- Is Another Black Death On The Way?
Is Another Black Death On The Way?
Plagues from the east are nothing new…
The Black Death and other epidemics arrived in Europe from China during the 1300’s, killing a large percentage of its population. Much of this pestilence came from rats that stowed away on merchant ships coming from the east.
At the end of World War I, another pandemic, wrongly called the Spanish flu, killed an estimated 18 to 50 million people in Europe and North America.
Seventeen years after the SARS virus killed some 800 people in China and Canada and terrified the entire world, a new plague threatens the West: the Wuhan Coronavirus.
Officially named 2019-nCoV, the new virus has so far infected over 800 people in China. This latest plague erupted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, population 11 million, which is located on the Yangtze River and is an important hub for national communications.
Like SARS, the Wuhan virus is believed to have come from a live animal market that specializes in exotic animals from the Himalayas or China’s remote mountain regions. Serving exotic animals at dinner parties is a big status symbol in China. Sometimes they are even served while still alive. Dog meat is a favorite in northern China.
SARS was believed to have come from civet cats. As a result, thousands of these felines were brutally killed. But it was later determined the virus originated from bats, then spread to other captive animals. Bat soup is another Chinese delicacy.
Keeping large numbers of captive animals crammed together in cages with poor ventilation and no cleaning is an ideal vector for viral diseases. Each year, China consumes 730 million pigs. Fifty percent of China’s factory farmed pigs have so far contracted lethal swine flu. Rising living standards have boosted demand for pork.
I have seen how China raises and transports pigs. It’s a nightmare of brutality and inhuman behavior. No wonder so many of these intelligent sensitive animals fall ill and die. Swine fever could be payback for China’s terrible cruelty to pigs.
And it’s not just China. Pigs in North America are treated almost as badly. A lady where I live was actually jailed and prosecuted for having given water to a truckload of thirsty, starving, terrified pigs on the way to the slaughterhouse.
In North America, animals destined for slaughter are packed together and then dosed with heavy antibiotics to combat communicable diseases from over-crowding and mistreatment. These same antibiotics then enter our food chain, causing us ever growing viral resistance.
When the SARS epidemic erupted in South China 17 years ago, the Chinese communist party tried to hush up the crisis, allowing infected people to travel to North America and Europe.
This time, China did the right thing by jumping hard on the epidemic: shutting down all air, sea and land communications with the greater Wuhan region and 14 smaller cities – right in the middle of China’s huge new year celebrations when over 400 million people return to their homes. The epidemic could not have come at a worse time.
Some Wuhan residents have already flown to other parts of Asia and North America. Simply checking incoming air travellers for fever will not prevent the virus from spreading or identify passengers who have contracted and are developing the illness.
A better solution would be to quarantine all people arriving from Central China and even bar airlines coming from there until we better understand the new virus. We stop so-called ‘terrorists’ and Muslims from flying to our shores. Why not potentially infective people?
China must also be pressed to cease its dangerous, inhumane trade in exotic wild animals and urged to treat all animals with humanity and care. China is a major cause of species loss. Aside from a few brave animal rights groups, there is very little consciousness of our animal neighbors in China nor understanding that animals are sentient beings with emotions similar to those of humans. The Chinese are one of the most intelligent people on earth. Yet when it comes to animals, all they see is walking food.
As I’ve seen on my travels across China, it has made great strides in public sanitation and cleanliness as well as planting trees. Now, it’s time to stop abusing animals or the plagues will keep coming.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 01/26/2020 – 00:00 - TEPCO Proposes 44-Year Plan To Decommission Fukushima No. 2 Nuclear Plant
TEPCO Proposes 44-Year Plan To Decommission Fukushima No. 2 Nuclear Plant
About a decade ago, a powerful earthquake triggered a 15-meter tsunami that disabled the power supply and cooling of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The accident led to nuclear cores of three reactors to meltdown, causing widespread radiation release, along with the evacuation of thousands of people within a 30-kilometer radius.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (TEPCO) is the operator of the nuclear power plant, released a statement last week detailing how it would take 44 years to decommission Fukushima No. 2 nuclear plant, reported The Japan Times.
Fukushima No. 2 plant is South of No.1 and North of No.3, which suffered a catastrophic triple meltdown in the March 2011 incident.
TEPCO outlines how the decommissioning process will be conducted in four phases: taking ten years for phase one, 12 years for phase two, and 11 years for both phase three and four.
“TEPCO will survey radioactive contamination at the nuclear plant in the first stage, clear equipment around nuclear reactors in the second, remove the reactors in the third and demolish the reactor buildings in the fourth,” the Times said.
By the end of phase four, so approximately 2064, a total of 9,532 spent nuclear fuel units from the plant will have been delivered to a local fuel reprocessing plant.
Japan’s Economy and Industry Ministry proposed last month that TEPCO could gradually release massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water being stored at the power plant.
In a December 2019 proposal, the ministry suggested a “controlled release” of the contaminated water into the Pacific. Another option via the ministry was allowing the radioactive water to evaporate, or a combination of the two methods.
The government is stepping up the pressure on TEPCO to do something as Fukushima’s ‘radioactive water crisis’ worsens. The problem is that TEPCO is running out of room to store the contaminated water.
But the ministry insisted that the controlled release of the contaminated water into the sea would be the best option because it would “stably dilute and disperse” the water from the plant, while also allowing the government and TEPCO to more easily monitor the operation.
And as we have reported, the Japanese fishing industry isn’t the only party that objects to the government’s plan. South Korea has also complained to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The Fukushima nuclear disaster is nowhere close to being resolved. Reactors released iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 23:30 - Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponize It
Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponize It
Submitted by Great Game India
Last year a mysterious shipment was caught smuggling Coronavirus from Canada. It was traced to Chinese agents working at a Canadian lab. Subsequent investigation by GreatGameIndia linked the agents to Chinese Biological Warfare Program from where the virus is suspected to have leaked causing the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.
Coronavirus Bioweapon – How Chinese agents stole Coronavirus from Canada and weaponized it into a Bioweapon The Saudi SARS Sample
On June 13, 2012 a 60-year-old Saudi man was admitted to a private hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a 7-day history of fever, cough, expectoration, and shortness of breath. He had no history of cardiopulmonary or renal disease, was receiving no long-term medications, and did not smoke.
Egyptian virologist Dr. Ali Mohamed Zaki isolated and identified a previously unknown coronavirus from his lungs. After routine diagnostics failed to identify the causative agent, Zaki contacted Ron Fouchier, a leading virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center (EMC) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for advice.
Abnormalities on Chest Imaging of the Saudi patient infected with Coronavirus. Shown are chest radiographs of the patient on the day of admission (Panel A) and 2 days later (Panel B) and computed tomography (CT) 4 days after admission (Panel C). Fouchier sequenced the virus from a sample sent by Zaki. Fouchier used a broad-spectrum “pan-coronavirus” real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method to test for distinguishing features of a number of known coronaviruses known to infect humans.
This undated file image released by the British Health Protection Agency shows an electron microscope image of a coronavirus, part of a family of viruses that cause ailments including the common cold and SARS, which was first identified in the Middle East. HANDOUT/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS This Coronavirus sample was acquired by Scientific Director Dr. Frank Plummer of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg directly from Fouchier, who received it from Zaki. This virus was reportedly stolen from the Canadian lab by Chinese agents.
The Canadian Lab
Coronavirus arrived at Canada’s NML Winnipeg facility on May 4, 2013 from the Dutch lab. The Canadian lab grew up stocks of the virus and used it to assess diagnostic tests being used in Canada. Winnipeg scientists worked to see which animal species can be infected with the new virus.
Research was done in conjunction with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s national lab, the National Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases which is housed in the same complex as the National Microbiology Laboratory.
The National Microbiology Lab (The Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health) on Arlington St. in Winnipeg. Wayne Glowacki/Winnipeg Free Press Oct.22 2014 NML has a long history of offering comprehensive testing services for coronaviruses. It isolated and provided the first genome sequence of the SARS coronavirus and identified another coronavirus NL63 in 2004.
This Winnipeg based Canadian lab was targeted by Chinese agents in what could be termed as Biological Espionage.
Chinese Biological Espionage
In March 2019, in mysterious event a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML ended up in China. The event caused a major scandal with Bio-warfare experts questioning why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China. Scientists from NML said the highly lethal viruses were a potential bio-weapon.
Following investigation, the incident was traced to Chinese agents working at NML. Four months later in July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc.
Xiangguo Qiu – The Chinese Bio-Warfare Agent
The NML scientist who was escorted out of the Canadian lab along with her husband, another biologist, and members of her research team is believed to be a Chinese Bio-Warfare agent Xiangguo Qiu. Qiu was the head of the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies Section in the Special Pathogens Program at Canada’s NML.
Xiangguo Qiu is an outstanding Chinese scientist born in Tianjin. She primarily received her medical doctor degree from Hebei Medical University in China in 1985 and came to Canada for graduate studies in 1996. Later on, she was affiliated with the Institute of Cell Biology and the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, not engaged with studying pathogens.
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese Biological Warfare Agent working at the National Microbiology Laboratory, Canada But a shift took place, somehow. Since 2006, she has been studying powerful viruses in Canada’s NML. The viruses shipped from the NML to China were studied by her in 2014, for instance (together with the viruses Machupo, Junin, Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever and Hendra).
Infiltrating the Canadian Lab
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu is married to another Chinese scientist – Dr. Keding Cheng, also affiliated with the NML, specifically the “Science and Technology Core”. Dr. Cheng is primarily a bacteriologist who shifted to virology. The couple is responsible for infiltrating Canada’s NML with many Chinese agents as students from a range of Chinese scientific facilities directly tied to China’s Biological Warfare Program, namely:
- Institute of Military Veterinary, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Changchun
- Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Chengdu Military Region
- Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hubei
- Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
Sources say Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng were escorted from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg on July 5, 2019. Since then, the University of Manitoba has ended their appointments, reassigned her graduate students, and cautioned staff, students and faculty about traveling to China. (Governor General’s Innovation Awards) All of the above four mentioned Chinese Biological Warfare facilities collaborated with Dr. Xiangguo Qiu within the context of Ebola virus, the Institute of Military Veterinary joined a study on the Rift Valley fever virus too, while the Institute of Microbiology joined a study on Marburg virus. Noticeably, the drug used in the latter study – Favipiravir – has been earlier tested successfully by the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences, with the designation JK-05 (originally a Japanese patent registered in China already in 2006), against Ebola and additional viruses.
However, the studies by Dr. Qiu are considerably more advanced and apparently vital for the Chinese biological weapons development in case Coronavirus, Ebola, Nipah, Marburg or Rift Valley fever viruses are included therein.
The Canadian investigation is ongoing and questions remain whether previous shipments to China of other viruses or other essential preparations, took place from 2006 to 2018, one way or another.
Dr. Gary Kobinger, former chief of special pathogens (right), and Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, research scientist (second from right) met with Dr. Kent Brantly and Dr. Linda Mobula, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the physician who administered ZMapp to Brantly in Liberia when he was infected with Ebola during the 2014-16 outbreak. (Submitted by Health Canada) Dr. Xiangguo Qiu also collaborated in 2018 with three scientists from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Maryland, studying post-exposure immunotherapy for two Ebola viruses and Marburg virus in monkeys; a study supported by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
The Wuhan Coronavirus
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu made at least five trips over the school year 2017-18 to the above mentioned Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which was certified for BSL4 in January 2017. Moreover, in August 2017, the National Health Commission of China approved research activities involving Ebola, Nipah, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses at the Wuhan facility.
Coincidentally, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is located only 20 miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market which is the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak dubbed the Wuhan Coronavirus.
The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is located just about 20 miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market, the epicenter of Coronavirus outbreak The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is housed at the Chinese military facility Wuhan Institute of Virology linked to China’s Biological Warfare Program. It was the first ever lab in the country designed to meet biosafety-level-4 (BSL-4) standards – the highest biohazard level, meaning that it would be qualified to handle the most dangerous pathogens.
In January 2018, the lab was operational ‘for global experiments on BSL-4 pathogens,’ wrote Guizhen Wu in the journal Biosafety and Health. ‘After a laboratory leak incident of SARS in 2004, the former Ministry of Health of China initiated the construction of preservation laboratories for high-level pathogens such as SARS, coronavirus, and pandemic influenza virus,’ wrote Guizhen Wu.
Coronavirus Bioweapon
The Wuhan institute has studied coronaviruses in the past, including the strain that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue. Researchers at the institute also studied the germ that causes anthrax – a biological agent once developed in Russia.
“Coronaviruses (particularly SARS) have been studied in the institute and are probably held therein,” said Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biowarfare. He said. “SARS is included within the Chinese BW program, at large, and is dealt with in several pertinent facilities.”
James Giordano, a neurology professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow in Biowarfare at the U.S. Special Operations Command, said China’s growing investment in bio-science, looser ethics around gene-editing and other cutting-edge technology and integration between government and academia raise the spectre of such pathogens being weaponized.
That could mean an offensive agent, or a modified germ let loose by proxies, for which only China has the treatment or vaccine. “This is not warfare, per se,” he said. “But what it’s doing is leveraging the capability to act as global saviour, which then creates various levels of macro and micro economic and bio-power dependencies.”
China’s Biological Warfare Program
In a 2015 academic paper, Shoham – of Bar-Ilan’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – asserts that more than 40 Chinese facilities are involved in bio-weapon production.
China’s Biological Warfare Program is believed to include full range of traditional chemical & biological agents with a wide variety of delivery systems including artillery rockets, aerial bombs, sprayers, and short-range ballistic missiles. #coronarovirus https://t.co/7qpDNNmqk7
— GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) January 25, 2020
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China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences actually developed an Ebola drug – called JK-05 — but little has been divulged about it or the defence facility’s possession of the virus, prompting speculation its Ebola cells are part of China’s bio-warfare arsenal, Shoham told the National Post.
Ebola is classified as a “category A” bioterrorism agent by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning it could be easily transmitted from person to person, would result in high death rates and “might cause panic.” The CDC lists Nipah as a category C substance, a deadly emerging pathogen that could be engineered for mass dissemination.
China’s Biological Warfare Program is believed to be in an advanced stage that includes research and development, production and weaponization capabilities. Its current inventory is believed to include the full range of traditional chemical and biological agents with a wide variety of delivery systems including artillery rockets, aerial bombs, sprayers, and short-range ballistic missiles.
Weaponizing Biotech
China’s national strategy of military-civil fusion has highlighted biology as a priority, and the People’s Liberation Army could be at the forefront of expanding and exploiting this knowledge.
Weaponizing Biotech – China’s War for Biological Dominance#coronoavirushttps://t.co/MEVQ5VERJw
— GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) January 25, 2020
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The PLA is pursuing military applications for biology and looking into promising intersections with other disciplines, including brain science, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence. Since 2016, the Central Military Commission has funded projects on military brain science, advanced biomimetic systems, biological and biomimetic materials, human performance enhancement, and “new concept” biotechnology.
In 2016, an AMMS doctoral researcher published a dissertation, “Research on the Evaluation of Human Performance Enhancement Technology,” which characterized CRISPR-Cas as one of three primary technologies that might boost troops’ combat effectiveness. The supporting research looked at the effectiveness of the drug Modafinil, which has applications in cognitive enhancement; and at transcranial magnetic stimulation, a type of brain stimulation, while also contending that the “great potential” of CRISPR-Cas as a “military deterrence technology in which China should “grasp the initiative” in development.
In 2016, the potential strategic value of genetic information led the Chinese government to launch the National Genebank, which intends to become the world’s largest repository of such data. It aims to “develop and utilize China’s valuable genetic resources, safeguard national security in bioinformatics, and enhance China’s capability to seize the strategic commanding heights” in the domain of Biotechnology Warfare.
Chinese military’s interest in biology as an emerging domain of warfare is guided by strategists who talk about potential “genetic weapons” and the possibility of a “bloodless victory.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 23:00 - The 'Golden Age Of Plastic'? Banks Are Quietly Raising Credit Limits For Freespending Borrowers
The ‘Golden Age Of Plastic’? Banks Are Quietly Raising Credit Limits For Freespending Borrowers
Credit-card lenders are calling it the ‘Golden Age of Plastic’. But that’s mostly because they’re the ones hoarding all the gold.
Gloom-and-doom economists who have portended the imminent collapse of the American consumer (we don’t want to name names) might have a reason to put off their calls for a downturn of epic proportions just a little bit longer. Because at a time when the American consumer is already leveraged to the hilt, and when credit data suggests some are finally biting the bullet and curbing spending to pay it down, lenders have hit on a novel strategy to boost growth.
And that strategy is, according to Bloomberg, raising certain borrowers’ credit limits without a request from the borrower. In other words, some consumers are waking up to notices or emails from their credit-card lenders informing them that their credit limits have just been raised – sometimes by a wide margin.
Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank told BBG that the company’s resistance to unsolicited credit-limit hikes is a “radical theology” because it goes above and beyond post-crisis safeguards. But now that lenders are being pressed to keep showing revenue growth at a time of record excess, Capital One has changed its mind with the explicit goal of trying to convince consumers to borrow more that they can afford to pay back – or at least not all at once.
Of course, while debt-fueled spending registers as growth in the all-important consumption metrics, there will eventually come a time when they debt must either be repaid, or written off.
“It’s like putting a sandwich in front of me and I haven’t eaten all day,” said D’Ante Jones, a 27-year-old rapper known as D. Maivia in Houston who was close to hitting the ceiling on his Chase Freedom card when JPMorgan Chase & Co. nearly doubled his spending limit a year ago without consulting him. He soon borrowed much more. “How can I not take a bite out of it?”
Banks insist that they raise credit limits “carefully”, and that they limit reckless borrowing.
But at this point, anybody who does make the mistake of carrying a balance is going to get hurt.
As we pointed out last month, something strange happened after the Fed started cutting interest rates again last year. While lenders were quick to lower the deposit rates they paid out to customers, interest rates on credit cards and other loans climbed, while the rates on credit cards hit all-time highs. It’s a trend we’ve documented before.
Revolving credit outstanding (i.e. credit card debt) cooled in the fall after a surge in July and a near record surge in August. And total outstanding credit-card borrowing hit a record $880 billion at the end of September, according to the New York Fed…
…but the problem here is that this is a double-edged sword. Because if American consumers really are finally cutting back on their spending to pay down debt, this would be bad news for the consumer-dependent economy.
Ironically, around the same time that Bloomberg published their story, Discover saw its biggest crash since the financial crisis on the highest Q4 charge-off rate in history.
So maybe giving irresponsible borrowers even more rope to hang themselves with wasn’t the best strategy.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 22:30 - Chinese Government Forces TV Host Who Popularized Eating Bats To Apologize
Chinese Government Forces TV Host Who Popularized Eating Bats To Apologize
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The Chinese government forced the host of a TV show which popularized eating bats to apologize in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, which scientists have linked to the consumption of wild animals.
Bat soup is a delicacy in some areas of China and was known to be sold at the illegal animal market in Wuhan blamed for being the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.
A show called Beauty Eats Bats which originally launched in 2016 was blamed for re-invigorating the trend of eating bats across the country, prompting the Chinese Communist Party to demand that its female host discourage the consumption of bats.
The woman featured in the clip took to social media to profusely apologize for her role in encouraging the consumption of bats and encouraged everyone to start washing their hands more.
【“吃蝙蝠”視頻瘋傳 當事人：為自己的無知道歉】隨著新型冠狀病毒感染的肺炎疫情消息不斷從“一線陣地”傳來，被研究認為是病毒自然宿主的蝙蝠，引起網友關注。近日，一段上線於2016年6月的“美女吃蝙蝠”視頻被網友扒出，女主持也因吃蝙蝠而被網友聲討。 22日，涉事主持汪某表示為自己曾經的無知道歉。 pic.twitter.com/sNeEPuCjbU
— 人民日報 People’s Daily (@PDChinese) January 25, 2020
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The video shows the woman breaking apart the corpse of a boiled bat, dipping its wing in sauce and eating it.
Meanwhile, the scale of the coronavirus outbreak continues to escalate.
56 million Chinese citizens have now been quarantined, with Chinese authorities claiming that around 1300 people have been infected so far.
However, according to one hospital worker in Wuhan, the government is lying and over 100,000 people have actually been infected.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that the United States will send a chartered flight to evacuate all of its citizens and diplomats out of Wuhan.
According to official figures, the virus has killed 41 people, although many suspect this number to be far higher.
Meanwhile, it’s probably a good idea for Chinese citizens to stop eating bats and other wild animals that are vectors for disease.
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Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 22:00 - This Is How China Is Hiding The True Number Of Coronavirus Deaths
This Is How China Is Hiding The True Number Of Coronavirus Deaths
As the world’s cortisol and stomach acid levels rise every hour in parallel with the number of officially reported Coronavirus infections (and deaths), which as of Saturday morning was roughly 1,400…
Source: Johns Hopkins GIS and Data. … the world has an unpleasant flashback to 2003 when for weeks Beijing would lie and hide the full extent of the SARS epidemic to avoid risking a social panic. To be sure, this time China has done its best to pretend it has learned from the past and it is so transparent, even President Xi Jinping warned that the country is facing a “grave situation”, and that the spread of the deadly virus is accelerating after holding a special government meeting on the Lunar New Year public holiday.
After staying largely silent in public about the outbreak since it first emerged in central China last month, Xi on Saturday convened a special meeting of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, calling for a more centralized response to the epidemic and asserting personal responsibility in addressing the crisis.
“When an epidemic breaks out, a command is issued. It is our responsibility to prevent and control it,” Xi said, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. He called for the new high-level committee to “address concerns within and outside the country,” indirectly referencing mounting global concern about the epidemic, which Mr. Xi described as a “grave situation” that was accelerating. “We definitely can win the battle to contain the epidemic,” he vowed.
That remains to be seen: as reported earlier, in China – which has put over 56 million people on lockdown quarantine – the coronavirus has killed at least 41 people and infected over 1,400 in China. Ominously, a UK researcher predicted that the Coronavirus would infect over 250,000 people in China in under two weeks, which has sparked a renewed fear that China will once again try to underrepresent the true severity of the diseases until it is too late.
A patient at the Zhongnan Hospital of China’s Wuhan University The problem is that even as China theatrically pretends to be so forthright about the extent of the epidemic – if only to avoid panic and chaos over allegations it is again hiding the full impact of the disease – it is doing precisely that, and now we know just how it is doing that: instead of putting down coronavirus as the cause of death for an unknown number of Wuhan casualties, China’s coroners and hospitals merely ascribe death to “viral pneumonia”, case closed.
Here’s how the WSJ describes this treacherous “bait and switch”:
A 53-year-old fitness trainer died on Wednesday after checking into a hospital in Wuhan a little more than a week earlier, said his niece. His family had expected the death certificate to reflect the deadly coronavirus, because as his condition deteriorated, his doctors told his family he was suffering from an untreatable virus in his lungs.
Instead, it recorded “severe pneumonia” as the cause of death, she said. The relatives of two other people who died in separate hospitals in Wuhan this week also described similar situations, saying the causes of death had been given as “viral pneumonia.”
Why did the hospital do this? Because as the relatives of all three now dead people said, the deceased hadn’t been included in China’s official count of 41 deaths attributed to coronavirus.
And that’s how China is suppressing the full extent of nCoV’s lethality, and keeping the mortality rate of the coronavirus artificially low: “There are likely to be many times more cases in Wuhan than officially confirmed,” said Neil Ferguson, a disease modeler at Imperial College London, who echoed the forecast of Jonathan Read, and estimated as many as 4,000 people may have been infected in Wuhan. “Clearly, the hospitals are overwhelmed.”
What’s worse is that if there are indeed 4,000 injected already, then the previously discussed catastrophic forecast of 250,000 cases by Feb 4 may be overly optimistic by half.
The official numbers are far lower of course: on Saturday morning, local time, the number of confirmed global infections had risen to at least 1,438, nearly doubling from the previous day. Comically, China has said it would hold officials accountable for any delays or omissions in reporting cases: so far such threats appear to have had precisely zero impact on anyone.
Others have confirmed as much: as the WSJ reports, “some Chinese media with reporters on the ground in Wuhan have said they have found cases that weren’t included in the official reporting. Caixin, a business journal, reported in early January that a doctor in Wuhan had been infected, 11 days before officials confirmed that medical staff had been infected. The Beijing News, a newspaper, reported this week that many patients weren’t officially labeled as carrying the new virus, even though their doctors and nurses said they were.”
Medical staff work to sterilize a hospital in Wuhan, China, on Jan. 24 That said, there may be a legitimate reason why the real number is being underreported, and it has to do with the flood of actual cases which is just too much for local doctors to keep up: China state-run TV cited doctors in Wuhan who said the number of patients with fever was too many to be treated and patients hospitalized couldn’t get the pathogenic test in time, because the samples needed to be sent to the provincial offices of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
That will soon change: China’s health ministry updated its protocol for identifying infections on Thursday with a simplified process for registering cases as suspected or confirmed. An earlier version, viewed by the Journal, required several steps of testing before a patient could be called a suspected case.
Yet despite these mitigating circumstances, it appears that the underlying incentive is to underreport the true extent of the epidemic for as long as possible.
One woman, a 63-year-old retiree in Wuhan, died on Tuesday, her nephew told the WSJ. The death certificate, viewed by the Journal, shows the cause of death as “pneumonia obtained from the community.” Doctors at the hospital that treated her told the family she had the new coronavirus, the nephew said, but she wasn’t counted as a case. The instance has also been reported by the Beijing News.
In another case, a 72-year-old former doctor was in the hospital for three days before he died on Tuesday, his nephew said. The doctors told the family he had caught viral pneumonia, he said. The niece said her uncle, the fitness trainer, first noticed symptoms of what he thought was a common cold in early January, which he believed he had caught at a banquet. He didn’t pay much attention initially, but a few days later, he decided to go to the hospital after seeing blood when he coughed. His niece said he had never been to the food market believed to be the epicenter of the virus.
“The doctor told us repeatedly that he caught the viral pneumonia that no medicine could treat,” she said. A patient’s immune system is the only defense, she said the family was told. “But after he died, the death certificate only said ‘severe pneumonia,’” she said, adding that she had expected the record to reflect the newly detected coronavirus.
The uncle was transferred to the infectious diseases unit on Wednesday, the niece said. Hours later, the family was informed that his condition was critical. Two days after her uncle died, China’s health ministry released the profiles of 39 deaths in Hubei due to the new virus, with two deaths listed in other provinces. She couldn’t find her uncle on the list.
As hundreds if not thousands of Wuhan residents die due to “severe pneumonia” instead of coronavirus, one can’t help but wonder if once the true cause of death is reported, instead of a 4% mortality rate as calculated by Dr. Jonathan Read, the Coronavirus epidemic won’t be in double digits – SARS was 11% – making this one of the most deadly epidemics in history.
Incidentally, here is a reminder of what happened when China’s attempts to cover up the full extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic were exposed:
A Chinese doctor who exposed the cover-up of China’s SARS outbreak in 2003 has been barred from traveling to the United States to collect a human rights award, a friend of the doctor and a human rights group said this week.
The doctor, Jiang Yanyong, a retired surgeon in the People’s Liberation Army, was awarded the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award by the New York Academy of Sciences. His army-affiliated work unit, Beijing’s Hospital 301, denied him permission to travel to the award ceremony in September, Hu Jia, a Chinese rights promoter who is a friend of Dr. Jiang’s, said Thursday.
Dr. Jiang rose to international prominence in 2003, when he disclosed in a letter circulated to international news organizations that at least 100 people were being treated in Beijing hospitals for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. At the time, the Chinese medical authorities were asserting that the entire nation had only a handful of cases of the disease.
The revelation prompted China’s top leaders to acknowledge that they had provided false information about the epidemic. The health minister and the mayor of Beijing were removed from their posts.
Surely this time is different.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 21:44 - 20,000 US Troops Have Surged Into Mideast Since Last Spring To 'Counter Iran'
20,000 US Troops Have Surged Into Mideast Since Last Spring To ‘Counter Iran’
The Associated Press reports a staggering surge of US troops into the Middle East since last Spring: “Over the past eight months, the United States has poured more than 20,000 additional troops into the Middle East to counter the escalating threat from Iran that peaked with the recent missile attack on American forces in Iraq.”
This despite President Trump’s multiple prior pledges to “bring the troops home” especially related to Syria and Iraq. Following the Soleimani assassination and subsequent Iranian ballistic missile retaliation on Ayn al-Assad airbase, where Friday it was reported that 34 soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries (a dramatically increased figure up from the prior 11), this trend in force build-up looks to continue. Here’s breakdown of the staggering numbers via the AP:
The top commander for US forces in the Middle East told a gathering of Marines and sailors during a speech aboard the USS Bataan on Thursday they could be there for “quite a while”.
Gen. Frank McKenzie addressed the question of any near-term potential draw down of the extra forces: “we’ll work that out as we go ahead,” he said.
Underscoring the Iran constitutes a serious “threat” he admitted:
“I’m not sure how long you’re going to stay in the theater. We’ll work that out as we go ahead. Could be quite a while, could be less than that, just don’t know right now.”
On the Iran threat specifically, he said further, “I do believe that they are deterred right now, at least from state-on-state actions by our response. And so I think that while that threat remains, I think we’re in a period where they’re certainly not seeking to escalate anything.”
Ironically Gen. McKenzie’s words were given a day before possibly up to one million Iraqis protested across the country Friday demanding an end of America’s military presence.
“Hundreds”
Zero integrity. https://t.co/Yu2R6EDPuA pic.twitter.com/sCjLzcHYC8
— Serge (@Zinvor) January 24, 2020
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An initial AP report merely put the anti-American forces protest at a mere “hundreds” – yet widely circulated photographs showed at least hundreds of thousands:
Hundreds of supporters of an influential, radical Iraqi Shiite cleric gather in central Baghdad to demand that American troops leave the country. https://t.co/EZ3goJSQ8f
— The Associated Press (@AP) January 24, 2020
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Later, international reports acknowledged that hundreds of thousands were protesting in major cities, especially Baghdad, after a call to action by popular Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
“Get Out America” signs were featured in the massive street protests:
Huge protests against the US presence in #Iraq. Main theme ‘Get out #America‘. 24 January 2020. Video from https://t.co/l0Nu2KApDj pic.twitter.com/kTDlcdzjV0
— tim anderson (@timand2037) January 24, 2020
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Though hard to confirm, a top official with the Iraqi Federal Police Forces Jaffar al-Batat has announced that the total number of demonstrators who came out Friday against the US occupation exceeded one million.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 21:30 - Martenson: The Risk Of A True Pandemic Is Higher Than We're Being Told
Martenson: The Risk Of A True Pandemic Is Higher Than We’re Being Told
OK, there’s a LOT of uncertainty and confusing/conflicting information currently circulating right now about the new coronavirus outbreak that has suddenly erupted out of Wuhan, China.
What’s really going on? What exactly is the ‘coronavirus’?
And most important: How worried do we need to be?
Given the poor communication so far by government health organizations and the media, the severity of the situation and the risk to public health, Chris Martenson filmed this important explanatory video hours ago.
Dr. Martenson’s PhD is in the field of pathogenic biology, so he understands the nature of this virus more than your average scientist.
In the video below, Chris explains the virus in layman’s terms, why the contagion we’re seeing is likely to spread substantially from here, and why the actions being taken so far by public health officials to contain the threat are woefully insufficient.
It’s important, maybe soon critical, to be well-informed on this outbreak. The ten minutes you spend watching this video may be the most important thing you do today:
After viewing, be sure to take prudent steps to secure the safety of your family’s health. Most measures are straightforward and inexpensive — there’s a huge upside to preparing now and a huge downside to delaying, so get busy.
Those interested can continue to follow our updated coverage on the coronavirus here.
Hopefully, authorities manage to contain this outbreak faster than it currently appears they will. But don’t bet your life on it.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 21:00 - Yale Cancels Prestigious Art History Course For Being "Too White"
Yale Cancels Prestigious Art History Course For Being “Too White”
A story and “justification” so absurd and absolutely bonkers that we sincerely wish this was The Onion and not from the oldest college daily newspaper in the United States and at one of the nation’s most elite Ivy League schools:
Yale will stop teaching a storied introductory survey course in art history, citing the impossibility of adequately covering the entire field — and its varied cultural backgrounds — in one course.
Decades old and once taught by famous Yale professors like Vincent Scully, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” was once touted to be one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. But this change is the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.
Avoid your eyes, according to Yale. Restoration work being done on Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” via The Boston Globe So that’s it, apparently: the great masterpieces recognized as such by the entire world for generations are now tainted by their supposed “whiteness” and must be censored by the Robespierre-like mob of the “woke”.
It’s not merely that the Western Civilization-focused “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” class has been deleted, but the entire concept of “Western art” itself will be a focus of criticism in the multiple new ‘more culturally sensitive’ classes that will replace it.
The Yale Daily News continues:
This spring, the final rendition of the course will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception. Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.
Clearly, it also sounds like students who happen to favor the Western and European greats will be set up for de-platforming and ridicule.
Yale campus. Image via Yale News How long before the beautiful centuries-old campus buildings themselves will be “discovered” as part of the Western tradition of architecture? Will they survive the decades to come as the “purge” grows ever fiercer and more anti-intellectual?
In the name of “diversity” it appears assigning any level of uniqueness to a work of art which happens to have emerged from the medieval or renaissance or early modern period will immediately be shamed by the ‘woke mob’.
This follows other Yale departments in prior years attempting to
purge“decolonize” their programs, especially in the English/Literature Department. We wonder how long the title “English Department” itself will be allowed to stand.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 20:30 - Coronavirus Kills Man In Shanghai As China Confirms Nearly 2,000 Cases
Coronavirus Kills Man In Shanghai As China Confirms Nearly 2,000 Cases
Summary
- First nCoV death reported in Shanghai
- South Korea confirms third case
- Toronto health officials to announce first ‘presumptive case’ of coronavirus in Canada
- 1975 Cases Worldwide; 56 deaths (still about a 3% mortality rate)
- 18 Chinese cities – 56 million people – quarantined
- President Xi said China faces a ‘grave situation’ as the spread is ‘accelerating’
- US and Russia planning evacuation of citizens from Wuhan
- Australia and Malaysia join the list of global nations with nCoV cases, in addition to France, Pakistan, Singapore, the US and Nepal
- Chinese President Xi Jinping empowered local governments and said teams from Beijing will be sent to severely impacted areas to strengthen front-line prevention and containment
- The US and France chartered planes to evacuate diplomats and nationals in containment zones
- The director of the CDC says she expects cases of human-to-human transmission in the US
- China banned all domestic tour groups immediately and overseas group tours from Jan 27
- Starbucks and China said they were closing some stores in China
- Wuhan is building a second emergency hospital, this one with 1300 beds
- 3 doctors in Beijing who visited Wuhan are confirmed to have the virus
* * *
Update (1934): Let the scapegoating begin.
Whispers about the top brass in Beijing and their displeasure with the local authorities on the ground in Wuhan have been circulating for at least a day. Now, the South China Morning Post has confirmed that President Xi is planning to throw local health officials under the bus.
In order for it to look like China’s leaders were simply caving to the public’s demands, doctors and the state-controlled press have lined up to criticize Wuhan’s top brass for not foreseeing and moving to prevent the severe shortages of supplies, workers and space that is now prompting China to build two massive hospitals in the span of 10 days. Doctors and journalists on the scene in Wuhan are calling for the local leaders – who were not named in the SCMP story – to “immediately step down”.
It’s early Sunday morning in Beijing, and with the new day comes a new batch of disheartening reports: Hubei province reported 13 new deaths, and the first death was reported in Henan province, bringing the total number of virus-linked deaths outside Wuhan to three.
More alarmingly, Chinese state media has reported a death from the virus in Shanghai. The reports have since been corroborated by the Western press.
#BREAKING Shanghai govt reports city’s first death from China virus pic.twitter.com/kT8e4XTaA7
— AFP news agency (@AFP) January 26, 2020
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In such a densely populated city, it’d be difficult to imagine a virus with this much infectious potential would spread like wildfire. It would be like Wuhan, but worse.
SHANGHAI REPORTS FIRST DEATH IN CORONAVIRUS-RELATED CASE ON JAN 25 – STATE MEDIA
— FXHedge (@Fxhedgers) January 26, 2020
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In an attempt to make it look like Beijing is taking responsibility for the sluggish response (remember, China basically did nothing for three weeks after the first cases became symptomatic), Hu Xijin, the editor of the state-controlled Global Times, tweeted that China should have been better prepared for the outbreak.
Forbidden City announced Thursday to close over fear of coronavirus, followed by other museums nationwide. Beijing cancelled temple fairs &other Spring Festival activities, prompting other cities to cancel large scale events. Spring Festival economy is taking a big hit this year.
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) January 24, 2020
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More Chinese cities are limiting or closing public transit, with Tianjin preparing to shut down all inter-province shuttle buses starting…Monday.
Some discrepancies have appeared in the tally of case: The WHO is saying it has confirmed 1,320 cases, while the SCMP. New coronavirus scares have emerged in India, where nearly 100 people are under observation, according to India Today. Seven people are reportedly showing symptoms of the virus. Russia has reported several suspected cases in Moscow, South Korea just confirmed its third case, and Toronto health officials have confirmed their first case.
For some reason, the WHO number is significantly short of the numbers being reported by the Western press: Reuters has just confirmed another death, bringing the total to 56, and the total number of confirmed cases at 1,975.
- DEATH TOLL FROM CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK IN CHINA AT 56 AS OF JAN 25 – STATE MEDIA – [RTRS]
- TOTAL NUMBER OF CONFIRMED CORONAVIRUS CASES IN CHINA AT 1,975 AS OF JAN 25- STATE MEDIA – [RTRS]
Will we have 2,500 cases confirmed by tomorrow afternoon? Or will there be even more?
* * *
Update (1723ET): Canadian news website Global News is reporting that Toronto health officials are about to announce that a “presumptive case” of coronavirus has been confirmed at Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital.#BREAKING: Ontario health officials are expected to announce that a “presumptive case” of coronavirus has been confirmed in Toronto.https://t.co/9y6sJGpvfO
— Globalnews.ca (@globalnews) January 25, 2020
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Two cases of the virus have been confirmed in the US, but after several scares, no cases have yet been confirmed in Mexico, although testing is still underway for a trio of cases in Jalisco.
* * *
Update (1530ET): Now that the market is closed, local authorities apparently feel it’s safe to start dribbling out the real numbers. The number of confirmed coronavirus cases soared on Saturday as China confirmed roughly 500 new cases. The number of cases outside China has also grown as Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia have all confirmed new cases. Meanwhile, another death has been confirmed, bringing the total to 42.
According to the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper that has been keeping probably the most comprehensive tally of confirmed nCoV cases around the world, put the total number at 1,497 Saturday afternoon in New York. Three doctors in Beijing who visited Wuhan have been confirmed to have the virus.
During a meeting of China’ Politburo on Saturday, President Xi not only urged disparate ethnic groups to work together and suppress the virus, but added that the “grave situation” seemed to be “accelerating,” according to the BBC and SCMP.
“Party committees and governments at different levels have to make proper plans to contain the virus under the guidance of the Central Committee,” he was quoted as saying.
“Hubei province has to regard virus prevention work as the most important task, and enforce stricter measures to stop the virus from spreading inside the province and spilling out into other areas. Isolation treatment should be provided for all infected patients.”
As we mentioned earlier, Beijing has dispatched medics and other medically-trained PLA soldiers to Wuhan and other cities to help the overwhelmed hospitals. This headline passed without much scrutiny from the Western media, but we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the situation on the ground is closer to a PLA takeover of all the hospitals in Wuhan. In China, one doesn’t simply send in the PLA to ‘help with the logistics’.
Why wouldn’t China want to tell the world that its massive military machine has temporarily taken over hospitals in the hot zone? Well, we’ll let you figure that one out.
As for Wuhan, it’ll soon be under complete lock down: Beginning Sunday private vehicles will be banned from its streets. To enforce that kind of a ban, one would need more than just the local police.
All events have been canceled, travel into and out of the city has been shut down, and, as we showed below, crude roadblocks have been set up to essentially seal off the city – a city of 11 million people – off from the rest of China. At least some form of travel restrictions are in place in some 18 cities in central Hubei. Restrictions include cutting off access to public transit and highways. Already, the economic fallout from the outbreak is being estimated in percentage points of local GDP, as we’ve previously discussed. The disruption of the holiday travel season will hammer China’s tourism industry, possibly even worse than 17 years ago during the SARS outbreak.
Horrifying images of patients infected with the virus have popped up on Twitter.
#coronavirus in action.pic.twitter.com/af7w2Z4Uu7
— Darren of Plymouth 🇬🇧 (@DarrenPlymouth) January 25, 2020
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As the situation grows increasingly serious, the senior Communist Party leadership, which has formed a group of top officials to oversee the crisis response, is giving local authorities carte blanche to take any necessary action to ensure hospitals remain fully staffed and supplied. There has reportedly been talk of punishing local officials who may have been slow to respond to the crisis during its early days.
After confirming its fifth case, Hong Kong has declared a state of emergency – the highest tier of public alert, according to the HKFP.
“Today I declare the lifting of the response level to emergency,” chief executive Carrie Lam told reporters. She is under pressure to limit arrivals from the Chinese mainland. Right now, anybody arriving from the mainland in Hong Kong must sign a”health declaration form”, though it’s not clear how that will stop patients carrying the virus who may be asymptomatic.However, schools in the city will not reopen until at least Feb. 17 and transportation to and from Wuhan will be canceled until further notice. On the mainland, tour groups have been cancelled until at least mid-week. Oh, and so much for that mask ban Lam declared that the city will invest necessary to prevent the spread of disease, including increasing the supply of surgical masks after several cases of extreme price gouging were reported.
The #HongKong Centre for Health Protection shares advice to prevent pneumonia and respiratory tract infection. https://t.co/Zgoq3I2PuP pic.twitter.com/qUty2NCXMT
— Hong Kong Free Press (@HongKongFP) January 25, 2020
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South Korea, which has confirmed at least two cases of the virus, said Saturday that it would declare all of China a “coronavirus watch zone” as local public health officials work to protect the public and suppress the virus. Several dozen people have already been tested for the virus in SK and come back negative, per Korea Times.
What a way to kick off the four-day lunar new year holiday.
* * *
As we move into Saturday evening on the ground in Wuhan, it’s becoming increasingly obvious to the broader global community that China’s authoritarian government has failed to contain this viral outbreak.
Chinese authorities expanded the travel restrictions on Saturday to cover 56 million Chinese, Al Jazeera reports. At least 18 cities in central Hubei are now dealing with at least some level of travel restrictions.
Unsurprisingly, some of the roadblocks remind us of ‘Mad Max’.
In order to control the Chinese virus, rural Hubei is conducting such a road closure… #CoronavirusOutbreak #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/LwMvSFniRc
— Corona vírus News (@NoticiasVirus) January 25, 2020
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In Wuhan, the situation looks grim. The number of confirmed cases is exploding: another 300 were announced on Saturday, while the death toll is steady at 41. Yesterday, videos flooded western social media (after being assiduously removed from Weibo and the rest of the Chinese Internet) purporting to show bodies piling up in hallways in Wuhan, with rumors that a doctor had succumbed to the virus.
Those rumors have now been confirmed: A doctor who worked at a hospital in Wuhan, China, where coronavirus patients are being treated died Saturday morning, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, a two-year-old Chinese girl has become the youngest to be diagnosed with the virus.
Doctor Liang Wudong, of the ENT department of Hubei Xinhua Hospital, died Saturday while fighting on the front lines to suppress the virus.
As it has all week, the South China Morning Post has kept an up-to-date running total of the confirmed cases & deaths. As of 10 am ET on Saturday, the total number stood at exactly 1400.
A map of the various cases shows the spread, though even the most up-to-date maps by Western news agencies appear to already be out of date, including this one by BBG.
Though China has pledged transparency, some suspect that the true tally of cases within Wuhan is much higher. With the epidemic spiraling out of control, President Xi called a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, a group of China’s top leaders, to discuss a response to the virus. At the meeting, the Communist Party set up a group to manage the response to the virus. The group will comprise members of the Party’s Central Committee, while being directed by the Standing Committee. During the meeting, President Xi said various ethnic groups must work together to contain the spread of the deadly virus. Xi also ordered party authorities to ensure that there are enough medical supplies in Wuhan – the capital of Hubei province and a city of 11 million five times the size of London and bigger than any US city.
“Party committees and governments at different levels have to make proper plans to contain the virus under the guidance of the Central Committee,” he was quoted as saying.
China’s National Health Commission announced on Saturday a nationwide plan to identify suspected cases of the deadly virus on trains, airplanes and buses. Inspection stations will be set up and passengers with suspected pneumonia will be “immediately transported” to a medical center. In the city of Haikou, the authorities said they would set up a 14-day observation center for all tourists who came from Hubei. They will not be allowed to leave the hotels where they are staying. At least 450 additional military and medical personnel have been deployed in Hubei to help with the situation.
Following reports last night of a suspected case in Sydney, Australian authorities have confirmed the first case of the virus. Yesterday, several cases were also identified in France. But that’s not all: Malaysia has confirmed that three cases of the virus have been detected. Japan is now up to three cases, all Chinese nationals, according to the Nikkei Asian Review.
Interfax reported Saturday afternoon that seven suspected cases of the virus have been detected in Moscow. The individuals are all said to be suffering from high temperatures. These would be the first confirmed cases in Russia after a nCoV scare involving a Chinese national in St. Petersburg was found to be negative, per TASS.
Following reports that the virus may have originated from people eating bats or rats, the party has ordered more inspections of agricultural products, and has temporarily banned the trade in wild animals. It has also shut down movie theaters, LNY-related events and other mass gatherings across the country, warning that people should avoid coming together en mass until the outbreak is contained.
Qinghai province in northwestern China confirmed its first case on Saturday, leaving Tibet as the only administrative area of China that remains virus-free.
In Wuhan, the horror stories are getting worse: One woman told the SCMP that her husband was turned away by several hospitals despite coughing up blood, a sign of very advanced pneumonia.
“I have nothing. No protective clothing, only a raincoat, and I am standing outside the hospital in the rain,” said the woman, who gave her name as Xiaoxi.
“I am desperate, I have lost count of time and days. I don’t know if we will both live to see the new year.”
The rapid rise in the number of cases doesn’t necessarily mean the outbreak is getting worse, according to a spokesman from the WHO. Instead, it could reflect better monitoring and intervention by government authorities. As far as determining the severity of the epidemic, it’s still too early to say.
“It’s still too early to draw conclusions about how severe the virus is because, at the beginning of any outbreak, you would focus more on the severe cases,” said Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Geneva.
Video from inside Wuhan, a city that has been nearly entirely sealed off from the outside world, the situation appears increasingly dire.
A lot of attention has been paid in the Western press about the effort to build a new, 1,000 bed hospital in Wuhan as the city’s current health-care infrastructure has been completely overwhelmed. They’re hoping to finish the building in under a week, an astonishing pace. State media reported Saturday that a second hospital will also be built.
Foreign governments including the US and Russia are hatching plans to air-lift their citizens out of Wuhan. This could include journalists covering the outbreak, meaning the flow of information out of the city could soon slow to a trickle. Meanwhile, scientists are scrambling to determine the virus’s infectious potential before victims start showing symptoms. If it’s confirmed that the virus spreads in this way, than that would make full containment virtually impossible.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 20:01 - 'Shifty' Schiff: Warmongering Stooge Of The Deep State
‘Shifty’ Schiff: Warmongering Stooge Of The Deep State
Authored by Daniel Lazare via AntiWar.com,
All the usual suspects are praising Adam Schiff’s marathon two-and-a-half-hour Senate speech on Wednesday to the skies.
Neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin calls it “a grand slam” in the Washington Post.
Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin describes it as “dazzling” on CNN.
Hillary Clinton: “Every American should watch this”
John Legend: “This is brilliantly argued and so compelling. Watch if you have time. Call your senators. Everyone says the outcome is predetermined. But make sure your senators hear from you if you’re moved by this. Thank you, Congressman Schiff, for standing up for what’s right.”
Debra Messing: “I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country.”
New York Times columnist Gail Collins says it was “a great job” and that Schiff is “a rock star” for pulling it off.
But in fact it was the opposite
a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.
What is that orthodoxy?
It’s that Russia invaded poor innocent Ukraine in 2014, that it interfered in the US presidential election in 2016 in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and propel Donald Trump into the White House, and that it’s now trying to smear Joe Biden merely because he had allowed his son to take a high-paying job with a notorious Ukrainian oligarch at a time when he was supposedly heading up the Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.
As Schiff put it with regard to Donald Trump’s famous July 25 phone call urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Biden’s activities:
“This investigation was related to a debunked conspiracy theory alleging that Ukraine not Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. This narrative propagated by the Russian intelligence services contends that Ukraine sought to help Hillary Clinton and harm then-candidate Trump…. This tale is also patently false and, remarkably, it is precisely the inverse of what the US intelligence community’s unanimous assessment was that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in sweeping and systemic fashion in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.”
So even though the Financial Times reported during the 2016 election campaign that the threat of a Trump victory was spurring “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they have never attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a US election,” articles like that are now down the memory hole because Schiff says they’re Russian propaganda that US intelligence agencies have determined to be false.
The same goes for arguments that it’s actually NATO’s aggressive expansion to the east that has led to a needless buildup of tensions, not Russia’s drive to the west. Recent examples include an article in the National Interest arguing that NATO has “empowered some of the most historically anti-Russian elements in that region – Ukrainian Banderites [i.e. followers of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera], Polish nationalists, Balkan Islamists” – elements that, not unreasonably, have sparked Russia’s worst fears – or one in the Nation stating that NATO’s drang nach osten is “the primary cause for the new and very dangerous Cold War.”
Articles like those are verboten as well because they go counter to the new line that Russia is entirely to blame. Declared Schiff:
“Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.”
As for Biden, a New York Times editorial said about his son’s unfortunate new job back in 2015:
“Sadly, the credibility of Mr. Biden’s [anti-corruption] message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices…. Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”
We must all put such sentiments behind us now Russia is seeking to “weaponize” such information, according to Schiff, and deploy it “against Mr. Biden just like it did against Hillary Clinton in 2016 when Russia hacked and released emails from her presidential campaign.” If Russia wants to weaponize it, then it’s best for the rest of us not to breathe a word of it lest people think we’ve been weaponized as well.
Bottom line: we must impeach Trump, according to Schiff’s epic presentation, not only because he’s overstepped his proper constitutional bounds, but because he’s part of a grand Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation, undercut US security, undermine faith in US intelligence agencies, and “remake the map of Europe by dent of military force.” In order to counter this all-encompassing threat, it is our patriotic duty to do the opposite by believing the CIA and redoubling US defense. If anyone tells us that Biden was guilty of a flagrant conflict of interest, we must stop up our ears because that’s what Moscow wants us to think. If anyone says that the entire Russian-interference narrative is just a silly conspiracy theory based on a paucity of facts and an abundance of paranoid speculation, we must do likewise because it’s just the Kremlin trying to worm its way into our minds.
When in doubt, just remember to bleat: America good, Russia baa-aa-aad.
But while it would be nice to dismiss this as a joke, it’s not. Schiff’s emergence as leader of the Democratic impeachment drive means that the party is re-grouping along the most retrograde Cold War lines. As reckless and appalling as Trump’s behavior is in the Persian Gulf, the emerging Democratic worldview is shaping up as no less extreme. Because it sees Russia as mounting a multi-pronged offensive, the clear implication is that the US must respond in kind. This means more troops deployments, more forces mobilized to counter Russian threats from Venezuela to the Middle East, more TV talking heads going on and on about this or that Kremlin conspiracy, and more labelling of people like Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein as Russian assets.
Remember, this is the Los Angeles neocon who backed the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and Saudi Arabia’s unprovoked war against Yemen, an assault that, since March 2015, has cost 100,000 lives and brought half the country to the brink of starvation. He supported Obama’s war in Libya and called for the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria and relies on arms manufacturers and military contractors for major financial support.
But while Bernie supporters may have thought that Democrats were edging away from such views, they’re plainly in the wrong. Schiff’s new-found prominence shows that the neocons are back in the saddle. Impeachment advocates should be careful of what they wish for because the anti-Trump forces are turning out to be no less dangerous than those helping him to remain.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 20:00 - New Research Casts Doubt Coronavirus Epidemic Started At Wuhan Food Market
New Research Casts Doubt Coronavirus Epidemic Started At Wuhan Food Market
Although practically all of the western media reports from the city of Wuhan have claimed that the city’s hospitals have been completely overwhelmed by cases of pneumonia as more cases of the Wuhan coronavirus are confirmed, the South China Morning Post reports that a team of researchers at Wuhan’s Jinyintan hospital have retraced the movements of the first individual who was diagnosed with the virus, and determined that he had no links to a shady seafood market selling live snakes and bats for human consumption.
Amazingly, SCMP caveated its report by claiming that other patients among the earliest cases had “continuous exposure to the market,” which was shut down on Jan. 1 by Wuhan authorities over fears that its trade in wild animals was linked to the viral outbreak. Authorities have since banned the selling of live animals at markets.
The researchers, seven of whom work at Wuhan’s Jinyintan hospital, designated for patients with the illness, revealed on Friday in The Lancet medical journal that symptoms of the new disease were first reported on December 1 – much earlier than the Wuhan government’s initial announcement on December 31 of 27 cases of the pneumonia-like infection.
According to the report, the first patient had no exposure to the Huanan seafood market which was shut down on January 1 over fears – later confirmed – that the new virus was linked to its trade in wild animals. The researchers added that none of the patient’s family had developed fever or any respiratory symptoms. There was also no epidemiological link between the first patient and the later cases, they found.
The researchers analysed data from 41 patients with confirmed infections who had showed an onset of symptoms up to January 2. Six of those patients died, putting the fatality rate of the group at 15 per cent. The researchers noted that clinical presentations of the patients greatly resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome.
The first patient to die from the new coronavirus had continuous exposure to the market before he was admitted to hospital with a seven-day history of fever, cough and breathing difficulties, according to their report.
Doctors also identified 13 other patients who had no contact with the market, which helps build the case for human to human transmission.
The absence of a link to the seafood market is one of the indicators for human-to-human transmission of the virus and the researchers identified another 13 patients who also had no direct exposure to the market.
“Taken together, evidence so far indicates human transmission for 2019-nCoV,” the report said. “We are concerned that 2019-nCoV could have acquired the ability for efficient human transmission,” the researchers added, along with a strong recommendation for precautions such as fit-tested N95 respirators and other personal protective equipment.
Much to Beijing’s chagrin, a team of Chinese scientists on Friday revealed that symptoms of the virus first emerged as early as Dec. 1, much earlier than the Wuhan government’s initial announcement of the first 27 cases on Dec. 31. The notion that the virus may have been transmitted to humans via consuming bats, rats, badgers or snakes was widely reported in the Western press, even by CNN.
Though the possibility of zoonotic transmission hasn’t been entirely ruled out, these researchers apparently believed that there’s reason to doubt that the fish market was the source of the virus. However, the situation is still very much in flux, and it remains true that some of the other patients did have contact with the market.
Either way, do the researchers findings lend more credence to the other conspiracy theory about the virus’s origin? Wuhan reportedly has two labs that participate in China’s bio-warfare program, as Radio Free Asia first reported, and a handful of US outlets, including the Washington Times, have picked up the story.
Was CoV manufactured by the real-world equivalent of Umbrella Corp?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 19:30 - Rabobank: What If… The Protectionists Are Right And The Free Traders Are Wrong?
Rabobank: What If… The Protectionists Are Right And The Free Traders Are Wrong?
Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank
“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 4, The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill)
What if… the protectionists are right and the free traders are wrong?
2020 starts with markets feeling optimistic due to a US-China trade deal and a reworked NAFTA in the form of the USMCA. However, the tide towards protectionism may still be coming in, not going out.
The intellectual appeal of the basis for free trade, Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, where Portugal specializes in wine, and the UK in cloth, is still clearly there. Moreover, trade has always been a beneficial and enriching part of human culture. Yet the fact is that for the majority of the last 5,000 years global trade has been highly-politicized and heavily-regulated. Indeed, global free-trade only began following the abolition of the UK Corn Laws in 1846, which reduced British agricultural tariffs, brought in European wheat and corn, and allowed the UK to maximize its comparative advantage in industry. Yet it took until 1860 for the UK to fully embrace free trade, and even then the unpalatable historical record is that during this ‘golden age’, the British:
Destroyed the Indian textile industry to benefit their own cloth manufacturers;
- Started the Opium Wars to balance UK-China trade by selling China addictive drugs;
- Ignored the Irish Potato Famine and continued to allow Irish wheat exports;
- Forced Siam (Thailand) to open up its economy to trade with gunboats (as the US did with Japan); and
- Colonized much of Africa and Asia.
As we showed back in ‘Currency and Wars’, after an initial embrace of free trade, the major European powers and Japan saw that their relative comparative advantage meant they remained at the bottom of the development ladder as agricultural producers, an area where prices were also being depressed by huge US output; meanwhile, the UK sold industrial goods, ran a huge trade surplus, and ruled the waves militarily. This was politically unsustainable even though the UK vigorously backed the intellectual concept of free trade given it was such a winner from it.
Regardless, the first flowering of free trade collapsed back into nationalism and protectionism – bloodily so in 1914. Free trade was tried again from 1919 – but burned-out even more bloodily in the 1930s and 1940s. After WW2, most developed countries had moderately free trade – but most developing countries did not. We only started to reembrace global free trade from the 1990s onwards when the Cold War ended – and here it is under stress again. In short, only around 100 years in a total of 5,000 years of civilization has seen real global free trade, it has failed twice already, and it is once again coming under pressure.
What are we getting wrong? Perhaps that Ricardo’s theory has major flaws that don’t get included in our textbooks, as summarized in this overlooked quote
“It would undoubtedly be advantageous to the capitalists of England…[that] the wine and cloth should both be made in Portugal [and that] the capital and labour of England employed in making cloth should be removed to Portugal for that purpose.” Which is pretty much what happens today! However, Ricardo adds that this won’t happen because “Most men of property [will be] satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations,” which is simply not true at all! In other words, his premise is flawed in that:
- It is atemporal in assuming countries move to their comparative advantage painlessly and instantly;
- It assumes full employment when if there is unemployment a country is better off producing at home to reduce it, regardless of higher cost;
- It assumes capital between countries is immobile, i.e., investors don’t shift money and technology abroad. (Which Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’, Book IV, Chapter II also assumes doesn’t happen, as an “invisible hand” keeps money invested in one’s home country’s industry and not abroad: we don’t read him correctly either.);
- It assumes trade balances under free trade – but since when has this been true? Rather we see large deficits and inverse capital flows, and so debts steadily increasing in deficit countries;
- It assumes all goods are equal as in Ricardo’s example, cloth produced in the UK and wine produced in Portugal are equivalent. Yet some sectors provide well-paid and others badly-paid employment: why only produce the latter?
As Ricardo’s theory requires key conditions that are not met in reality most of the time, why are we surprised that most of reality fails to produce idealised free trade most of the time? Several past US presidents before Donald Trump made exactly that point. Munroe (1817-25) argued: “The conditions necessary for Free Trade’s success – reciprocity and international peace – have never occurred and cannot be expected”. Grant (1869-77) noted “Within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade”.
Yet arguably we are better, not worse, off regardless of these sentiments – so hooray! How so? Well, did you know that Adam Smith, who we equate with free markets, and who created the term “mercantile system” to describe the national-protectionist policies opposed to it, argued the US should remain an agricultural producer and buy its industrial goods from the UK? It was Founding Father Alexander Hamilton who rejected this approach, and his “infant industry” policy of industrialization and infrastructure spending saw the US emerge as the world’s leading economy instead. That was the same development model that, with tweaks, was then adopted by pre-WW1 Japan, France, and Germany to successfully rival the UK; and then post-WW2 by Japan (again) and South Korea; and then more recently by China, that key global growth driver. Would we really be better off if the US was still mainly growing cotton and wheat, China rice and apples, and the UK was making most of the world’s consumer goods? Thank the lack of free trade if you think otherwise!
Yet look at the examples above and there is a further argument for more protectionism ahead. Ricardo assumes a benign global political environment for free trade. Yet what if the UK and Portugal are rivals or enemies? What if the choice is between steel and wine? You can’t invade neighbours armed with wine as you can with steel! A large part of the trade tension between China and the US, just as between pre-WW1 Germany and the UK, is not about trade per se: for both sides, it is about who produces key inputs with national security implications – and hence is about relative power. This is why we hear US hawks underlining that they don’t want to export their highest technology to China, or to specialize only in agricultural exports to it as China moves up the value-chain. It also helps underline why for most of the past 5,000 years trade has not been free. Indeed, this argument also holds true for the other claimed benefit of free trade: the cross-flow of ideas and technology. That is great for friends, but not for those less trusted.
Of course, this doesn’t mean liked-minded groups of countries with similar-enough or sympathetic-enough economies and politics should avoid free trade: clearly for some states it can work out nicely – even if within the EU one could argue there are also underlying strains. However, it is a huge stretch to assume a one-size-fits-all free trade policy will always work best for all countries, as some would have it. That is a fairy tale. History shows it wasn’t the case; national security concerns show it can never always be the case; and Ricardo argues this logically won’t be the case.
Yet we need not despair. The track record also shows that global growth can continue even despite protectionism, and in some cases can benefit from it. That being said, should the US resort to more Hamiltonian policies versus everyone, not just China, then we are in for real financial market turbulence ahead given the role the US Dollar plays today compared to the role gold played for Smith and Ricardo! But that is a whole different fairy tale…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 19:00 - "We All Knew About Epstein" Admits Cindy McCain – Who Did Nothing About It
“We All Knew About Epstein” Admits Cindy McCain – Who Did Nothing About It
Sen. John McCain’s widow says “everyone” knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, but were “afraid” to do anything about it.
“Epstein was hiding in plain sight,” said McCain, during an appearance at the State of the World 2020 conference in Florida, according to the Washington Examiner.
“We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing, but we had no one that was — no legal aspect that would go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.”
McCain said a girl from her daughter’s high school was one of Epstein’s victims and that she hopes Epstein “is in hell.”
Epstein’s massive wealth and his connections to powerful politicians and celebrities allowed him to continue trafficking young women and girls long after many had exposed his devious interests.
Dr. Barbara Sampson, the New York City medical examiner, said Epstein died by suicide at a Manhattan federal detention facility last August. His death and the circumstances surrounding it have created controversy after the former medical examiner of New York, Dr. Michael Baden, told 60 Minutes that he believes Epstein was murdered. –Washington Examiner
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 18:30 - Two Iran War Votes In House Will Seek To Halt Trump Preemptive Strikes
Two Iran War Votes In House Will Seek To Halt Trump Preemptive Strikes
Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,
While most of the focus in Congress is on the impeachment, Congress has still found time to advance some votes relevant to the potential war with Iran, and are set for some such votes next week.
Two votes are planned in the House, and expected on Thursday. One is from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) prohibiting any funding for a war in Iran without Congressional authorization. The second will attempt to reveal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF).
Image via BBC The 2002 AUMF was meant to authorize the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the Hussein government long gone, many have questioned the relevance of the AUMF, though the administration has at times claimed it authorizes other wars, including military action against ISIS in “Syria or elsewhere.”
The votes are seen not only as a rebuke of Trump’s unilateral action against Iran but a win for House progressives, who have spent years seeking limits on presidential authority. The Trump administration has claimed the 2002 AUMF legally justifies military action against the Islamic State group “in Syria or elsewhere.” — Defense News
While the Iraq AUMF isn’t directly related to a possible Iran War, repealing it would go a long way toward Congress reasserting its war-making powers, and emphasizing that the authorizations aren’t open-ended after the intended war is long over, allowing them to be reinterpreted indefinitely for other operations.
Marching now through Washington DC against the US war on Iran and the illegal occupation of Iraq. #NoWarWithIran pic.twitter.com/dIP8WKpR4f
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 25, 2020
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The Senate is not expected to take up any of the Iran War votes this week, though the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be given a briefing from the State Department on the matter. The State Department had previously canceled this briefing weeks ago.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 18:00 - "Thermonuclear, Pandemic-Level Bad" – Harvard Epidemiologist Warns Viral Outbreak Might Get A Lot Worse
“Thermonuclear, Pandemic-Level Bad” – Harvard Epidemiologist Warns Viral Outbreak Might Get A Lot Worse
As we’ve stepped up our coverage of the nCoV coronavirus outbreak over the past week, some on Twitter have published what we feel are exaggerated criticisms accusing us of fearmongering.
While we understand that the information we’ve shared can be distressing, we’d like to take a moment to remind readers that all of the information and research we have cited is legitimate, having originally been conducted by credible epidemiologists, like the UK’s Jonathan Read. The fact is, the Chinese government hasn’t been nearly as “transparent” as it promised, and it seems like the more we learn about the true scope of this outbreak, the more concerned we become.
The reality is that – as the Architect told Neo in “The Matrix: Reloaded” – denial is the most predictable of human responses. And while the world’s public health authorities certainly still have time to get their arms around this outbreak before it becomes a massive, global pandemic with deadly consequences, the WHO’s dithering response the other day (asserting that they don’t yet have enough evidence of human-to-human secondary transmission to declare a global health emergency) certainly doesn’t inspire confidence.
Now that we have that out of the way – let’s move on to Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, a public health scientist on the faculty at Harvard.
A few days ago, Dr. Feigl-Ding tweeted that he was “really, deeply worried about this new coronavirus outbreak” because the virus seemed to have an”upward infection trajectory curve much steeper than SARS.”
I’ll be honest – as an epidemiologist, I’m really deeply worried about this new coronavirus outbreak. 1) the virus has an upward infection trajectory curve much steeper than SARS. 2) it can be transmitted person to person before symptoms appear — I.e. it is silently contagious! pic.twitter.com/5Kjo6DkbQj
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 23, 2020
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On Friday, the doctor, a well-respected epidemiologist who has worked as an advisor to the World Health Organization, tried his hand at a few projections based on an infection rate much higher than the RO (r-naught) rating of 1.4-2.5 recently estimated by the WHO. As we explained last night, when determining the infectious potential of a virus, arguably the most important variable is RO. This represents the average number of secondary cases resulting from every new infection in an entirely susceptible population.
Of course, government interventions and more vigilant hygiene practices once the public is aware of the threat will help lower the virus’s r-naught variable. But remember, nCoV (the WHO’s name for the virus) has already been quietly spreading among the people of Wuhan for weeks. And as Dr. Feigl-Ding explains, early evidence would suggest that nCoV is contagious before symptoms appear.
Last night, we published the findings of a team of UK epidemological researchers led by Jonathan Read. Read published a paper with four colleagues that estimates transmission parameters for the Wuhan coronavirus and calculates that the true R0 of 2019-nCoV is between 3.6-4.0 or roughly the same as SARS, and reaches a conclusion about spread of the coronavirus epidemic that is frankly terrifying. With an r-naught of 3.8, the virus could eventually cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in China alone.
In fact, it’s not simply terrifying: With an r-naught of 3.8, this virus could be “thermonuclear, pandemic level bad.”
HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad – never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating… #WuhanCoronovirus #CoronavirusOutbreak pic.twitter.com/6mmxIHL9Ue
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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As Dr. Feigl-Ding goes on to explain, using Read’s findings as a jumping-off point, the 4,000 number being kicked around by some scientists as the true number of viral cases in Wuhan might be much too low. By early Feb., the doctor warns that nearly a quarter of a million Chinese could be infected.
2/ “We estimate the basic reproduction number of the infection (R_0) to be 3.8 (95% confidence interval, 3.6-4.0), indicating that 72-75% of transmissions must be prevented by control measures for infections to stop increasing…
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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3/ … We estimate that only 5.1% (95%CI, 4.8-5.5) of infections in Wuhan are identified, and by 21 January a total of 11,341 people (prediction interval, 9,217-14,245) had been infected in Wuhan since the start of the year. Should the epidemic continue unabated in Wuhan….
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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4/ we predict the epidemic in Wuhan will be substantially larger by 4 February (191,529 infections; prediction interval, 132,751-273,649), infection will be established in other Chinese cities, and importations to other countries will be more frequent. Our model suggests that..
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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5/ travel restrictions from and to Wuhan city are unlikely to be effective in halting transmission across China; with a 99% effective reduction in travel, the size of the epidemic outside of Wuhan may only be reduced by 24.9% on 4 February. Our findings are…
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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To be sure, these findings should be taken with a grain of salt. They are based on a set of assumptions that could change as scientists learn more about the virus. But as things stand, it appears that nCoV has a higher infectious potential than other coronaviruses, meaning it will be more difficult to contain. And the possibility of an unchecked pandemic on par with the 1918 Spanish flu shouldn’t be ruled out yet.
6/ …critically dependent on the assumptions underpinning our model, and the timing and reporting of confirmed cases, and there is considerable uncertainty associated with the outbreak at this early stage. With these caveats in mind, our work suggests that…
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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7/ a basic reproductive number for this 2019-nCoV outbreak is higher compared to other emergent coronaviruses, suggesting that containment or control of this pathogen may be substantially more difficult.”!!!! #wuhanvirus #CoronavirusOutbreak #ChinaCoronaVirus …
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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[Tweet No. 8 was deleted]
9/ …cannot be stopped by containment alone. A 99% quarantine lockdown containment of Wuhan will not even reduce the epidemic’s spread by even 1/3rd in the next 2 weeks. Thus, I really hate to be the epidemiologist who has to admit this, but we are potentially faced with…
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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10\ … possibly an unchecked pandemic that the world has not seen since the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Let’s hope it doesn’t reach that level but we now live in the modern world 🌎 with faster ✈️+ 🚞 than 1918. @WHO and @CDCgov needs to declare public health emergency ASAP!
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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11/ REFERENCE for the R0 attack rate (reproductive coefficient) of 3.8 and the 99% containment models come from this paper: https://t.co/KrQfuAfS4l
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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12/ What is the typical R0 attack rate for the seasonal flu in most years? It’s around an R0=1.28. The 2009 flu pandemic? R0=1.48. The 1918 Spanish Flu? 1.80. This new #WuhanCoronavirus reproductive value again? R0=3.8. (Flu reference: https://t.co/ldAWBlFkvA)
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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13/ …and it gets even worse, the Lancet now reports that the coronavirus is contagious even when *no symptoms*: specifically: “crucial to isolate patients… quarantine contacts as early as possible because asymptomatic infection appears possible”! https://t.co/FZr3Es1VwZ
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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Even if we assume a much lower r-naught, like, say, 2.8, which is just above the upper band of the WHO’s estimates, the results could still be “pretty bad”.
14/ Let’s pretend the 3.8 estimate is too high (there’s unpublished estimates of 2.5). even if this virus’s R0=2.5, that’s still 2x higher than seasonal flu’s 1.28 (ref above), and higher than 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic of 1.80 that killed millions. So 2.8 is still super bad folks
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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15) My response to some people who think I’m trying to stoke fear… I’m a Harvard trained scientist with a doctorate in epidemiology (and the youngest dual doctoral grad from Harvard SPH). Here are my response: https://t.co/tdxg3gJQ72 https://t.co/AgL4idz8Yc
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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Based on the above thread, the situation might seem especially dire. But as Dr. Feigl-Ding explains later, actions like China’s mass quarantine of 46 million and other public-health precautions should help to contain the virus and reduce its ability to spread.
Small note: While there were reports of SARS having 0.49 after containment started, a WHO cited experts who said SARS had initial R0 of 2.9 then 2.0-3.5, which which fell to 0.4 after quarantine. But SARS is more symptomatic than this Wuhan virus. To be updated. pic.twitter.com/wNXf3rgcqg
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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Now, Feigl-Ding’s critics have pointed out that this is only one estimate, and that Read and his team have already revised down their r-naught calculation.
“there is considerable uncertainty associated with the outbreak at this early stage.” & yet you tweeted: “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD”. A Public health scientist should KNOW better than to be an alarmist. https://t.co/2Z5meAFnSx @stgoldst
Very disappointing.
— Politics Trumps All (@TrumpsPolitics) January 25, 2020
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The doctor repeatedly said as much during the thread, but we suppose there’s something about people tweeting in all-caps that some find extremely off-putting.
Some folks think I’m trying to incite fear. I’m not trying—I’m a scientist. This #coronavirus #WuhanCoronovirus is serious. Over 50 million people are quarantined + case counts will go up much more. Predict @WHO will declare emergency. Let’s hope for the best, prepared for worst. https://t.co/H3UcR9eAjs
— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020
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And of course this isn’t 1918 – medical technology is far more advanced. In the event of a mass infection, a vaccine could be found to save the day. But that doesn’t mean we should simply dismiss the more dire projections out of hand. This virus could still leave thousands dead before it peters out.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 17:35 - The 1%: Illinois' Pension Millionaires
The 1%: Illinois’ Pension Millionaires
Authored by Austin Berg via IllinoisPolicy.org,
More than 129,000 Illinois public pensioners will see expected payouts of $1 million or more during retirement.
Illinois is home to a small, powerful and protected class of wealth.
Their profits are immense. They bear little to no risk. And the state’s social safety net has been gutted to pay for their privileges, which are closely guarded by politicians.
Sound familiar?
These are Illinois’ pension millionaires.
Among the state’s 12.7 million residents, they constitute the 1%.
More than 129,000 Illinois public retirees will collect estimated payouts of more than $1 million each over the course of their retirements, according to new analysis from the Illinois Policy Institute.
No public-sector worker should be personally shamed for getting a great deal. Those who choose a life of public service deserve honor and praise.
At the same time, it’s crucial that Illinoisans understand these retirement benefits and call for reform. They have resulted in cuts to core services and constant calls for tax hikes across the state for more than two decades. They’re also pushing the pension funds toward insolvency.
Extreme payouts and early retirements are the norm across Illinois’ five state-run retirement systems:
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More than 22,000 retirees in the State Universities Retirement System (43%) will receive an expected lifetime payout of more than $1 million, with 42% retiring before their 60th birthday.
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More than 31,000 retirees in the State Employees’ Retirement System (51%) will receive an expected lifetime payout of more than $1 million, with half retiring before age 60.
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Nearly 75,000 retirees in the Teachers’ Retirement System (68%) will receive an expected lifetime payout of more than $1 million, with more than half retiring before age 60.
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The remaining pension millionaires at the state level are spread across the Judges’ Retirement System (nearly 900, or 94%) and the General Assembly Retirement System (more than 200, or 67%).
Meanwhile, the average 401(k) balance nationwide for people aged 60 to 69 is $195,500, according to CNBC.
These numbers can be difficult to believe. So they’re often spun. There are four common “buts” used to justify the status quo:
1) But these benefits attract top talent
In fact, these benefits have made important fields like teaching much less attractive in Illinois. That’s because in order to pay for the extreme benefits promised in the past, new teachers are enrolled in an unfair “Tier 2” retirement plan that is so lousy it will likely result in a lawsuit when the first Tier 2 worker vests on Jan. 1, 2021.
2) But these workers don’t get Social Security
In fact, almost all state employees in SERS are eligible for Social Security benefits on top of their pensions, which average $1.7 million for career workers.
For other public retirees in Illinois, trading million-dollar payouts for a Social Security check would be a serious downgrade. The average Social Security benefit for 2019 is $17,532 per year. And the earliest anyone can qualify for Social Security is age 62, with the full retirement age pegged at 67 for anyone born after 1960.
3) But workers paid into the system
The average state worker or teacher in Illinois retires before age 60, takes home a lifetime pension benefit of more than $1 million and contributes less than 10% of that amount to the system – the rest is covered by taxpayers.
4) But politicians underfunded the system
Illinois pensions were underfunded because they were overpromised. Like a teenage barback trying to front a monthly payment on a Lamborghini, state politicians have kicked the can, borrowed and lied to keep up appearances. Illinois state and local governments now spend the most in the nation – about double the national average – on pensions as a share of their budgets. Consider that the state spends about one-third less today, adjusted for inflation, than it did in the year 2000 on core services including child protection, state police and college money for poor students. During that time, pension spending increased 501%.
Paying more is not an option.
Backing reforms for a fair pension system should be the No. 1 priority for Illinois state lawmakers. And other states can show them how.
A pension constitutional amendment in Illinois that matches states such as Hawaii and Michigan would allow for changes to retirement ages, capping maximum pensionable salaries, and doing away with guaranteed permanent benefit increases in favor of a true cost-of-living adjustment pegged to inflation. All of this can be done without cutting a dime from the checks of current retirees. These changes to “future” benefits have been enacted in Arizona, where they had support from union leaders who realized pensions were in peril.
If Illinoisans work together, commonsense pension reform can ensure state government works for everyone.
Not just the 1%.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 17:10 -
- Iran's Fars News Knocked Off Web By US Treasury Order
Iran’s Fars News Knocked Off Web By US Treasury Order
Iran’s well-known state media outlet Fars News Agency says US sanctions have knocked it off the internet. As of Friday and into early Saturday the en.farsnews.com domain remained inaccessible while the outlet says it quickly alternately established English content on https://en.farsnews.ir/, which remains live.
Iran says the US Treasury Department shut down international access to its English news site due to new regulations related to US sanctions.
https://t.co/Y1sm3SQURo Domain Blocked Under US Sanctionshttps://t.co/JK7Worzcpa pic.twitter.com/U2wNL78mYH
— Fars News Agency (@EnglishFars) January 25, 2020
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It’s not the first time state-linked Iranian media outlets have had access to Western audiences blocked, with PressTV complaining in recent months about being blocked on YouTube and other popular social media sites; however it’s less common for their domains to be blocked.
Fars outlet issued a Farsi language tweet Friday which reads according to a translation:
“From an hour ago, audience access to the Fars News Agency site has encountered a problem due to being placed on America’s sanctions list, and the technical part of [this] News Agency is working to create access for the audience on the farsnews.ir domain.”
It further said administrators of its state-controlled site were notified Friday that it was being shut down after the US Treasury Department ordered the drastic action it due to sanctions violations.
Fars has since erected a separate domain for its now blocked English language site.
As Iran’s PressTV describes further:
The news agency said that it had received an email from the server company, which explicitly said that the blockage is due to an order by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and its inclusion in the list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN).
The agency attached to its post a screenshot of its website with the message “www.farsnews.com’s server IP address could not be found.”
In the wake of the Jan.8 Iranian ballistic missile attack on Ayn al-Asad airbase in Iraq, Iranian media outlets were slammed by western analysts for “spreading disinformation” — which initially included claims of multiple American troop deaths and a totally obliterated base.
But in reality both sides could be blamed for sowing war propaganda and disinformation, given the US side initially said “no casualties” — later revised to 11 traumatic brain injuries, and days ago dramatically updated to 34 total head injuries.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 16:45 - Digital Currency: What Do The Global Banking Elite Want?
Digital Currency: What Do The Global Banking Elite Want?
Amidst the annual spectacle of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Bank for International Settlements this week announced that multiple central banks have created a group that will ‘assess potential cases for central bank digital currencies‘.
Here is the press release from the BIS in full:
The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Sveriges Riksbank and the Swiss National Bank, together with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), have created a group to share experiences as they assess the potential cases for central bank digital currency (CBDC) in their home jurisdictions.
The group will assess CBDC use cases; economic, functional and technical design choices, including cross-border interoperability; and the sharing of knowledge on emerging technologies. It will closely coordinate with the relevant institutions and forums – in particular, the Financial Stability Board and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI).
The group will be co-chaired by Benoît Cœuré, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, and Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the CPMI. It will include senior representatives of the participating institutions.
As with every other recent development in regards to CBDC’s, the BIS stand at the heart of the issue. The new central bank grouping comes just over six months after the BIS first established an Innovation Hub for central banks (also known as Innovation BIS 2025) with the objective being to ‘foster international collaboration on innovative financial technology within the central banking community‘.
With the agenda to introduce central bank digital currency gathering further momentum, now would be as good a time as any to ask what the global banking elite are seeking to achieve over the short to medium term.
In 2019 I published around a dozen articles on the subject of digital currency, examining the latest speeches from central bankers and the actions they were taking to formulate the foundations for a cashless society. The Innovation BIS 2025 project is a important pillar to the aspirations of the financial elite. By 2025 they are targeting the completion of reformed payment systems in the UK, the U.S and beyond, systems that will possess the capability to interface directly with Fintech firms that specialise in blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT). Both blockchain and DLT would be essential for the roll out of a fully fledged CBDC network.
During a speech at the Central Bank of Ireland in March 2019, BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens stated plainly what a CBDC future would look like:
Like cash, a CBDC could and would be available 24/7, 365 days a year. At first glance, not much changes for someone, say, stopping off at the supermarket on the way home from work. He or she would no longer have the option of paying cash. All purchases would be electronic.
To avoid confusion, there are two variants of CBDC that are regularly discussed by central bank officials. The first is a wholesale CBDC, which would be used to facilitate payments exclusively between financial sector firms. The second option, a retail CBDC, would be for use by the general public.
To quote Carstens from the same speech he made in Ireland:
A CBDC would allow ordinary people and businesses to make payments electronically using money issued by the central bank. Or they could deposit money directly in the central bank, and use debit cards issued by the central bank itself.
This would be a significant departure from the traditional model of commercial banks digitising the money held in people’s bank accounts. To way up the likelihood of this scenario, let’s examine what the International Monetary Fund have been saying.
Former Managing Director Christine Lagarde, who is now President of the European Central Bank, addressed the Singapore Fintech Festival in November 2018 and hinted at how the future composition of a CBDC could look:
If digital currencies are sufficiently similar to commercial bank deposits— then why hold a bank account at all?
What if, instead, central banks entered a partnership with the private sector—banks and other financial institutions—and said: you interface with the customer, you store their wealth, you offer interest, advice, loans. But when it comes time to transact, we take over.
Banks and other financial firms, including startups, could manage the digital currency. Much like banks which currently distribute cash.
In this reality, central banks would, according to Lagarde, ‘retain a sure footing in payments‘. By extension, they would also retain autonomy over an all digital financial system.
The IMF expanded on Lagarde’s speech in December 2019 with the publication of an article called, ‘Central Bank Digital Currencies: 4 Questions and Answers‘. Co-written by Tobias Adrian, the Financial Counsellor and Director of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, it asserts that the IMF is now gradually helping countries ‘develop policies‘ as they ‘consider CBDC options and seek advice.’
One of those options is a public-private partnership, which IMF staffed have termed as a ‘synthetic CBDC‘. In the summer of 2019 Mark Carney first raised the prospect of a ‘Synthetic Hegemonic Currency‘ that could be provided by the public sector ‘through a network of central bank digital currencies‘. This would ultimately be at the expense of the world reserve status of the dollar.
The synthetic CBDC model as envisioned by the IMF would see private sector firms like JP Morgan and Barclays issuing digital coins to the general population. Banks would continue ‘innovating and interfacing with customers‘, whilst central banks would ‘provide trust to the system by requiring that coins be fully backed with central bank reserves and by supervising the coin issuers.’ This is worth keeping in mind because as the article confirms, such a set up would ‘preserve the comparative advantages of each participant.’ In other words, global financial institutions and the central banks operating beneath them would work hand in hand with Fintech developers rather than be in competition, creating a state / private lock in that every citizen would be bound by due to the abolition of cash.
The coins the IMF refer to are known as ‘Stablecoins‘, which central bankers routinely discussed throughout 2019. Stablecoins are regarded as a form of crypocurrency, and differ from the likes of Bitcoin in that issuers of the coins would back them using a basket of established fiat currencies. The theory is that this would give the coins stability in terms of their valuation. Stablecoins would be all digital with blockchain and distributed ledger technology central to their make up, meaning payments would be instantaneous across borders.
A few days after the IMF’s article, Lael Brainard of the Federal Reserve addressed an event held in Frankfurt, Germany in honour of Benoit Coeure’s departure from the European Central Bank (the same Benoit Coeure who has now begun his new role heading up the Innovation Hub at the BIS).
This was an important speech because between the lines Brainard set the scene for how central banks could take advantage of the rise in stablecoins. She talked of how the emergence of crypto technology has raised ‘important questions for central banks‘, and that the ‘prospect of global stablecoin payment systems has intensified the interest in central bank digital currencies.’
Facebook’s Libra project is cited by central banks as the bellwether of stablecoins. Whilst Libra has yet to launch, implementation would give it the title of a global stablecoin used throughout multiple different jurisdictions. For Brainard and her colleagues, this brings into question the level of regulation and safeguards that they deem necessary for stablecoins to be rolled out world wide. Without them, Brainard warned, ‘stablecoin networks at global scale may put consumers at risk‘ as well as the financial system as a whole.
There are also questions related to the implications of a widely used stablecoin for financial stability. If not managed effectively, liquidity, credit, market, or operational risks, alone or in combination, could trigger a loss of confidence and run-like behaviour.
Chief amongst the risks raised are money laundering and the financing of terrorism, and it is here where the distinction between a permissioned and permissionless stablecoin network becomes apparent. Central bankers openly advocate for a permissioned network where access must be granted by participants. A permissionless network, according to Brainard, ‘may be more vulnerable to money laundering and terrorist financing.’
One solution mooted by Brainard would be for coordinated regulatory action rather than individual nations determining how stablecoins would be allowed to function. In Brainard’s words, ‘any global payments network should be expected to meet a high threshold of legal and regulatory safeguards before launching operations.’
Elites have been fashioning for decades the narrative that global problems are too large and complex in scale to be remedied at the national level. Their argument has been that more centralisation of powers and the diminishment of the nation state is required to bring about order out of chaos. The seeming regulatory vacuum surrounding stablecoins has given central banks the platform to gradually begin cementing central bank digital currency as a safer alternative, primarily because they would be a ‘direct liability of the central bank.’
As the debate continues around digital currency, the Federal Reserve are quietly progressing with plans to introduce a new payments system called ‘FedNow‘. This will be a platform where users would be able to ‘send and receive payments immediately and securely 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.’
The biggest selling point of digital currency is the convenience factor of national and cross border payments being settled and available without delay. I suspect this is where the banking elite want people to focus their attention, as opposed to how a digital currency network that incorporates central banks and selected private sector players would result in the end of tangible assets.
If you believe what central bankers are saying, then the concept of CBDC’s remain at the investigative stage. Sweden continues to lead the way with the development of an e-krona. The Riksbank has now procured a technology supplier to begin an e-krona test pilot, with the leading objective being to ‘broaden the bank’s understanding of the technological possibilities for the e-krona.’
With the Riksbank being part of the new central bank group working through the BIS, and the IMF admitting that they are now assisting countries in devising policies around digital currency, we are witnessing just how closely they are all collaborating with one another.
One question is whether stablecoins will be used as a stalking horse for CBDC’s, taking them beyond a mere concept. Financial instability has always been an opportunity for the global elite. Stablecoins without sufficient regulatory oversight create an opening for central banks to step in further down the line.
Something to ponder also is how faith could be lost with future stablecoin providers. BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens has said before that trust can be compromised in four particular ways – currency devaluations, hyperinflation, wide-scale payment system disruptions and bank defaults. Naturally, Carstens has positioned central banks as the institutions that can rectify such conflict, even though it has been proven that throughout history it is their policies that have created economic instability leading to collapse.
In relation to what Carstens said about compromising trust, three months prior to the EU referendum Bank of England official Ben Broadbent made a very telling comment in a speech appropriately titled, ‘Central banks and digital currencies‘, about the necessity for currency degradation before the public demand a solution to the traditional monetary model.
Degrade a currency sufficiently, via hyperinflation and collapse of the banking system, and people will eventually look for alternatives. But that’s generally the sort of thing that has to happen. Almost always, these currency substitutions occur only once the existing currency has become deeply compromised. Even then, the thing people naturally reach for is an existing, trusted currency – often the US dollar – rather than some entirely new unit of account.
When currency substitution has occurred naturally it’s almost always done so only after the incumbent currency has been debauched by hyperinflation.
I have warned extensively over the past couple of years of the risk of a global trade conflict triggering higher inflation, the devaluation of currencies such as sterling and the raising of interest rates. It is what would occur afterwards that is of more concern. Would people look to central banks as the saviours in a crisis scenario, giving them licence to digitise all assets through a network of CBDC’s?
As ever, central banks will require sustained geopolitical conflict to shape the future design of the financial system. They are already headlong in devising that very system through the reformation of global payment systems. But with distractions in the shape Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency still dominating the discourse, potentially up to 2025, how many are even aware of what the central banks are planning?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/25/2020 – 16:20
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