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Debt Rattle November 25 2021

Nov 252021

November 25, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: adverse event, Fauci, heart risk, Hunter Biden, Israel, mandate, Marik, reinfection, UAW, waning 66 Responses »

Peter Stackpole SophiaLoren in a Manhattan Coffee, NYC 1958

• Fauci Claims His Critics Are “Killing People” (SN)

• Dr. Marik Suspended After Suing Hospital for Banning COVID Treatments (CHD)

• Are Adverse Events In Covid-19 Vaccine Trials Under-Reported? (DeMasi)

• Severe Reactions to Covid Vaccines Far More Common Than VAERS Data Shows (BN)

• Pfizer And Moderna Vaccines “Dramatically Increase” Heart Risk (Attkisson)

• Reinfection From Covid-19 Is Rare, Severe Disease Is Even Rarer (CNN)

• US COVID Deaths In 2021 Have Surpassed 2020’s Total (ZH)

• Scientists Announce Discovery of New Vaccine Resistant Strain of Virus (CTH)

• Vaccine Immunity Waning, Signs Israel Faces Fifth COVID Wave (Haaretz)

• Missouri Sues To Block Vaccine Mandate For Health Care Workers (MT)

• Big Three U.S. Automakers Agree to Not Mandate Vaccines for UAW Union Members

• Assisted Death Only For Vaccinated, German Euthanasia Association Says (RT)

• This Elephant Is Truly Difficult To Unsee (Turley)

VDB
https://twitter.com/i/status/1463646508956454917

“If you agree with me, you can listen to my opinions. With Dr. Fauci, it’s not the same. He has opinions, but he wants you to be forced to do as he says.”

• Fauci Claims His Critics Are “Killing People” (SN)

Anthony Fauci, who continues to appear on TV every day two years into the pandemic, declared Tuesday that anyone who criticises him is “killing people.” In an MSNBC interview, Fauci proclaimed “I’m not in it for a popularity contest. I’ve devoted my entire professional career of 50 years to try and essentially safeguard and preserve the health and lives of the American people and as an infectious disease doctor who deals with outbreak, that gets really extended to the rest of the world.” “That’s what I do,” Fauci further declared, adding “The praise or the arrows and slings are really irrelevant. I do what science drives you to do, and that’s what I do. And you know, I’m not in it for a popularity contest. I’m trying to save lives.” In between gain of function funding and torturing dogs, he cares about lives.

Fauci continued, “And the people who weaponize lies are killing people. So the only question I have is that when you show Tucker Carlson and Peter Navarro criticizing me, I consider that a badge of honor.” He added, “I just wanted to make that statement. People throw up those people that make ridiculous statements. They’re telling people to do things that they’re going to die from and telling me I should go to jail. As they say in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, give me a break, will ya.”The arrogance is plain to see once again. Fauci’s critics are pointing out his lies over funding dangerous experiments with coronaviruses, his flip flops over health policies such as masking and lock downs, and his constant moving the goalposts when it comes to vaccine efficacy, in tandem with an obvious casual lack of regard for freedom.

In an interview with Glenn Beck this week, Senator Rand Paul noted that “Fauci not only has a casual disregard for science, but also for individual liberty. You combine the two — ignoring the science, and then having no regard at all for individual liberty — and you have a really dangerous situation. But it’s also dangerous because we’ve centralized the authority.” Paul further explained, “I have opinions on where the virus came from. I have opinions on how to treat it. But they’re my opinions, you don’t have to take them. If you agree with me, you can listen to my opinions. With Dr. Fauci, it’s not the same. He has opinions, but he wants you to be forced to do as he says. So it is the difference between coercion and freedom. And in freedom, there are many choices. But the real danger is, as we centralize authority, ultimately you get authoritarianism. And I think that he could easily be a medical dictator, if he were allowed to be.”

Who would you rather have in your corner, Marik or Fauci?

What snows under is that Marik, Varon, McCullough et al are the top in their fields. Or were, until their ideas diverged from Fauci’s.

• Dr. Marik Suspended After Suing Hospital for Banning COVID Treatments (CHD)

A top critical care physician who filed a lawsuit against Sentara Norfolk General Hospital over its ban on administering life-saving drugs to treat COVID patients, has had his hospital privileges suspended.Dr. Paul Marik, chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School and director of the ICU at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, learned about the 14-day suspension when he arrived to work on Saturday and found a letter on his desk.The letter was dated Nov. 18 — the same day Marik appeared before a judge in Norfolk Circuit Court requesting a temporary injunction to lift the ban, Marik’s attorney said.Judge David Lannetti did not grant the temporary injunction, but did determine Marik had standing to bring his lawsuit, allowing the case to move forward which will give Marik the opportunity to “establish his right to administer life-saving treatments that patients have been prohibited access to by Sentara,” the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) said in a statement.

Sentara’s attorneys didn’t tell Marik about the suspension during Thursday’s hearing, nor did they mention it to the judge, said Marik’s attorney, Fred Taylor, a partner at the Virginia law firm Bush & Taylor. In a Nov. 22 letter to the judge, Marik’s attorney accused Sentara of making a material misrepresentation during the hearing by failing to disclose the letter and telling the court the hospital would not retaliate against Marik for filing the lawsuit.“Evidently Sentara chose, for reasons of its own, not to disclose this suspension either to the court or the plaintiff during the hearing,” Marik’s attorney told the judge. In his letter, Taylor told the judge: “The letter [from Sentara to Marik] gives no explanation whatsoever for the ‘coincidence’ of Sentara’s choosing to suspend Dr. Marik at this particular moment, leaving only one realistic conclusion. Sentara has engaged in a blatant act of retaliation against Dr. Marik for filing this suit and for exposing to the public Sentara’s unlawful unjustified denial of safe, potentially life-saving medicines to its COVID patients in violation of Virginia statutory law and public policy.”

In Sentara’s letter to Marik, hospital officials summoned Marik to a proceeding scheduled for Dec. 2 during which, the hospital said, “no lawyer representing Dr. Marik will be permitted and no recording/video or transcript … will be made.” Sentara said its suspension of Marik was based in part on an allegation that he informed COVID patients that his “hands were tied” and there was nothing more he could do for them.

Excellent long article.

• Are Adverse Events In Covid-19 Vaccine Trials Under-Reported? (DeMasi)

Data on adverse events is vital for effective decision-making by regulators, policy makers, doctors, and patients. But there are serious concerns about publication bias or selective omission of data, whereby adverse events are less likely to be published than positive results. A systematic review in PLOS journal analysed 28 studies and found that adverse events were less likely to appear in published journal articles than unpublished studies (e.g. industry-held data). Experts now suggest that the pivotal Covid-19 vaccine trials may have beenunder-reported adverse events in several ways. In the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccine trials, participants were given digital apps to record adverse events remotely – a more convenient, time efficient and cost-effective way of gathering patient data.

A major problem however, is that the pre-determined options on the digital apps have a narrow focus on particular adverse events. For example, the app only allows a participant to record what the company deems as ‘expected’ events such as fever, pain at injection site, temperature, redness, swelling, fatigue, headache, diarrhoea, chills, muscle and joint pain. But if they experience a serious adverse event like myocarditis or early signs of transverse myelitis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a myopathic disorder, myocarditis or thrombosis, there is no option for them to record it on the app. Case in point: Brianne Dressen, a participant in the AstraZeneca (AZD1222) trial. She suffered a severe adverse event after her first injection and became disabled. But her smartphone app did not allow her to record the particular type of adverse event, nor did it allow her to record her symptoms in her own words.

Once hospitalised, Ms Dressen was ‘unblinded’ from the trial. She was informed that she had been given the AstraZeneca vaccine, not the placebo, and advised not to have the second injection. The investigators subsequently “withdrew” Ms Dressen from the trial, they disabled her smartphone app, and all her data from that day onwards, were never documented despite still experiencing disability today. Ms Dressen was concerned about the lack of reporting of her adverse event (and others) in the trial’s publication in the top-tiered New England Journal of Medicine. She wrote to the journal’s editor-in-chief Dr Eric Rubin, seeking to “request inaccuracies in the trial publication be corrected, and to demand complete reporting of the trial publication and results.” Dr Rubin refused to correct the inaccurate data in his journal. The full email exchange has been made public.

Dressen
https://twitter.com/i/status/1457829975680245769

“..9.4 million “serious” adverse events..”

• Severe Reactions to Covid Vaccines Far More Common Than VAERS Data Shows (BN)

Richard Baris, also known as the People’s Pundit, is currently one of the best pollsters in the country. I had the pleasure of appearing on a TPUSA Orlando panel with him on election integrity matters and can tell you he is the real deal. In fact, I suggest that you support his work to reform the corrupt polling industry in America by considering joining his Locals community. Now, Baris was concerned by the noticeable disparity between the AEs reported in Pfizer’s documents (more on that below) and the VAERS website, and had taken it upon himself to start polling Americans directly about their vaccine experiences. He went above and beyond the critical threshold needed for a representative sample of national significance by polling 2,414 registered voters across the country. Furthermore, he drilled down enough to check all the boxes on represenative subgroups. This gives his results a sound 95% confidence interval in terms of their representative value.

[..] The Baris poll shows that simply the “serious adverse effects” from the Covid vaccines – described as events so serious they “prevent daily activity” – were reported to be 5.2% among all groups. This spans self-identified Democrat, Republican, and Independent voters. Independent voters had the highest reported serious adverse effect rate at 6.5%. The extrapolated data would project out at a national scale to around 9.4 million “serious” adverse events, which alone dwarf the VAERS reports by 14 times over. But if you take all of the events together, a whopping 63% of Americans who take the vaccines have some kind of adverse event. Since there are 194 million Americans who are reportedly “fully vaccinated,” or nearly 60% of the population, there is no way to square the VAERS reports and the monumental scale of AEs that are communicated by this trustworthy and reliable polling.

It’s not just pollsters who are sounding the alarm on serious Covid vaccine events: Cardiologists are reporting a huge spike in heart inflammation cases to the American Heart Association (AHA). A cardiac surgeon has circulated a warning to the AHA that heart inflammation markers are drastically increasing in patients in conjunction with increasing mRNA Covid vaccination rates. [..] “Dr. Jessica Rose, who is normally positive about vaccines, says that VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), the US database for vaccine injuries, has only managed to collect an estimated 1% of the total number of serious side effects from mRNA injections,’ NewsVoice reported. “VAERS is, unfortunately, a weak system when it comes to how side effect data is handled, says Rose.

She, therefore, divided adverse reactions and side effects into several categories such as neurology, immunology, reproductive organs, and cardiovascular. In this way, she has created a warning system where it should be easier to see if and in that case how side effects can be linked to the mRNA vaccines.” “Rose says that the so-called ‘covid vaccines’ are not actual vaccines but rather injections of genetic material,” the report added. “Several studies have been published, despite attempts to censor these, which show that the spike proteins themselves are very toxic to the body. These spike proteins are foreign proteins.” “The fact that millions of people have been injected with these so-called ‘mRNA vaccines’ is to be considered a crime against humanity, Dr. Jessica Rose believes.”

We covered Gundry’s report a few days ago.

• Pfizer And Moderna Vaccines “Dramatically Increase” Heart Risk (Attkisson)

The Covid-19 Pfizer and Moderna RNA vaccines “dramatically increase” a common measure of heart risk in people. That’s according to a recently-published “warning” in the journal Circulation by cardiologist Dr. Steven Gundry, who is called a pioneer in infant heart transplant surgery. The analysis was presented at the recent meeting of the American Heart Association. The “dramatic changes in most patients” means they are at higher risk of a new Acute Coronary Syndrome, such as heart attack, according to Gundry. In part, the analysis states: “We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”

“Recently, with the advent of the mRNA COVID 19 vaccines (vac) by Moderna and Pfizer, dramatic changes in the PULS score became apparent in most patients” Dr. Steven R Gundry in Circulation. Scientists have already established a myriad of heart and blood related effects of Covid-19 vaccines in some patients, including young people. Among the adverse events linked to the vaccines are thrombosis blood clots and heart inflammation known as myocarditis and pericarditis. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) say the vaccines are safe and effective for everyone they are recommended for, and that the benefits outweigh the known risks, which will be emerging for some years as more people get vaccinated.

There are millions of adverse events officially reported by people after vaccination, including thousands of heart-related injuries. The PULS (Protein Unstable Lesion Signature) Test measures the most clinically-significant protein biomarkers that measure the body’s immune system response to arterial injury. These injuries lead to the formation and progression of cardiac lesions which may become unstable and rupture, leading to cardiac event.

CNN says don’t vaccinate the recovered. Well, they almost do.

• Reinfection From Covid-19 Is Rare, Severe Disease Is Even Rarer (CNN)

When people got reinfected with Covid-19, their odds of ending up in the hospital or dying were 90% lower than an initial Covid-19 infection, according to a new study. The study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found that there were few confirmed reinfections among 353,326 people who got Covid-19 in Qatar, and the re-infections were rare and generally mild.The first wave of infections in Qatar struck between March and June of 2020. In the end about 40% of the population had detectable antibodies against Covid-19. The country then had two more waves from January through May of 2021. This was prior to the more infectious delta variant.To determine how many people got reinfected, scientists from Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar compared the records of people with PCR-confirmed infections between February of 2020 and April 2021.

They excluded 87,547 people who got the vaccine. Researchers found that among the remaining cases there were 1,304 reinfections. The median time between the first illness and reinfection was about 9 months. Among those with reinfections, there were only four cases severe enough that they had to go to the hospital. There were no cases where people were sick enough that they needed to be treated in the intensive care unit. Among the initial cases, 28 were considered critical. There were no deaths among the reinfected group, while there were seven deaths in the initial infections. “When you have only 1,300 reinfections among that many people, and four cases of severe disease, that’s pretty remarkable,” said John Alcorn, an expert in immunology and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh who was not affiliated with this study.

The study has limits. It was done in Qatar, so it’s not clear if the virus would behave the same way anywhere else. The work was done when the alpha and beta variant were the cause of many re-infections. There were 621 cases where it was undetermined and 213 from a “wild type” virus. There was no mention of the delta variant, which is now the predominant strain. That could have an impact on the number of reinfections.

And still we can’t say the vaccines don’t work?

60% vaccinated should mean a significant decrease in deaths, if not simply 60%. It should never mean deaths go up.

• US COVID Deaths In 2021 Have Surpassed 2020’s Total (ZH)

COVID-19 has killed more people in 2021 than 2020. The virus was reported as the underlying cause of death (or a contributing cause of death) for an estimated 377,883 people in 2020, accounting for 11.3% of deaths, according to the CDC. As of Monday, more than 770,000 people have died from the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data. That means over 15,000 more people have died in 2021 than last year from COVID-19 – and there’s still more than a month left. his has happened despite the fact that last year no Americans were vaccinated (now 59% of all eligible Americans have had the “life-saving” jab) and some 17% have received booster shots…

The 2021 U.S. death toll caught some doctors by surprise. They had expected vaccinations and precautionary measures like social distancing and scaled-down public events to curb the spread of infections and minimize severe cases. But, The Wall Street Journal has its own explanation, suggesting lower-than-expected immunization rates as well as fatigue with precautionary measures like masks allowed the highly contagious Delta variant to spread, largely among the unvaccinated, epidemiologists say. Among missteps, Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious-diseases doctor at Stanford University, said, public-health officials failed to effectively communicate that the purpose of vaccines is to protect against severe cases of Covid-19 rather than to prevent the spread of infection entirely, which may have led some to doubt the effectiveness of the shots. CDC has an excuse too, claiming that there was a larger undercount of Covid-19 deaths in 2020, when the disease was newer and a scarcity of tests made confirming some infections difficult.

Scientists, Facing Scrutiny About Vaccinations Not Stopping Virus, Announce Discovery of New Vaccine Resistant Strain of Virus

• Scientists Announce Discovery of New Vaccine Resistant Strain of Virus (CTH)

As more data revels less benefit to vaccination status; and additional data reveals vaccinated individuals are becoming the group with the most adverse health outcomes; the scientific and medical community -writ large- are facing increased scrutiny to justify the public benefit of a seemingly endless booster approach with little upside. In essence, what good are all these vaccinations; and specifically all the rules of proving your vaccinated status vis-a-vis passports; if the vaccinated can still be infected and spread the virus? The voices asking this question are growing more loud by the day. Then, all of a sudden….

Isn’t that convenient? A new variant that tamps down the issue of questioning science about why the vaccine doesn’t seem to work. It appears the COVID science always has a way to explain why the COVID science may not work. SKY NEWS – “Scientists have raised concerns about a new variant of coronavirus that has an “extremely high number” of mutations that vaccines may not protect the human body against. The B.1.1.529 variant was first detected in Botswana, Africa in November with subsequent infections confirmed through genome sequencing in South Africa and in a traveller from Hong Kong after returning from the Rainbow Nation. Only ten cases have been reported across the world but health experts believe it could have spread further than three countries as nations ease COVID-19 restrictions and restart international travel.

The latest variant has 32 spike mutations in the spike protein, the part of the virus that most vaccines use to boost the immune systems against the highly infectious disease. Mutations in spike protein can affect the virus’ ability to infect cells within the body and spread but also makes it difficult for immune cells to attack the pathogen. The worrying number of mutations mean it could evade immunity.”

More boosters! They work great!

• Vaccine Immunity Waning, Signs Israel Faces Fifth COVID Wave (Haaretz)

The expert health panel advising Israel’s government believes that another COVID wave is on the horizon in light of waning vaccine effectiveness, and that the children’s vaccination drive would not be enough by itself to halt the pandemic. This comes amid the launch of Israel’s vaccine drive for children aged five to 11 on Tuesday, and an accelerating infection rate, ending a ten-week standstill of coronavirus’ spread in the country. The panel advised the coronavirus cabinet to enact further restrictions, in part because the vaccination of children takes time to come into effect. Among the suggestions is a further test for travelers arriving in Israel after three to five days. In a coronavirus cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called for officials to begin planning for an antigen test campaign for schools after the upcoming Hanukkah break.

The ministers also decided that existing restrictions on indoor spaces should be extended for another two weeks. Prof. Eran Segal from the Weizmann Institute made a presentation on Tuesday in front of the coronavirus cabinet in which he argued that the level of immunity has fallen since November, and that this is reflected by the rise in the number of new confirmed cases. According to Segal, the reasons for the rise in the R number – the average number of people each coronavirus carrier infects – include the slackened enforcement of restrictions, an increase in infection among children and a fall in immunity among the general public. “In this reality, vaccines aren’t enough to stop the [coronavirus] wave, and we need to continue using all the effective methods that minimize infection without hurting the economy,” a summary of the coronavirus cabinet meeting on Tuesday read.

“This includes strengthening public awareness and effectively enforcing Green Pass guidelines and masks in enclosed spaces, as well as renewing the effort of ensuring those exposed to the virus quarantine,” it added. [..] The expert panel advising the government on coronavirus also met on Monday, and a report summarizing the discussion shows that they also fear a further wave of the virus. “At the moment, there is still no clear evidence of a significant outbreak, but it is very likely that one will occur,” the report said, citing the fact that a third of the population remains unprotected. This refers to 670,000 unvaccinated Israelis, more than a million people who haven’t received the booster, and children under 12.

“Requiring health care workers to get a vaccination or face termination is unconstitutional and unlawful and could exacerbate health care staffing shortages to the point of collapse..”

• Missouri Sues To Block Vaccine Mandate For Health Care Workers (MT)

Attorney General Eric Schmitt led a coalition of nearly one dozen states Wednesday in a legal effort to block the federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) umbrella. The effort in partnership with the Nebraska attorney general is the first lawsuit to challenge the CMS mandate, according to the Attorney General’s Office. The lawsuit alleged the mandate violates the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). Schmitt has already sued to block the federal vaccination requirements for large companies and federal contractors and employees.

“Unfortunately, with this latest mandate from the Biden administration, last year’s health care heroes are turning into this year’s unemployed. Requiring health care workers to get a vaccination or face termination is unconstitutional and unlawful and could exacerbate health care staffing shortages to the point of collapse, especially in Missouri’s rural areas,” Schmitt said in a statement. “My office has been, and will continue to be, a national leader in challenging the Biden administration’s illegal edicts, and this instance is our latest effort to push back on this unprecedented federal overreach,” Schmitt said.

The Biden administration unveiled two heavily expected COVID-19 vaccination requirements earlier this month. One required employers with at least 100 workers to ensure they are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly tests by Jan. 4. The CMS rule required all health care workers, clinical and non-clinical, under Medicare and Medicaid programs to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Jan. 4. Exemptions would be permitted for people with a medical or religious excuse, a senior administration official had said. Both rules would cover about two-thirds of the workforce in the country, according to the White House.

Compromise.

• Big Three U.S. Automakers Agree to Not Mandate Vaccines for UAW Union Members

A big win for medical privacy and the principles of freedom. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have agreed the United Auto Workers union members will not be forced to take the mandatory vaccine as a condition of employment. Additionally, the vaccine status of the workers will remain private with a policy of private and voluntary disclosure. UAW – “At a meeting Monday evening, the COVID-19 Joint Task Force, comprised of the UAW, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, has aligned on a policy of voluntary and confidential disclosure of vaccination status for UAW members. Each company will provide additional communication to employees on how, where and when to report their vaccination status.

In addition to encouraging members to disclose their vaccination status, the Task Force continues to urge all members, coworkers, and their families to get vaccinated and get booster vaccinations against COVID-19, while understanding that there are personal reasons that may prevent some members from being vaccinated, such as health issues or religious beliefs. After reviewing the status of CDC and OSHA guidelines, the Task Force also decided it is in the best interest of worker safety to continue masks in all worksites at this time.”

Morals are easily abandoned. As is compassion.

• Assisted Death Only For Vaccinated, German Euthanasia Association Says (RT)

Anyone wishing to be euthanized now has to first present proof of vaccination or recovery from Covid, as per the new guidelines issued by Germany’s euthanasia association. A statement put out by the Hamburg-based group on Friday reads “assisted suicide and the preliminary examination of a patient’s ability to make decisions freely implies physical closeness between people. However, that is precisely the precondition for the spread of Covid.” In February 2020, Germany’s top court overturned a ban on providing euthanasia as unconstitutional. A number of German regions have put in place strict curbs, banning the unvaccinated from most public places. Across the country only recovered or inoculated people can enter restaurants, museums and similar venues, while those even with a negative Covid test cannot.

Amid the surge in cases, the German states of Saxony and Bavaria have both cancelled all Christmas markets. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her fellow party members on Monday that the current wave of Covid in Germany was worse than any previous one and called for stricter measures to contain it. The country’s health minister, Jens Spahn, went even further, claiming that “by the end of this winter everyone in Germany will either be vaccinated, recovered or dead.” Those statements came as the seven-day infection rate per 100,000 people broke a new grim record on Wednesday, reaching the 404.5 mark, as reported by Germany’s disease control and prevention authority, the Robert Koch Institute.

“Once again, ABC. NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other media just cannot see the elephant.”

• This Elephant Is Truly Difficult To Unsee (Turley)

I previously wrote a column on the one year anniversary of the Hunter Biden laptop story that marveled at the success of the Biden family in making the scandal vanish before that 2020 election. It was analogized to Houdini making his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear in his act. The Biden trick however occurred live before an audience of millions. Now, in an encore, a new major story on Biden’s Chinese dealings has surfaced. Once again, poof! The media has made the story disappear except for a couple of the usual outlets. Even with the New York Times reporting on the story, the disclosure of Biden’s role in securing one of the world’s largest cobalt mines for China (a key component to electric battery production) has been ignored by the major networks and many other print outlets. Once again, ABC. NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other media just cannot see the elephant.

What is most amazing about this continuing trick is that the story has all of the elements that the media longed to confirm during the Trump Administration on the financial dealings of the Trump children. The son of the President was involved in a successful effort to handover a strategically vital natural resource to the Chinese that would guarantee their dominance in one of the most important new industries of the “Green economy.” This occurred during a period when Hunter Biden and his uncle were accused of running a global influence peddling operation with foreign powers that cashed in on the Vice Presidency of Joe Biden. Then there is the fact that the story appears to contradict denials of continuing ownership in such foreign interests by the Bidens.

Finally, there is the fact that this windfall from the Chinese occurred in a field that Hunter Biden knew nothing about (much like his work on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma) and he was, by his own description, a hopeless addict. In his recent book, Hunter admits that he was a crack addict and alcoholic all the way up to the start of his father’s presidential campaign — in his words, “Drinking a quart of vodka a day by yourself in a room is absolutely, completely debilitating,” as well as “smoking crack around the clock.” This elephant is truly difficult to unsee.

NASA only uses 15 digits of π for calculating interplanetary travel. At 40 digits, you could calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe with an accuracy that'd fall off by less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom https://t.co/iXpDgKZvBx pic.twitter.com/QXAcgmLhWz

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 24, 2021

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Debt Rattle April 19 2021

Apr 192021

April 19, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:27 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, bitcoin, Chauvin, China, COVID, Czech, hot war, Lord Byron, Pfizer, Putin whisperers, reinfection 34 Responses »

Theodoros Vryzakis The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi 1861

• How Pfizer Became the Status Vax (Slate)

• Michigan Now Requires Masks For 2-Year-Olds (JTN)

• Trial To Study Effect Of Immune System On Covid Reinfection (G.)

• Biden’s Sanctions Binge The High-Water Mark Of The ‘Putin Whisperers’ (Ritter)

• Escobar: So Who Wants A Hot War?

• Russia Tells 20 Czech Diplomats To Leave By Monday Night (RT)

• Black Leaders Warn Of Fallout If Derek Chauvin Acquitted (F.)

• 3 Kids Or More: Chinese Researchers Call To Abandon Birth Limits (RT)

• China Calls Bitcoin An ‘Investment Alternative’ In Major Shift In Tone (CNBC)

• UK House Prices Surge As High Demand Meets Record Shortage (G.)

• Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for the Future of Food (Todhunter)

• Lord Byron’s £4,000 Cheque That Helped Create Modern Greece (G.)

BioNTech SEC Filing, November 2020:

“mRNA therapies have been classified as gene therapy medicinal products”
“Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA.”

UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights

Article 6 – Consent
1. Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned. “The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.”

VAERS injury report #1074247 caused by Pfizer vaxx:

Symptoms: Death
Life threatening: No

Madness in all its glory.

• How Pfizer Became the Status Vax (Slate)

Last week, on a phone call with Tom Cox, a former representative in the Kansas state Legislature who now works in government relations, I told him I was soon to get my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. “Welcome to the ruling class,” he replied. Cox had also gotten the Pfizer shot, and with it, he has lately developed—facetiously, he swears—a sense of Pfizer superiority. It started after he, his closest friends, and his immediate family all happened to get the Pfizer vaccine. “We started calling ourselves ‘double-dosed Pfizer elites,’ ” Cox said. “I will refer to anyone who’s had one dose as a ‘one-doser.’ Like, ‘Oh, you’re a one-doser? OK, well, you’ll reach this enlightened plane soon enough.’ ”

“One of my cousins got Moderna, and I was like, ‘That’s OK. We need a strong middle class. We can’t all be CEOs.’ ” Cox is likely not the first Pfizerphile you’ve heard sing his vaccine brand’s praises. Pro-Pfizer sentiment is all over TikTok, where you can find skits of bros bonding over their shared Pfizer status, or one creator declaring that the name itself “Sounds rich. Decadent. Luxury!” Olajide Bamishigbin, a psychology professor in California, was on a similar wavelength recently when he tweeted a GIF of SpongeBob SquarePants dressed in a top hat and monocle alongside the words, “Me when somebody says they got any vaccine other than Pfizer.”

The Pfizer superiority complex is at once a joke and a real phenomenon. But is it affecting the vaccine rollout? “Even though I think that we have this instinct that’s out there”—the belief that Pfizer is the elite shot—“it still feels more playful than really driving outcomes,” said Manuel Hermosilla, a professor of marketing at Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School who studies the pharmaceutical industry. He said he thinks people understand that getting whatever vaccine you can should trump any brand preference—though it’s unclear how this week’s news about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could change that equation. On Tuesday, U.S. health agencies recommended a pause in administration of the J&J vaccine, after six women developed a rare blood clot disorder within weeks of receiving the shot. In all likelihood, this pause will be temporary.

With the blood clot scare in the news, it may seem an uncouth time to be a Pfizer snob. Objectively, the Pfizer vaccine may have the best numbers, with an efficacy rate originally reported as 95 percent. But with a 94 percent efficacy rate, the Moderna vaccine was right behind it, and J&J’s efficacy rate of 66 percent was actually quite good, if you understand what the numbers mean. And the J&J shot has one big advantage on the other two, which is that it can be administered in one dose instead of two. Once you’re able to get it again.

Utter madness.

• Michigan Now Requires Masks For 2-Year-Olds (JTN)

The Michigan state government this week directed state residents as young as two years old to begin wearing masks in the hopes that doing so will help bring down the state’s coronavirus numbers. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said in a press release on Friday that the state will expand its COVID-19 response — what the state DHHS calls “the strongest public health order in the Midwest” — to apply its masking requirement “to children ages 2 to 4” in order to “further protect the state’s residents.” “Expanding the mask rule to children ages 2 to 4 requires a good faith effort to ensure that these children wear masks while in gatherings at childcare facilities or camps,” the announcement says, adding that the order “follows recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance.”

Also brought to you by Pfizer?

• Trial To Study Effect Of Immune System On Covid Reinfection (G.)

The immune response needed to protect people against reinfection with the coronavirus will be explored in a new human challenge trial, researchers have revealed. Human challenge trials involve deliberately exposing healthy people to a disease-causing organism in a carefully controlled manner, and have proved valuable in understanding and tackling myriad conditions from malaria to tuberculosis and gonorrhoea. The first human challenge trials for Covid began this year, with the study – a partnership led by researchers at Imperial College London among others – initially looking at the smallest amount of virus needed to cause infection among people who have not had Covid before.

Now researchers at the University of Oxford have announced that they have gained research ethics approval for a new human challenge trial involving people who have previously had coronavirus. Recruitment is expected to start in the next couple of weeks. “The point of this study is to determine what kind of immune response prevents reinfection,” said Helen McShane, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Oxford, and chief investigator on the study. McShane said the team would measure the levels of various components of participants’ immune response – including T-cells and antibodies – and then track whether participants became reinfected when exposed to the virus.

Participants must be healthy, at low risk from Covid, aged between 18 and 30, and must have been infected with the coronavirus at least three months before joining the trial. As well as having previously had a positive Covid PCR test, they must also have antibodies to Covid. Given the timing criteria, McShane said it was likely most participants would have previously been infected with the original strain of the virus. The first phase of the trial will initially involve 24 participants split into dose groups of three to eight people who will receive, via the nose, the original strain of coronavirus. The idea is to start with a very low dose and, if necessary, increase the dose – up to a point – between groups.

“Our target is to have 50% of our subjects infected but with no, or only very mild, disease,” said McShane, adding that once the dose required to achieve this is determined it will be administered to 10-40 other participants to confirm the dose. The second phase of the study – expected to start in the summer – will involve a new group of participants and will study closely their immune response before and after exposure to the virus, as well as the level of virus and symptoms in those who become reinfected. Should reinfection be confirmed, or symptoms develop, in either phase of the trial, participants will be given a monoclonal antibody treatment. Participants will be reimbursed just under £5,000 for the full study, as each volunteer will need to quarantine for at least 17 days during the trial, and be followed up for 12 months.

Must read by Scott Ritter, history lesson. I still wonder why Yeltsin appointed Putin. People say it’s because he thought he’d be pliable. But did he not maybe regret having sold out his country, and knew very well who and what Putin was?

• Biden’s Sanctions Binge The High-Water Mark Of The ‘Putin Whisperers’ (Ritter)

Joe Biden has announced a new wave of sanctions against Russia and signalled the potential for more. Biden’s mouth is writing checks the US can’t cash, and his latest tantrum is likely the last gasp of failed anti-Russia strategy. Back in the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union wore “big-boy pants” – they understood the realities of the world they lived in and accepted the consequences of their respective actions like adults. Espionage was a given; when you succeeded, you kept your mouth shut, and when you were caught, you took your lumps in silence. What underpinned this approach was the kind of begrudging respect that professionals of equal stature afford to one another – each side had a job to do, and they got on with it.

Both sides were engaged in active propaganda, some overt, much of it covert. This ideological combat was waged in the battlefield of the minds of intellectuals and activists, who were entrusted to decide for themselves which brand of idealism they would embrace. The CIA underwrote such notable literary journals such as The Paris Review and Encounter, while Soviet efforts to infiltrate the Black Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960’s are well documented. And yet, throughout this war of words, Kennedy somehow met with Khrushchev, Nixon and Carter with Brezhnev, and Reagan with Gorbachev. We opposed the Soviets, but we also respected them as worthy opponents. This attitude changed, almost overnight, with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, and the end of the Cold War.

The successor to the once mighty Soviet Union was the Russian Federation, which had been transformed from a world power capable of dictating global outcomes to a regional train wreck, in desperate need of foreign assistance to keep it from falling apart. Inside the CIA, the once all-powerful Office of Soviet Analysis (SOVA), the largest and most prestigious fiefdom within the Directorate of Intelligence, was dissolved, replaced by the more generic sounding “Office of Slavic and Eurasian analysis”, and later, the Office of Russian and European analysis. Old-time analysts who had spent decades studying the Soviet Union were dismissed or reassigned, replaced by a new breed, who viewed Russia not as an adversary to be respected, but a victim to be exploited.

Moscow Station – the CIA operation inside the Soviet Union – was likewise gutted, transforming overnight from the premier posting for the agency’s most capable case officers into a backwater where new officers were sent to cut their baby teeth and old officers to retire. The CIA’s approach to Russia in the 1990’s was one of negligent incompetence, where analysis was lazy and operations virtually non-existent. The demand for high quality intelligence simply did not exist in an environment where the Russian government, in the form of an alcoholic president named Boris Yeltsin, had completely subordinated himself to the will of his American masters, and the Russian national security establishment was more than happy to sell its secrets to anyone willing to pay a price.

“Now listen to the sound of Stoltenberg yappin’: We pledge “unwavering support” to Ukraine. Woof woof. Now go back to play in your sandboxes.”

• Escobar: So Who Wants A Hot War?

Zelensky’s warmongering script comes directly from MI6’s Richard Moore. Russian intel is very much aware of all the fine print. Glimpses were even carefully leaked to a TV special on the Rossiya 1 channel. I confirmed it with diplomatic sources in Brussels. British media also got wind of it – but obviously was told to further distort the mirrors, blaming everything on, what else, “Russian aggression”. German intel is practically non-existent in Kiev. Those NATO advisers remain legion. Yet no one talks about the explosive MI6 connection. Careless whispers in Brussels corridors swear that MI6 actually believes that in the case of a volcanic but as it stands still preventable hot war with Russia, continental Europe would burn and Brexitland would be spared.

Dream on. Now back to the circus. Both Little Blinken and NATO straw man Stoltenberg parroted the same script in Brussels after talking to the Ukrainian Foreign Minister. That was part of a NATO “special meeting” on Ukraine – where some Eurocrat must have told a bunch of extra clueless Eurocrats how they would be carbonized on the spot by Russian TOS-1 Buratino’s terrifying explosive warheads if NATO tried anything funny. Listen to the sound of Blinken yappin’: Russian actions are “provocative”. Well, his staff certainly did not hand him a copy of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu examining step by step the deployment of the annual US Army DEFENDER-Europe 21: “The main forces are concentrated in the Black Sea and Baltic region.”

Now listen to the sound of Stoltenberg yappin’: We pledge “unwavering support” to Ukraine. Woof woof. Now go back to play in your sandboxes. No, not yet. Little Blinken threatened Moscow with “consequences” whatever happens in Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov’s infinite patience is nearly Daoist. Sun Tzu’s Art of War, by the way, is a Daoist masterpiece. Peskov’s answer to Blinken: “It is simply not necessary for us to go around forever proclaiming: ‘I am the greatest!’ The more one does this sort of thing, in fact, the more people doubt it…” When in doubt, call the irreplaceable Andrei Martyanov – who always tells it like it is. The Crash Test Dummy gang in D.C. still does not get it – although some Deep State pros do.

Here’s Martyanov: As I am on record constantly – the United States never fought a war with its Command and Control system under the relentless sustained fire impact and its rear attacked and disorganized. Conventionally, the United States cannot win against Russia in Europe, at least Eastern part of it and Biden Admin better wake up to the reality that it may, indeed, not survive any kind of escalation and, in fact, modern Kalibrs, 3M14Ms, as a matter of fact, have a range of a 4,500 kilometers, as well as 5,000+ kilometer range of X-101 cruise missiles, which will have no issues with penetrating North American airspace when launched by Russia’s strategic bombers without even leaving the safety of Russia’s airspace.

Can’t get over that crazy story of the same guys and fake passports being used in 2014, and then again in the 2018 Skripal case. How stupid does MI6 think we all are?

• Russia Tells 20 Czech Diplomats To Leave By Monday Night (RT)

Twenty Czech diplomats have been declared personae non-gratae and must now leave Russia before the end of April 19, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday, a day after Czech officials expelled 18 diplomats to Moscow. Earlier on Sunday, the Czech ambassador to Moscow, Vítezslav Pivonka, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, which expressed a “strong protest” over Prague’s actions this weekend. Citing allegations of the involvement of the Russian intelligence in a 2014 blast at a military depot in the Czech Republic, which was initially thought to be an accident, the Czech government ordered 18 Russian diplomats out of the country. The decision was announced on Saturday by Prime Minister Andrej Babis and Foreign Minister Jan Hamacek.

The envoy was also informed that 20 staff members of the Czech embassy in Moscow would have to leave Russia by the end of Monday, April 19. Reports in the media on Saturday cited diplomatic sources as having said that a proportionate retaliation from Moscow would effectively shut down the embassy, but it was not immediately clear how severely the work of the diplomatic mission has actually been affected. Notably, the diplomatic scandal rocked Czech-Russian relations on the eve of FM Hamacek’s scheduled visit to Moscow, where he was to have discussed the possible purchase of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. The breakdown in relations has also disrupted Russian-Czech cooperation in the field of nuclear energy.

On Sunday, Czech Minister of Industry and Trade Karel Havlicek said Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, would likely be barred from tendering for renovating the Czech Republic’s Dukovany nuclear power plant. Also on Saturday, Czech police said they were looking for two Russian citizens who were in the area of the military depot at the time of the blast, apparently implying their involvement without directly saying so. The news was met with much ridicule in Russia, as the suspects are the same men who were accused by London of the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 – an allegation denied by Moscow. Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov have previously denied any links to Russian intelligence, claiming they were businessmen and complaining that Britain’s unsubstantiated accusations had ruined their lives.

These people don’t appear to have much faith in the US justice system. But how is this not an attempt at jury tampering? Dangerous. “If you don’t find him guilty, there’ll be riots”. What happened to everyone has a right to a fair trial?

• Black Leaders Warn Of Fallout If Derek Chauvin Acquitted (F.)

As a verdict nears in the trial of Derek Chauvin amid renewed outrage over police killings, multiple Black leaders involved in calls for reform are emphasizing the necessity that the former Minneapolis Police officer be convicted for George Floyd’s death—and warning of the fallout if he is not. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who is representing the families of Floyd and Daunte Wright, the 20-year-old fatally shot by Minnesota police last week, told ABC News’s “This Week” the American legal system will have “once again … broken our hearts” if Chauvin is acquitted on murder and manslaughter charges.

“We cannot condone this inhumanity America, we cannot condone this evil that we saw on that video [of Floyd’s arrest],” Crump said during the Sunday morning interview, warning that if the trial’s outcome doesn’t set a new precedent, “people are going to continue having these emotional protests.” Also speaking during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), who has been working on a bipartisan policing reform bill, said she’s anticipating outrage if Chauvin is acquitted on all three counts, adding: “We’ve seen people get off with minimal sentences” in “too many of these cases.” “I don’t think anyone in Minneapolis, frankly anyone in the U.S., and over a good part of the world, would understand any verdict other than guilty,” Bass said.

This comes after fellow Calif. Rep. Maxine Waters (D), speaking at a Saturday night rally in Brooklyn Center, where Wright’s shooting has sparked nearly a week of protests, urged demonstrators to “get more active” and “more confrontational” if Chauvin isn’t found guilty of murder. “We cannot let these killings continue,” Waters told a crowd of protesters. “If nothing does not happen, we know we’ve got to not only stay in the streets but we’ve got to fight for justice. But I am very hopeful… that we will get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty. If we do not, we will not go away.”

Maxine Waters

Maxine Waters is marching in Brooklyn Center tonight and told people to take to the streets if Chauvin is acquitted pic.twitter.com/RemfvCCLAn

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 18, 2021

What a difference a generation makes. But the effects of the one child policy will reverberate for many generations. If only because everyone wanted their one child to be a boy.

• 3 Kids Or More: Chinese Researchers Call To Abandon Birth Limits (RT)

China must “fully liberalize” its birth-control policy to increase its labor force in the upcoming decades and compete with such countries as the US economically, a paper published by the People’s Bank of China says.
Beijing should pay close attention to the fact that the country’s birth rate is declining, while its population is aging fast, the researchers argued. The research, which was published this week by China’s central bank as part of its working paper series, suggests that the country’s main economic rival, the US, is undergoing “favorable changes” in working population rates, largely through mass immigration. Based on statistics and forecasts by the United Nations – which might even overestimate China’s reproduction rate, according to the researchers – the report suggests that in the next three decades, China’s population will decrease by some 32 million people.

At the same time, US may add 50 million people to its population by 2050. Furthermore, the researchers warned that China’s labor force is set to shrink, while the US will see an expansion. And unlike China, the US will have the benefit of “skilled immigration.” While China had 70.6% of its population in the labor force as of 2019, compared with the US rate of 65.2%, that advantage is predicted to drop to 3.2 percentage points from 5.4 percentage points by 2035, the paper said. By 2050, the US will swing to a 1.3 percentage-point advantage over China in the labor-force rate, the authors predicted, adding: “For [China] to narrow the gap with the United States in the past four decades, it relied on cheap labor and huge numbers of people… What will we rely on in the next 30 years? This is worth our thoughts.”

[..] The authors argued that China’s government must quickly change its family-planning policies: “Our country must clearly recognize the changes in the situation… firmly seize the precious time window, change concepts, comprehensively implement policies, and respond effectively.” Beijing “must fully liberalize childbirth” allowing “three births and above,” the paper said. In fact, women should be encouraged to have more babies, the researchers added, calling on both the government and society to create a “good reproductive environment,” improving childbirth, healthcare and school systems.

Xi concedes defeat?

• China Calls Bitcoin An ‘Investment Alternative’ In Major Shift In Tone (CNBC)

China’s central bank is now calling bitcoin an “investment alternative” — marking a significant shift in Beijing’s tone after a crackdown on cryptocurrency issuance and trading nearly four years ago. Industry insiders called the comments “progressive” and are watching closely for any regulatory changes made by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). “We regard Bitcoin and stablecoin as crypto assets … These are investment alternatives,” Li Bo, deputy governor of the PBOC, said on Sunday during a panel hosted by CNBC at the Boao Forum for Asia. “They are not currency per se. And so the main role we see for crypto assets going forward, the main role is investment alternative.”

[..] China was once one of the world’s largest buyers of bitcoin. But in 2017, China banned so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs), a way to raise money for crypto companies by issuing digital tokens. That same year, authorities shut down local cryptocurrency exchanges. The moves were prompted by concerns about financial stability. As investment alternatives, “many countries, including China, are still looking into it and thinking about what kind of regulatory requirements. Maybe minimal, but we need to have some kind of regulatory requirement to prevent … the speculation of such assets to create any serious financial stability risks,” Li said. He added that the central bank will keep its current regulations on cryptocurrencies.

They’re just sucking even more people into overpriced “properties”, wage slaves for life. PredaTORY.

• UK House Prices Surge As High Demand Meets Record Shortage (G.)

A frenzy of activity has driven UK property prices to a record high this month, just as the government launches a mortgage guarantee scheme to help people with small deposits on to the housing ladder. Online property portal Rightmove said the average asking price jumped by 2.1% in April to a new all-time high of £327,797, an increase of £6,733 from March. The surge was driven by a shortage of houses on the market, at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is driving many families to search for more spacious properties away from the cities, following the shift to working from home. Some potential sellers are holding off until they have been vaccinated against Covid-19, agents say, adding to a dearth of properties available. From Monday, several banks and building societies will begin offering mortgages covering 95% of a purchase price under the government guarantee scheme.

Announced in March’s budget, it will allow lenders to buy a guarantee on the portion of the mortgage between 80% and 95%. The government will then cover losses on that slice of debt if a borrower gets into financial difficulty and their property is repossessed. Ministers say it will provide an affordable route to home ownership, with Lloyds, Santander, Barclays, HSBC and NatWest launching mortgages under the scheme on Monday. “Every new homeowner and mover supports jobs right across the housing sector, but saving for a big enough deposit can be hard, especially for first-time buyers,” said the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. “By giving lenders the option of a government guarantee on 95% mortgages, many more products will become available, boosting the sector, creating new jobs and helping people achieve their dream of owning their own home.”

“There is no global shortage of food.”

• Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for the Future of Food (Todhunter)

There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper ‘The Myth of a Food Crisis’. However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods. It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose. Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.

It really is a case of old wine in new bottles. And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards. The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.

The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation. The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.

In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use. The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.

What a life. What a man. And what a poet.

• Lord Byron’s £4,000 Cheque That Helped Create Modern Greece (G.)

Racked by fever, prone to fits of delirium, consumed by his last great passion – the liberation of Greece – Lord Byron lay on his sickbed. It was 18 April 1824. The great Romantic poet would be dead the next day. “I have given her [Greece] my time, my means, my health,” he is recorded as saying in a moment of lucidity. “And now I give her my life! What could I do more?” Byron’s death in Missolonghi, the malaria-ridden town where he had spearheaded the Greeks’ revolt against Ottoman rule, induced instant shock, convulsing the English-speaking world. The man who was “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, a celebrity of his day who was loved and loathed in equal measure, had spent a mere 100 days in the land whose freedom he had championed so vociferously.

“The loss of this illustrious individual is undoubtedly to be deplored by all Greece,” its provisional government declared hours after the news filtered through. “But it must be more especially a subject of lamentation at Missolonghi, where his generosity has been so conspicuously displayed.” As Greece celebrates the bicentenary of its war of independence, a banknote unearthed by the Observer in the country’s state archives sheds new light on the poet’s fabled generosity. It also offers indelible proof of his commitment to the Greek cause. In the cheque Byron stipulates that £4,000 – roughly £332,000 today – be paid to Giovanni Orlando, a representative of the provisional government that, alarmed by the way the war was going, had approached the British peer for funds.

Note of exchange for £4,000 signed by Lord Byron. Photograph: General State Archives of Greece

The money was to go towards emergency needs – notably financing a fleet to defend Missolonghi from besieging Ottoman Albanians. Both sides agreed it would be repaid against a much bigger loan to be raised in London where Orlando was headed.[..] Byron agreed to the loan in Kefalonia, part of the British-run Ionian Islands where the poet and his coterie of fellow travellers had stopped on their way to Greece. The cheque, subsequently cashed in Malta, was taken in the form of silver Spanish dollars and transported in trunks to Missolonghi by the poet. The money was then used to fund fighting ships run as a commercial enterprise by profit-minded Greek islanders. “The demand came from the legislative body,” wrote Pietro Gamba, the Italian count who was with Byron throughout the ill-fated expedition and had witnessed the exchange in Kefalonia in November 1823. “A squadron of 14 vessels, nine Hydriot and five Speziot, would then immediately put to sea.”

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Debt Rattle May 20 2020

May 202020

May 20, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:15 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, coronavirus, Covid19, emissions, Flynn, Iran, Poroshenko, reinfection, reopening, subpoena, testing, Venezuela, Worldometer 25 Responses »

Russell Lee South Side market, Chicago 1941

• Study Finds Recovered COVID Patients Who Test Positive Not Infectious (ZH)

• Australian Study: COVID19 Spreads In Schools ‘Considerably Less’ Than Flu (JTN)

• Why Australia Must SPEND Its Way Out Of The COVID19 Crisis (DM)

• EU Exec To Propose €1 Trillion Euro Recovery Plan With Grants And Loans (R.)

• The Great Opening-up (Jim Kunstler)

• China Backs Investigation Of WHO And Coronavirus Pandemic (SCMP)

• 8 Countries to Import Iran-Made Coronavirus Test Kits (FARS)

• Global Carbon Emissions Down Nearly 20% Since Lockdowns Began (JTN)

• The Mystery Behind Worldometer (CNN)

• Venezuela Files Claim To Force Bank Of England To Hand Over Gold (R.)

• Senate GOP Compile Massive Subpoena List For FBI Abuse Probe (ZH)

• Flynn Lawyers Appeal Requests Case Dismissal, Removal Of Judge Sullivan (JTN)

• Phone Calls Between Biden And Ukraine’s Poroshenko Leaked (ZH)

• Ukraine Judge Orders Joe Biden Listed As Alleged Perpetrator Of Crime (Solomon)

• Global cases top 5,000,000

• Russia +8,764 (down from 9,263 May 19 and 9709 May 18)

• US records over 21,000 new cases in past 24 hours

• US records 1,536 new deaths (vs 759 day before),

• Total US deaths 93,533, projected to be 113,000 by mid-June

NYC, a city of 8.4 million people, reporting just shy of 16,000 CV-19 deaths in the 5 boroughs. First death on 3/14.

Over the past sixty-five days, about 1 in every 500 residents of New York City has died from COVID-19. Not caught it. Not got really sick. Died.

Sixty-five days.

— Ben Hunt (@EpsilonTheory) May 19, 2020

Yesterday I wrote: Obesity means having a body mass index (BMI) of greater than 30. Morbid obesity means having a BMI of 40 or higher.

Well, “according to the results of his medical exam released last year, Trump, 73, had a listed height of 6 feet, 3 inches and a weight of 243 pounds. That would put his body mass index at 30.4, which narrowly qualifies him in the “obese” category of 30 or greater.”

And very far removed from morbidly obese. But Pelosi said it anyway, and then “quipped” that she didn’t know he’d be offended by it. Fine, if that’s the level of conversation you want….. But what do you think will happen if he pays her back in kind? Don’t you dare complain, Nancy.

BREAKING: Coronavirus Outbreak

Good day today in Europe, down 14% from yesterday

Italy 451 today, lowest since March 3, 2.5 months!
Lombardy 175, lowest since March 1. Emilia-Romagna 35, peak was 980. 16/21 provinces below 20! 4 zeros and 2 ones.

UK 2,711, less than 1/2 peak pic.twitter.com/NptnXOsTam

— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) May 19, 2020

• Cases 5,006,675 (+ 94,955 from yesterday’s 4,911,720)

• Deaths 325,320 (+ 4,866 from yesterday’s 320,454)

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

From Worldometer

From SCMP:

From COVID19Info.live:

Tyler claims this is ground for reopening economies, but fear of reinfection has not been a major factor so far, it’s fear of first-time infection.

• Study Finds Recovered COVID Patients Who Test Positive Not Infectious (ZH)

[..] a study from the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that patients who test positive for COVID-19 after recovering from the illness appear to be shedding dead copies of the virus. That would suggest that these patients are not infectious, the scientists said, which helped dispel fears that some patients can remain infectious for months after being infected. While the study doesn’t answer every question about the virus’s longevity – such as patients who almost appear to have developed a “chronic” form of the illness because their symptoms have persisted for so long. But still, the finding was greeted as a major relief, and, if anything, should encourage economies to reopen more quickly, as a potential trigger for reinfection that had panicked some experts appears to be a non-issue.

The research also undermines the reliability of ‘antibody’ tests like the ones NY Gov Andrew Cuomo insisted would be ‘critical’ for NY’s reopening. The results mean health authorities in South Korea will no longer consider people infectious after recovering from the illness. Research last month showed that so-called PCR tests for the coronavirus’s nucleic acid can’t distinguish between dead and viable virus particles, potentially giving the wrong impression that someone who tests positive for the virus remains infectious. The research may also aid in the debate over antibody tests, which look for markers in the blood that indicate exposure to the novel coronavirus. Experts believe antibodies probably convey some level of protection against the virus, but they don’t have any solid proof yet. Nor do they know how long any immunity may last.

[..] As a result of the findings in the South Korea study, authorities said that under revised protocols, people should no longer be required to test negative for the virus before returning to work or school after they have recovered from their illness and completed their period of isolation. “Under the new protocols, no additional tests are required for cases that have been discharged from isolation,” the Korean CDC said in a report. The agency said it will now refer to “re-positive” cases as “PCR re-detected after discharge from isolation.” Some coronavirus patients have tested positive again for the virus up to 82 days after becoming infected. Almost all of the cases for which blood tests were taken had antibodies against the virus. If nothing else, this study is just the latest reminder of how much we don’t know about the virus.

One study says nothing. Are you going to send your kids to school BECAUSE one Australian study says this?

• Australian Study: COVID19 Spreads In Schools ‘Considerably Less’ Than Flu (JTN)

A study out of Australia shows the spread of COVID-19 is not driven by children in educational environments, a finding expected to influence the ongoing debate about when to reopen schools in many Western countries. Authorities in the United States, the European countries and other nations around the world began shutting down schools in February and March under the assumption that schoolhouses – packed full of children and usually hotspots of community virus transmission – would contribute to major coronavirus outbreaks. Many public officials, particularly in the U.S., have vowed to keep schools closed until the fall and possibly beyond. Yet health authorities are beginning to question that approach to pandemic mitigation.

Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the World Health Organization, said last week that “children don’t seem to be getting severely ill from this infection,” that there “have not been big outbreaks in schools” where they have remained open, and that it sees “children are less capable of spreading” the virus. The study out of Australia, released last month by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, found that “SARS-CoV-2 transmission in children in schools appears considerably less than seen for other respiratory viruses, such as influenza.” The study determined that, out of hundreds of “close contacts” that were in proximity to numerous positive COVID-19 patients in a school environment, only a scant number contracted the disease there.

“In contrast to influenza, data from both virus and antibody testing to date suggest that children are not the primary drivers of COVID-19 spread in schools or in the community,” the researchers said. “This is consistent with data from international studies showing low rates of disease in children and suggesting limited spread among children and from children to adults,” they also said. The researchers do note that, in mid-March, the government advised parents to keep their children at home for online learning even as schools remained open. Following that advice, “face-to-face attendance in schools decreased significantly and this may have impacted the results of this investigation.” School holidays in early April may have also affected the results.

Steve Keen: ‘Give $100,000 per person as a flat rate to everyone to eliminate the private debt..’

• Why Australia Must SPEND Its Way Out Of The COVID19 Crisis (DM)

[Economist Martin North] said Australia just has to accept it’s been hit by a one-in-a-hundred-year storm and that the Budget will not be balanced for a long time. Australia’s government debt level is hovering around 30 per cent of GDP which is low compared to Japans which hit 238 per cent of GDP in 2018. ‘Interest rates have never been as low as now and from a debt servicing perspective we have the capacity to get more funds,’ he said. Mr North said now was the time to invest in solid nation-building infrastructure that would set the groundwork for the next 30 years of Australia’s future. However, Mr North said he feared the Government would be pressured to prop up old economic distortions such as the over-reliance on housing construction which fueled a house price bubble and unsustainable mass migration. ‘We can’t just go back to pre-covid days, it would be a major mistake,’ he said.

[..] Economist Leith Van Onselen, who worked for Treasury, Goldman Sachs and now writes for website Macrobusiness, said governments should take advantage of the low borrowing rates to build infrastructure now. ‘Not only would this help overcome Australia’s massive infrastructure deficit brought about by 15 years of mass immigration, but would also help stimulate the economy during a period of weak private demand and high unemployment,’ he told Daily Mail Australia. Mr Van Onselen said the nation-building benefits would be undone if the government reverted back to mass migration. ‘This would overload the new infrastructure and lift labour supply, thus being self defeating,’ he said. Wages had already stagnated due to an oversupply of labour before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

[..] Australia’s economy has also been distorted by runaway house prices in recent years. Professor Steve Keen of the University College of London said this had resulted in Australia’s private debt levels becoming the ‘biggest bubble in human history’ at 190 per cent of GDP, far greater than the government’s relatively modest debt to GDP ratio of 30 per cent. Professor Keen has advocated massive cash handouts to every Australian to get rid of the enormous levels of private debt so the economy can have a chance to recover. ‘Give $100,000 per person as a flat rate to everyone to eliminate the private debt,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.

The money would need to be distributed in such a way that it would go directly to paying down debt, Professor Keen said. But those without debt should still receive the payment so they are not penalised. The Australian economy may be unable to recover from the coronavirus shock unless the private debt burden is reduced, Professor Keen said. He said the solution was a debt jubilee, reducing private debt from 190 per cent of GDP to just 90 per cent of GDP.

Guaranteed to fail spectacularly. The EU should stay out of this.

• EU Exec To Propose €1 Trillion Euro Recovery Plan With Grants And Loans (R.)

The European Commission will present a pandemic recovery plan next week that will exceed 1 trillion euros in a mix of grants and loans, Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said on Tuesday. Dombrovskis, speaking after a meeting of EU finance ministers, welcomed a proposal by France and Germany for a 500 billion euro fund to disburse grants to worst-hit regions and sectors. But he said the Commission would be bolder. “Our ambition is not to increase the financing capacity in the range of hundreds of billions, but rather by a figure exceeding a trillion euros,” he said. “Of course in this case we are talking about both in loans and grants.”

Dombrovskis said the Commission, like France and Germany, would link access to the recovery money to sound economic policies and structural reforms. This could become a friction point with Italy and Spain, worst affected by the epidemic, who are wary of northern fiscal hawks dictating policies in exchange for grants. “We not only need additional money for the recovery, but we also need reforms, we need to ensure a business environment that is conducive to investment,” Dombrovskis said. “So, as part of our recovery instrument, we intend to propose… a Recovery and Resilience Facility, which will be concentrating on investments and structural reforms,” he said.

Dombrovskis also said the recovery money would have to follow the EU’s long-term priorities of making the bloc climate-neutral by 2050, digitalising the economy and investing in research and innovation. mEU governments are divided if the recovery money should be loans or transfers, with the highly indebted southerners like Italy, Greece or Spain calling for grants and less indebted and fiscally frugal countries in favour of loans. The commission’s proposal on May 27, linking the Recovery Fund with the EU’s next long-term budget for 2021-2027, will be the basis for discussions of all EU governments in June. Dombrovskis said the Commission was examining if some of the cash could be available in 2020, but said most was likely to be available in 2021.

“Spooky as it’s been, the Covid-19 virus has also been a great cover-story for the natural collapse of a severely unbalanced, ecologically unsound, and dishonestly represented set of arrangements..”

• The Great Opening-up (Jim Kunstler)

The current nostalgia for pre-Covid-19 business-as-usual is understandably intense. Gone especially from daily life are all the ceremonies of human togetherness, from gatherings of friends to the casual shoulder-rubbings of urban life to the crowded venues of the lively arts to the great moiling orgies of pro sports. The life of the perpetual jigsaw puzzle, YouTube, and Netflix has proved inadequate to human aspiration. Gone, too, are livelihoods, revenue streams, and rewarding roles in everyday existence. The itch to get out and do, get out and make, get out and be, is overwhelming. Behind those plain yearnings, though, looms the specter of a system that appeared to be already foundering before Covid-19 entered the scene.

There is, at least, considerable agreement that the disease catalyzed the disorders of finance and economy and accelerated the damage – just not among the people most responsible for engineering the fragilities that actually crashed things Jerome Powell, Pope of the Church of the Federal Reserve, went on the 60-Minutes show last night to reassure the nation that things will eventually get back to normal. “I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year.” Yessir, if you say so. Were his fingers crossed? You couldn’t tell because the camera had him framed in a head-shot. Personally, I think the Fed Chairman was blowing smoke up the nation’s wazoo. Spooky as it’s been, the Covid-19 virus has also been a great cover-story for the natural collapse of a severely unbalanced, ecologically unsound, and dishonestly represented set of arrangements that are now unspooling at horrifying speed.

The car industry is dying. The airline industry is laying out its fleet of big birds in desert graveyards. The college racketeering operation went off a cliff, along with medical profiteering. Agribusiness no longer has a business model. Hundreds of kinds of services no longer have customers who can afford their offerings from acupuncture to zymurgy. None of that will be fixed by injections of miracle money borrowed from ourselves in quantities that would turn every US citizen into a millionaire – if it wasn’t just pounded down the rat-holes of the stock and bond markets. The big question about the Great Opening-up is when the recognition of all that turns to raw emotion. Covid-19 may still be with us then, but it will be the least of our problems. The masks will come off. The dance will commence.

But not now. Try again in 5 years.

• China Backs Investigation Of WHO And Coronavirus Pandemic (SCMP)

Member states of the World Health Organisation, including China, backed a call on Tuesday for an independent investigation into the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 318,000 people around the world. The resolution, which was drafted and promoted by the European Union but did not identify any country by name, called for an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” of the pandemic, including the actions of the WHO. At a virtual meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, the United States, which has accused the WHO of being a “puppet of China”, did not block the adoption of the resolution.

The US said the resolution was the “first critical step” in ensuring the world health body could play its roles and there was an international system capable of “responding effectively” to the next pandemic. But it also “dissociated” itself from the resolution’s statement on rights for poor countries to waive intellectual property rules in obtaining medicine in emergencies, Reuters reported. Earlier on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump threatened to permanently freeze US funding to the WHO and reconsider his country’s membership if the United Nations agency did not commit to “major substantive improvements” within the next 30 days.[..]

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the resolution was in line with Beijing’s positions that countries should support the WHO and that the evaluation should be carried out at “appropriate time”. “These are all consistent with China’s positions and also reflect the common wishes of the majority of countries in the world,” Zhao said. Zhao also hit out at Australia for pushing for an investigation into China’s handling of the outbreak. The two-day gathering did not include discussions of a proposal for Taiwan to regain its observer status. [..] Liu Weidong, a specialist in international affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that after weeks of posturing by countries such as the US and Australia, Beijing’s cooperative approach at the gathering had softened criticism of China.

“China’s performance at this assembly and its stance, were open and very selfless,” Liu said. “China’s actions do make it seem that it is selflessly contributing to building a global community of health for all.” He said US calls to trace the origins of Sars-CoV-2, the official name for the virus that causes Covid-19, were losing support. “Everybody will realise the [US] criticised China and found fault with China due to internal politics, which is a very calculating behaviour. Not many countries may end up following [the US] because it will affect their own soft power,” he said. “America’s international influence now compared to before Covid-19 definitely has fallen a lot.”

A country of 83 million people that sees numbers rise again, should perhaps not export its tests.

• 8 Countries to Import Iran-Made Coronavirus Test Kits (FARS)

Vice President for Science and Technology Sorena Sattari said that Iranian knowledge-based firms have started manufacturing coronavirus test kits and eight countries have agreed to import such items from the country.
“Iran presently has a capacity of producing 1 million serology test kits per day and 1.5 million of C-Creative Protein (CPR) test kits per month,” Sattari said on Tuesday. “Part of the mentioned figure is used inside the country and the rest is exported,” he added. In relevant remarks on May 10, Deputy head of the Iranian presidency’s office for scientific affairs Mehdi Qalenoyee said that Iranian firms are going to export serological test kits to eight more countries after a first successful cargo was sent to Germany earlier in the week.

Qalenoyee said export of two types of coronavirus test kits to the Philippines and Pakistan was waiting for confirmation from the local officials after Iranian companies manufacturing the special tools sent sample kits to labs in those countries. He added that India, Nigeria and Armenia will receive the items once travel restrictions are eased. The official also said that Qatar, Georgia and Syria will soon be included in the list of export destination for the Iranian test kits. The announcement comes a few days after Iran sent a first cargo of serological test kits to Germany, where officials are trying to conduct the tests on a great scale to identify the immunity rate against COVID-19.

Exports of diagnostic devices and equipment from Iran to other countries is a sign of success for home-grown efforts to fight the coronavirus. Iran has been highly praised for its robust response to the disease as many governments and organizations keep castigating the US for its refusal to lift illegal sanctions to let the country access medical supplies and vital equipment needed to confront the virus.

Half the global economy is on hold, and the reduction is still only 20% of what is called for.

• Global Carbon Emissions Down Nearly 20% Since Lockdowns Began (JTN)

Carbon emissions worldwide are reportedly down by nearly 20% since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdowns, another highlighting the impact of ongoing shutdowns on human activity and the worldwide economy. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, titled “Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement,” states that the reduction in average global emissions peaked at 26% before settling at 17%, compared mean emission levels in 2019. The authors, who hail from the U.K., the U.S., Norway and other countries, say that the total level of emission reductions for the whole year could range anywhere from 4% to 7%, depending on the disease mitigation procedures that remain in place, and for how long.

“Government actions and economic incentives post-crisis will likely influence the global CO2emissions path for decades,” they write. “At present it is unclear how long and deep the [economic] crisis will be, and how the recovery path will look, and therefore how CO2 emissions will be affected.” Governments worldwide have enacted severe and open-ended lockdowns and shutdowns since the disease began spreading late last year, with presidents, governors and other executives around the world unilaterally closing down huge swaths of their economies in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus.

CNN sets out to discredit Worldometer, mentions that Wikipedia editors find it makes errors. First, that would be a badge of honor for anyone not working at either CNN or Wikipedia, and second, it’s not possible to get every detail right when tracking multiple data from 200+ countries. If only because they themselves track data in different ways from each other.

The story falls apart when CNN finds that Johns Hopkins, which it thinks is much more reliable, cites Worldometer on a very regular basis.

• The Mystery Behind Worldometer (CNN)

When Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez boasted of Spain’s high rankings, he didn’t pull his numbers out of thin air. On April 27, the OECD wrongly ranked Spain eighth in testing per capita. Initially, the OECD had used data from OWID to compile its statistics. But it sourced the Spanish numbers independently because OWID’s data was incomplete. [..] In its statement, the OECD said “we regret the confusion created on a sensitive issue by any debate on methodological issues” and stressed that increasing the availability of testing in general is more important than knowing where any particular country ranks. Sánchez’s later reference to a Johns Hopkins study, in which he said Spain ranked fifth for testing worldwide, appears to have been a case of mixed-up attribution by the prime minister.

JHU has not published international testing figures. Jill Rosen, a spokeswoman for the school, told CNN the university couldn’t identify a report that matched Sánchez’s description. At a press conference on May 9, Sánchez evaded a CNN question pressing him on the JHU study’s existence and listed the government’s numbers on testing totals instead. In comments made to a Spanish reporter the next day, health minister Salvador Illa continued to insist the testing data had been released by JHU, though he pointed to Worldometer as the underlying source. Since Johns Hopkins gets its data from Worldometer, he argued, it’s just as good. “It is data given by the John Hopkins University […] taken from as a fundamental source of information, the website Worldometer,” Illa said. “You can check it.”

[..] One Wikipedia editor, James Heilman, a clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of British Columbia, said Wikipedia volunteers have noticed persistent errors with Worldometer, but also with “a more reputable name with a longer history of accuracy,” referring to Johns Hopkins. “We hope they also double check the numbers.” In an article published in February, JHU said it began manually tracking Covid-19 data for its dashboard in January. When that became unsustainable, the university began scraping data from primary sources and aggregation websites. Lauren Gardner, the associate engineering professor who runs the university’s Covid-19 dashboard, told CNN in a statement that the university uses a “two-stage anomaly detection system” to catch potential data problems.

“Moderate” changes are automatically added to the dashboard but flagged so staff can double-check them in real time. Changes beyond a certain threshold require “a human to manually check and approve the values before publication to the dashboard,” Gardner said. The university’s reliance on Worldometer has surprised some academics. Phil Beaver, a data scientist at the University of Denver, seemed at a loss for words when he was asked what he thought of JHU citing Worldometer. “I am not sure, that is a great question, I kind of got the impression that Worldometer was relying on [Johns] Hopkins,” he told CNN after a lengthy pause.

Reuters labels it “foot-dragging”. Like we are clueless nitwits.

• Venezuela Files Claim To Force Bank Of England To Hand Over Gold (R.)

Venezuela’s central bank has made a legal claim to try to force the Bank of England to hand over €930 million ($1.02 billion) of gold so President Nicolas Maduro’s government can fund its coronavirus response, according to the document submitted in a London court. The claim follows a request Venezuela made to the Bank of England in April to sell part of its gold reserves there and send the proceeds to the United Nations to help with the country’s coronavirus-fighting efforts. Since 2018, the Bank of England has delayed the transfer of 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold stored there to Maduro, who Britain does not recognize as the country’s legitimate leader. The bank offers gold custodian services to many developing nations.

The claim, submitted in a commercial court and dated May 14, says the Venezuelan central bank “seeks an order requiring BoE to comply with the proposed instruction.” The funds, once transferred to the United Nations Development Programme, would be used to buy healthcare equipment, medicine, and food to address Venezuela’s “COVID-19 emergency,” the document seen by Reuters said. Selling off the country’s gold reserves has become one of the Maduro administration’s few options to raise funds due to U.S. sanctions. The collapse in global oil prices and a paralyzing coronavirus quarantine has further crippled Venezuela’s moribund economy. “The foot-dragging by the Bank of England is critically hampering Venezuela and the UN’s efforts to combat COVID-19 in the country,” Sarosh Zaiwalla, a London-based lawyer representing the central bank, said in a statement.

Nice list.

• Senate GOP Compile Massive Subpoena List For FBI Abuse Probe (ZH)

In the wake of bombshell evidence that shows the Obama DOJ inappropriately targeted the 2016 Trump campaign, Senate Republicans have compiled a list of 53 individuals they want to interview as part of their own comprehensive probe into the matter, separate of the Trump DOJ’s separate criminal investigation headed up by US Attorney John Durham. That said, as Fox News reports, the effort is being led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), so we expect weekly cable news appearances in which Graham wags his finger and issues the sternest of empty threats to investigate the swamp. Graham has previously come under fire for failing to follow through on promises to seek testimony from current and former DOJ and FBI officials – telling Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that he doesn’t want to interfere with Durham’s probe.

But – in the unlikely event Graham isn’t going to simply run cover for the swamp in a sham investigation designed to placate those who seek justice, here are the names of those on the subpoena list, via Fox News: The majors: [former FBI Director] James Comey, [former FBI Deputy Director] Andrew McCabe, [former Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper, [former CIA Director] John Brennan, [former Deputy Attorney General] Sally Yates. We note that the names of both President Obama and his VP Joe Biden are conspicuously absent, despite the fact that both of them were in a January 5, 2017 meeting in which Obama gave Comey the nod to conceal information from the incoming Trump administration. Graham, in response, said that asking for testimony from a former president would set a ‘dangerous precedent.’

Everyone else: “Trisha Anderson, Brian Auten, James Baker, William Barr, Dana Boente, Jennifer Boone, Kevin Clinesmith [the FBI lawyer who allegedly falsified a CIA email to secure the Carter Page FISA warrant], Patrick Conlon, Michael Dempsey, Stuart Evans, Tashina Gauhar [a top DOJ deputy when classified details of Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador were illegally leaked to The Washington Post], Carl Ghattas, Curtis Heide, Kathleen Kavalec, David Laufman [who arranged a key meeting with a Steele dossier source], Stephen Laycock, Jacob Lew, Loretta Lynch, Mary McCord, Denis McDonough, Arthur McGlynn, Jonathan Moffa, Sally Moyer, Mike Neufield, Sean Newell, Victoria Nuland, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Stephanie L. O’Sullivan, Lisa Page, Joseph Pientka [who interviewed Flynn at the White House while also playing a key role in the Carter Page probe, and whom the FBI has hidden from scrutiny], John Podesta, Samantha Power, E.W. “Bill” Priestap [who authored the memo debating whether the bureau simply wanted Flynn “fired”], Sarah Raskin, Steve Ricchetti, Susan Rice, Rod Rosenstein, Gabriel Sanz-Rexach, Nathan Sheets, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Glenn Simpson, Steve Somma [an FBI case agent who apparently was involved in several key FISA omissions], Peter Strzok, Michael Sussman, Adam Szubin, Jonathan Winer, and Christopher Wray.”

The more they resist, the harder Powell will come.

• Flynn Lawyers Appeal Requests Case Dismissal, Removal Of Judge Sullivan (JTN)

Attorneys for former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Tuesday asked a federal appeals court to force a district court to dismiss the case, as the Justice Department has requested. The petition also asks that the judge, Emmet Sullivan, be removed from Flynn’s case and that his U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacate his order to appoint former federal judge John Gleeson to argue against the dismissal of Flynn’s case and discuss whether the retired lieutenant general deserves to face contempt for perjury. Flynn in 2017 plead guilty to lying to the FBI but later sought to withdraw his plea. Evidence has since emerged suggesting the FBI had no case against Flynn but set up an interview hoping it would catch him lying, his lawyers and Justice officials have said.

Sullivan last week announced his intention to allow the filing of amicus curiae briefs, which meant that Flynn’s case would not immediately conclude. These “friend of the court” briefs allow parties interested in but not involved in a case to present their views. Sullivan also announced last week the appointment of Gleeson. In the petition filed Tuesday, Flynn’s legal team, which includes attorney Sidney Powell, blasted Sullivan and requested that the case be reassigned to a different judge.

“The district judge’s latest actions – failing to grant the Government’s Motion to Dismiss, appointing a biased and highly-political amicus who has expressed hostility and disdain towards the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the prosecution, and the promise to set a briefing schedule for widespread amicus participation in further proceedings – bespeaks a judge who is not only biased against Petitioner, but also revels in the notoriety he has created by failing to take the simple step of granting a motion he has no authority to deny,” the petition says of Sullivan. “This is an umpire who has decided to steal public attention from the players and focus it on himself. He wants to pitch, bat, run bases, and play shortstop. In truth, he is way out in left field” the petition also states.

Haven’t heard from Zelensky for a while.

• Phone Calls Between Biden And Ukraine’s Poroshenko Leaked (ZH)

Leaked phone calls between Joe Biden and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko explicitly detail the quid-pro-quo arrangement to fire former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin – who Poroshenko admits did nothing wrong – in exchange for $1 billion in US loan guarantees (which Biden openly bragged about in January, 2018). The calls were leaked by Ukrainian MP Andrii Derkach, who says the recordings of “voices similar to Poroshenko and Biden” were given to him by investigative journalists who claim Poroshenko made them. Shokin was notably investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, to sit on its board.

Shokin had opened a case against Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, who granted Burisma permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. In January, 2019, Shokin stated in a deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister. The leaked calls begin on December 3, 2015, when former Secretary of State John Kerry starts laying out the case to fire Shokin – who he says “blocked the cleanup of the Prosecutor Generals’ Office,” and sated that Biden “is very concerned about it,” to which Poroshenko replies that the newly reorganized prosecutor general’s office (NABU) won’t be able to pursue corruption charges, and that it may be difficult to fire Shokin without cause.

Later in the leaked audio on February 18, 2016 – less than three months after the Kerry conversation – Poroshenko delivers some “positive news.” “Yesterday I met with General Prosecutor Shokin,” says Poroshenko. And despite of the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I specially asked him – no, it was day before yesterday – I specially asked him to resign. In, uh, as his, uh, position as a state person. And despite of the fact that he has a support in the power. And as a finish of my meeting with him, he promised to give me the statement on resignation. And one hour ago he bring me the written statement of his resignation. And this is my second step for keeping my promises.” To which Biden replied: “I agree.”

Four weeks later on March 22, 2016, Biden says “Tell me that there is a new government and a new Prosecutor General. I am prepared to do a public signing of the commitment for the billion dollars.” Poroshenko tells Biden that one of the leading candidates is the man who replaced Shokin, Yuriy Lutsenko who later said in a deposition that Hunter Biden and his business partners were receiving millions of dollars in compensation from Burisma. Then, on May 13, 2016, Biden congratulates Poroshenko on “getting the new Prosecutor General,” saying that it will be “critical for him to work quickly to repair the damage Shokin did.” “And I’m a man of my word,” Biden adds. “And now that the new Prosecutor General is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that one billion dollar loan guarantee.”

Next nail. Same coffin.

• Ukraine Judge Orders Joe Biden Listed As Alleged Perpetrator Of Crime (Solomon)

The infamous story of Joe Biden’s effort to force the firing of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor in 2016 has taken a new legal twist in Kiev, just as the former vice president is sewing up the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in America. In Kiev late last month, District Court Judge S. V. Vovk ordered the country’s law enforcement services to formally list the fired prosecutor, Victor Shokin, as the victim of an alleged crime by the former U.S. vice president, according to an official English translation of the ruling obtained by Just the News. The court had previously ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigations in February to investigate Shokin’s claim that he was fired in spring 2016 under pressure from Biden because he was investigating Burisma Holdings, the natural gas company where Biden’s son Hunter worked.

The court ruled then that there was adequate evidence to investigate Shokin’s claim that Biden’s pressure on then-President Petro Poroshenko, including a threat to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, amounted to unlawful interference in Shokin’s work as Ukraine’s chief prosecutor. But when law enforcement agencies opened the probe they refused to name Biden as the alleged perpetrator of the crime, instead listing the potential defendant as an unnamed American. Vovk ruled that anonymous listing was improper and ordered the law enforcement agencies to formally name Biden as the accused perpetrator.

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Taleb likes to say it’s not the state that shuts down an economy, it’s the people:

If you ever wonder where we're at on the dystopia scale, consider that it's normal to believe the government is spying on you, and crazy to believe that they're not.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 19, 2020

He called Biden, Obama and Clinton warmongers to their faces in 2008. They laughed, but he wasn't joking. pic.twitter.com/Xwp9PzQeBC

— In the NOW (@inthenow) May 18, 2020

And the Oscar goes to… pic.twitter.com/onrdaez6s1

— Life on Earth (@planetpng) May 18, 2020

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

Debt Rattle April 30 2020

Apr 302020

April 30, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:05 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, coronavirus, Covid19, FBI, Flynn, Hillary, rally, reinfection, Remdesivir, Sidney Powell, small farms, Steele, Strzok, Sweden, testing, Vietnam, WHO 21 Responses »

Wyland Stanley Golden Gate Bridge under construction 1935

• FBI Notes Detail Effort To Frame Michael Flynn (Solomon)

• Handwritten Notes, Emails Reveal FBI Agents Set Perjury Trap For Flynn (SAC)

• Steele Testifies Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice Knew About His Anti-Trump Research

• The NY Times Used to Correct Its Whoppers. But Not These (Kuntz)

• WHO Declines Comment On Remdesivir In COVID-19, Hopes For Best (R.)

• Fauci Says Leak Concerns Fueled His White House Revelation Of Remdesivir Tests (R.)

• Britain Has Europe’s Second Highest COVID-19 Death Toll (R.)

• UK To Miss 100,000 Coronavirus Tests Target, Minister Admits (G.)

• Seoul Tests Find False Positives, Not Reinfections In Recovered Patients (KH)

• After Aggressive Mass Testing, Vietnam Says It Contains COVID19 Outbreak (R.)

• Los Angeles To Offer Free Coronavirus Tests To All Residents (NBC)

• Small Farms, Stressed And Underfunded, Struggle For Coronavirus Relief (IC)

• COVID19 Crisis Will Wipe Out Demand For Fossil Fuels – IEA (G.)

• Swedish City To Dump Ton Of Chicken Manure In Park To Deter Visitors (G.)

• Stock Surge Is A Bear Market Rally That Will Collapse – Bianco (CNBC)

• US records 2,502 #coronavirus deaths in past 24 hours:

• Ben Hunt @EpsilonTheory
– 2,390 Americans died today of CV-19, the sixth worst day of this nat’l disaster. 2,470 Americans died yesterday, the fifth worst day of this nat’l disaster. I bet you didn’t know that. I bet you thought the death toll was improving. Now ask yourself, WHY wasn’t I told this?

• The coronavirus may have killed more people in the U.S. than is officially known: Total deaths in 7 hard-hit states are nearly 50% above normal, CDC data shows. That’s 9,000 more deaths than were reported as of April 11 in official counts.

Yesterday we had 6,120 new deaths. Today it’s 10,135. Not sure what caused that surge. I did the screenshots at roughly the same time.

• Cases 3,232,992 (+ 83,759 from yesterday’s 3,149,233)

• Deaths 228,520 (+ 10,135 from yesterday’s 218,385)

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

From Worldometer – Among Closed Cases, Deaths have fallen to 18%

From SCMP: Note: SCMP has a new layout for its tracker.

From COVID19Info.live: Note: watch Peru, it’s rising fast. As are Russia and Brazil, Mexico.

Found something not corona to start off with today. What an insane tale this has already become. Sidney Powell has promised more soon.

Think back before she became Flynn’s lawyer, and now look at this. The man had been bankrupted by these shenanigans; I still wonder who pays her.

So we have Comey, McCabe, Priestap. And then what about Obama, Hillary, Biden?

• FBI Notes Detail Effort To Frame Michael Flynn (Solomon)

A senior FBI official’s handwritten notes from the earliest days of the Trump administration expressed concern that the bureau might be “playing games” with a counterintelligence interview of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to get him to lie so “we could prosecute him or get him fired.” The notes and other emails were provided to Flynn’s lawyers under seal last week and released Wednesday night by court order, providing the most damning evidence to date of potential politicalization and misconduct inside the FBI during the Russia probe. The notes show FBI officials discussed not providing Flynn a Miranda-like warning before his January 2017 interview — a practice normally followed in such interviews — so that he could be charged with a crime if he misled the agents, the officials said.

“What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?,” the handwritten notes of the senior official say. The notes express further concern the FBI might be “playing games.” Multiple officials confirmed to Just the News that the author of the notes is William Priestap, the now-retired FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the ultimate supervisor for fired agent Peter Strzok, who led the Russia probe. Justice Department officials are investigating whether Priestap’s notes were written in conjunction with meetings he had with top leaders like then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, officials said.

A special prosecutor is reviewing DOJ’s and the FBI’s handling of the Flynn prosecution, which led to the former Trump adviser and retired general pleading guilty to lying to the FBI under a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia case. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell filed a court motion last week saying new evidence has emerged showing Flynn was “framed” and his conviction should be dismissed. The officials said the notes are part of that new evidence and had been withheld from Flynn’s defense team for years even though they were potential evidence of innocence.

#FLYNN docs just unsealed, including handwritten notes 1/24/2017 day of Flynn FBI interview. Transcript: “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Read transcript notes, copy original just filed. @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/8oqUok8i7m

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) April 29, 2020

There’s plenty to be said against Flynn, that’s not it. I think of his lobbying for Turkey in 2016.

The Sparrow Project @sparrowmedia on Twitter:

PRO TIP: “The FBI are not your friends, don’t lionize the FBI. Also, Michael Flynn is an Islamophobic, criminal, neo-crusader who should be sent to the gallows for the brutality he oversaw in JSOC, and at Camp Bucca in Iraq, brutality that ultimately gave birth to ISIS.”

• Handwritten Notes, Emails Reveal FBI Agents Set Perjury Trap For Flynn (SAC)

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan unsealed four pages of stunning FBI emails and handwritten notes Wednesday, regarding former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, which allegedly reveal the retired three star general was targeted by senior FBI officials for prosecution, stated Flynn’s defense attorney Sidney Powell. Those notes and emails revealed that the retired three-star general appeared to be set up for a perjury trap by the senior members of the bureau and agents charged with investigating the now-debunked allegations that President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia, said Sidney Powell, the defense lawyer representing Flynn. Moreover, the Department of Justice release 11 more pages of documents Wednesday afternoon, according to Powell.

What is especially terrifying is that without the integrity of Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney Jensen, we still would not have this clear exculpatory information as Mr. Van Grack and the prosecutors have opposed every request we have made,” said Powell. It appears, based on the notes and emails that the Department of Justice was determined at the time to prosecute Flynn, regardless of what they found, Powell said. “The FBI pre-planned a deliberate attack on Gen. Flynn and willfully chose to ignore mention of Section 1001 in the interview despite full knowledge of that practice,” Powell said in a statement. “The FBI planned it as a perjury trap at best and in so doing put it in writing stating ‘what is our goal? Truth/ Admission or to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

The documents, reviewed and obtained by SaraACarter.com, reveal that senior FBI officials discussed strategies for targeting and setting up Flynn, prior to interviewing him at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017. It was that interview at the White House with former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Special Agent Joe Pientka that led Flynn, now 61, to plead guilty after months of pressure by prosecutors, financial strain and threats to prosecute his son. Powell filed a motion earlier this year to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea and to dismiss his case for egregious government misconduct. Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017, under duress by government prosecutors, to lying to investigators about his conversations with Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak about sanctions on Russia. This January, however, he withdrew his guilty plea in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

He stated that he was “innocent of this crime” and was coerced by the FBI and prosecutors under threats that would charge his son with a crime. He filed to withdraw his guilty plea after DOJ prosecutors went back on their word and asked the judge to sentence Flynn to up to six months in prison, accusing him of not cooperating in another case against his former partner. Then prosecutors backtracked and said probation would be fine but by then Powell, his attorney, had already filed to withdraw his guilty plea.

The documents reveal that prior to the interview with Flynn in January, 2017 the FBI had already come to the conclusion that Flynn was guilty and beyond that the officials were working together to see how best to corner the 33-year military veteran and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The bureau deliberately chose not to show him the evidence of his phone conversation to help him in his recollection of events, which is standard procedure. Even stranger, the agents that interviewed Flynn later admitted that they didn’t believe he lied during the interview with them.

.@AndrewCMcCarthy says we’re seeing a planned out scheme to get a 33 year combat vet (@GenFlynn) to say something inaccurate so they could charge him with the a false statement.

Thank God for @SidneyPowell1 pic.twitter.com/X3xborav1Z

— Josh Cremeans “DirtyTruth” (@AKA_RealDirty) April 30, 2020

As if we couldn’t have guessed. Note the role played by Victoria Nuland.

• Steele Testifies Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice Knew About His Anti-Trump Research

Steele recently testified in a British court that he believed both then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and then-Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice were aware of his dossier research as it was going on in summer 2016. The testimony makes his most direct link yet between his Russia collusion research and the top of the Clinton campaign and Obama White House. Steele told a British court he believed he had been hired by the Fusion GPS firm owned by Glenn Simpson through the Democratic National Committee-linked law firm Perkins Coie to assist the Clinton campaign during the election, according to a transcript of the testimony.

“I presumed it was the Clinton campaign, and Glenn Simpson had indicated that. But I was not aware of the technicality of it being the DNC that was actually the client of Perkins Coie,” Steele testified in March under questioning from lawyers for Russian bankers suing over his research. “You knew it was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign didn’t you?” a lawyer for the businessmen asked. “I believed it was the campaign. Yes,” he answered. “The leadership of the Clinton campaign?” he was asked. “Fine, the leadership of the campaign,” Steele conceded. The lawyer persisted. “You also understood that Hillary Clinton herself was aware of what you were doing?” the lawyer asked. “I think Glenn had mentioned it, but I wasn’t clear,” Steele answered.

Then Steele was confronted with what lawyers said were notes he took at a meeting with the FBI in 2016 in which he purported to tell agents that Clinton was aware of his research. The lawyers read from those notes during the court proceedings. The notes, according to the transcript, read: “We explained that Glenn Simpson/GPS Fusion was our commissioner but the ultimate client were the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign and that we understood the candidate herself was aware of the reporting at least, if not us.” The lawyers prodded: “It’s your note, so we assume it’s accurate?” “Yes,” Steele answered during the March 17 testimony. You can read that testimony here.

[..] A day later in additional testimony, Steele was asked how he came to present some of his dossier findings to the U.S. State Department during an October 2016 meeting with then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec. The former British MI6 agent turned private intelligence investigator said his meeting was set up by State officials Jonathan Winer and Victoria Nuland after longtime Clinton adviser and friend Strobe Talbott had reached out to him. “The meeting was set up by a State Department official called John Winer,” Steele explained. “At your request?” the lawyers asked. “No, at his request, his suggestion. He invited us into meet, as I understood it, at her request, Assistant Secretary of State Nuland,” Steele answered.

Not much use waxing nostalgic about a washed out rag.

• The NY Times Used to Correct Its Whoppers. But Not These (Kuntz)

The New York Times is widely admired for owning up to its errors. In addition to the corrections it runs each day, it has a tradition of publishing extensive Editor’s Notes and even full-length investigations when it has determined that flawed reporting misled readers and botched the rough first draft of history.[..] During the last few years the Times has published two other sets of deeply flawed articles that also demand such extended corrections: “The 1619 Project” and its Trump-Russia coverage. It is a sign of how much the Times, and mainstream journalism in general, have changed that it appears highly unlikely the “paper of record” will correct the record.

[..] The Trump-Russia coverage, even with caveats pinning assertions to sources rather than solid evidence, clearly created a false impression that Donald Trump and his team were in cahoots with the Russians. It’s hard to believe that former Times Executive Editor Max Frankel would have written an op-ed for the paper declaring that an “obvious bargain [was] reached during the campaign of 2016” between the Trump campaign and Russia if he hadn’t read those unmistakable insinuations in the Times. The Trump campaign is suing the Times for libel over Frankel’s claims. (Full disclosure: I was hired as an editor at the Times in 1988 under Frankel.)

A fuller accounting by the Times is especially necessary because the media’s pushing of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories was central to an unprecedented and possibly criminal effort to subvert or remove a president under false pretenses. Unless the Times and other sources come clean about who was feeding them misleading and partisan information, we may never understand this momentous chapter of history. Protecting confidential sources is, of course, one of the bedrocks of journalism. The free flow of information depends on people being able to share hard truths without jeopardizing their careers or lives.

But not when sources lie or mislead. When that happens, the confidentiality deal is off and “your responsibility would be to set the record straight,” Lynn Walsh, ethics chair of the Society of Professional Journalists, confirmed to me recently in a general conversation about SPJ’s standards for anonymous sourcing. When sources engage in gross deception on a matter of such import, even committing national security crimes in the process, the news media involved should honor their higher duty – to their readers or viewers – to expose the malfeasance and correct the record.

Even the WHO won’t commit. A handful scary reports of people dying from 70-year old, tried and tested and never lethal, chloroquines, followed by upbeat though opaque stories on remdesivir.

Note the tweet below about 65,000(!) Italian RA, lupus patiens on long term hydroxychloroquine. Deadly, right? With a 90% reduction in COVID19 infection rate…

One difference: chloroquine patents have run out, so no big profits for “investors”. Which they will get from remdesivir if it “works”.

• WHO Declines Comment On Remdesivir In COVID-19, Hopes For Best (R.)

A top World Health Organization official declined comment on Wednesday on reports that Gilead Science’s remdesivir could help treat COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, but said that further data was needed. “I wouldn’t like to make any specific comment on that, because I haven’t read those publications in detail,” Dr Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s emergencies programme, told an online briefing in response to a question, adding it can sometimes take a number of publications to determine a drug’s efficacy. “Clearly we have the randomised control trials that are underway both in the UK and US, the ‘Solidarity trials’ with WHO. Remdesivir is one of the drugs under observation in many of those trials. So I think a lot more data will come out,” he said. Ryan added: “But we are hopeful this drug and others may prove to be helpful in treating COVID-19.”

The Italian Society for Rheumatology studied 65,000 patients on longterm hydroxychloroquine for RA and Lupus.

Only 20 patients tested positive for COVID-19. No ICU, no deaths.

This is a 90% reduction in infection rate compared to the rest of Italy.https://t.co/Pta97oBA8O

— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) April 28, 2020

Reauters headline spells it out: “US Stocks Surged As Hopes For An Effective COVID-19 Treatment Prompted A Broad Rally”.

• Fauci Says Leak Concerns Fueled His White House Revelation Of Remdesivir Tests (R.)

Concerns over leaks compelled the top U.S. infectious disease official to reveal data on Gilead Sciences Inc’s experimental drug remdesivir, the first in a scientifically rigorous clincial trial to show benefit in treating COVID-19. The dramatic announcement by Dr Anthony Fauci in the Oval Office on Wednesday prompted concerns among scientists that the Trump administration was raising hopes about a coronavirus treatment before sharing the full data with researchers. As a cautionary example of inflating the potential value of a therapy, some pointed to President Donald Trump’s repeated endorsements of malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, with no evidence that it works. Newer data suggests the malaria treatments may carry significant risks for some sufferers of the respiratory disease caused by the virus.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is running the trial, said he took the first opportunity to get the word out that patients taking a dummy treatment or placebo should be switched to remdesivir in hopes of benefiting from it. He expressed concern that leaks of partial information would lead to confusion. Since the White House was not planning a daily virus briefing, Fauci said he was invited to release the news at a news conference with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards(D). “It was purely driven by ethical concerns,” Fauci told Reuters in a telephone interview. “I would love to wait to present it at a scientific meeting, but it’s just not in the cards when you have a situation where the ethical concern about getting the drug to people on placebo dominates the conversation.”

The numbers tell us it’s a matter of days before Britain overtakes Italy in having most deaths in Europe.

• Britain Has Europe’s Second Highest COVID-19 Death Toll (R.)

Britain now has Europe’s second highest official COVID-19 death toll with more than 26,000, according to figures published on Wednesday that raised questions about Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s response to the outbreak. Some 26,097 people died across the United Kingdom after testing positive for COVID-19 as of April 28 at 1600 GMT, Public Health England (PHE) said, citing daily figures that included deaths outside of hospital settings for the first time. That means the United Kingdom has suffered more COVID-19 deaths than France or Spain have reported, though less than Italy, which has Europe’s highest death toll and the second worst in the world after the United States.

“We must never lose sight of the fact that behind every statistic there are many human lives that have tragically been lost before their time,” Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told reporters. “We are still coming through the peak and…this is a delicate and dangerous moment in the crisis.” Such a high UK death toll increases the pressure on Johnson just as opposition parties accused his government of being too slow to impose a lockdown to limit contagion from the new coronavirus, too slow to introduce mass testing and too slow to get enough protective equipment to hospitals. Johnson returned to work on Monday after recuperating from COVID-19, which had left him gravely ill in intensive care at the peak of the coronavirus outbreak. He celebrated the birth of a baby son on Wednesday.

Opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer criticised Johnson’s response to the world’s worst public health crisis since the 1918 influenza outbreak. Johnson had spoken of Britain’s “apparent success” in tackling COVID-19 in a speech to the nation on Monday. “We are possibly on track to have one of the worst death rates in Europe,” Starmer told parliament. “Far from success, these latest figures are truly dreadful,” he added, referring to previously published data. Starmer said his calculations showed 27,241 had died in the UK from COVID-19, the lung disease caused by the coronavirus. In mid-March the government’s chief scientific adviser said keeping Britain’s death toll below 20,000 would be a “good outcome”.

Government reveal their failures piecemeal, after shouting out loud about BIG targets. This model does require cooperation of the media at all times.

• UK To Miss 100,000 Coronavirus Tests Target, Minister Admits (G.)

The UK government is likely to miss its target of carrying out 100,000 coronavirus tests by the end of April, a cabinet minister has admitted. After weeks of ministers insisting the deadline would be met, Robert Buckland, the justice secretary, said it was “probable that we won’t” reach it on Thursday but said it was likely in the next few days. “Even if we don’t hit it, we will in the next few days hit that target. We are up to 52,000 being tested, capacity is rising and I think it was right to set an ambitious target. Sometimes if you don’t hit a target on the due date, the direction of travel is the most important thing. And I believe we are going to get there and move beyond it because we need more,” he told Sky News.

The target was set by Matt Hancock, the health secretary, on 2 April as the government came under pressure over low testing levels. At that point, there was capacity for 12,799 daily tests in England, with just over 10,650 tests carried out. The total as of 9am on Wednesday was 52,429 tests with capacity to do 73,000, but only 33,000 individuals were tested because of multiple retests. [..] .. hospital leaders launched a strident attack on the government’s testing strategy, regardless of the target. Saffron Cordery, the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents foundation trusts in England, dismissed the 100,000 target as a “red herring” that distracted from the lack of a coherent overall strategy.

NHS Providers said in a report on Wednesday: “NHS trust leaders believe they have done all they can to support the national testing effort so far but are increasingly frustrated with the lack of clarity on how the testing regime will be developed for this next phase. “At the moment they feel they are on the end of a series of frequent tactical announcements extending the testing criteria to new groups with no visibility on any longer term strategy, and are being expected at the drop of a hat to accommodate these changes with no advance notice or planning.”

Might be good news. Might even be very good. But it’s also yet another condemnationn of testing as a whole.

• Seoul Tests Find False Positives, Not Reinfections In Recovered Patients (KH)

South Korea’s infectious disease experts said Thursday that dead virus fragments were the likely cause of over 260 people here testing positive again for the novel coronavirus days and even weeks after marking full recoveries. Oh Myoung-don, who leads the central clinical committee for emerging disease control, said the committee members found little reason to believe that those cases could be COVID-19 reinfections or reactivations, which would have made global efforts to contain the virus much more daunting. “The tests detected the ribonucleic acid of the dead virus,” said Oh, a Seoul National University hospital doctor, at a press conference Thursday held at the National Medical Center.

He went on to explain that in PCR tests, or polymerase chain reaction tests, used for COVID-19 diagnosis, genetic materials of the virus amplify during testing, whether it is from a live virus or just from fragments of dead virus cells that can take months to clear from recovered patients. The PCR tests cannot distinguish whether the virus is alive or dead, he added, and this can lead to false positives. “PCR testing that amplifies genetics of the virus is used in Korea to test COVID-19, and relapse cases are due to technical limits of the PCR testing.” As of Sunday, 263 people in Korea tested positive for the disease again after being declared virus-free, of which 17 were minors or teens, the National Medical Center said. “The respiratory epithelial cell has a half-life of up to three months, and RNA virus in the cell can be detected with PCR testing one to two months after the elimination of the cell,” Oh said.

I saw the first graph here and thought something doesn’t add up. Vietnam didn’t do mass testing, 213,000 in a country of 96 million people is nothing compared to the 6.1 million in the 320 million US.

What the second graph shows is the clue: Vietnam tests a lot compared to confirmed cases.

• After Aggressive Mass Testing, Vietnam Says It Contains COVID19 Outbreak (R.)

Vietnam, a country of 96 million people which shares a border with China, is signalling that it has succeeded where many wealthier and more developed countries have not by containing the new coronavirus. The government is officially reporting a relatively small 270 cases and zero deaths. That puts the country on course to revive its economy much sooner than most others, according to several public health experts interviewed by Reuters. Its slightly more populous regional neighbour the Philippines, in comparison, has reported almost 30 times as many cases and more than 500 deaths. These public health experts say Vietnam was successful because it made early, decisive moves to restrict travel into the country, put tens of thousands of people into quarantine and quickly scaled up the use of tests and a system to track down people who might have been exposed to the virus.

“The steps are easy to describe but difficult to implement, yet they’ve been very successful at implementing them over and over again,” said Matthew Moore, a Hanoi-based official from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who has been liaising with Vietnam’s government on the outbreak since early January. He added that the CDC has “great confidence” in the Vietnamese government’s response to the crisis. Vietnam increased the number of laboratories that can test for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, from three at the beginning of the outbreak in January, to 112 by April. As of Wednesday, 213,743 tests had been conducted in Vietnam, of which 270 were positive, according to health ministry data. That ratio of 791 tests to every confirmed case is by far the highest in the world, according to data from health ministries compiled by Reuters. The next highest, Taiwan, has conducted 140 tests for every case.

[..] “It is organised, it can make country-wide policy decisions that get enacted quickly and efficiently and without too much controversy,” said Guy Thwaites, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. Thwaites said the number of positive tests processed by his organisation’s lab was in line with government data. He said the hospital where he works on the wards – Ho Chi Minh City’s 550-bed Hospital for Tropical Diseases, serving a population of 45 million people in southern Vietnam – had not admitted any additional cases not reflected in the government’s numbers. “If there was ongoing and unreported or unappreciated community transmission, we would have seen the patients in our hospital. We have not,” he said. Thwaites said his organisation’s lab increased capacity from being able to do around 100 tests a day to around 1,000 a day.

Get yourself tested. Don’t wait.

• Los Angeles To Offer Free Coronavirus Tests To All Residents (NBC)

Los Angeles will begin offering free coronavirus tests to all residents no matter if they have symptoms or not, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday. Garcetti said that all residents of Los Angeles County can get the tests. The website to schedule tests says it is open to any county resident regardless of symptoms. Those with symptoms will be given priority. The mayor said he believes Los Angeles is the first major city to offer tests to all residents. He said they now have enough testing capacity to handle the increased tests. Testing rules had previously been relaxed to allow grocery store workers, first responders and other essential workers with exposure to the virus to get tests regardless of whether they have symptoms. Health officials say that even those without symptoms can spread the virus.

All you need to know is America doesn’t like small. But people can still buy from small farms. All it may take is some effort.

• Small Farms, Stressed And Underfunded, Struggle For Coronavirus Relief (IC)

Before coronavirus hit, farmers in the U.S. were already hurting from years of falling food prices, severe weather, and, more recently, President Donald Trump’s trade war. “We’ve had a record number of farm bankruptcies [in the U.S.], total farm debt is at $425 billion, [and farmer] incomes have fallen by about half since 2013,” said Eric Deeble, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which supports small and mid-sized family farms. Now, with the global pandemic closing factories and restaurants and disrupting supply chains, already stressed farms are grappling with lower demand and fewer markets to sell in, as well as a presidential administration that favors relief for big businesses over small.

Small farmers in particular — those who sell directly to farmers markets, schools, and other local food hubs — are facing an existential crisis, as they face slim odds of accessing competitive federal stimulus money. They have reason to be pessimistic. In recent years, federal subsidies to help struggling farmers have flowed almost exclusively to large corporate farms. Of the roughly $28 billion the Trump administration has distributed to food producers to offset losses from his trade wars, almost all went to big farms. Advocates for small farmers say this is driven in part by the preference of Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Purdue, who has encouraged farmers to get bigger farms if they wanted to stay in business. “Big get bigger and small go out … and that’s what we’ve seen,” he told a group of Wisconsin dairy farmers in 2018, echoing Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary, who infamously told farmers in the 1970s to “get big or get out.”

While 91 percent of U.S. farms are small — defined by the federal government as an operation with gross cash income under $250,000 — large farms account for 85 percent of the country’s farm production. The public health crisis has already had a devastating impact on agriculture across the country. A report released in mid-March by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition estimated that small farms would see a $689 million decline in sales from March to May this year due to Covid-19, leading to a payroll decline of $103 million and a total loss to the economy of $1.3 billion. Now, as the pandemic shows no sign of slowing, the coalition worries that the impact for small farmers will be even more substantial — which could lead many small farms to permanently close.

When are they planning to tell us that renewable energy is not renewable?

• COVID19 Crisis Will Wipe Out Demand For Fossil Fuels – IEA (G.)

Renewable electricity will be the only source resilient to the biggest global energy shock in 70 years triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, according to the world’s energy watchdog. The International Energy Agency said the outbreak of Covid-19 would wipe out demand for fossil fuels by prompting a collapse in energy demand seven times greater than the slump caused by the global financial crisis. In a report, the IEA said the most severe plunge in energy demand since the second world war would trigger multi-decade lows for the world’s consumption of oil, gas and coal while renewable energy continued to grow. The steady rise of renewable energy combined with the collapse in demand for fossil fuels means clean electricity will play its largest ever role in the global energy system this year, and help erase a decade’s growth of global carbon emissions.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said: “The plunge in demand for nearly all major fuels is staggering, especially for coal, oil and gas. Only renewables are holding up during the previously unheard of slump in electricity use.” Renewable energy is expected to grow by 5% this year, to make up almost 30% of the world’s shrinking demand for electricity. The growth of renewables despite a global crisis could spur fossil fuel companies towards their goals to generate more clean energy, according to Birol, but governments should also include clean energy at the heart of economic stimulus packages to ensure a green recovery. “It is still too early to determine the longer-term impacts,” said Birol. “But the energy industry that emerges from this crisis will be significantly different from the one that came before.”

What makes Sweden so successful.

• Swedish City To Dump Ton Of Chicken Manure In Park To Deter Visitors (G.)

The university town of Lund in Sweden is to dump a tonne of chicken manure in its central park in a bid to deter up to 30,000 residents from gathering there for traditional celebrations to mark Walpurgis Night on Thursday. “Lund could very well become an epicentre for the spread of the coronavirus on the last night in April, [so] I think it was a good initiative,” the chairman of the local council’s environment committee, Gustav Lundblad, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper. “We get the opportunity to fertilise the lawns, and at the same time it will stink and so it may not be so nice to sit and drink beer in the park,” Lundblad said, adding that the only potential drawback was that the smell may not be confined to the park.

“I am not a fertiliser expert, but as I understand it, it is clear that it might smell a bit outside the park as well,” Lundblad admitted. “These are chicken droppings, after all. I cannot guarantee that the rest of the city will be odourless. But the point is to keep people out of the city park.” Sweden has opted for a light touch approach to containing Covid-19, eschewing the strict lockdowns imposed by its Nordic neighbours and much of the rest of Europe and favouring personal responsibility over draconian enforcement. Walpurgis Night, celebrated on 30 April, is widely marked across central and northern Europe with parties and bonfires. The festivities are classed as “spontaneous” so cannot be banned by authorities, but to avoid the risk of spreading the coronavirus many towns and cities in Sweden have asked citizens to give the tradition a miss this year.

Just in case you still thought there are financial markets.

• Stock Surge Is A Bear Market Rally That Will Collapse – Bianco (CNBC)

Market researcher James Bianco warns April’s big run will collapse. His reason: Investors are too bullish. “I understand the market has been up a lot since the March low. But what I see in the market is a retracement rally that looks very similar to the first type of rallies that you get in protracted bear markets,” the Bianco Research president told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Wednesday. Bianco warned last month the coronavirus turmoil would be worse than the financial crisis. In early March, he put all his money in cash and never looked back — despite the bounce. So far this month, the S&P 500 is up almost 14%. If the trend holds, it’ll be the index’s best showing since 1974.

Meanwhile, the Dow is up more than 12% in the same period and is on track for its best monthly performance since January 1987. “We’ll revisit the 2,200 S&P low, if not make a lower low — probably by late summer,” he said. “That’s going to come because we’re going to find out now is a critical time for the market.” Bianco predicts there will be an overwhelming realization that life isn’t getting back to normal when then economy starts to reopen. “What the market seems to be thinking is we’re going to restart, and we’re all going to pretend that it’s 2019,” said Bianco. “And, we’re all going to stand on the subway platform with 500 other people waiting for the next train.”

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Before the lockdowns:

Free America now… from psychopaths! pic.twitter.com/jm9TKY4HTo

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) April 29, 2020

pic.twitter.com/Q833u4Is8h

— General Flynn (@GenFlynn) April 29, 2020

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Debt Rattle February 27 2020

Feb 272020

February 27, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:48 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, coronavirus, Covid19, HIV, Italy, masks, Mecca, mistreatment, MSM, Mueller, NYT, Patient Zero, reinfection, reward, SARS, South Korea, Trump 35 Responses »

‘Daly’ Store, Manning, South Carolina 1941

• China City Offers $1,400 To Virus Patients Who Report To Authorities (R.)

• UK Hospitals To Deny Care To Weakest If Pandemic Hits (Ind.)

• The Hunt For ‘Patient Zero’ – The World’s Health May Depend On It (SCMP)

• Japanese Woman Tests Positive For Second Time (R.)

• HIV-Like Mutation Makes Coronavirus Far More Infectious Than Sars (SCMP)

• Virus Response Delay Could Have Added 100,000 Cases, China Expert (SCMP)

• 60 Cases In US, One May Be Due To ‘Community Spread’ Of Infection (SCMP)

• At This Rate, How Is China’s Economy Going To Recover Lost Ground? (SCMP)

• Saudi Arabia Halts Travel To Islam’s Holiest Site To Prevent Spread (AP)

• Pandemic Bonds: A “Scheme Like No Other” (Webb)

• Judge Refuses to Intervene In Mistreatment of Assange by Prison Officials (Sp.)

• Assange Blasts Court For Preventing Communication With “Spied-On” Lawyers, (RT)

• Assange Detention Illegal Under English, European And International Law (RT)

• Prosecution of Julian Assange Violates First Amendment (Napolitano)

• Trump Campaign Sues New York Times For Libel Over Russia Story (R.)

• Cases 82,419 (+ 1,190 from yesterday’s 81,229).

• Deaths 2,808 (+ 39 from yesterday’s 2,769)

• Italy 468 cases (25% rise)

• South Korea 334 new cases, total 1,595 (26% rise)

• Japan 16 new cases, total 196, Diamond Princess 705

• US 60 cases
– 14 “US cases”, 3 repatriated from Wuhan and 42 from the Diamond Princess
– 83 monitored in Nassau County, Orange County declares state of emergency
– Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar: “We have 30 million surgical masks. Those would be the gauze tied behind the ear-type masks meant to really protect people from the healthcare workers spreading. We have 12 million N95 NIOSH-certified masks in the stockpile and we have about 5 million N95 masks that I believe may have expired, they’re no longer NIOSH-certified.”

• France 18 cases

• Pakistan confirms first 2 cases

• Norway, Greece first case

• Saudi Arabia bars pilgrims from Mecca

• South Korea has tested 40,000 people. Japan 900.

From SCMP:

From Worldometer

Coming soon to a town near you.

• China City Offers $1,400 To Virus Patients Who Report To Authorities (R.)

A city in China’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the global coronavirus epidemic, will pay residents as much as 10,000 yuan ($1,425.96) if they proactively report symptoms of the illness and it is confirmed after testing. Qianjiang, a city of around one million people located about 150 km (90 miles) from the stricken provincial capital of Wuhan, has reported a total of 197 cases so far and is stepping up efforts to ensure its infected people are confined and treated. It is the latest of a number of regions to offer cash rewards to encourage members of the public to volunteer for medical checks.

Hubei has reported over 65,000 cases and more than 2,600 deaths from the epidemic. Worldwide, the death toll is about 2,800 and about 80,000 have been infected. The Qianjiang task force handling the epidemic said in a notice that residents would be entitled to the full 10,000 yuan payment if their coronavirus diagnosis is confirmed. Those who have previously been diagnosed will not be eligible. Those who are not immediately ruled out as suffering from the disease will be given 1,000 yuan, while those declared to be “suspected” cases will earn 2,000 yuan, it said.

Also coming soon to a town near you.

• UK Hospitals To Deny Care To Weakest If Pandemic Hits (Ind.)

NHS patients could be denied lifesaving care during a severe coronavirus outbreak in Britain if intensive care units are struggling to cope, senior doctors have warned. Under a so-called “three wise men” protocol, three senior consultants in each hospital would be forced to make decisions on rationing care such as ventilators and beds, in the event hospitals were overwhelmed with patients. The medics spoke out amid frustration over what one said was the government’s “dishonest spin” that the health service was well prepared for a major pandemic outbreak. The doctors, from hospitals across England, said the health service’s existing critical care capacity was already overstretched and “would crumble” under the demands of a pandemic surge in patients who may all need ventilation to help them breathe.

Those denied intensive care beds could be those suffering with coronavirus or other seriously ill patients, with priority given to those most likely to survive and recover. Doctors said this would lead to “tough decisions” needing to be made about the wholesale cancellation of operations to free-up beds. One consultant said the “three wise men” protocol had been discussed at his hospital in recent weeks while another from the north of England said it had been raised “informally”. It was initially developed after the 2009 swine flu pandemic but is still included in several NHS trust plans seen by The Independent. One doctor explained: “If you can imagine the real worst-case scenarios where supply is massively outstripped by demand we would have to refuse to admit many people who would normally get ventilated.

Yeah, like when it turns out (s)he was infected in the Wuhan biolab.

• The Hunt For ‘Patient Zero’ – The World’s Health May Depend On It (SCMP)

Chinese officials are still trying to trace the epidemic back to its source in China. The first coronavirus case was reported to the WHO on December 31 and has been linked to Wuhan’s Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market. However, a new study published by a team of Chinese scientists last week said the virus might have been imported from somewhere else. The first known Covid-19 patient, a male who showed symptoms on December 8, had been discharged but said he was not at the Huanan market, the Wuhan government said in a Weibo post on Wednesday. “We don’t know who the very first patient zero was, presumably in Wuhan, and that leaves a lot of unanswered questions about how the outbreak started and how it initially spread,” Borwein said.

Knowing who patient zero is would help prevent future outbreaks and provide information about how to prevent transmission, Borwein said. But as time passes, identifying the index case grows increasingly difficult. “Figuring out who patient zero was wouldn’t give us all the answers but it would help to map the path the virus has taken and how it’s travelling,” she said. “It’s hard to draw that map without knowing where it starts.” John Nicholls, a University of Hong Kong clinical professor in pathology, said identifying patient zero during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic in 2002-03 was vital from an epidemiological perspective, as it highlighted the mode of its spread. The disease, which infected over 8,000 and killed 813 people globally, was traced to a then 64-year-old medical professor from Guangzhou, who had infected at least 13 tourists staying at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong.

Reinfection warrants much more attention than it gets.

• Japanese Woman Tests Positive For Second Time (R.)

A woman working as a tour bus guide in Japan has tested positive for coronavirus for a second time, in what authorities say is the first such case. The woman, in her 40s and a resident of Osaka in western Japan, tested positive on Wednesday after developing a sore throat and chest pains, the prefectural government said. She first tested positive on 29 January and was discharged from the hospital after recovering on 1 February, before testing negative on 6 February. The health ministry confirmed the case was the first in Japan where a patient tested positive for coronavirus for a second time after being discharged from hospital, Japanese media said. Though a first in Japan, cases of second positive tests have been reported in China. The outbreak has spread rapidly and widely, infecting about 80,000 people globally and killing nearly 2,800, the vast majority in mainland China.

“Once you have the infection, it could remain dormant and with minimal symptoms, and then you can get an exacerbation if it finds its way into the lungs,” said Professor Philip Tierno at New York University’s school of medicine. He said much remained unknown about the virus: “I’m not certain that this is not bi-phasic, like anthrax,” he said, meaning the disease might appear to go away before recurring. The woman’s second positive test came as the number of confirmed cases in Japan rose by 16 to 186, in addition to the 704 diagnosed from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Tokyo has urged that big gatherings and sports events be scrapped or curtailed for two weeks to contain the virus, while pledging the 2020 Olympic Games will still go ahead.

We’re going to see large-scale HIV-drug testing on corona cases.

• HIV-Like Mutation Makes Coronavirus Far More Infectious Than Sars (SCMP)

The new coronavirus has an HIV-like mutation that means its ability to bind with human cells could be up to 1,000 times as strong as the Sars virus, according to new research by scientists in China and Europe. The discovery could help to explain not only how the infection has spread but also where it came from and how best to fight it. Scientists showed that Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) entered the human body by binding with a receptor protein called ACE2 on a cell membrane. And some early studies suggested that the new coronavirus, which shares about 80 per cent of the genetic structure of Sars, might follow a similar path.

But the ACE2 protein does not exist in large quantities in healthy people, and this partly helped to limit the scale of the Sars outbreak of 2002-03, iwhich infected about 8,000 people around the world. Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions. When looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola.

“This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV [the new coronavirus] may be significantly different from the Sars coronavirus in the infection pathway,” the scientists said in a paper published this month on Chinaxiv.org, a platform used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to release scientific research papers before they have been peer-reviewed. “This virus may use the packing mechanisms of other viruses such as HIV.” According to the study, the mutation can generate a structure known as a cleavage site in the new coronavirus’ spike protein. The virus uses the outreaching spike protein to hook on to the host cell, but normally this protein is inactive. The cleavage site structure’s job is to trick the human furin protein, so it will cut and activate the spike protein and cause a “direct fusion” of the viral and cellular membranes.

Compared to the Sars’ way of entry, this binding method is “100 to 1,000 times” as efficient, according to the study. Just two weeks after its release, the paper is already the most viewed ever on Chinarxiv. [..] Chinese researchers said drugs targeting the furin enzyme could have the potential to hinder the virus’ replication in the human body. These include “a series of HIV-1 therapeutic drugs such as Indinavir, Tenofovir Alafenamide, Tenofovir Disoproxil and Dolutegravir and hepatitis C therapeutic drugs including Boceprevir and Telaprevir”, according to Li’s study.

Government ‘expert’ Zhong Nanshan does more whitewashing, praising the government response. Problem is, there WAS a huge delay. It should read: Virus Response Delay DID Add 100,000 Cases.

The same Zhong Nanshan said on Jan 28 that “..the number of new cases will plateau within the next ten days..”

• Virus Response Delay Could Have Added 100,000 Cases, China Expert (SCMP)

The number of daily coronavirus infections in South Korea could exceed those in China, with Beijing reporting 433 new cases on Thursday – slightly higher than the 406 of a day earlier – while South Korean cases surged on Thursday morning to 334, bringing its total infections to 1,595. If the number of new infections reported by Seoul continues to rise at the rate of recent days, South Korea’s cases could surpass China’s as early as Thursday afternoon, when health officials there are due to report their latest figures. China’s National Health Commission said 409 of its new cases were reported in Hubei province – the epicentre of the outbreak. [..] But cases outside Hubei returned to double digits, with 24 cases reported, a jump from just nine and five cases over the past two days respectively.

Zhong Nanshan, China’s top respiratory disease expert, said the number of patients would have been greatly reduced if China had taken action in early December, or even in early January. China announced human-to-human transmission of the virus on January 20, and Zhong said a delay of just a few more days could have led to well over 100,000 infections. “There have been three coronavirus outbreaks since the beginning of the 21st century. We should take actions to prevent it spreading whenever there is a coronavirus infection case. This is a big lesson for us,” Zhong said. He also called for more authority to be given to the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its local branches.

Currently local CDCs only reports to their local governments who decide what action to take on communicable diseases. “In other countries, the CDC can report to the central government, and even alert the public directly under ‘special circumstances’. Although our expert team announced on January 20 that human to human transmissions had occurred, but that (the transmission) was discovered much earlier … nobody paid attention to it,” Zhong said. He said doctors, including Li Wenliang, had raised the alarm in mid to late December but it was not reported to the government until December 30, adding that the local government had not paid attention to the warnings, “or they did not understand what it was. That is why the spread has not been stopped”.

Why just the one?

• 60 Cases In US, One May Be Due To ‘Community Spread’ Of Infection (SCMP)

US health officials said on Wednesday they had detected a possible case of “community spread” of Covid-19 – the disease caused by the new coronavirus – with a patient testing positive, despite having no travel history to places with outbreaks or of being exposed to someone already infected. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statement was released soon after President Donald Trump said in a White House press briefing that he had appointed Vice-President Mike Pence to lead the containment effort against the spread of the illness that emerged in China’s Hubei province. Community transmission – in which multiple cases are detected without any clear source of infection – could significantly weaken the effectiveness of containment measures such as travel restrictions.

“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of Covid-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC statement said. “It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveller who was infected,” it said. The patient tested positive for the illness after being screened by “astute clinicians” in the public health system in California, the CDC said. [..] The new case brings the total number of coronavirus infections in the US to 60. This includes 45 people who were either brought back from the central Chinese city of Wuhan – the epicentre of the outbreak – or from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan

More government propaganda: “..normality could gradually return to the other 96 per cent of the economy.”

• At This Rate, How Is China’s Economy Going To Recover Lost Ground? (SCMP)

The escalation of the coronavirus epidemic has completely changed the consensus narrative about China’s economic performance in 2020. The cautious optimism that followed the signing of the phase one trade deal between the US and China has now given way to acute concerns about an economy that has been paralysed by a severe epidemic for more than a month. Even assuming a quick resolution to the crisis, followed by a decent recovery, the Chinese economy will probably struggle to deliver growth much higher than 5 per cent. Therefore, the consensus forecast for full-year growth of 5.8 per cent despite the epidemic – according to the latest Bloomberg survey – must reflect expectations of significant policy easing by China.

However, while stimulus measures may help the economy, it is worth cautioning that their effectiveness is heavily contingent on how the Covid-19 outbreak evolves. To the extent that much of China’s macro outlook will be driven by the epidemic, it is encouraging to see some progress in the fight against the coronavirus. Since early February, the daily increase in infection cases in China has fallen steadily, from nearly 4,000 to about 500. Recent changes in diagnostic methodology have created volatility in the data, but not derailed the overall declining trend. What is also encouraging is that the infection rate outside the epicentre of Hubei has dipped to below 10 cases a day, thanks to Beijing’s aggressive quarantine tactics to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Since Hubei accounts for 4 per cent of China’s GDP, this means that normality could gradually return to the other 96 per cent of the economy. However, a rapid containment of the coronavirus is only a necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for the realisation of the upbeat consensus forecast. Two other conditions are necessary: namely, an orderly resumption of the economy, and sufficient policy support. On the first point, there are fewer reasons for optimism. The draconian restrictions imposed by Beijing to contain the outbreak continue to hamper both the movement of people and the resumption of economic activity.

Middle East pressure cooker.

• Saudi Arabia Halts Travel To Islam’s Holiest Site To Prevent Spread (AP)

Saudi Arabia on Thursday halted travel to the holiest sites in Islam over fears about a new viral epidemic just months ahead of the annual haj pilgrimage, a move coming as the Middle East has over 220 confirmed cases of the illness. The extraordinary decision by Saudi Arabia stops foreigners from reaching the holy city of Mecca and the Kaaba, the cube-shaped structure the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims pray toward five times a day. It also said travel was suspended to Prophet Muhammad’s mosque in Medina. The decision showed the worry about the outbreak potentially spreading into Saudi Arabia, whose oil-rich monarchy stakes its legitimacy on protecting Islam’s holy sites.

The epicentre in the Middle East’s most-affected country, Iran, appears to be in the holy Shiite city of Qom, where a shrine there sees the faithful reach out to kiss and touch it in reverence. “Saudi Arabia renews its support for all international measures to limit the spread of this virus, and urges its citizens to exercise caution before travelling to countries experiencing coronavirus outbreaks,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement announcing the decision. “We ask God Almighty to spare all humanity from all harm.” Disease outbreaks always have been a concern surrounding the haj, required of all able-bodied Muslims once in their life, especially as pilgrims come from all over the world. The earliest recorded outbreak came in 632 as pilgrims fought off malaria. A cholera outbreak in 1821 for instance killed an estimated 20,000 pilgrims. Another cholera outbreak in 1865 killed 15,000 pilgrims and then spread worldwide.

If a pandemic is declared after July 15, people stand to make a lot of dough.

• Pandemic Bonds: A “Scheme Like No Other” (Webb)

A little known specialized bond created in 2017 by the World Bank may hold the answer as to why U.S. and global health authorities have declined to label the global spread of the novel coronavirus a “pandemic.” Those bonds, now often referred to as “pandemic bonds,” were ostensibly intended to transfer the risk of potential pandemics in low-income nations to financial markets. Yet, in light of the growing coronavirus outbreak, the investors who purchased those products could lose millions if global health authorities were to use that label in relation to the surge in global coronavirus cases. On Tuesday, federal health officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that they are preparing for a “potential pandemic” of the novel coronavirus that first appeared in China late last year.

[..] some have argued that the CDC’s concerns about a likely pandemic have come too late and that action should have been taken much earlier. For instance, in early February, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, had told the New York Times that the novel coronavirus is “very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” while former CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden had echoed those concerns at the time, stating that it is “increasingly unlikely that the virus can be contained.” Despite those warnings, among many others, the CDC waited to announce its concerns that the virus could spread throughout the United States. Their Tuesday announcement riled markets, wiping out $1.7 trillion in stock market value in just two days.

[..] In June 2017, the World Bank announced the creation of “specialized bonds” that would be used to fund the previously created Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) in the event of an officially-recognized (i.e. WHO-recognized) pandemic. They were essentially sold under the premise that those who invested in the bonds would lose their money if any of six deadly pandemics hit, including coronavirus. Yet, if a pandemic did not occur before the bonds mature on July 15, 2020, investors would receive what they had originally paid for the bonds back in addition to interest and premium payments on those bonds that they recieve between the date of purchase and the bond’s maturation date.

The PEF, which these pandemic bonds fund, was created by the World Bank “to channel surge funding to developing countries facing the risk of a pandemic” and the creation of these so-called “pandemic bonds” was intended to transfer pandemic risk in low-income countries to global financial markets. According to a World Bank press release on the launch of the bonds, WHO backed the World Bank’s initiative. However, there is much more to these “pandemic bonds” than meets the eye. For example, PEF has a “unique financing structure [that] combines funding from the bonds issued today with over-the-counter derivatives that transfer pandemic outbreak risk to derivative counterparties.” The World Bank asserted that this structure was used in order “to attract a wider, more diverse set of investors.” Critics, however, have called the unnecessarily convoluted system “World-Bank-enabled looting” …

“..precedent of a High Court judge who called up Belmarsh prison’s governor on the phone to instruct him to change the prison’s practices towards an inmate..”

• Judge Refuses to Intervene In Mistreatment of Assange by Prison Officials (Sp.)

Julian Assange’s lawyers have repeatedly submitted unsuccessful requests to the Judge on his case, over the past few months, for her to intervene over his prison conditions, which have included denying Assange proper access to his case file. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been subjected to “horrendous” treatment at the hands of prison authorities, the Belmarsh Magistrate’s Court (sitting at Woolwich Crown Court) heard on 25 February. The award-winning journalist and publisher was handcuffed 11 times as he was shuttled between the courthouse and the prison (despite the two locations being practically connected to each other), he was also strip-searched twice, and his legal papers were confiscated from him, according to his legal team and fellow WikiLeaks journalists.

Edward Fitzgerald QC, one of Assange’s barristers, pleaded with Judge Vanessa Baraitser to intervene with prison authorities. But she refused to intervene in any way, stressing that she had repeatedly told Assange’s lawyers that as far as she was concerned she had “no jurisdiction over [Assange’s] prison conditions”. Baraitser, who appeared frustrated with the request and points made by Fitzgerald, suggested that “surely this is a matter for the prison governor”. On 13 January 2020 Gareth Pierce, veteran human rights solicitor and part of Assange’s legal team, gave Baratiser precedent of a High Court judge who called up Belmarsh prison’s governor on the phone to instruct him to change the prison’s practices towards an inmate. But Baraitser was only prepared to go as far as to make a generalised statement in court that it would be “helpful” if the prison improved Assange’s access to his lawyers and his case file. Baraitser had also previously refused to intervene on 19 November 2019.

“Mr Assange, generally defendants do not have a voice.”

Truer words were never spoken about Julian.

• Assange Blasts Court For Preventing Communication With “Spied-On” Lawyers, (RT)

On the third day of his extradition hearing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has rebuked the court for preventing him from communicating with his legal team, saying his prosecutors have “100 times more contact hours each day.” Amid a prosecution argument about whether or not he stands charged with “political offenses” Assange stood and told the court that “the problem is I cannot participate, I cannot privately communicate with my lawyers.” Judge Vanessa Baraitser responded to the 48-year-old journalist and publisher by saying she would not allow him to address the court: “Mr Assange, generally defendants do not have a voice.”

The Australian continued to try and get his point across so the magistrate adjourned the court for five minutes while the defense team held a ‘private’ meeting. “The other side must have something like 100 contact hours each day,” Assange said upon the conclusion of the adjournment, before adding that his legal team is being spied on. There is already enough spying on my lawyers as it is. There are a number of unnamed embassy officials here. There are two microphones in here. What’s the point of asking if I can concentrate if I can’t participate? “I am as much a participant in these proceedings as I am at Wimbledon,” Assange wistfully joked while alleging that there was a microphone in the glass defendants dock.

The defense team asked for Assange to be removed from the dock so that he could sit with them; prosecutors reportedly didn’t object but the judge felt the security team might. “It is your call Madam,” the prosecutors said. Defense counsel Edward Fitzgerald argued that Assange is “no threat to anyone,” adding: “He is a gentle man of an intellectual nature. There’s no reason for him not to sit with us.” The judge then asked whether they would like to submit a formal bail application to make that a reality. The defense team will now submit such a formal bail application and a decision will be made on Thursday morning. For the time being, Assange will remain in the dock away from his legal team.

This courageous voice is currently confined at the back of a shameful court in #UK behind a bulletproof glass screen as if he was a war criminal, while the real war criminals are free. But they will be accused – and this is what they fear most. Listen to #Assange! pic.twitter.com/NStFaxzWk0

— Srećko Horvat (@HorvatSrecko) February 26, 2020

“..the existence of a treaty is the fundamental basis of the Assange extradition request and that, without a treaty, there would be no such request in the first place. Choosing to ignore the provisions of such a treaty is itself an abuse of process..”

• Assange Detention Illegal Under English, European And International Law (RT)

Day three of the Julian Assange extradition hearing is focusing on whether the allegations against Assange amount to “political offenses.” If so, it would likely be outside of the judge’s jurisdiction to approve extradition. Kicking off proceedings at Woolwich Crown Court on Wednesday, defense counsel Edward Fitzgerald argued that 17 of the 18 counts with which the WikiLeaks founder has been charged fall under the US Espionage Act, which makes them political on face value. He added that the 18th count, of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, was in order to carry out the other alleged offenses. Discussing the policy of not extraditing for political offenses, Assange’s lawyer said: “It is an essential fundamental protection, which the US puts in every single one of its extradition treaties.”

Fitzgerald said that political defence from extradition goes back 100 years and is standard in treaties based on the UN model, including the European Union convention on extradition, the Interpol convention and many others. “The more we research this, the more one sees this is a universal norm.” He also noted that while the US adds the ‘political defense’ extradition provision into all of its treaties, authorities there only take issue when it is invoked against them, despite using it to protect US citizens from extradition to hostile nations. WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson provided a video update from outside the court, saying that the case should be thrown out. “This is in contravention to all international treaties, to European Convention on Human Rights to UN treaties,” he said.

Fitzgerald cited numerous precedents tying international law and the ECHR with English law in determining the legality of detention, essentially arguing that Assange’s detention is illegal under all three. Furthermore, the initial charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion is illegal under US law, not English law, rendering all subsequent arguments inadmissible. He continued that the right to due process has been a part of English law since the Magna Carta, while also forming a cornerstone of the constitution. Fitzgerald then added that the existence of a treaty is the fundamental basis of the Assange extradition request and that, without a treaty, there would be no such request in the first place. Choosing to ignore the provisions of such a treaty is itself an abuse of process, he added.

Illegal under American law too.

• Prosecution of Julian Assange Violates First Amendment (Napolitano)

“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” — First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution In the oral argument of the famous U.S. Supreme Court cases known collectively as the Pentagon Papers Case, the late Justice William O. Douglas asked a government lawyer if the Department of Justice views the “no law” language in the First Amendment to mean literally no law. The setting was an appeal of the Nixon administration’s temporarily successful efforts to bar The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing documents stolen from the Department of Defense by Daniel Ellsberg. The documents were a history of the Vietnam War, which revealed that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his secretaries of defense and state and the military’s top brass materially misrepresented the status of the war to the American people.

Stated differently, they regularly, consistently and systematically lied to the public and the news media. Though LBJ was retired, Nixon did not want this unvarnished version of the war he was still fighting to make its way into the public arena. The Nixon DOJ persuaded a federal district court judge to enjoin the publication of the documents because they contained classified materials and they had been stolen. In a landmark decision, the court ruled that all truthful matters material to the public interest that come into the hands of journalists – no matter how they get there – may lawfully be disseminated. That does not absolve the thief – though the case against Ellsberg was dismissed because the FBI committed crimes against him during his prosecution – but it does insulate the publisher absolutely against civil and criminal liability.

Trump can launch a hundred of these lawsuits against the NYT alone. This is from Reuters, published in the Guardian. All MSM, and all clinging to the “Mueller established so-and-so” narrative. Mueller didn’t establish a thing, other than an all-pervasive bias. All he had left after 3 years was 13 Russians and Assange who could’t speak up for themselves. And there’s still people who say Mueller is not a liar and a coward.

• Trump Campaign Sues New York Times For Libel Over Russia Story (R.)

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign said on Wednesday it had filed a libel suit against the New York Times accusing the newspaper of intentionally publishing a false opinion article related to Russian interference in the 2016 US election. In an escalation of the Republican president’s long-running battle with the news media, campaign officials said the lawsuit was being filed in New York state supreme court, the state’s trial-level court. A statement from the campaign said the aim of the litigation was to “hold the news organization accountable for intentionally publishing false statements against President Trump’s campaign”. The lawsuit relates to a 27 March 2019, opinion article written by Max Frankel, who served as executive editor of the Times from 1986 to 1994.

The campaign attached to a news release a draft copy of the suit accusing the newspaper of “extreme bias against (the campaign) and animosity” and cited what it called the Times’ “exuberance to improperly influence the presidential election in November 2020”. Trump is seeking re-election on 3 November. The opinion piece was headlined, “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo” with a subhead adding, “The campaign and the Kremlin had an overarching deal: help beat Hillary Clinton for a new pro-Russian foreign policy.” Quid pro quo is a Latin term meaning a favor in exchange for a favor. The lawsuit originated with the Trump re-election campaign, but Trump himself has contended the Times has at times been biased against him.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller documented Moscow’s campaign of hacking and social media propaganda to boost Trump’s 2016 candidacy and harm his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. It documented numerous contacts between people associated with Trump’s campaign and Russians. Mueller found insufficient evidence to show a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s team and Russia but did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice related to the investigation. In the opinion piece, Frankel stated, “Collusion – or a lack of it – turns out to have been the rhetorical trap that ensnared President Trump’s pursuers.”

Frankel added: “There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions. The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo.”

Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser to Donald J Trump for President Inc, said: “Today the President’s re-election campaign filed suit against the New York Times for falsely stating the Campaign had an ‘overarching deal’ with ‘Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy’ to ‘help the campaign against Hillary Clinton’ in exchange for ‘a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from … economic sanctions’. “The statements were and are 100% false and defamatory. The complaint alleges the Times was aware of the falsity at the time it published them, but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign, while misleading its own readers in the process,” Ellis said. In a copy of the lawsuit provided by his re-election team, the campaign stated, “The Times was well aware when it published these statements that they were not true.”

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Debt Rattle February 16 2020

Feb 162020

February 16, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:54 am Finance Tagged with: Bloomberg, Cambodia, campaign spending, coronavirus, cruise ship, HillBerg, Malaysia, McCabe, quarantine, reinfection 19 Responses »

John Collier Trucks on highway en route to Utica, New York 1941

• Chinese Doctors Say Wuhan Coronavirus Reinfection Even Deadlier (ZH)

• 70 More Infections On Diamond Princess Cruise Ship Bring Total To 355 (SCMP)

• Cruise Passengers Face 14 More Days In Quarantine On Return To Hong Kong (SCMP)

• Quarantined Cruise Ship Passenger Speaks Out Against US Evacuation Plan (Fox)

• American From Cruise Ship Docked In Cambodia Tests Positive In Malaysia For Coronavirus (R.)

• Cruise Firm Seeks New Virus Test For Passenger From Ship In Cambodia (R.)

• New Coronavirus Threatens Meltdown In China’s Economy (SCMP)

• Coronavirus Scare Leaves China’s Empty Restaurants Selling Off Stocks (R.)

• Chinese Students -Used To- Spend Billions Overseas (CNN)

• Fiat Chrysler Suspends 500L Production Over China Supply Disruption (R.)

• Looming Hill-Berg: Bloomberg Considering Hillary Clinton As Running Mate (NYP)

• TV Execs Celebrate Unprecedented Flood Of Bloomberg Campaign Spending (IC)

• Why Wasn’t Andrew McCabe Charged? (NR)

• Cases: 69,264, up 2,162 from yesterday

• Deaths: 1,669, up 143 from yesterday

Cruise ship the Diamond Princess -off Yokohama- has 3,711 people on board. 1,219 have been tested of which 355 have been confirmed positive for the virus. The ship has been in quarantine for 11 days, so capacity for testing is apparently limited to just over 100 per day. Not impressive. And this doesn’t yet tell us how many people have been tested more than once. But that appears to be necessary.

The main development over the past 24 hours concerns the cruise ships and getting infected more than once. The Diamond Princess is turning into one of Dante’s circles of hell -take your pick- just as governments send planes to pick up their citizens aboard the ship. Who will arrive home just in time to start another 14 days of quarantine. Lovely. Hong Kong and Canada have reported this renewed quarantine, the US must follow suit.

The Diamond Princess is also a loud flashing warning sign about the ease with which the virus spreads. Everyone has been isolated in their cabins for 10+ days, yet there are 70 more cases daily. With a 14-day incubation time, less than a third of passengers tested in those 10+ days with a 30% infection rate, and questionable testing quality, what awaits these people? What awaits those who are not at present considered suspect?

Another cruise ship, the Werkendam, finally accepted in Cambodia after being shunned by 4-5 other countries, has let well over 1,000 passengers leave the ship before one was diagnosed positive for COVID19. It arrived on Thursday carrying 1,455 passengers and 802 crew, 236 passengers and 747 crew remain on board.

Potentially even more ominous is Tyler’s piece on re-infection. If people can be infected more than once, that means their immune systems have successfully fought the virus once, only to be weakened by both the fight and the medication applied in that fight. Imagine large scale re-infection. Imagine the hospital accomodation needed. Which country has that kind of spare capacity?

A second infection of a recovered patient will hit a body with compromised immunity. Cytokine storms, ACE2.

• Chinese Doctors Say Wuhan Coronavirus Reinfection Even Deadlier (ZH)

Doctors working on the front lines of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak have told the Taiwan Times that it’s possible to become reinfected by the virus, leading to death from sudden heart failure in some cases. “It’s highly possible to get infected a second time. A few people recovered from the first time by their own immune system, but the meds they use are damaging their heart tissue, and when they get it the second time, the antibody doesn’t help but makes it worse, and they die a sudden death from heart failure,” reads a message forwarded to Taiwan News from a relative of one of the doctors living in the United Kingdom.

“The source also said the virus has “outsmarted all of us,” as it can hide symptoms for up to 24 days. This assertion has been made independently elsewhere, with Chinese pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan saying the average incubation period is three days, but it can take as little as one day and up to 24 days to develop symptoms. Also, the source said that false negative tests for the virus are fairly common. “It can fool the test kit – there were cases that they found, the CT scan shows both lungs are fully infected but the test came back negative four times. The fifth test came back positive.” -Taiwan Times

Notably, one of the ways coronaviruses cripple the immune system is via an HIV-like attachment to white blood cells, which triggers a ‘cytokine storm’ – a term popularized during the avian H5N1 influenza outbreak – in which an uncontrolled release of inflammatory ‘cytokines’ target various organs, often leading to failure and in many cases death. The cytokine storm is best exemplified by severe lung infections, in which local inflammation spills over into the systemic circulation, producing systemic sepsis, as defined by persistent hypotension, hyper- or hypothermia, leukocytosis or leukopenia, and often thrombocytopenia. In addition to lung infections, the cytokine storm is a consequence of severe infections in the gastrointestinal tract, urinary tract, central nervous system, skin, joint spaces, and other sites. (Tisoncik, et. al, Into the Eye of the Cytokine Storm – 2012)

According to the 2012 study, “Cytokine storms are associated with a wide variety of infectious and noninfectious diseases and have even been the unfortunate consequence of attempts at therapeutic intervention.” How do coronaviruses enter the body? With SARS (sudden acute respiratory syndrome), another coronavirus, researchers discovered that one of the ways the disease attaches itself is through an enzyme known as ACE2, a ‘functional receptor’ produced in several organs (oral and nasal mucosa, nasopharynx, lung, stomach, small intestine, colon, skin, lymph nodes, thymus, bone marrow, spleen, liver, kidney, and brain).

ACE2 is also “abundantly present in humans in the epithelia of the lung and small intestine, which might provide possible routes of entry for the SARS-CoV,” while it was also observed “in arterial and venous endothelial cells and arterial smooth muscle cells” – which would include the heart. This has led some to speculate that Asians, who have higher concentrations of ACE2 (per the 1000 genome project) may be affected to a greater degree than those of European ancestry, who produce the least of it – and have largely been the asymptomatic ‘super spreaders’..

The Diamond Princess is a mess. But would it have been better to let potentially infected passengers leave and spread the disease? Perhaps this is one of those situations that we don’t have an solution for.

• 70 More Infections On Diamond Princess Cruise Ship Bring Total To 355 (SCMP)

The number of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which remains quarantined in a dock in Yokohama, Japan, has risen to 355, up 70 from the last government count, the country’s health minister said on Sunday. “So far, we have conducted tests for 1,219 individuals. Of those, 355 people tested positive. Of those, 73 individuals are not showing symptoms,” Katsunobu Kato told public broadcaster NHK. Canada has chartered a plane to evacuate its citizens from the ship, the Canadian government said in a statement late on Saturday. Canadian passengers who exhibit symptoms of infection will not be allowed to board the flight and will instead be transferred to the Japanese health care system, the government said. Passengers who fly to Canada will enter a 14-day quarantine on arrival.

I lost count, which circle of hell is this again?

• Cruise Passengers Face 14 More Days In Quarantine On Return To Hong Kong (SCMP)

Hong Kong passengers stranded on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan have baulked at the suggestion they spend another 14 days in quarantine when they return home, even as they welcomed the government’s move to arrange chartered flights to bring them back to the city. The evacuation plan came as 70 new cases of the coronavirus were confirmed by Japanese health officials on Sunday morning, taking the total number of infections aboard the vessel to 355, including at least 11 Hongkongers who have been hospitalised. Among the 330 passengers from Hong Kong who have been held on the ship for 11 days, Young Wo-sang, who was stranded with his wife, welcomed the news, but said he did not understand the need for another two weeks in quarantine.

“We have been placed in quarantine in Japan from February 5, and it has been nearly 14 days already. Why is there a need to quarantine us for another 14 days?” The Hong Kong Immigration Department said the move was to protect against the health risks associated with repatriating the residents, 260 of whom are SAR passport holders, with the remaining 70 travelling on other passports. Young said his wife received text messages from the department in the early hours of Sunday, that said the couple would be notified when they could leave, once Japanese authorities had confirmed the detailed plans for disembarkation.

Damned if you do and doomed if you don’t.

• Quarantined Cruise Ship Passenger Speaks Out Against US Evacuation Plan (Fox)

A passenger aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which is currently quarantined off the coast of Japan amid a coronavirus outbreak, is speaking out against the United States’ plan to evacuate American passengers. Matthew Smith, who has been quarantined with his wife since Feb. 5, told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that he prefers to stay on the cruise ship. “Our greatest desire at this point is to maintain the quarantine that the Japanese health officials have established,” Smith said, “then get a test for the virus at the end of that quarantine so we can establish with relative certainty that we are not infected and be free to go. “Unfortunately, the State Department has thrown a monkey wrench into that,” he added.

Approximately 400 Americans and their families on the Diamond Princess will be offered seats on two flights that could arrive at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif., as early as Sunday, a CDC official told The Wall Street Journal. A CDC team will screen passengers and those exhibiting symptoms won’t be allowed on the flights. Smith, however, said he’s skeptical about the proposed plan. “I understand getting off the ship to be in another space, but under this circumstance, the offer is we’re going to put you on buses with other people who haven’t completed their quarantines and have not been tested for the virus,” Smith said.

“We’re going to then put you on a plane with all these people and take you back to the United States, and because of the risk you still pose due to that situation we’re going to stick you in another quarantine.” Smith said he would rather stay put on the Diamond Princess ship. While the ship is “getting a bad rap” for its living conditions, Smith said he is content where he is. “We have access to the balcony, we are fed well – three times a day along with excess food — they provide all the necessities we need in there,” he said.

Or did she?

• American From Cruise Ship Docked In Cambodia Tests Positive In Malaysia For Coronavirus (R.)

An 83-year-old American woman who had been a passenger on a cruise ship that docked in Cambodia has tested positive for the new coronavirus on landing in Malaysia, health authorities said on Saturday. The American woman flew to Malaysia on Friday from Cambodia along with 144 others from the ship, the Malaysian health ministry said in a statement. The woman’s husband had tested negative, it said. The MS Westerdam, operated by Carnival Corp unit Holland America Inc, docked in the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on Thursday after being shunned by five countries on fears that passengers could be carrying the virus.

The Westerdam, carrying 1,455 passengers and 802 crew, spent two weeks at sea. The passengers were tested regularly on board and Cambodia also tested 20 once it docked. None was found to have the new coronavirus that has killed more than 1,500 people, the vast majority in China. U.S. President Donald Trump has thanked Cambodia for taking in the ship in a rare message to a country that is one of China’s closest allies and has often been at odds with Washington.

Holland America Line doesn’t think she was ever really positive.

• Cruise Firm Seeks New Virus Test For Passenger From Ship In Cambodia (R.)

More tests are needed to confirm that an American passenger from a cruise ship docked in Cambodia has the new coronavirus after she tested positive in Malaysia, the MS Westerdam’s operator said on Sunday. The 83-year-old woman was the first passenger from the MS Westerdam, operated by Carnival Corp unit Holland America Inc, to test positive for the virus. “While the first results have been reported, they are preliminary at this point and we are awaiting secondary testing for confirmation,” Holland America said in a statement. Cambodian authorities called on Malaysia to review its test results.

Holland America said 236 passengers and 747 crew remained aboard the vessel, which is docked in the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. It arrived on Thursday carrying 1,455 passengers and 802 crew. It had spent two weeks at sea after being turned away by Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Thailand. The passengers were tested regularly on board and Cambodia also tested 20 once it docked. None was found to have the new coronavirus that has killed more than 1,500 people, the vast majority in China.

The American woman flew to Malaysia on Friday from Cambodia along with 144 others from the ship, the Malaysian health ministry said in a statement, adding that she was in stable condition. The woman’s husband had shown symptoms but tested negative, it said. The couple were the only ones among the 145 to show symptoms, the ministry said. Cambodia’s government said its own tests had been done in collaboration with the World Health Organisation and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The Ministry of Health requests the Malaysian authorities to review the results of the test,” Cambodia’s Ministry of Health said in statement.

Everything stands still. Nobody believes China’s official numbers anymore. How about 0% GDP growth?

• New Coronavirus Threatens Meltdown In China’s Economy (SCMP)

Given the rapid advance of medical science and globalisation of recent decades, the scale, spread and economic costs of human epidemics are rocketing up, even if fatality rates are starting to fall. Never before has China paid such an economic price for an epidemic as it has done already with the coronavirus, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan and causes the disease now officially known as Covid-19. And the damage is spreading. It is too soon to assess the full impact of the virus as the data changes day after day and not even the brightest expert can say with any certainty when the outbreak might end. Nevertheless, that has not stopped economists from attempting to forecast the likely economic cost based on precedents such as the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars.

Sars sickened about 8,000 people and killed fewer than 800 and in these terms has already been surpassed by the new coronavirus, though its fatality rate of 9.6 per cent is significantly higher than that of Covid-19, which some estimates put at around 2.4 per cent. Sars cut two percentage points from China’s real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2003 and caused US$50 billion of damage to the global economy. Of course, the economic losses from Covid-19 will depend somewhat on how long the outbreak lasts and on what policy support the Chinese government comes up with to offset the impact. But even at this stage, it is obvious that the economic impact of Covid-19 will be far more severe than that of Sars, or any other previous epidemic, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the Chinese economy is four times as big as it was in 2003, so its losses and the impact on the global economy are likely to be correspondingly larger. China’s gross domestic product accounted for around 16 per cent of the global total last year while it was just four per cent in 2003. A rough estimate is that Covid-19 will cause at least four times as big a loss as Sars. Secondly, the timing is far worse. The outbreak took place just days before the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese travel domestically and internationally to attend family reunions and festive events. Sars happened in the second quarter of the year, when there was far less activity to disrupt. [..] Thirdly, China’s rapid urbanisation means Chinese are now much more likely to travel domestically and abroad than two decades ago. This also means that when they stop travelling, the disruption is greater.

Not a good time for small business in China.

• Coronavirus Scare Leaves China’s Empty Restaurants Selling Off Stocks (R.)

Wang Chuanchao shuttered his restaurant in central Beijing three weeks ago as the scare over the coronavirus epidemic in country kept customers away and now he’s reduced to selling off vegetables on the street outside to cut losses. Anticipating packed tables at his 125-seater restaurant over the Lunar New Year, Wang says he bought in 300,000 yuan (nearly $43,000) worth of ingredients, ranging from celery to ox tripe. Now, he has to find ways to pay the rent, and his staff, so he can re-open for business once his customers find the courage to come back. “We must help ourselves as we can’t count on anything else,” the 32-year-old Wang, standing in front of a stall laden with vegetables that would perish unless they’re sold quickly. “We must try all efforts to cut our losses.”

Most other restaurants have been forced to do the same, as demand has plummeted following the outbreak in the central city of Wuhan in December, with local authorities across the country curbing travel and closing off public areas to prevent the coronavirus spreading. “We purchased stocks of foodstuffs worth 500,000 yuan before the new year, but now the fresh vegetables have started rotting,” said Liu, a young man working at The Cheng’s restaurant in downtown Beijing. “We threw it all away yesterday.” A report published this week by China Cuisine Association said scare over the epidemic has cost the catering sector 500 billion yuan in lost earnings during the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, with 93% restaurants shutting down operations.

“In 2017, an estimated 900,000 Chinese tertiary students studied abroad.”

• Chinese Students -Used To- Spend Billions Overseas (CNN)

If it weren’t for the novel coronavirus outbreak, Xu Mingxi would have been in class at a prestigious New York university this week. Instead, the 22-year-old has spent the past three weeks confined to his family’s apartment in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak, which is currently on lockdown to prevent the virus spreading. But even if Xu could leave home, the United States – where he’s studied for the past four-and-a-half years – won’t let him in. Over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away in Beijing, Alex – who asked not to use her real name for fear of online retribution – is in a similar situation. She’s spent the past two weeks at home with her mom and grandpa, being delivered groceries by community leaders.

She’s worried she won’t be able to fly to Sydney to study later this month and may have to delay her law degree by a semester. As novel coronavirus spreads, over 60 countries have imposed travel restrictions on Chinese citizens, hoping to limit their exposure to the virus that has killed more than 1,600 people, almost all in mainland China, and infected over 68,000 worldwide. Both Australia and the US have put temporary bans on foreign nationals who visited China in the 14 days prior to their arrival. That has locked Xu and Alex out of their studies — and they are by no means alone. In 2017, an estimated 900,000 Chinese tertiary students studied abroad. Around half of those went to either the United States or Australia, contributing billions of dollars to their economies — money that those countries now stand to lose.

It is not clear how many of the 360,000 Chinese students studying in the US were outside the country when the US travel ban hit on January 31, shortly before many universities were due to resume. But when Australia imposed its restrictions at the start of February, authorities estimated that 56% of Chinese students — about 106,680 people — were still abroad. Term was due to begin in late February or early March. “For Australia, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. It’s exactly the time of the year in which people are coming from China to Australia,” said Andrew Norton, a professor in the practice of higher education policy at the Australian National University. The virus outbreak coincided with the Lunar New Year — the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar, when many students go home to see their family.

First of many?

• Fiat Chrysler Suspends 500L Production Over China Supply Disruption (R.)

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles said it had temporarily halted production at its Serbian plant due to disruptions related to components sourced from China, where companies have been hampered by the outbreak of a new coronavirus. Planned downtime at the Kragujevac plant in Serbia has been rescheduled, an FCA spokesman said on Friday. Production will restart later this month, the spokesman said, adding that the group did not expect the changes would affect total production forecasts for this month. “We are in the process of securing future supply of the affected parts,” the spokesman said. The automaker builds the 500L in Kragujevac.

The spokesman said the supply of audio system parts had been disrupted. Output at the Kragujevac plant was about 40,000 units last year, Serbian media reported, or a quarter of total capacity. FCA had said on Feb. 6 that it might have to temporarily close a European plant within two to four weeks if the impact of the coronavirus in China created supply line issues. The Kragujevac stoppage marks first time an automaker has had to idle a facility in Europe due to the virus. The next few weeks will be critical for automakers. Parts made in China are used in millions of vehicles assembled around the world. China’s Hubei province, epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, is a major hub for vehicle parts production and shipments.

The ultimate fight for control over the party. How can Bernie, Tulsi and AOC be expected to support the Looming Hill-Berg?

• Looming Hill-Berg: Bloomberg Considering Hillary Clinton As Running Mate (NYP)

He’s with her? Mike Bloomberg could team up with Hillary Clinton to try to take down President Trump in November — by making her his running mate. Bloomberg’s internal polling found the combo “would be a formidable force,” sources close to the campaign told the Drudge Report Saturday. Bloomberg’s communications director did not deny the rumored matchmaking effort. “We are focused on the primary and the debate, not VP speculation,” Jason Schechter said in a statement. But minutes after Drudge broke the news, Bloomberg himself posted a coy message about working with female colleagues. “I would not be where I am today without the talented women around me,” he tweeted. “I’ve depended on their leadership, their advice and their contributions.”

A Bloomberg campaign insider told The Post that the two have long been simpatico – going back to the days when she represented New York in the U.S. Senate and he was Gotham’s mayor. “I am sure that they polled it, just because you would be dumb not to wonder,” the insider said. “You want to see what a match-up might look like.” But the pairing is a “net negative” for Bloomberg, a Democratic strategist said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Brad Bannon, a consultant not affiliated with any presidential campaign. “If he wins the nomination, there’s going to be a lot of unhappiness in the progressive wing of the party,” Bannon explained. “You can’t afford to have them sit on their hands in November.”

[..] Asked about the looming Hill-Berg, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has endorsed Sanders, deflected. “I would hope [Bloomberg] would not be in a position to be choosing a running mate at all,” she told The Post during her Queens campaign office opening Saturday. “I think Bloomberg’s past on stop and frisk, on harassment of women— all of these claims are huge red flags.” Clinton and Bloomberg were spotted together in December at Orso in the Theatre District, where they dined with daughter Chelsea, Barry Diller, Diane von Furstenberg, and others, Page Six reported – supposedly to celebrate the birthday of socialite Annette de la Renta. “From what I have seen they have always been friendly,” the campaign insider said.

Trump draws the viewers, Bloomberg pays for them.

• TV Execs Celebrate Unprecedented Flood Of Bloomberg Campaign Spending (IC)

Fox news hosts regularly bash former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg as a globalist demagogue intent on seizing Americans’ firearms and big gulp sodas. High-level executives at the company, however, are much more enthusiastic about the billionaire politician and Democratic presidential candidate. Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, is one of several media executives to welcome Bloomberg’s unprecedented spending spree on television advertisements. In a February 5 briefing for investors, Murdoch noted that he had heard “the Bloomberg campaign has expected to sort of double its advertising spend earlier this week.” The billionaire’s campaign, Murdoch noted, makes purchases on a week-to-week basis, making it difficult to project the ultimate benefit for his company.

“But obviously,” he added, “we expect it to be very strong and particularly, as I mentioned, in the markets of our local TV stations.” Bloomberg, the ninth wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at almost $62 billion, has upended the Democratic presidential primary with an infusion of cash that has smashed through historical records in a matter of weeks. Advertising Analytics, which tracks campaign spending, reported Thursday that Bloomberg has already spent $363 million on cable, broadcast, and radio advertisements alone. The 2020 campaign is shaping up to be an incredible financial opportunity for media companies, with one market research firm recently estimating that nearly $7 billion of paid advertising be spent this year, up over 60 percent since the 2016 presidential race.

Bloomberg alone has enticed media executives to see the race as a golden opportunity. “The political is going to be huge this year,” boasted Christopher Ripley, president and chief executive of Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest owners of television stations in the country, speaking last month at the Citi 2020 Global TMT West conference in Las Vegas. “The amount of fundraising that’s happened through this year has broken all records. And the good news about politicians is they never return the money, they spend it,” Ripley quipped.

Well, it’s going to be an election like never before.

• Why Wasn’t Andrew McCabe Charged? (NR)

The Justice Department announced Friday that it is closing its investigation of Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s former deputy director, over his false statements to investigators probing an unauthorized leak that McCabe had orchestrated. McCabe was fired in March 2018, shortly after a blistering Justice Department inspector general (IG) report concluded that he repeatedly and blatantly lied — or, as the Bureau lexicon puts it, “lacked candor” — when questioned, including under oath. Why not indict McCabe on felony false-statements charges? That is the question being pressed by incensed Trump supporters.

After all, the constitutional guarantee of equal justice under the law is supposed to mean that McCabe gets the same quality of justice afforded to the sad sacks pursued with unseemly zeal by McCabe’s FBI and Robert Mueller’s prosecutors. George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.

I emphasize Flynn’s intent because purported lack of intent is McCabe’s principal defense, too. Even McCabe himself, to say nothing of his lawyers and his apologists in the anti-Trump network of bureaucrats-turned-pundits, cannot deny that he made false statements to FBI agents and the IG. Rather, they argue that the 21-year senior law-enforcement official did not mean to lie, that he was too distracted by his high-level responsibilities to focus on anything as mundane as a leak — even though he seemed pretty damned focused on the leak while he was orchestrating it. The “he did not believe he intentionally misled them” defense is not just implausible; it proved unavailing on McCabe’s watch, at least in General Flynn’s case.

Hence, McCabe has a back-up plan: To argue that it would be extraordinary — and thus unconstitutionally selective and retaliatory — for the Justice Department to prosecute a former official for false statements in a “mere” administrative inquiry (which the leak probe was), as opposed to a criminal investigation. Again, tell that to Flynn, with whom the FBI conducted a brace-style interview — at the White House, without his counsel present, and in blithe disregard of procedures for FBI interviews of the president’s staff — despite the absence of a sound investigative basis for doing so, and whom Mueller’s maulers squeezed into a guilty plea anyway.

Don’t ask.

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