the coronavirus recovery in the country with the most confirmed cases and deaths in the world coming up in the show while the mainstream media focused on the lives lost to grown a virus groundbreaking you're a scientist professor adrian owen tells us how covert 970 was maybe left with profound long term damage panders china faces criticism from nato nations for its national security law and on kong we speak to the youngest ever person to become a legislator in the former british colony about fleeing alleged persecution to build an international consensus all the small coming of the delays going underground 1st throughout the current pandemic we've heard that the us has the highest reported number of deaths worldwide while the u.k. has the highest death count but capita worldwide belgium but we haven't heard much about covert patients who have apparently recovered groundbreaking neuroscientist at western university in canada present a green owen is studying the ofter effects of those survivors and believes the findings will show some will develop profound neurological problems he's here to tell me about it via skype from london in on terrio thank you adrian for coming on

so normally maybe you'd be in an i.c.u. for the past few months you've been looking into this where are you at now with the research well we just we just launched a little over a week ago and what we're trying to do is to recruit 50000 covert survivors to this study because you know it's becoming more and more obvious as people are starting to emerge from the. immediate impact of the virus that that they are developing neurological problems and many of these are our cognitive challenges things like problems in concentrating on as in memory problems and so solving making simple decisions and i think we need to get on top of this very quickly you really think and you're an expert in this field that this anecdotal evidence of a lot of tasteless of well these may all be connected with brain function. well you know we know that i mean if you think about what goes on in cody it's essentially a spiritual problem and that of course interferes with the oxygen supply to the

brain and we know a lot about how anything that interferes with the oxygen get into your brain can affect brain function now it may be that there are direct viral affects maybe the virus itself sex that right not at i don't think we will be clear on that yet but we do know that there are these indirect effects caused by also the oxygen being on a ventilator being in the i.c.u. being on sedatives all of these things and known to affect brain function so what is your hunch because it's arguably not as exciting for a scientist that it is indeed just a function of respiratory. impacts from coronavirus or blood clotting that is affecting the brain as opposed to the virus itself somehow attacking the brain itself we don't i think it is as interesting as you said being in this conversation i spent a lot of my time in the i.c.u. looking at patients who had brain injuries but you know most of those brain injuries aren't due to say an impact to the brain

a lot of these patients are people who had a cardiac arrest and the problem you know most people think well let's hop problem that's not a brain problem but but actually when you have a cardiac arrest it affects the oxygen supply to the brain and the result is brain damage and we have exactly the same problem here you know maybe the interruption of oxygen to the brain is at a different level the ultimate result is still brain damage and that's what i'm really interested in in trying to track and prevent if at all possible and so while there is anecdotal evidence there's also firm evidence the growing of viruses is in the family of sars virus is in and sent back a 23 the survivors did have long term neurological complications. yes that's right i mean that's another factor that no meat made us think that it was essential to get on with this study now we experienced this before obviously on a much smaller scale that we know about how survivors of similar viruses in the

past have gone on to have long term problems with concentrating and memory in the and these are the not small problems these are things that can affect people's ability to work and people's ability to go about their everyday activities we have more than 10000000 people in the world right now who are recovering from coronavirus and you know imagine if a year from now we have 10000000 people who are able to carry out their their jobs affectively that's a huge economic and societal problem because dementia or alzheimer's the biggest killers in this country as a 2018 in the office of national citizen fix i'm just wondering are you saying the dementia alzheimer's style dynamics may apply in that i don't know our prime minister who recovered regrown a virus his brain function the fact that it's presumably. it could worsen we're talking about worsening over time it's not just people recover and as

long as their brain function recovers it will stay at that function level. i mean and that is actually one of the critical questions we were addressing in this study you know it could be and i think we all hope that these problems are temporary people experience temporary problems with memory and concentration it could be that they're permanent you're just stuck with this situation which is course. much worse but the worst possible scenario is that this virus can trigger some sort of degenerative situation where people actually get worse over time now we don't know when that's the case not really is it really is too early to say but it could be and we could end up with a generation of people who are suffering with a dementia like illness down the line the prime minister here is under attack for a perceived. care homes where so many thousands of people here died what is there. to link degenerative diseases like

dementia with over that all. well there are many factors involved people who are old are more horrible by definition they tend to have more other medical issues going on they may have spiritual issues and they have heart issues they may have issues with their brain directly you know like dementia so this you know this population of people are inherently more vulnerable when anything any virus light like this hits and i think that's probably the main factor of course there's a there's a community issue as well if these people are already living together in a you know in a small space so when one of them contracts the virus it's very easy passed on to others and those have been widely discussed in the media but do you think that somehow dementia treatments may help in any if it's proven long term brain effects of growth of ours i think we don't know the answer to that we don't really have effective treatments for dementia and i think the same would be true if it turns

out that the virus causes some kind of degenerative situation i think it's unlikely that we're going to have a treatment that we can pull off the shelf to to. to deal with that but so it's i think the priority right now is to try and understand what these problems are understand how widespread it's going to be and put steps into place to deal with it if and if and when it occurs as i say we don't have any evidence yet that degenerative for those people watching you are recovering from coronavirus but what made you start thinking about brain function was it and you might have to define this word neuro tropic dynamics was it was it this report a lot of taste and lots of swill. yes i mean once it started become apparent that people were losing taste musing smell it it was it was clear there were some neurological issues going on because those are both neurological.

neurological symptoms if you like i guess people tend to think it's something to do with the nose because it's all in the brain now that that started to make us think what well is there anything else going on and i i started to ask around and. talk to people who were recovering from code and many of them were reporting bigger issues problems with things like memory and concentration and early on in the pandemic i was really thinking well you know this is not a problem for a neuroscientist like me this is a problem for ologist people who want to understand viruses but you know as this is a new dawn and more and more people are attracted to viruses and more and more people in as a result are now starting to recover it's very clear that this is a problem this is not one or 2 people many many people are reporting these kinds of neurological deficits and we've had people on this program from the independent scientific advisory group on emergencies what did you make watching if you did from

gallagher of boris johnson here flanked by his drop government scientists form of. officials of perjury violence and johnson said we are following the science does that make any sense to you. well i you know i'm going to comment on that the political background to that situation obviously i did watch i was i was aware of it and you know i can only hope that the politicians are really taking the scientists very very seriously and i guess i was getting at the fact that science obviously changes and probably changes because of hopefully innovations that you come up with but then if you immediately started to suspect. relations to brain cognition obviously there's a higher case of frequency of dementia in care homes that there is in the accident emergency or grow the virus warden or spittal do you think there are implications

here for future pandemics i think there are because you know i think everything we can learn from this pandemic will be useful in the future and you know whether that's how best to contain it or best to develop vaccines or how best to anticipate the if you like knock on effects like cognitive deficits and that's why here it's so important for us to get access to a large number of people we want a lot of people to sign up to cody brain study dot com because then we can start to pull a pull apart some of these pieces you know it may seem obvious that the worse your viral symptoms the worse your cognitive or brain deficits are going to be down the line but you know maybe that's not true maybe even people who are asymptomatic young people people out in the street of got through this without even getting into hospital maybe those people are also going to be affected with these neurological problems and you know until we assess a lot of people we're really not going to know who's if you like immune you know

who's going to run into trouble down the line i know you're at the beginning of the journey if there's a big if there are parallels between how corona virus itself acts on the brain and dementia what are the what sort of dementia degenerative curve are we looking at i mean will people know if they haven't got a brain or worsening brain function in a year's time after recovering them basically they're safe. well that's an extremely good question again is one that we can't really answer until we get get hold of the data and as most people know alzheimer's disease is a is a fairly slow generally a slow moving neurodegenerative disease it can often be some years before somebody eventually succumbs to to the disease itself but you know there are other forms of neurodegeneration that go much more quickly and so on and right now we know we don't know whether whether the effects of corona virus are in one of those 2

categories you know i think typically looking at somebody's performance of decline in this case over the course of the year is enough to determine whether they are to generating and how quickly the process is going so that that's actually why we plan to follow people for an entire year because we can learn a lot from how somebody performs a year from now relative to how they performed day that's really the key is going to tell us with that this is a moving target or stationary permanent problem which is finally and briefly i know over in china they're coming out with dementia drugs ali go. right in in china there are drugs coming out. what if the research money goes into all of this and we get nothing out because if sars did affect brain function back in 2002 and 23 why is it we still don't know more about the the sars family of viruses and how they affect the brain condition. well one of the reasons is because you know we

didn't have as many people back then we now have as many people surviving for us to be able to do this kind of research i think you know in many ways sounds a bit bizarre but this is a great scientific opportunity we have one of the largest scientific natural scientific experiments in the world more than 10000000 people contract in the same virus so i think this is the 1st time in history we've really had this all of opportunity where we can look at a large proportion of those people look at the experiences they've had look at the apps the other diseases they were coping with the time whether they were sedated whether they were hospitalized with ice and to magic and try and pack what is behind this into you know recent this is the 1st time we've been able to do this professor thank you. after the break what are you supposed violent rioters in all kong have to do with the cia we speak to one of them kong's youngest ever

legislators about upholding democracy under the flag of the people's republic of china all of them all going about through i'm going to grow. a young people for a while you know it's up to them to make it in their own image and other millennialism jancee i'm a boomer you know i already had a plan for your 15 year experience in the united states post world war 2 poles were landing the stock markets never had a work day in my life because of that and that you know so it's up to them to decide what's great make a great and good luck with. the my who is in miami. on the inside them.

impossible as any. one when they're in the same. scene the following you can but i'm before. you know. welcome back well as nato nations remain in the minority in their criticism of china over its new national security law the media has largely been in the majority in voicing concerns that china is trampling over a british democracy that found its roots in colonialism but its shadows have arguably lived on nathan law as the youngest ever legislator to be elected to the hall got council quoting anti british imperialism out

a gun the that eventually led to his arrest spending 7 months in jail he is the founder and former chairman of the pro-democracy party demos cysto before going on the run to what he alleges is persecution from china and he joins me now via skype from an undisclosed location nathan thanks so much for coming on 1st of all i'm going to ask you why an undisclosed location why we are now the house if you cannot reach for now and there are so many answers before i say once again before that i will let you know where my whereabouts and my purse. in my purse and they have so now could it be a response to article 38 of this new law i don't know where you heard in the world but apparently article 38 seems to suggest that any offenses committed against hong kong special administrative region from outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region is liable for action let alone a permanent resident. which i presume you are well. and so i am if i

have committed something liable to open i'll be prosecuted so it is not about where i be but. is about well whether any uncertainty is created by the chinese authority or even that the courageous. reached outside china yeah i'll just wait and see whether it's safe to reveal my location d.c. power levels are doing this on shoes to sit here in britain according to the united nations or edward snowden who had to flee to moscow well i think i was there all the while actually on many. many similarities that we can come together from now in hong kong i've been a prominent activist and author of election now with the car truck tony and know

that while basically none of the laws hong kong has implemented will be like that it's just written in such a broad and take anyone who went to protest could possibly be gracious and face my phone dies all kinds of thing so my reaction is to touch a little and yes definitely destroying of course freedom n.f.l. ptolemy were things best because i'm going to say we have to prove apparently that deng xiaoping's translates or own who said he wanted it julie this wants to be free in this country with things better in hong kong do you think under the british dictatorship when the pathan and there was a sachin. well 1st of all. it is quite meaningless to come the same size in different era because the time has changed and secondly we could see as the last 2 decades actually hong kong and. laska that case of its colonial time all call

actually. was implemented with a serious of liberalisation and democratisation measures but it all being returned to the pipe a chain we can say bache and actually intentionally hole the process of democratization in hong kong and to concentrate power while more and more throughout the income taken of one country 2 systems you see the chinese authorities claim that this is imperialist meddling they accuse hong kong human rights groups of being some sometimes in the payment an often linked to cia backed organizations that lend us government funded n.g.o.s for the fallout from beijing has always been used to stigmatize to home they have never felt provided any relevant after the for the accusation because these are not true calm people come out to protest for their own sake and for the sake of democracy and because china has not been doing what they

have promised all come people which are democracy and autonomy so this kind of narrative for china is being used to fool its own critics and and tries to fool the well but they refuse to listen to these lies so it is impossible to recognise that this system is not mobilized by hong kong people themselves in south socal 'd life morea and also how for and this is not about imperil it is about china author terry and expansion they want to control on call every era to kate all the freedoms that we have enjoyed it is a means to an end for the so-called human rights activists to work with cia agent organizations because the national endowment for democracy is clear that it has a role in the pro-democracy movement professors you john rooney has been imprisoned a constitutional law professor who we asked about on this program he wrote for the

national endowment for democracy it's on his do on their web site and the any deviously funded by the 5. well i have no idea what that kind of accusation was the ground was merely someone writing something on their website or their organization you know if you go check on the protest side of income people people carrying their own resources to the ground and supporting them is going by their own even though there are international organizations night boys a couple to hong kong but that doesn't mean that wrestling financially organized or organized patiently it is a false accusation and i don't think what you have coined now about the length of benghazi on coming this is a correct description i'm not sure of the hundreds of millions of people whose governments are being destabilized by the naslund of a democracy how given the over the decades would agree tell me about the hong kong

democracy council that you're on the board of hong kong people elect. organization that focus on. africa if you walk on the u.s. so it does not directly involved in the local ground protest in hong kong right but it's called the hong kong democracy council and it seems to have direct links to lobbying in washington for laws that suggest unless hong kong enact legislation that helps washington there should be u.s. sanctions on china well i say. call rationale behind though is when china is found out to. commit itself to the promise off on the british on declaration well it's a toad it accountable because the declaration is time and by british and chinese

government and it is tabled in the united nation so my now talking about the professional treatment of hong kong that is the major premiss of that which is hong kong remains autonomous so if home going on the direct autocratic control from china it is just an ordinary chinese city so why the well should all the perpetual comment on home i think this is the logic behind the i don't i don't think the way to country use the use of words and the rationale behind. hong kong human rights and democracy that help the discussion except is not the will do that it's a tiny minority of countries nato countries that we're talking about most of the world isn't making a big fuss about this hong kong act and perhaps they see that it is absurd that china should abide by u.s. legislation over what is part of its country i think that is also and all the false

protection was the act piers the act is about where the u.s. should continue to give preferential treatment to hong kong which from the perspective of china that could possibly be the internal policy of the u.s. in meddling on an issue and we have to understand that that international status of hong kong is being recognized by the entire coming in to be a step they have to show that they remain strong rule through all and all told me so that the trust is on system if you imagine if just one can i don't adjust to about i don't have. just talk about the u.s. ongoing human rights and democracy act which marco rubio lobbied for with george long your colleague and samuel jew but it clearly says sanctions should be put on china if china does not serve u.s. interests. what sort of act is that i presume you lobbied for this act well i think

. that's on the lay for hong kong people's point of view we need to hold china accountable and that's what the welfare to do so for the high value of normal people on the street and on kong is they should be a defacto colony of the united states well i don't think that is a direct link so call me and call on if they and that kind of call don't call in only you know my set there was the current international says it's absolutely wrong you don't call it's not on the us then that's kind of relevant sanctioning mckenna's them like the money is being implemented all over the world not only about china's about all the human rights they hold all the human rights falling out so i don't think that kind of like condemn i think the. current state of mind and i think you're using the wrong comparison to understand what's happening in hong kong i'm krista because it's cactus rusher alleging that that is related to nato nation

intelligence services to me why you think we haven't heard more about the way good muslim concentration camps that we did hear of a while back apparently millions of muslims imprisoned and the news seems to have disappeared from from. newspapers and mainstream media because hong kong waste a lot of international media station and i urge the world that we should continue continue to pressure beijing to china and to and the confrontation coming change on which actually the u.s. congress has passed and not. well concerning that issue so i think that it's not about him paralysed them it's all about going on this is about the well they have like acumen a thing well let's just image the throughout the past decade because the. liberal commune. it allowed them to do so and that's not right you see evidence of these

so-called concentration camps apparently comes from the network of chinese human rights defenders backed financed by the us government and homophobic far right i call adrian sense there are only 2 pieces of evidence in fact the basis for the accusation that millions of we get is. in concentration camps based on 8 people interviewed by the network of chinese human rights defenders is that propaganda to have you seen the series of b.b.c. proper and that news. yes absolutely. but it also can make people that you counted any well again as i say the evidence for the initial accusations are 8 people you're saying there is no involvement you've had no involvement with anyone involved in u.s. intelligence as regards your role or your colleagues role in the hong kong protest

movement. by my colleagues and i have no connection to the u.s. intelligence and any thought of intelligence from around the world we fight for hong kong people's freedom for our own and all young calm people are. nagel hope you're safe thank you thank and that's of the show will be back on monday 4 years after you get prime minister david cameron resigned after failing to keep britain in the e.u. and overseeing a policy of austerity that led to deaths of the citizens he vowed to protect until then wash your hands join the underground when you present that facebook and instagram. so we were. going to name chris mccomb give you more from.

him on those he just came down for whatever they think i did you hear that oh. i'm talking is a very international community. meeting yesterday and the trick is you don't need to explain. this to the kids who keep it is this stuff that i need to do. there's a push for them at the world to distribute the business for their nuclear cooperation in antarctica is everything to produce the illusion we live in front of t.v. with the above the. 5 area that would affect all day but i decided not to take this life. with my gig and tell you that.

this is the kaiser report love on lockdown and i don't know what the heck's going on but lockdown is great you know for every dollar i spend amazon i get like 20 back. to my amazon stock goes up it's great this is a magic money tree times 100 times 20 times 20000 wow it's fantastic. well certainly since the time before we went into a lockdown and this time now since we have a total change of mindset something has happened rather.