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malonema1

Kelly says report he called Trump an idiot is 'total BS' - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • White House chief of staff John Kelly personally denied calling President Donald Trump an "idiot" in an afternoon conversation with the commander in chief, relaying nearly the same statement in his face-to-face talk with the President as the one he released publicly, according to an administration official.
  • "I spend more time with the President than anyone else and we have an incredibly candid and strong relationship. He always knows where I stand and he and I both know this story is total BS," Kelly said in a statement. "I am committed to the President, his agenda, and our country. This is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration's many successes."
  • But the White House official pointed out a big difference between the Kelly incident and Tillerson -- Kelly immediately denied the report and denounced it to the President's face. Tillerson declined to do so, simply saying he wouldn't play that Washington game
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  • Some have pointed to a controversy earlier this year over former staff secretary Rob Porter, who was ousted amid a scandal involving allegations that he abused two ex-wives, as a turning point in terms of Kelly's influence.
  • n another example of Kelly being unhappy, one official said Kelly used "salty language" about Trump when Trump wasn't thrilled with picking Kirstjen Nielsen to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Another senior administration official said while Trump and his chief of staff have had disagreements, Kelly has never used that kind of language to criticize Trump.
fischerry

Spicer compares 'alternative facts' to getting different weather reports | Fox News - 0 views

  • Spicer compares 'alternative facts' to getting different weather reports
  • White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended the concept of "alternative facts" in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity Tuesday night and claimed that his statement about Donald Trump's inauguration audience had been twisted by the mainstream media.
  • One weather report comes out and says it's going to be cloudy and the next one says there's going to be light rain. No one lied to you.
katyshannon

'Glad we are back to the supersonic age': Philippines gets first fighter jets in a deca... - 1 views

  • Philippine President Benigno Aquino has approved the purchase of 44 billion pesos (US$932 million) worth of military equipment to help boost maritime security capability as tensions simmer in the South China Sea.
  • Defence Undersecretary Fernando Manalo made the announcement Saturday after the government received the first two of a dozen new South Korean-made light fighter jets to enhance the country’s air defence capabilities.
  • Aquino authorised the multi-year contract to purchase two frigates, eight amphibious assault vehicles, three anti-submarine helicopters, two long-range patrol aircraft, three aerial radars, munitions for the fighters and close support planes, Manalo said.
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  • The FA-50 fighter trainers from South Korea were acquired by the Philippines for 18.9 billion pesos. Seoul has committed to deliver 10 more light fighters until 2017.
  • Weapons for the FA-50s, including bombs and rockets, will be purchased later.
  • The Philippines has had no fighter capability since it mothballed its Vietnam War vintage F-5A/Bs in the mid-2000s. It has a few S-211 Italian trainer jets, acquired in the late 1980s.
  • “With these aircraft, our capability to guard maritime borders will be enhanced,” an air force general said, declining to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media. “Our response time will be quicker but we would need radar and communications to fully integrate our air defence systems.”
  • The Philippines’ ill-equipped armed forces are no match for those of China, despite receiving two cutters and coastal radar stations from the United States in 2011. Washington promised to deliver late next year another cutter and two C-130 planes.
  • In January 2013, the Philippines brought its disputes with China to international arbitration, but Beijing refused to participate and pressed for one-on-one negotiations.
  • An international tribunal in The Hague, however, dismissed China's legal arguments last month and ruled that it has authority to hear the Philippines' case.
  • It said it expects to hand down a decision next year on several issues raised by the Philippines, including the validity of China's sweeping territorial claims under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
  • China has built seven artificial islands in the Spratly Islands and is constructing military facilities, including airfields, ports and lighthouses.
  • Still, the Philippines has ruled out a military solution to the territorial conflicts with its limited defence capabilities.
  • China claims 90 per cent of the South China Sea’s 3.5 million sq km waters. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan also have claims to at least parts of the area.
Javier E

What Brett Kavanaugh should have said - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • During this process, many conservatives have asked plaintively whether people should really be held responsible for the sins they committed when they were 17. The answer is that what you did then matters, but so does what you think about it now.
  • And Kavanaugh doesn’t seem to have done any thinking at all. So let’s imagine he were to say something like this: I’m not proud of everything I did when I was young; I doubt any of us are. But growing up means learning from our mistakes, in part so we can help our children grow into responsible adults. When I look back now I realize that my friends and I reveled in our own privilege — we were male, white, rich, and destined to have limitless opportunities laid before us. We drank too much. We treated the young women we knew like objects, or potential conquests, or the butt of jokes. We certainly didn’t empathize with them. If we had, we would have understood how our own behavior made them feel; how it could make them feel vulnerable, degraded, even victimized. We would have understood that those feelings can stay with a person for life, and be a source of pain and anguish, even if you were never the victim of a crime. We can look back now and say that we can’t expect that kind of empathy from a teenager. But it’s exactly what we should expect. Even if we weren’t capable of it then, today’s teenagers can be, if we use our own failings to teach them to be better than we were. That’s what I’ve tried to do as an adult.
  • ather than making the ridiculous claim that as a young man he was brimming with all the wisdom, forbearance and deep respect for women we expect of a mature adult in 2018 — which no one can possibly believe — at least it would demonstrate that over the course of his life he has indeed learned something and become a better person than he was. But apparently that’s too much to ask.
Javier E

It's the Guns - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • here is a simpler and more powerful explanation of why there has been no similar school shooting in Germany since 2009; or in Canada since 2007; none in the United Kingdom since 1996—while conversely, more young Americans have died in school shootings in 2018 than in all the nation’s combat operations all over the world.
  • The answer is almost insultingly simple and has the virtue only of being true: It’s the guns.
  • Back in 2012, Nate Silver observed: "Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South, or a number of other demographic characteristics.”
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  • More than 70 percent of Trump voters in 2016 described guns as “very important” to their vote, versus only 40 percent who described abortion as “very important” to their vote and only 25 percent who felt that way about gay rights
  • With the slow fading of battles over same-sex marriage and abortion, and the rapid collapse of other aspects of conservative ideology, guns may now rank as the single most important political dividing line in 21st century America.
  • Only 30 percent of Americans own guns. Thus far, that minority has sufficed to block substantial federal action on guns. But a one-third minority—and especially a non-urban one-third minority—may no longer suffice to shape American culture.
  • The outrage after Parkland looked less like a political movement, more like the great waves of moral reform that have at intervals since the 1840s challenged the existing political order in the name of higher ethical ideals.
  • The most important success of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, was not to change laws (although they changed some), but to change hearts: to persuade Americans that drunk driving was not funny, not charming, and not acceptable.
  • American gun culture in the 2010s is as blithely irresponsible as American alcohol culture in the 1960s.
  • According to a Pew survey, only about one-quarter of gun owners think it essential to alert visitors with children that guns may be present in the home.
  • Only 66 percent of gun owners think it essential to keep guns locked up when not in use. (Ninety percent of non-gun-owners think so.) Only 45 percent of them actually do it.
Javier E

How false hope spread about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 - and the consequences... - 0 views

  • President Trump has repeatedly touted the anti-malarial medications hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as that much-needed solution.
  • Scientists have since pointed to major flaws in those original studies and say there is a lack of reliable data on the drugs. Experts warn about the dangerous consequences of over-promoting a drug with unknown efficacy: Shortages of hydroxychloroquine have already occurred, depriving lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients of access to it. Doctors say some patients could die of side effects. Other potential treatments for covid-19 could get overlooked with so much concentration on one option.
  • Raoult’s findings helped bring the theory to the United States. However, scientists have since discredited the trial, pointing to major flaws in the way it was conducted. The journal that published the study announced on April 3 that it did not meet its standards.
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  • A large portion of activity online at the end of February and early March appeared in French and centered on a study published by French researcher and doctor Didier Raoult.
  • Anecdotal evidence refers to people’s personal stories about taking the drugs and has no basis in scientific data. It’s akin to a Yelp review.
  • The faulty research then appeared in the Gateway Pundit, Breitbart and the Blaze. It ultimately made its way to Fox News, first appearing on Laura Ingraham’s program on March 16. Fox News shows hosted by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson went on to promote the drugs and continue to do so.
  • On March 19, Trump first mentioned hydroxychloroquine at a White House news briefing. DiResta’s analysis showed that the following week, the claim started to spike in the United States, with 101,844 posts on Facebook. Starbird reports Trump’s first mention set off a surge in attention, seeing tens of thousands of tweets per hour in late March.
  • Trump again spoke about the drugs at news conferences on April 3, 4 and 5. Mentions on Twitter skyrocketed on April 6.
  • scientists say there is only “anecdotal evidence” on the drugs. To a layperson, that may not sound bad, but it’s actually an insult in the scientific community.
  • Yet before the record could be set straight, the hypothesis spread widely on U.S. social media.
  • t there’s very little evidence that we actually have that this has a clinical benefit, which is kind of bad for something that’s being very heavily promoted. We should probably have some data and some science behind it.”
  • Asked whether chloroquine was a possible cure for covid-19, Janet Diaz of WHO told reporters on Feb. 20 that the organization was prioritizing other therapeutics: “For chloroquine, there is no proof that that is an effective treatment at this time. We recommend that therapeutics be tested under ethically approved clinical trials to show efficacy and safety.” A few weeks later, both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were included in a mega-trial WHO launched.
  • The Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use approval to distribute millions of doses of the drugs to hospitals across the country on March 29.
  • Luciana Borio, the former head of medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, criticized the FDA’s EUA announcement and has called for a randomized clinical trial of the drugs.
  • “I think that it was a misuse of emergency authorizations of the authority that the FDA has. Because it gives this credence that the government is actually backing, and it’s so common for people to equate that with an approval,” Borio said.
  • When asked whether any of the completed studies have provided substantial evidence that the benefits of the drugs outweigh the risks, Borio responded, “Not at all. No study was done in a way that would allow that conclusion.”
  • Over the course of only a few weeks, posts online, the media and politicians turned chloroquine from an unknown drug to a “100% coronavirus cure,” misleading the public on its effectiveness and engendering unintended but negative consequences.
  • Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as treatments for covid-19 are not yet backed by reliable scientific evidence. In a pandemic, it’s important for everyone to follow the lead of scientists. Rumors on the Internet are the least reliable source of information. And politicians are not qualified to provide scientific advice, despite even the best intentions.
  • In particular, Trump’s incorrect comments on the drugs and his role in advocating for their use, based on minimal and flimsy evidence, sets a bad example. His advocacy for this unproven treatment provides potentially false hope and has led to shortages for people who rely on the drugs. The president earns Four Pinocchios.
andrespardo

'The United States is broken as hell' - the division in politics over race and class | ... - 0 views

  • What is true for class also goes for race, gender, age and a range of other affiliations: the American left are the products of the very society they are trying to change. As Trump has targeted women, black people, Latinos, Muslims and immigrants – to name but a few – so those groups have rallied and are asserting themselves while others, within the progressive coalition, have become more sensitized to their condition.
  • At a recent orientation for one Chicago-based progressive group new members related their experiences of the financial crash. The black participants shared stories about losing their jobs and homes and moving back in with their parents. The white ones talked about mounting college debt, graduating from college unable to find a job and moving in with their parents.
  • The first women’s march in Pittsburgh, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, was deeply divided over the involvement of women of color, culminating in a separate march and a black organizer asking whether the official march was a “whites-only feminist event”. In a very segregated city with an almost even split among black, Latino and white, the socialist victories in Chicago came in a range of places, including predominantly black, Latino and white wards as well as a couple that were relatively mixed.
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  • The Chicago DSA branch is overwhelmingly white,” he concedes. “But if you look at the leadership, it’s overwhelmingly people of color. And if you look towards the work we’re doing it’s very intentionally geared towards issues that directly impact people of color and where the solution or the movement is led by people of color.”
  • “They asked me: ‘How could you work with DSA?’ And I said, ‘I’m tired of people who advocate for me and my voice is not at the table.’ We don’t need any more spokespeople. We need people to walk with us.”
  • “I think Trump is going to be a one-term president,” she says. “I don’t think he’s going to win at all. Unless, the Democratic party fucks up and gets this nomination wrong. Which they could.”
Javier E

How policy decisions spawned today's hyperpolarized media - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • it’s worth stepping back to remember that this is a recent development, and that the polarization of the media stems in large part from public policy decisions. Such polarization was not inevitable or in any way natural.
  • In the decades that followed World War II, the big three television networks dominated the news. Together with a few major metropolitan newspapers, they set the tone for the national conversation.
  • on virtually all these programs, journalists steered clear of a partisan perspective.
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  • Much of this approach was shaped by the Fairness Doctrine. A policy of the Federal Communications Commission beginning in 1949, the doctrine was based on the notion that the television networks were “public trustees.” Licensed by the federal government, they ought to serve the entire nation, the argument went, by airing competing perspectives on controversial issues. While the policy had been intended to foster a full and fair debate, in practice it led networks to avoid employing anchors or reporters with obvious biases and to play most issues down the middle.
  • Almost overnight, the media landscape was transformed. The driving force was talk radio. In 1960, there were only two all-talk radio stations in America; by 1995, there were 1,130. While television news on the old networks and the cable upstart CNN still adhered to the standard of objectivity, radio emerged as a wide-open landscape
  • In the 1980s, all of this changed. President Ronald Reagan believed the marketplace, not the government, was the best arbiter for competing viewpoints (and for much else).
  • Reagan’s FCC promptly killed it. The Democratic Congress tried to restore the doctrine, but Reagan vetoed the bill.
  • In the landmark Red Lion Broadcasting Co. Inc. v. FCC in 1969, the court ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was constitutional. Free speech, the justices held, was “the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters.” Therefore, the networks had to provide “ample play for the free and fair competition of opposing views.”
  • By 1995, conservatives accounted for roughly 70 percent of all talk-radio listeners
  • By 1994, he had an audience of 20 million Americans tuning in on some 650 stations. “What Rush realizes, and what a lot of listeners don’t,” an Atlanta station manager explained, “is that talk-radio programming is entertainment, it is not journalism.”
  • President George H.W. Bush courted the radio giant in the hope of winning over his right-wing listeners. In June 1992, the president invited Limbaugh to the White House for an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. In a telling detail, Bush insisted on carrying Limbaugh’s bag into the White House himself. In exchange for such self-abasement, Limbaugh threw his full support behind the president.
  • For conservatives, the success of their ideology on talk radio proved that their suspicions about the Fairness Doctrine had been right. Conservative voices had long been ignored in the mainstream media, they claimed, but now that the free market had been unchained, it was clear what the people wanted.
  • Rush Limbaugh emerged as a national conservative celebrity. With regular attacks on “commie-libs,” “feminazis” and “environmentalist wackos,” Limbaugh quickly cultivated a loyal audience of self-styled “Dittoheads.” Others in the industry took their cues from him. “I’m not sure where the business is going,” Bill O’Reilly told a friend in 1993. “But my gut says it’s going in the direction of Rush, and, man, I’m going to be there.”
  • The end of the Fairness Doctrine had drastically changed the standards of news.
  • cable television entrepreneurs realized that they, too, could thrive by providing the news from a partisan perspective. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News,
  • “Talk-radio shows started to go crazy” with coverage of Clinton’s misdeeds, NBC network president Bob Wright remembered. “We were not paying much attention to it at NBC News. And MSNBC wasn’t. CNN wasn’t. And what Fox did was say, ‘Gee, this is a way for us to distinguish ourselves. We’re going to grab this pent-up anger — shouting — that we’re seeing on talk radio and put it onto television.' ”
  • After 9/11, the network flourished as a full-throated supporter of the war on terrorism. In contrast to its rival CNN, which consciously framed its coverage for a diverse international audience, Fox News increasingly played to conservative viewers at home with nationalistic and populist themes.
  • “Am I slanted and biased?” Fox anchor Neil Cavuto once said in response to critics. “You damn well bet. … You say I wear my biases on my sleeve. Well, better that than pretend you have none, but show them clearly in your work."
  • nder Trump, the merger of the media giant and modern conservatism has been completed. Several of its hosts serve as informal advisers to the president, while some Fox-affiliated figures, such as former network executive Bill Shine and on-air host Heather Nauert, have taken formal roles in the Trump administration.
  • Liberals have had their news outlets, too, of course. Late in the Bush presidency, MSNBC became a left-leaning operation, and the liberal “blogosphere” flourished online
  • But liberals never replicated in scale or scope anything like Fox News or Limbaugh. In the end, none of the liberal outlets formed as cohesive a loyal alliance with the Democratic Party as conservative broadcasters did with the GOP.
  • And that fracturing and polarization can be traced, in large part, to the end of the Fairness Doctrine
  • Though some now seek to revive it, the doctrine is a relic of the past. Today’s communication landscape — including cable, social media and both traditional and satellite TV — is far too unruly for federal officials to regulate. Nor should they try.
  • Polls reveal that the public dislikes the form our media have taken and might be receptive to new models that push back against the partisan tide. If the public demands new models of information, including some that reflect the evenhandedness that ruled during the heyday of the Fairness Doctrine, we may yet see another media revolution.
delgadool

Maryland Lifts Many Covid Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Across Maryland on Wednesday, mayors, county executives, business owners and public health officials were parsing Gov. Larry Hogan’s surprise Tuesday announcement that he was loosening statewide Covid restrictions.
  • “With the pace of vaccinations rapidly rising and our health metrics steadily improving, the lifting of these restrictions is a prudent, positive step in the right direction and an important part of our economic recovery,” Mr. Hogan said. He was joined at his announcement by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, a former director the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is now a senior adviser to the governor.
  • “I was shocked, I thought it was a joke,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and former Baltimore health commissioner.
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  • Baltimore County Executive John A. Olszewski, Jr., said, “leaders across Maryland have been forced to scramble to meet with our legal teams, health officials, and neighboring jurisdictions to understand how this impacts our own executive orders and to determine if and how to use our own local authority moving forward.”
  • Maryland ranks in the middle of states in the percentage of its people who have been given at least one vaccine dose, according to a New York Times database, and somewhat above average in the number of new cases it has been reporting lately relative to its population — 13 per 100,000 residents. All three of the variants of the virus that are being tracked by the C.D.C. have been reported there, but only one in significant numbers: B.1.1.7, which was first identified in Britain and is more transmissible and possibly more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.
Javier E

Opinion | The Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab. These 5 Key Points Explain Why. - The... - 0 views

  • a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.
  • If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.
  • The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
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  • Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
  • Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
  • When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
  • The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.
  • The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature
  • The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
  • Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse.
  • By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started, when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
  • In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
  • Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. The Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States.
  • owever, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.
  • While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
  • Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
  • When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
  • At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengl
  • In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.
  • Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him. Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
  • In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military.
  • In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”
  • The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.
  • Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions.
  • ​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.
  • In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice. Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafety levels, including BSL-2.
  • Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping. Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels, and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
  • An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”
  • Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak: “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
  • SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
  • One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.
  • The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.
  • In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed
  • To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
  • A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019
  • More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
  • Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.
  • Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.
  • With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species. Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections
  • investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
  • Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade. For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill.
  • No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
  • In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals
  • In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals. The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.
  • it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.
  • a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.
  • Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.
  • it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.
  • Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.
  • A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic
  • Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.
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