Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Greens desperately trying to harness concern about Covid-19 for their fake climate crisis.

COVID-19 and climate change: A healthy dose of reality

Joel Makower Monday, March 16, 2020 – 2:11am

It’s too early to tell whether COVID-19 is linked in any way to the climate crisis. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t; we’ll likely never know for certain. Still, consider the global health crisis currently upon us as a warm-up act for a climate-changing world.

In the immortal words of the ‘70s rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

For nearly two decades, health officials around the world have warned about the rise of infectious disease from a warming climate. The Pentagon, for example, started raising concern back in 2003 in an independent study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense. It warned that “As famine, disease and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity.”

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Such warnings seem both prescient and obvious today, given the global scramble to corral COVID-19. But it also provides an opportunity to plan for the next infectious outbreak, and the ones after that.

Indeed, climate change could make the coronavirus seem like the good old days.

“Infectious disease transmission is sensitive to local, small-scale differences in weather, human modification of the landscape, the diversity of animal hosts, and human behavior that affects vector-human contact, among other factors,” write the authors of the Third National Climate Assessment, produced by more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee and reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences. It warned:

The public health system is not fully prepared to monitor or respond to these growing disease risks. The introduction of new diseases into non-immune populations has been and continues to be a major challenge in public health. There are concerns that climate change may provide opportunities for pathogens to expand or shift their geographic ranges.

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Read more: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/covid-19-and-climate-change-healthy-dose-reality

Claims of a link between global warming and disease are nonsense. Even mosquito borne diseases thrive in Arctic climates; in the 19th century, in the depths of the Little Ice Age, endemic Malaria was a major killer disease in Northern Europe.

But what if I’m wrong?

Is there any doubt that in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, medical research will receive a lot more attention? A decade from now, if a new disease like Covid-19 emerges, it will be contained and cured so fast we won’t even know there was a problem.

Even the Covid-19 crisis may be solved much faster than people fear. The unprecedented focus on Coronavirus is producing results, everything from vaccine trials to experimental drug therapies, partly based on experimental treatments developed during the SARS and MERS outbreaks are being tested, and promising results are emerging.

From February;

Remdesivir and chloroquine effectively inhibit the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in vitro

Manli Wang, Ruiyuan Cao, Leike Zhang, Xinglou Yang, Jia Liu, Mingyue Xu, Zhengli Shi, Zhihong Hu, Wu Zhong & Gengfu Xiao 

Dear Editor,

In December 2019, a novel pneumonia caused by a previously unknown pathogen emerged in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in central China. The initial cases were linked to exposures in a seafood market in Wuhan.¹ As of January 27, 2020, the Chinese authorities reported 2835 confirmed cases in mainland China, including 81 deaths. Additionally, 19 confirmed cases were identified in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and 39 imported cases were identified in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, United States, Vietnam, Singapore, Nepal, France, Australia and Canada. The pathogen was soon identified as a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which is closely related to sever acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV).² Currently, there is no specific treatment against the new virus. Therefore, identifying effective antiviral agents to combat the disease is urgently needed.

An efficient approach to drug discovery is to test whether the existing antiviral drugs are effective in treating related viral infections. The 2019-nCoV belongs to Betacoronavirus which also contains SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV). Several drugs, such as ribavirin, interferon, lopinavir-ritonavir, corticosteroids, have been used in patients with SARS or MERS, although the efficacy of some drugs remains controversial.³ In this study, we evaluated the antiviral efficiency of five FAD-approved drugs including ribavirin, penciclovir, nitazoxanide, nafamostat, chloroquine and two well-known broad-spectrum antiviral drugs remdesivir (GS-5734) and favipiravir (T-705) against a clinical isolate of 2019-nCoV in vitro.

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Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0

Imagine if all the money wasted on useless renewables had been spent on something useful, like medical research. Where would we be today, if the billions which have been wasted on wind and solar subsidies had instead been spent on finding new and better ways to cure disease?

The last thing we all need is for climate fear-mongers to drag the world into a new medical research dark age, by sucking all the money out of the system with their ever growing demands for special consideration and government subsidies.