science in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences, Mari Ricker, MD, professor of family and community medicine in the College of Medicine – Tucson, and Mirelle Phillips, CEO and founder of Studio Elsewhere. This project will address a serious pandemic workforce issue and provide solutions to prevent and reduce burnout through the built environment.
     
  • “Development of a New Strategy for Quantifying the Environmental Transmission of Infectious Diseases in the Built Environment for Selecting Non-pharmaceutical Interventions,” led by Kelly Bright, PhD, associate research professor of environmental science in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences, Amanda Wilson, PhD, assistant professor in the Zuckerman College of Public Health, and Charles Gerba, PhD, professor of environmental science in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences. This study will quantify the risk of viruses becoming airborne based on certain activities and provide a new tool for determining which non-pharmaceutical interventions best reduce the transmission of infectious diseases.

The Aegis Consortium is building a diverse network of experts – virologists, economists, public health specialists, information architects, engineers and more – and tapping into all corners of the human experience to develop comprehensive pandemic-prevention solutions.

More than 200 UArizona faculty and over 100 external partners have led or participated in Aegis-related initiatives and research efforts since its inception in 2021.


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No Privacy, No Property: The World In 2030 According To The WEF

No Privacy, No Property: The World In 2030 According To The WEF

Authored by Madge Waggy via SevenWop.home.blog,

The World Economic Forum…

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No Privacy, No Property: The World In 2030 According To The WEF

Authored by Madge Waggy via SevenWop.home.blog,

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded fifty years ago. It has gained more and more prominence over the decades and has become one of the leading platforms of futuristic thinking and planning. As a meeting place of the global elite, the WEF brings together the leaders in business and politics along with a few selected intellectuals. The main thrust of the forum is global control.

Free markets and individual choice do not stand as the top values, but state interventionism and collectivism. Individual liberty and private property are to disappear from this planet by 2030 according to the projections and scenarios coming from the World Economic Forum.

Eight Predictions

Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound change. The scenario for the world in 2030 is more than just a forecast. It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns. 

According to the projections of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private property.

If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable environment. 

In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key countries, a global agency would set the price of CO2 emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.

In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:

  1. People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.

  2. The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.

  3. Organs will not be transplanted but printed.

  4. Meat consumption will be minimized.

  5. Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.

  6. To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.

  7. People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.

  8. Western values will be tested to the breaking point..

Beyond Privacy and Property

In a publication for the World Economic Forum, the Danish ecoactivist Ida Auken, who had served as her country’s minister of the environment from 2011 to 2014 and still is a member of the Danish Parliament (the Folketing), has elaborated a scenario of a world without privacy or property. In “Welcome to 2030,” she envisions a world where “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” By 2030, so says her scenario, shopping and owning have become obsolete, because everything that once was a product is now a service.

In this idyllic new world of hers, people have free access to transportation, accommodation, food, “and all the things we need in our daily lives.” As these things will become free of charge, “it ended up not making sense for us to own much.” There would be no private ownership in houses nor would anyone pay rent, “because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it.” A person’s living room, for example, will be used for business meetings when one is absent. Concerns like “lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment” are things of the past. The author predicts that people will be happy to enjoy such a good life that is so much better “than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth.”

Ecological Paradise

In her 2019 contribution to the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils of the World Economic Forum, Ida Auken foretells how the world may look in the future “if we win the war on climate change.” By 2030, when CO2 emissions will be greatly reduced, people will live in a world where meat on the dinner plate “will be a rare sight” while water and the air will be much cleaner than today. Because of the shift from buying goods to using services, the need to have money will vanish, because people will spend less and less on goods. Work time will shrink and leisure time will grow.

For the future, Auken envisions a city where electric cars have substituted conventional combustion vehicles. Most of the roads and parking spaces will have become green parks and walking zones for pedestrians. By 2030, agriculture will offer mainly plant-based alternatives to the food supply instead of meat and dairy products. The use of land to produce animal feed will greatly diminish and nature will be spreading across the globe again.

Fabricating Social Consent

How can people be brought to accept such a system? The bait to entice the masses is the assurances of comprehensive healthcare and a guaranteed basic income. The promoters of the Great Reset promise a world without diseases. Due to biotechnologically produced organs and individualized genetics-based medical treatments, a drastically increased life expectancy and even immortality are said to be possible. Artificial intelligence will eradicate death and eliminate disease and mortality. The race is on among biotechnological companies to find the key to eternal life.

Along with the promise of turning any ordinary person into a godlike superman, the promise of a “universal basic income” is highly attractive, particularly to those who will no longer find a job in the new digital economy. Obtaining a basic income without having to go through the treadmill and disgrace of applying for social assistance is used as a bait to get the support of the poor.

To make it economically viable, the guarantee of a basic income would require the leveling of wage differences. The technical procedures of the money transfer from the state will be used to promote the cashless society. With the digitization of all monetary transactions, each individual purchase will be registered. As a consequence, the governmental authorities would have unrestricted access to supervise in detail how individual persons spend their money. A universal basic income in a cashless society would provide the conditions to impose a social credit system and deliver the mechanism to sanction undesirable behavior and identify the superfluous and unwanted.

Who Will Be the Rulers?

The World Economic Forum is silent about the question of who will rule in this new world.

There is no reason to expect that the new power holders would be benevolent. Yet even if the top decision-makers of the new world government were not mean but just technocrats, what reason would an administrative technocracy have to go on with the undesirables? What sense does it make for a technocratic elite to turn the common man into a superman? Why share the benefits of artificial intelligence with the masses and not keep the wealth for the chosen few?

Not being swayed away by the utopian promises, a sober assessment of the plans must come to the conclusion that in this new world, there would be no place for the average person and that they would be put away along with the “unemployable,” “feeble minded,” and “ill bred.” Behind the preaching of the progressive gospel of social justice by the promoters of the Great Reset and the establishment of a new world order lurks the sinister project of eugenics, which as a technique is now called “genetic engineering” and as a movement is named “transhumanism,” a term  coined by Julian Huxley, the first director of the UNESCO.

The promoters of the project keep silent about who will be the rulers in this new world. The dystopian and collectivist nature of these projections and plans is the result of the rejection of free capitalism. Establishing a better world through a dictatorship is a contradiction in terms. Not less but more economic prosperity is the answer to the current problems. Therefore, we need more free markets and less state planning. The world is getting greener and a fall in the growth rate of the world population is already underway. These trends are the natural consequence of wealth creation through free markets.

Conclusion

The World Economic Forum and its related institutions in combination with a handful of governments and a few high-tech companies want to lead the world into a new era without property or privacy. Values like individualism, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are at stake, to be repudiated in favor of collectivism and the imposition of a “common good” that is defined by the self-proclaimed elite of technocrats. What is sold to the public as the promise of equality and ecological sustainability is in fact a brutal assault on human dignity and liberty. Instead of using the new technologies as an instrument of betterment, the Great Reset seeks to use the technological possibilities as a tool of enslavement. In this new world order, the state is the single owner of everything. It is left to our imagination to figure out who will program the algorithms that manage the distribution of the goods and services.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/03/2023 - 23:45

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Vehicles Sales increase to 15.67 million SAAR in September; Up 15% YoY

Wards Auto released their estimate of light vehicle sales for September: September U.S. Light-Vehicles Sales Bounce Back Despite Gloomy Conditions (pay site).Hard to say exactly how much but sales could have been slightly stronger in September if not f…

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Wards Auto released their estimate of light vehicle sales for September: September U.S. Light-Vehicles Sales Bounce Back Despite Gloomy Conditions (pay site).
Hard to say exactly how much but sales could have been slightly stronger in September if not for some lost inventory caused by production cuts related to plant shutdowns from UAW strikes at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. Sales losses will be more strongly felt in October as production cuts mount.
Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows light vehicle sales since 2006 from the BEA (blue) and Wards Auto's estimate for September (red).

The impact of COVID-19 was significant, and April 2020 was the worst month.  After April 2020, sales increased, and were close to sales in 2019 (the year before the pandemic).  However, sales decreased in 2021 due to supply issues.  The "supply chain bottom" was in September 2021.

Vehicle SalesThe second graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967.

Vehicle sales are usually a transmission mechanism for Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy, although far behind housing.  This time vehicle sales were more suppressed by supply chain issues and have picked up recently.

Sales in September were above the consensus forecast.

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Government

Nationwide test of Wireless Emergency Alert system could test people’s patience – or help rebuild public trust in the system

If an alert from the federal government pops up on your phone, will you notice it? Will you know who it’s from? Will you trust it?

A message like this should pop up on your phone on Oct. 4, 2023. Jeff Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Wireless Emergency Alert system is scheduled to have its third nationwide test on Oct. 4, 2023. The Wireless Emergency Alert system is a public safety system that allows authorities to alert people via their mobile devices of dangerous weather, missing children and other situations requiring public attention.

Similar tests in 2018 and 2021 caused a degree of public confusion and resistance. In addition, there was confusion around the first test of the U.K. system in April 2023, and an outcry surrounding accidental alert messages such as those sent in Hawaii in January 2018 and in Florida in April 2023.

The federal government lists five types of emergency alerts: National (formerly labeled Presidential), Imminent Threat, Public Safety, America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response (Amber), and Opt-in Test Messages. You can opt out of any except National Alerts, which are reserved for national emergencies. The Oct. 4 test is a National Alert.

We are a media studies researcher and a communications researcher who study emergency alert systems. We believe that concerns about previous tests raise two questions: Is public trust in emergency alerting eroding? And how might the upcoming test rebuild it?

Confusion and resistance

In an ever-updating digital media environment, emergency alerts appear as part of a constant stream of updates, buzzes, reminders and notifications on people’s smartphones. Over-alerting is a common fear in emergency management circles because it can lead people to ignore alerts and not take needed action. The sheer volume of different updates can be similarly overwhelming, burying emergency alerts in countless other messages. Many people have even opted out of alerts when possible, rummaging through settings and toggling off every alert they can find.

Even when people receive alerts, however, there is potential for confusion and rejection. All forms of emergency alerts rely on the recipients’ trust in the people or organization responsible for the alert. But it’s not always clear who the sender is. As one emergency manager explained to one of us regarding alerts used during COVID-19: “People were more confused because they got so many different notifications, especially when they don’t say who they’re from.”

When the origin of an alert is unclear, or the recipient perceives it to have a political bias counter to their own views, people may become confused or resistant to the message. Prior tests and use of the Wireless Emergency Alert system have indicated strong anti-authority attitudes, particularly following the much-derided 2018 test of what was then called the Presidential Alert message class. There are already conspiracy theories online about the upcoming test.

People receive mobile alerts from then-president Donald Trump in a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch aired on Oct. 6, 2018.

Trust in alerts is further reduced by the overall lack of testing and public awareness work done on behalf of the Wireless Emergency Alert system since its launch in June 2012. As warning expert Dennis Mileti explained in his 2018 Federal Emergency Management Agency PrepTalk, routine public tests are essential for warning systems’ effectiveness. However, the Wireless Emergency Alert system has been tested at the national level only twice, and there has been little public outreach to explain the system by either the government or technology companies.

More exposure and info leads to more trust

The upcoming nationwide test may offer a moment that could rebuild trust in the system. A survey administered in the days immediately following the 2021 national test found that more respondents believed that the National Alert message class label would signal more trustworthy information than the Presidential Alert message class label.

Similarly, in contrast to the 2021 test, which targeted only select users, the Oct. 4 test is slated to reach all compatible devices in the U.S. Since users cannot opt out of the National Alert message class, this week’s test is a powerful opportunity to build awareness about the potential benefits of a functional federal emergency alert system.

The Oct. 4 test message is expected to state, “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert system. No action is needed.” We instead suggest that action is, in fact, urgently needed to help people better understand the rapidly changing mobile alert and warning ecosystem that confronts them. Familiarity with this system is what will allow it to support public health and safety, and address the crises of the 21st century.

Here are steps that you can take now to help make the Wireless Emergency Alert system more effective:

  • The Wireless Emergency Alert system is only one form of emergency alert. Identify which mobile notification systems are used by your local emergency management organizations: police, fire and emergency services. Know which systems are opt-in and opt-out, and opt in to those needed. Ensure access to other sources of information during an emergency, such as local radio and television, or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather radio.

  • Understand the meaning of mobile device notification settings. Just because you are opted in to “Emergency Alerts” on your cellphone does not necessarily mean you are signed up to receive notifications from local authorities. Check the FEMA website for information about the Wireless Emergency Alert system and your local emergency management organizations’ websites about opt-in systems.

  • Have a plan for contacting family, friends and neighbors during an emergency. Decide in advance who will help the vulnerable members of your community.

  • Find out if your local emergency management organizations test their alert systems, and make sure to receive those local tests.

  • Anticipate the possibility that mobile systems will be damaged or unavailable during a crisis and prepare essentials for sheltering in place or quick evacuation.

Finally, push back on the lack of information and rise of misinformation about alerts by sharing reliable information about emergency alerts with your family and friends.

Hamilton Bean has received funding from the Department of Homeland Security and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Elizabeth Ellcessor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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