• Molnupiravir is given to thousands of vulnerable patients to treat against Covid
• The antiviral, made by US pharma giant Merck, forces mutations in the virus

By Emily Craig

Published: 19:28 EDT, 25 September 2023 | Updated: 20:44 EDT, 25 September 2023

Chinese researchers have discovered a new virus on the ocean floor of the deepest place on earth.

The pathogen was found in sediment five miles below sea level in the Mariana Trench, the lowest point on earth in the Pacific Ocean, and south of Japan.

‘Wherever there’s life, you can bet there are regulators at work,’  Min Wang, a marine virologist at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao who led the research, said. ‘Viruses, in this case.’

The virus is a bacteriophage – which means ‘bacteria eater’ – and survives by infecting and replicating inside bacteria. 

Yue Su, one of the authors of the research study, told DailyMail.com that isolating and learning more about bacteriophage gene libraries is beneficial to humans.

‘They help protect humans from bacterial infections, especially in today’s era of antibiotic use and the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria,’ Su said.

Su also said current research suggests there is no precedent for bacteriophages like the virus found in the ocean sediment infecting humans and marine life, because its host is bacteria.

Therefore, the team can store the new strain in an ordinary laboratory lab at about 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius).

The team published their report in Microbiology Spectrum.

The virus was found in sediment 29,200 feet below sea level in the Mariana Trench which reaches nearly 36,100 feet at its lowest point.

The bacteria, which is infected by the virus, is usually found in sediment deep in the ocean and in hydrothermal vents – or openings on the seafloor that release hot water streams, according to the report.

‘To our best knowledge, this is the deepest known isolated phage in the global ocean,’ Wang said.

Research is currently limited on hadal viruses – or viruses from the hadal zone which is the deepest part of the ocean – Su said, so no viruses that can infect animals or humans have been isolated from the zone yet.

But the team is not ruling out the possibility of the presence of viruses in the zone that could infect animals and humans, and Su said future research will be needed there.

According to Wang, an analysis of the virus’s genetic material suggests the existence of a viral family in the ocean that was not known of before. 

It also gives new insights into deep-sea phages and phage-host interactions, Wang said. 

The new virus is being identified as vB_HmeY_H4907, and the team’s analysis shows it has a similar structure to its host. 

The virus is lysogenic, meaning it invades and replicates inside the host, and doesn’t usually kill the bacterial cell.

The research team looked for viruses in bacterial strains that were collected and isolated by another team under Yu-Zhong Zhang, also a marine virologist at the Ocean University of China.

Climate change and rising ocean temperatures affect ocean currents and sedimentation, for example, and Su said the team speculates these environmental factors may impact the survival pressures on viruses as their hosts’ metabolism change due to changes in the ocean. This could potentially lead to the rise of new viruses, but there is currently no research in this area, Su said. 

Wang said the researchers’ findings lead to new questions and research around how viruses in harsh, secluded environments stay alive, and how they co-evolve alongside their hosts. 

The team wants to continue investigating interactions between deep-sea viruses and their hosts, and searching for new viruses in other extreme places.

‘Extreme environments offer optimal prospects for unearthing novel viruses,’ Wang said. 

• Researchers in Japan have developed a Covid vaccine in pill form
• When given to monkeys, it saw them develop the necessary antibodies
• READ MORE: FDA approves new Covid booster vaccines for every American

By Caitlin Tilley, Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Published: 00:05 EDT, 13 September 2023 | Updated: 00:05 EDT, 13 September 2023

Doctors have been put on high alert about rising cases of a potentially severe respiratory virus in parts of the United States, which could signal a bad nationwide outbreak is to come. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned medical professionals the rising rates of respiratory syncitial virus, or RSV, in Florida and Georgia in recent weeks signal the start of the respiratory virus season.  

And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has advised healthcare workers to brace for what could be a ‘tripledemic’ of RSV, flu, and Covid-19 cases this winter.

RSV infects the lungs and the respiratory tract and typically causes cold-like symptoms, though it can be deadly to seniors who have weaker immune systems and infants whose already-narrow airways fill with mucus, making it hard to breathe. 

RSV is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants one or younger in the US. Each year, the virus causes up to 80,000 hospitalizations and 300 deaths in children under age 5. 

And in seniors, the virus can cause up to 160,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 fatalities every year.

Treatments and preventive measures for RSV have become more widely available in just the past year, and the CDC is urging clinicians to stock up on vaccines for adults and pregnant women and monoclonal antibodies for infants when they become available.    

This summer ushered in the most substantial win for protecting babies FROM RSV, though, with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of a monoclonal antibody to protect against RSV called Nirsevimab, which will become available in October.

Nirsevimab is a single-shot monoclonal antibody that, in clinical trials, cut the chance of serious RSV infection requiring hospitalization by nearly 75 percent. 

For seniors 60 years and older, there are now two new vaccines to help fend off the virus, with one of them proving to be 80 percent effective at preventing RSV infection. 

But the vaccines for older adults are not like a traditional flu shot that is available to all who want one. Doctors must decide after consultation with their patients whether the rare, yet potentially severe health risks associated with the vaccine, such as atrial fibrillation and neurological complications, outweigh the benefit of protection. 

Regional increases early in the season, such as those currently occurring in the Southeast, offer health officials a glimpse of what may be to come for the rest of the country in the next several months. 

Agency officials monitoring disease testing results in Florida found the number of diagnostic tests coming back positive for RSV exceeded five percent for about a month. The typical test positivity rate for RSV this time of year is around three percent. 

In Georgia, the CDC observed an uptick in the number of hospitalizations due to RSV. Around two for every 100,000 children in Georgia were hospitalized for RSV during the week ending on August 5. By August 19, that rate had risen to seven hospitalizations per 100,000 children. 

The uptick in cases this time of year would not otherwise be noteworthy, as seasonal RSV, along with influenza, typically begins in early fall and peaks in the winter. 

But the last few years have been an exception to that rule thanks to pandemic-era social distancing measures like masking and isolation. Meant to stave off Covid, the measures also largely stamped out seasonal virus outbreaks as we knew them.

But when the world gradually reopened in 2021 after Covid-19 vaccines became available, seasonal viruses came back too. 

Last year’s RSV season was among the worst. 

Covid, flu, and RSV began to circulate with some overlap, garnering fears of a ‘tripledemic’. 

Now, there is renewed concern of another ‘tripledemic’, a situation in which three diseases join forces and overwhelm the healthcare system, which so far has not had the devastating consequences at the scale many epidemiologists feared. 

Still, the CDC is recommending doctors ramp up testing for RSV, as well as Covid and the flu, in schools, daycares and long-term care facilities, and stockpile the latest medicine. 

The health agency also recommends all infants under eight months born during RSV season should receive the antibody within their first week of life, while infants born outside the typical season should get Nirsevimab before the next RSV season begins. 

While the shot has been shown to be extremely effective, the CDC acknowledged not all hospitals will have it in their arsenal immediately due to high demand. 

Pregnant women can also receive a vaccine that confers immunity to their unborn babies for a continuous six months of protection after birth. 

China has discovered two new coronaviruses lurking in bats – and state-funded virologists are parading them as proof Covid did not leak from a lab.

Both pathogens harbour the same genetic quirk believed to make the pandemic-causing strain so infectious.

Until SARS-CoV-2 spawned in China towards the end of 2019, no sarbecoviruses (the virus family it belongs to) had even been found to have a ‘furin cleavage site’.

Experts argued this oddity pointed to the pandemic as having a man-made origin, challenging Beijing‘s insistence that it emerged naturally.

However, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention-backed researchers said their discovery ‘deepens our understanding of the diversity of coronaviruses’.

Sharing their findings in a scientific journal, they argued it ‘strongly’ indicates SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site ‘naturally originated’.

They wrote the discovery: ‘Provides clues about the natural origin of the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2.’

But independent experts said the study cannot draw such a conclusion as the viruses discovered aren’t actually that closely related to Covid.   

Neither of the two viruses, known as CD35 and CD36, have yet been proven capable of infecting humans.

This prospect requires ‘further investigation’, according to the researchers, who were funded indirectly by President Xi Jinping’s communist regime through China’s national research and development programme.

Dr Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University and lab leak proponent, said the paper’s conclusions do nothing to dismiss the possibility that Covid leaked from a research facility. 

‘The viruses reported in the paper are not SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses,’ he told MailOnline. 

‘They are not even sarbecoviruses (the subgenus of viruses comprising SARS-CoV-1-related and SARS-Cov-2-related viruses). 

‘The authors of the paper classify them as hibecoviruses, placing clade hibecovirus adjacent to, but distinct from, clade sarbecovirus.’

He, therefore, said that the paper cannot draw any conclusion about Covid’s unique furin cleavage site. 

‘SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of hundreds of known sarbecoviruses that has an furin cleavage site,’ he said.

‘This was true before the paper and remains true after the paper.

‘No informed person would suggest that the paper, somehow, suffices dismiss the idea that Covid emerged from a lab.’

Professor Francois Balloux, an infectious disease expert based at University College London echoed these same doubts. 

‘It’s a hibecovirus, totally unrelated to SARS-CoV-1/2,’ he told MailOnline. 

‘It carries a furin cleavage site but many coronaviruses (outside sarbecoviruses) do.

‘This paper tells us nothing about the origin of Covid. It just adds one more coronavirus species to the hundreds described to date.’

The study itself describe CD35 and CD36 as being a 54 per cent genetic match for Covid. 

This means it’s not actually that related to Covid itself.

For comparison, a virus called RaTG13 collected from bats in China in 2013 is a 96 per cent match and has no furin cleavage site. 

Scientists in the study analysed results from 112 bats captured in ‘abandoned caves’ in Baoting County, Hainan Province in Southern China in March and April in 2021. 

Of the bats collected samples from 7 (6.3 per cent) tested positive for coronaviruses.

CD35 and CD36 were found in samples taken from great roundleaf bats, which are also known as the great Himalayan leaf-nosed bat.

The authors noted: ‘Bat CoV CD35 is so far the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 with a polybasic furin-like site, strongly suggesting that the cleavage site is of natural origin, which provides clues to the evolutionary origin of the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2.’

They added that as great roundleaf bats have a wide geographic distribution, being found in southern China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Malaysia, this means CD35 could be circulating widely. 

Five of the paper’s ten authors were affiliated with the Chinese CDC – Beijing’s equivalent of the UK Health Security Agency or US organisation of the same name.

The discovery itself was published in Virologica Sinica, the publishing arm of the Chinese Society for Microbiology (CSM).

This society is linked to the state-affiliated China Association of Science and Technology with its website adding that it ‘accepts administrative supervision’ from the Chinese Government’s ‘Ministry of Civil Affairs’. 

Virologica Sinica is also edited by Dr Shi Zhengli, an influential scientist described as China’s ‘bat woman’ who works inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) – considered to be the source of the Covid pandemic in some corners.

Its editorial board also features over a dozen other academics linked to the WIV.

And the study can count a British zoologist whose organisation funded research at the WIV, and central to the debate about Covid’s origins, among its fans.

Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, which directed millions of US Government cash to fund experiments at the Chinese lab Tweeted about the study:  ‘Happy Saturday! Here’s a newly discovered bat β-CoV with a furin cleavage site from bats in Hainan Province China.

He also quoted the study’s conclusion ‘..this study deepens our understanding of the diversity of CoVs & provides clues about the natural origin of the FCS of SARS-CoV-2.’

Dr Daszak has been passionate defender of the WIV over the course of the pandemic and has repeatedly shot down any suggestion experiments at the lab could have led to the emergence of Covid. 

The expert in zoonosis, the spread of viruses from animals to humans, hails from the mining town Dukinfield, on the outskirts of Manchester, and has been one of the central, and controversial, figures at the centre of the debate on Covid’s origin.  

He has been accused of orchestrating a behind-the-scenes ‘bullying’ campaign to ensure blame for Covid was directed away from WIV. 

This involved allegedly persuading 26 other scientists to sign off on a letter he wrote to the scientific journal The Lancet claiming the virus could only have been natural in origin and to suggest otherwise creates ‘fear, rumours, and prejudice’.

The letter was so influential that it cowed most experts into refusing even to consider that the virus could have been man-made.

It also later emerged that Dr Daszak told his fellow signatories in an email that the letter would not be sent under the EcoHealth logo to not make it identifiable as coming from any ‘one organisation’ or ‘person’. 

These emails show that he even considered not signing the letter himself, although in the end he did.

He was also accused of not declaring EcoHealth’s, and therefore his own, ties with WIV during investigations into the pandemic. 

In January 2021, Dr Daszak joined the World Health Organization (WHO) team sent to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the virus. 

The group’s report, published in March 2021, concluded it was ‘extremely unlikely’ that the virus originated in a laboratory.

But he came under fire after it emerged that he had a working relationship with Dr Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV nicknamed ‘Bat Woman’, and one of the very scientists whose work he was tasked with investigating.

EcoHealth Alliance has provided at least $600,000 to WIV where research was carried out. 

Dr Daszak has previously defended his connections to WIV during investigations into Covid’s origins, arguing the probe should involve those who know the most about coronaviruses in China.  

He also chaired a group of scientists probing Covid’s origins for the medical journal The Lancet but stepped down when his link with Chinese virus research was revealed.

The lab leak theory, once dismissed as an outright conspiracy, has gained increasing traction in the years since the virus first caused a global pandemic. 

Insiders at the heart of Beijing’s response to the pandemic have also admitted that the nation quietly investigated the possibility of the virus emerging from one of its labs.

Such investigations occurred despite President Xi Jinping’s communist administration repeatedly denying the hypothesis, labelling it a smear campaign by ‘anti-China’ forces and insisting the virus emerged naturally instead. 

Back in 2020 the overwhelming opinion, shared by the world’s leading experts, was that Covid crossed naturally from animals infected with a bat coronavirus to humans.

But consensus over how the pandemic began three years ago has slowly started to shift.

Even some US intelligence officials have backed it, with FBI director Christopher Wray stating in February that the virus ‘most likely’ originated from a lab incident in Wuhan.

However, most experts maintain that Covid most likely emerged naturally, being transmitted from animals to humans – what is known as zoonosis.

Such theories have largely pointed to Wuhan’s Huanan seafood wholesale market, where numerous species of live animals were kept and sold, as the potential site where such an infection could have taken place. 

And in February 2021, an investigation into Covid’s origin by the World Health Organization said it was ‘extremely unlikely’ the virus leaked from a lab. 

But plans for a second phase of the investigation, involving audits of laboratories in the Wuhan area, were rejected by the Chinese government.

No concrete proof to support either argument has ever been found, leaving experts fearing the truth behind Covid’s origins will never be uncovered. 

Beyond being just establishing a historical fact, experts also want to find how Covid emerged to help stop other similar pathogens becoming pandemics in the future. 

A deadly virus that few people even know exists is causing misery across intensive care units and pediatric hospitals, doctors warn.

High rates of Covid, flu and even RSV during winter led to hospitals overflowing during winter during a situation dubbed a ‘tripledemic’.

But cases of human metapneumovirus (HMPV), which can cause bronchitis and pneumonia, shot up to record levels in spring, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s respiratory virus surveillance systems.

It may partly explain why so many people tested negative for flu and Covid in recent months despite showing symptoms.

Dr John Williams, a pediatrician at the University of Pittsburgh who has spent his career researching vaccines and treatments for HMPV, said HMPV was ‘the most important virus you’ve never heard of’.

Dr Williams said that as well as flu and RSV, HMPV was one of viruses most likely to hospitalize people and even kill them.

This year in mid-March, 11 percent of tested cases were positive for HMPV. This is 36 percent higher than the average seasonal peak prior to the pandemic of seven percent.

Most patients who caught the virus probably did so unknowingly, as people are only tested for it in the hospital or emergency room.

Due to a lack of testing, the number who get infected or die from HMPV each year is not known, but test positivity — the swabs that are being tested — is on the rise.

And blood tests show that most children have had it by the age of five.

There are no vaccines or drugs to treat HMPV.

It causes a cough, runny nose, sore throat and fever. In serious cases, patients may struggle to breathe, or suffer bronchitis or pneumonia.

As with the flu, babies and the elderly are most at risk because their immune systems are either still developing or deteriorating.

HMPV is spread by direct or close contact with an infected person, such as a cough, shaking hands, sneezing or touching infected objects or surfaces. 

One study found that it was the second most common cause of respiratory infections in kids after respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which typically causes mild, cold-like symptoms but hits infants and older adults harder. 

HMPV and RSV are in the Pneumoviridae family.

A New York study found it was as common in hospitalized older patients as RSV and the flu.

All three infections can cause deadly cases of pneumonia in seniors.

Leigh Davison, 59, came down for HMPV in early April after attending a family gathering.

Her symptoms were so bad that she could no longer talk on the phone.

She told CNN: ‘I couldn’t get out more than a couple of words. I would go into violent, violent coughing to the point where I was literally almost throwing up.’

She was sure she had Covid, but after six negative rapid tests became nervous about pneumonia instead as she is immunocompromised.

But she had a clear X-ray from a radiology clinic. She was to see her physician, who sent her to an ER room for further tests, which showed she had HMPV.

Ms Davison said: ‘I was like, “What?” Because it sounds really dire.’

The virus gave her severe bronchitis and she was admitted to the hospital for observation.

She was sick for around a month and then got better.

Of the respiratory infections she has had in her lifetime, HMPV was ‘the worst I’ve ever experienced’, she said. 

HMPV was uncovered by Dutch researchers in 2001 from samples from children in the Netherlands with unexplained respiratory infections.

Some were seriously ill and needed to be on a ventilator, but were not testing positive for any pathogens.

The scientists looked at the virus’ genes are saw that it was closely related to avian metapneumovirus, which infects birds.

The new virus was named human metapneumovirus. The researchers think it hopped from birds to humans and then evolved.

Dr John Williams, a pediatrician at the University of Pittsburgh who has spent his career researching vaccines and treatments for HMPV, said HMPV was ‘the most important virus you’ve never heard of’.

A study from 2020 estimated that in children under five, there were more than 16 million HMPV infections in 2018, more than 600,000 hospitalizations and more than 16,000 deaths.

Meanwhile, Covid shot maker Moderna recently completed an early study of an mRNA vaccine against HMPV and parainfluenza.

Covid lockdowns have also meant that people’s immune systems are generally a lot weaker because of a lack of social interaction and natural exposure to pathogens. 

An NIH-published study suggested the mortality rate for HMPV after 100 days was 43 percent.

Researchers estimate that 10 to 12 percent of respiratory illness in children is linked to HMPV.