Category: zerohedge

China on Thursday announced the “indefinite” suspension of all activity under a China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue amid strained relations between the two countries, its state economic planner said on Thursday.

The news caused the Aussie Dollar to fall sharply, dropping as low as 0.7701 vs the US dollar vs. Wednesday’s $0.7747.

“Recently, some Australian Commonwealth Government officials launched a series of measures to disrupt the normal exchanges and cooperation between China and Australia out of Cold War mindset and ideological discrimination,” said China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) regarding the decision.

According to CNBC, trouble in paradise began in 2018 when Australia became the first country to publicly ban Chinese tech giant Huawei from its 5G network – citing national security grounds over companies that were “likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government.” The move followed similar action by the Trump administration over espionage concerns.

Under Chinese law, companies must cooperate with intelligence services, according to the BBC.

Relations were further strained in 2018 after Australia officially called for an independent investigation into the origin of the COVID-19, resulting in an ongoing spat which included Beijing targeting exports, and Australia canceling two deals struck between the state of Victoria and China on its Belt and Road Initiative, causing the Chinese embassy to issue a warning over bilateral ties.

More recently, China accused Australia of giving a “free pass” to terror-sympathizers over accusations that Aussie politicians are backing Uighur activists and providing external support to Muslim fundamentalists in Xinjiang – which came just weeks after a senior Australian official warned that the “drums of war” are “beating” as relations continue to sour.

“In a world of perpetual tension and dread, the drums of war beat — sometimes faintly and distantly, and at other times more loudly and ever closer,” said Australia’s Department of Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo in comments that were made public late last month.

“Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarization of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war,” he said.

As we noted at the time, While Pezzullo didn’t mention China in the remarks that were published, it’s clear he was referencing tensions with Beijing in the Indo-Pacific. Australia has followed the US in its military provocations against China and is a member of the Quad, a group that is seen as a possible foundation for an anti-China NATO-style alliance in Asia.

Days earlier, Australia’s defense minister said the possibility of a war erupting over Taiwan should not be “discounted” and warned of regional tensions. “People need to be realistic about the activity,” Defense Minister Peter Dutton said. “There is militarization of bases across the region. Obviously, there is a significant amount of activity and there is an animosity between Taiwan and China.”

Beijing responded to Dutton’s comments on Monday. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said China hoped Australia would “fully recognize the high sensitivity of the Taiwan issue” and refrain from “sending any false signals to the separatist forces of ‘Taiwan independence.'”

The last meeting under the China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue was in 2017.

Authored by Patricia McCarthy via AmericanThinker.com,

In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931), who was then living in California, wrote to Orwell.  Huxley had briefly taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.

Huxley generally praises Orwell’s novel, which to many seemed very similar to Brave New World in its dystopian view of a possible future.  Huxley politely voices his opinion that his own version of what might come to pass would be truer than Orwell’s.  Huxley observed that the philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is sadism, whereas his own version is more likely, that controlling an ignorant and unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less wasteful by other means.  Huxley’s masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell’s with sadism and fear. 

The most powerful quote In Huxley’s letter to Orwell is this: 

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

Aldous Huxley.

Could Huxley have more prescient?  What do we see around us?  

Masses of people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal.  The majority of advertisements that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs, some of them miraculous but most of them unnecessary.  Then comes COVID, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China.  The powers that be tragically deferred to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping for just such an opportunity.  Suddenly, there was an opportunity to test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty years.  They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still highly experimental.  These jabs are not really vaccines at all, but a form of gene therapy.  There are potential disastrous consequences down the road.  Government experiments on the public are nothing new.

Since there have been no actual, long-term trials, no one who contributed to this massive drug experiment knows what the long-term consequences might be.  There have been countless adverse injuries and deaths already for which the government-funded vaccine producers will suffer no liability.  With each passing day, new side-effects have begun to appear: blood clots, seizures, heart failure.

As new adverse reactions become known despite the censorship employed by most media outlets, the more the Biden administration is pushing the vaccine, urging private corporations to make it mandatory for all employees.  Colleges are making them mandatory for all students returning to campus.

The leftmedia are advocating the “shunning” of the unvaccinated.  The self-appointed virtue-signaling Democrats are furious at anyone and everyone who declines the jab.  Why?  If they are protected, why do they care?  That is the question.  Same goes for the ridiculous mask requirements.  They protect no one but for those in operating rooms with their insides exposed, yet even the vaccinated are supposed to wear them!

Months ago, herd immunity was near.  Now Fauci and the CDC say it will never be achieved?  Now the Pfizer shot will necessitate yearly booster shots.  Pfizer expects to make $21B this year from its COVID vaccine!  Anyone who thinks this isn’t about money is a fool.  It is all about money, which is why Fauci, Gates, et al. were so determined to convince the public that HCQ and ivermectin, both of which are effective, prophylactically and as treatment, were not only useless, but dangerous.  Both of those drugs are tried, true, and inexpensive.  Many of those thousands of N.Y. nursing home fatalities might have been prevented with the use of one or both of those drugs.  Those deaths are on the hands of Cuomo and his like-minded tyrants drunk on power.

Months ago, Fauci, et al. agreed that children were at little or no risk of getting COVID, of transmitting it, least of all dying from it.  Now Fauci is demanding that all teens be vaccinated by the end of the year!  Why?  They are no more in danger of contracting it now than they were a year ago.  Why are parents around this country not standing up to prevent their kids from being guinea pigs in this monstrous medical experiment?  And now they are “experimenting” on infants.  Needless to say, some have died.  There is no reason on Earth for teens, children, and infants to be vaccinated.  Not one. 

Huxley also wrote this:

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.  To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” 

– Crome Yellow

Perhaps this explains the left’s hysterical impulse to force these untested shots on those of us who have made the decision to go without it.  If they’ve decided that it is the thing to do, then all of us must submit to their whims.  If we decide otherwise, it gives them the righteous right to smear all of us whom they already deplore.

As C.J. Hopkins has written, the left means to criminalize dissent.  Those of us who are vaccine-resistant are soon to be outcasts, deprived of jobs and entry into everyday businesses.  This kind of discrimination should remind everyone of …oh, Germany three quarters of a century ago.  Huxley also wrote, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”  That is precisely what the left is up to, what BLM is planning, what Critical Race Theory is all about. 

Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, said these new vaccines are “hacking the software of life.”  Vaccine-promoters claim he never said this, but he did.  Bill Gates called the vaccines “an operating system” to the horror of those promoting it, a Kinsley gaffe.  Whether it is or isn’t hardly matters at this point, but these statements by those behind the vaccines are a clue to what they have in mind. 

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.

This is exactly what the left is working so hard to effect: a pharmacologically compromised population happy to be taken care of by a massive state machine.  And while millions of people around the world have surrendered to the vaccine and mask hysteria, millions more, about 1.3 billion, want no part of this government vaccine mania.

In his letter to Orwell, Huxley ended with the quote cited above and again here because it is so profound:

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

Huxley nailed the left more than seventy years ago, perhaps because leftists have never changed throughout the ages. 

Humans readily respond to changing market conditions in various ways when it comes to soaring commodity prices. For instance, as random length lumber futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange hit a record $1,640 on Wednesday, there has been a multi-month explosion of internet searches for people who want to learn how to make lumber. 

Genius right? Bypass Weyerhaeuser Co., Georgia-Pacific LLC, West Fraser Timber Co., Ltd., among others, and who cares about the low-end wood sold at home improvement retailers, such as Home Depot and Lowes. 

Amid a lumber price storm, people are becoming their lumberjacks in the pursuit of cheap wood. Google searchers for “portable sawmill” have exploded to record highs in the last couple of months, coinciding with lumber prices. 

So what is a portable sawmill? Just like it sounds – it’s a portable saw on a trailer that is large enough to cut logs into lumber. The same lumber that Home Depot and Lowes are charging an arm and a leg. 

Before the pandemic, any discussions of lumber prices were painfully dull, but now it has become the talk of the town. And maybe ordinary folks are buying these machines to save money on new home builds or capitalize on soaring prices. 

Soon, lumber contracts are going to outpace gold futures. 

The lumber situation is very relatable to ammunition – as shortages appeared and prices jumped, people learned how to make their own ammo

Authored by Richard Bernstein, RealClearInvestigations,

The mass shooting in Atlanta on March 16, which took the lives of six Asian women among the eight victims, appears to be a one-off event – the violent act of a deeply troubled 21-year-old man who, according to what he told the police, was trying to wipe away sexual temptation, in the form of massage parlors that he felt guilty patronizing.

But that’s not how the incident was treated by the Asian American commentariat. Instead, a consensus quickly formed among journalists, scholars, and cultural figures writing op-eds and giving broadcast interviews that the shooting represented a pervasive, historical victimization by Asian people at the hands of the white majority. It was almost as if shootings of Asian women by white gunmen were an everyday occurrence, rather than a singular, exceedingly rare event.

Bee Nguyen, the first Asian woman to be elected to the George state assembly, declared at a rally four days after the shooting that the incident requires us “to demand justice not only for these victims but for all victims of white supremacy.” The Asian-American Association of Massachusetts, a supposedly nonpartisan group established by the state legislature, issued a statement blaming the attack on “misogyny, white supremacy, and the historical portrayal of Asians as the ‘Yellow Peril.’”

The Korean American novelist R.O. Kwon wrote a “letter to my fellow Asian women whose hearts are breaking,” published in Vanity Fair, saying that the Atlanta murders represented “the passing of women shot for what they looked like, killed by a racist gunman and by this country’s white supremacy.”

Two days after the attack, the page one headline in The New York Times read, “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women,” with the article quoting several women excoriating the Atlanta police for even thinking that the massage parlor shootings may not have been racially motivated. There were no views on the other side of the issue in the Times coverage. Similarly in a New York Times podcast, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong said, “We have also been victims to systemic racism throughout history,” except, she continued, “we have been conditioned to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

“I think that came from the white supremacist system that we live in,” she added.

The country may be used to this sort of narrative, with its intersectionality vocabulary of racial oppression and sexism. Looked at historically, these terms do contain kernels of truth when applied to Asian Americans, who have experienced plenty of both exclusion and violence in the past.

Still, the prevailing narrative for Asian peoples in America over the last quarter-century and longer has told a success story. Asians may experience a certain residual bigotry, but they have overcome it, the story goes, turning themselves into the “model minority.” The values of hard work, studiousness, and the postponement of gratification won them a disproportionate number of slots at the country’s most coveted schools and helped them become the wealthiest large ethnic group in America.

But that all was ignored in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, with commentary turning instead to a narrative of victimization at the hands of the same supposedly white supremacist America that has, in what seems a contradiction, welcomed them as immigrants and allowed them to prosper.

This is significant. It signals the ever-growing expansion into the mainstream of a set of ideas once considered the province of a radical political and academic fringe. Asian Americans — or at least the Asian Americans paid attention to by the mainstream media — apparently have adopted a version of critical race theory, the notion that America is divided into white oppressors and the non-white oppressed, and that history consists of the effort of the former to maintain the “structures of oppression” that ensure its dominance over the latter. Through this lens, the triumphalist narrative of Asian success is a patronizing expression of racism.

“The dangerous and racist ideology” of the “model minority” is “a means to really minimize and silence and erase the diverse, rich Asian experience in order to reinforce and maintain systemic racism and oppression,” Anastasia Kim, an associate professor of psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, said in a colloquium on the Atlanta murders.

In many ways, the growing embrace of this narrative of systemic racism and white supremacy, at least among the intelligentsia, represents the continued assimilation of Asian Americans – like other groups, they too are embracing their victimhood. They, too, are highlighting discriminatory events from the past. But the effort is fraught not only because of the broad success that many millions of Asian Americans have enjoyed in supposedly white supremacist America, but also because of the complex politics of race itself.

The very term Asian American is an arbitrary construct, one that throws together people from more than 20 countries and regions that in many cases have no more to do with each other culturally or racially than they do with Africa or Europe.

Conditions vary considerably among them. Indian Americans have the highest average household incomes in America; people originating in Cambodia, Bhutan, and Bangladesh are less prosperous. There are Hmong refugees and other tribal groups from Laos; the descendants of Vietnam boat people who escaped South Vietnam after the communist takeover there in 1975; rich ethnic Chinese tycoons and ethnic Chinese and Korean workers in nail salons, dry cleaners and restaurants. Almost nothing, except the mania for creating ethnic groupings and contrasting them with the supposedly dominant whites, justifies putting them into the same category.

 But even among scholars, at least in recent public comments, there seems to be little effort to put the past history into context, or to acknowledge how much things have changed.

Since the mid-1960s, 14 million Asian immigrants have arrived in the country.

Different subgroups have had different outcomes, but the average household incomes of Indian Americans, Korean Americans, and Chinese Americans are substantially higher than whites, despite the latter’s supposed efforts to maintain their dominance.

Lawsuits have been filed against Harvard and Yale by groups representing Asian students, claiming that they are held to a higher standard than other students in admissions decisions. Still, even with that higher standard, 20%-30% of the student bodies and a great deal of the faculties of the most exclusive universities in the land are of Asian descent. At the California Institute of Technology, which does not strive for racial balance in admissions, the number is 43%.

And yet, the Asian American commentariat seems determined to have Asian Americans identified as a group victimized by white supremacy. One reason clearly is that, in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, doing so has become fashionable. Liberal Asian Americans working in elite institutions wish, as do white liberals, to show solidarity with blacks, and one way to do that is to express a common victimization. 

“There’s definitely a cool factor, especially for young people,” said Kenny Xu, a writer on these topics and author of the forthcoming book, “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.” “Look at Hassan Minaj and his tirade in favor of affirmative action.” The reference was to the popular Indian American stand-up comic who a couple of years ago inaugurated a Netflix series, “Patriot Act,” by ridiculing the lawsuit brought by some Asian students against Harvard for allegedly discriminating against them in admissions.

“I find it hilarious,” Minaj said, “that this is the hill we’re willing to die on.”

But the tropes of critical race theory long predate recent events. The academic world, especially the ethnic studies departments, have been preparing this ground for decades, promoting the idea that white supremacy is at the heart of the American experience, and the constant repetition of that notion has gradually transformed it from a theory to established, indisputable fact.

Scott Kurashige, chair of the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Department at Texas Christian University, for example, put it this way in an interview with Vox: “What we need to realize is that there’s this timeless structure in which there’s always one group on top and another at the bottom. … This country has had a white supremacist ruling class since the beginning.”

Lok Siu, an associate professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC-Berkeley, told the New York Times that anti-Asian violence is “built into the structure and built into the way we think of Asians and the way we insert Asians into society.”

Asked to elaborate on this idea, she spoke of the long history of exclusion of Asians, going back to the ban on the immigration of Chinese women in 1875, followed by the ban on virtually all Asian immigration that lasted from 1925 to 1965, the murderous anti-Chinese riots in California and other places in the 19th century, the laws forbidding marriage between Asian men and white women, and even bans on land ownership by Asians. There’s no question that for many decades America did treat Asians with systemic, legally enforced, exclusionary racism.

“When you have these laws about who belongs and who doesn’t belong, you’re creating an ideology of distrust, that these people don’t really belong here,” Siu said in a Zoom interview. “There’s a bamboo ceiling that prevents Asian Americans from actually achieving full equity with white Americans, and that is still an issue. It’s not written into law, but you can see can see how it functions, making Asians the perpetual foreigner, the yellow peril.”

By no means do all Asian Americans agree with that analysis, or with the adoption of the critical race theory narrative. On contentious issues like affirmative action, there are bitter divides among Asian groups and between some of them. In the election last year, voters in California defeated by a 67% majority Proposition 16, which would have ended a state ban on racial preferences in state college admissions. Groups made up largely of ethnic Chinese played prominent roles on both sides of that issue.

“Asians are caught in the crossfire of a culture war, with the progressive side seeking to inject traces of white supremacy into every situation to confirm their ideology,” said Wenyuan Wu, the executive director of Californians for Equal Rights, one of the groups that opposed Proposition 16.

There are also aspects of the Asian American discourse that will be controversial among both Asians and non-Asians. Among the demands made by Stop AAPI Hate, the group reporting on the incidents of anti-Asian attacks, is that the United States discontinue the China Initiative, the Justice Department program to investigate technology theft by China and its agents in the country. The program, according to a letter the group sent to President Biden, “has led to the wrongful targeting and persecution of Chinese scientists.”

One element in this picture, also originating in the academic world, is a concerted attack on the idea of the model minority, pejoratively called the Model Minority Myth by its detractors. The criticism, which has been made for at least a quarter-century, has been that it creates a misleading stereotype of the smart but nerdy Asian student, which leaves out Asians who don’t fit the stereotype and need help.

But in recent years, the attack against the model minority idea has been portrayed in CRT terms — as an element in an insidious conspiracy to maintain white supremacy, because implicit in the notion of Asian success is assumption that if Blacks changed their behavior, they could do just as well, and it’s their fault if they don’t.

“Why Be a ‘Model Minority’ When You Could Dismantle White Supremacy?” was the headline in a recent article in The Nation, written by Dae Shik Kim, a community organizer in Seattle.

“Asian Americans have long been used as a tool by white supremacists to justify systemic racism against black people,” the author writes, voicing an argument and the vocabulary used by many others.

A related notion, also with roots in academia, is what’s called “adjacent whiteness” or “honorary whiteness” or “conditional whiteness.” It’s the idea that the system of white supremacy has accorded Asians some of the presumed privileges of being white as a way of deterring solidarity among the supposedly oppressed groups.

“Conditional whiteness … weaponizes people of color against their own communities by making individuals complicit in perpetuating racism and exhibiting dominance over other non-white bodies,” one writer, Dorothy He, said in the online journal Reappropriate.

That seemingly radical statement has gone mainstream. In the ethnic studies curriculum recently adopted by the California Board of Education, one of the sample lessons is “Asian American Pacific Islanders and the Model Minority Myth.”

According to the curriculum guidelines, students in that class “will understand how this label for AAPIs becomes a hindrance to expanding democratic structures and support and, at worst, how it creates a division among the AAPI community and places a wedge between them and other oppressed groups.”

In other words, from now on, when it comes to describing the Asian American experience in California schools, the ideas of critical race theory will be treated as accepted truths. The California curriculum was devised as a model for the rest of the country, and other states are likely to follow it.

Progress politicians have been pitching free public housing for years as a cure for housing, wealth, and all sorts of other inequalities. Several West Coast cities have implemented housing first initiatives, with taxpayers shelling out more than one billion dollars in the last half-decade. Years later, the attempt to break the homeless in perpetuity hasn’t worked out exactly as politicians promised. 

Ignoring the failures on the West Coast, Kansas City leaders have been exploring a similar housing first initiative for residents experiencing homelessness.

According to The Kansas City Star, Kansas City officials are considering a “150-bed village” almost like the “Hoovervilles” of the 1930s Great Depression. If built, maybe the village should be called “Bidenville.” 

Here’s an example of one of the tiny homes classy sheds. 

Local officials have yet to decide on the exact location of the new homeless village and provided limited details about the construction.

Last week, Mayor Quinton Lucas said the homeless village would support Kansas City’s homeless population by allowing them “a sense of dignity and pride in housing options.” 

“We’ve recognized for too long — for years, for generations — we have not done enough,” Lucas said. “We have not done enough to be creative. We have not done enough to help people get back on their feet.”

“Kansas City is not looking the other way anymore,” the mayor added.

We’ve seen this story before. West Coast politicians, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles, have made grand announcements about solving homelessness through housing first initiatives, but none seem to be working. 

Touted by influential political leaders, activists, and media outlets in Los Angeles, the simple solution was to build more housing for the homeless. Five years later, a billion dollars down the drain, the project has been plagued by construction delays, massive cost overruns, and accusations of corruption. 

Meanwhile, unsheltered homelessness jumped 41%, vastly outpacing the construction of new supportive housing units. Streets are also becoming more dangerous, drug use is skyrocketing, and public disorder is out of control. 

Without acknowledging success, Los Angeles recently called for more shelters for the entire homeless population of skid row by October. A similar story is also playing out in San Francisco. 

So back to Kansas City, as if officials there have yet to publicly acknowledge the failures of the housing first initiatives on the West Coast – it appears they are diving headfirst into a destructive policy. 

But again, none of that matters when City Manager Brian Platt said the housing project would be partially funded with federal stimulus. 

Platt said, “This is a big part of that recovery and relief for people in the city.”  

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

A Democratic candidate who lost her bid during last weekend’s Texas congressional special election sounded the alarm that the 2022 midterms “could be a major setback” for the Democratic Party.

During the special election, two Republicans – and no Democrats – advanced in the runoff as the top two vote-getters in the race for Texas’s 6th Congressional District, after no one in the 23-candidate field won an outright majority of votes on May 1.

Republicans Susan Wright, wife of the late Rep. Ron Wright, finished with 19 percent of the vote, while Jake Ellzey garnered 14 percent. Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez finished third with 13 percent and conceded on May 2.

“On Saturday, Republican candidates got 62 percent of the vote to 38 percent for Democrats (R+25). All the things I thought would motivate Democrats, such as the attempted violent overthrow of a legitimate election result, along with Snowmaggedeon … failed to get our voters out,” Sanchez wrote on Monday after conceding defeat.

“I’m sounding the alarm bell: If Democrats don’t organize and prepare, 2022 could be a major setback to our gains of recent years,” she said.

Wright, notably, was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, who on Monday championed his endorsement.

“Please explain to the Democrats and RINOs that the reason Texas-06 completely shut out Democrats in Saturday’s Jungle Primary is because of my Endorsement of Susan Wright, who surged last week after receiving it,” the former president said in a statement on Monday.

“RINO,” or “Republican in name only,” is a term used against Republicans who seemingly embrace progressive or Democratic politics.

The fact that no Democrats advanced can also be seen as a blow to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) quest to keep her majority after 2022. Generally, the party of the president loses seats during midterm elections, and in 2018, Democrats were able to reclaim the House majority after Trump’s 2016 victory.

The House, meanwhile, is currently split at 218 Democrats to 212 Republicans with five vacancies, which means that Pelosi can only lose two votes to pass legislation. If there is a tie in the House, the bill won’t pass.

During an interview last week, however, Pelosi struck an optimistic tone and asserted that Democrats would prevail during the midterms. The reason why, she said, is because of recent census results.

“I feel very confident that the Democrats will hold the majority after the next election,” she told CBS News in late April. “I think that we’re—for all the huffing and puffing the Republicans are doing, these numbers were not as good for them as they had hoped. They wanted three in Texas, two in Florida, and the rest.”

The rate of seniors collecting Social Security benefits has plunged to the lowest level in a decade, which Bloomberg suggests may be due to the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths among the elderly.

According to the Social Security Administration, the number of people who took retirement benefits rose by just 900,000 to 46.4 million in March, the smallest year-over-year gain since April 2009.

More via Bloomberg:

While the Office of the Chief Actuary at the government agency said it is still too early to assess the impact from Covid-19, the year-over-year change appears to reflect excess deaths. About 447,000 people who died from the virus were 65 or older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or about 80% of total deaths.

The number of Social Security beneficiaries has risen in the past decade as baby boomers — the large cohort born between 1946 and 1964 — started to reach retirement age. Usually, during economic downturns, many are forced into retirement due to job losses, which adds to the retiree pool.

According to the CDC, there were 660,200 excess deaths from all causes between January 26, 2020 and February 27, 2021, mostly associated with COVID. 

Bloomberg notes that other factors ‘can’ have an impact on Social Security numbers – for example, “In the early 2000s, the bump in beneficiaries was likely tied to the Senior Citizens’ Freedom to Work Act signed into law in April 2000,” which reduced penalties for beneficiaries who continued to work. That said, there’s nothing of the sort going on which could explain the current dropoff.

Life expectancy in the United State plunged by a full year in the first half of 2020 – the biggest drop since WWII – to 77.8 years from 78.8 in 2019 according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

 

Authored by Nicholas Wade via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (emphasis ours)

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

A tale of two theories. After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002, in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.

The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the major point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.

From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.

The discussion part of their letter begins, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.” But wait, didn’t the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors’ degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.

The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.

First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.

If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). Since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated.

But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper’s speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.

The authors’ second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.

Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus “would probably” have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.

And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words.

Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific, statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged.

Doubts about natural emergence. Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Daszak, kept asserting before, during, and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and after a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.

Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to occur in a bat virus’s spike proteins before it could infect people.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.

Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].” In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells.

The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.

“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Baric and Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, “may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.” Given various restrictions being placed on gain-of function (GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at “a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.”

That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.

Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Baric had developed, and taught Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanized mice. These laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.

Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells. How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.

The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. (“CoV” stands for coronavirus and “S protein” refers to the virus’s spike protein.)

“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”

“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.

It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.

“It is also clear,” Ebright said, “that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.” “Genomic context” refers to the particular viral backbone used as the testbed for the spike protein.

The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific project being funded there by the NIAID.

Even if the grant required the work plan described above, how can we be sure that the plan was in fact carried out? For that we can rely on the word of Daszak, who has been much protesting for the last 15 months that lab escape was a ludicrous conspiracy theory invented by China-bashers.

On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.

“And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS,” Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. “Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger….

“Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can’t vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals — so what do we do?

“Daszak: Well I think…coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.” The insertions he referred to perhaps included an element called the furin cleavage site, discussed below, which greatly increases viral infectivity for human cells.

In disjointed style, Daszak is referring to the fact that once you have generated a novel coronavirus that can attack human cells, you can take the spike protein and make it the basis for a vaccine.

One can only imagine Daszak’s reaction when he heard of the outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan a few days later. He would have known better than anyone the Wuhan Institute’s goal of making bat coronaviruses infectious to humans, as well as the weaknesses in the institute’s defense against their own researchers becoming infected.

But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, he immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s souped-up viruses. “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true,” he declared in an April 2020 interview.

The safety arrangements at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak was possibly unaware of, or perhaps he knew all too well, the long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories. The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing.

One reason for SARS1 being so hard to handle is that there were no vaccines available to protect laboratory workers. As Daszak mentioned in the December 19 interview quoted above, the Wuhan researchers too had been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells. They would have been as defenseless against the SARS2 virus, if it were generated in their lab, as their Beijing colleagues were against SARS1.

A second reason for the severe danger of novel coronaviruses has to do with the required levels of lab safety. There are four degrees of safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a new BSL4 lab, but its state of readiness considerably alarmed the State Department inspectors who visited it from the Beijing embassy in 2018. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the inspectors wrote in a cable of January 19, 2018.

The real problem, however, was not the unsafe state of the Wuhan BSL4 lab but the fact that virologists worldwide don’t like working in BSL4 conditions. You have to wear a space suit, do operations in closed cabinets, and accept that everything will take twice as long. So the rules assigning each kind of virus to a given safety level were laxer than some might think was prudent.

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated.

Much of Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”

“It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard — biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office — that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” Ebright says.

“It also is clear,” he adds, “that this work never should have been funded and never should have been performed.”

This is a view he holds regardless of whether or not the SARS2 virus ever saw the inside of a lab.

Concern about safety conditions at the Wuhan lab was not, it seems, misplaced. According to a fact sheet issued by the State Department on January 21, 2021, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

David Asher, a fellow of the Hudson Institute and former consultant to the State Department, provided more detail about the incident at a seminar. Knowledge of the incident came from a mix of public information and “some high end information collected by our intelligence community,” he said. Three people working at a BSL3 lab at the institute fell sick within a week of each other with severe symptoms that required hospitalization. This was “the first known cluster that we’re aware of, of victims of what we believe to be COVID-19.” Influenza could not completely be ruled out but seemed unlikely in the circumstances, he said.

Comparing the rival scenarios of SARS2 origin. The evidence above adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped. But the case, however substantial, falls short of proof. Proof would consist of evidence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or related labs in Wuhan, that SARS2 or a predecessor virus was under development there. For lack of access to such records, another approach is to take certain salient facts about the SARS2 virus and ask how well each is explained by the two rival scenarios of origin, those of natural emergence and lab escape. Here are four tests of the two hypotheses. A couple have some technical detail, but these are among the most persuasive for those who may care to follow the argument.

1) The place of origin. Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the SARS2 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn’t what happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.

Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, which ranges across southern China. The bats’ range is 50 kilometers, so it’s unlikely that any made it to Wuhan. In any case, the first cases of the COVID-19 pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation.

What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with an intermediate host, which in turn must often cross paths with people. All these exchanges of virus must take place somewhere outside Wuhan, a busy metropolis which so far as is known is not a natural habitat of Rhinolophus bat colonies. The infected person (or animal) carrying this highly transmissible virus must have traveled to Wuhan without infecting anyone else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill.

It’s a stretch, in other words, to get the pandemic to break out naturally outside Wuhan and then, without leaving any trace, to make its first appearance there.

For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China’s leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise.

2) Natural history and evolution. The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don’t just make one time jumps from one species to another. The coronavirus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation — a change in one of its RNA units — causes a different amino acid unit to be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein better able to attack the cells of some other species.

Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this intermediate host to people.

In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a further four, the epidemic took off.

But when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well adapted to human cells. Researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad Institute compared SARS2 with late stage SARS1, which by then was well adapted to human cells, and found that the two viruses were similarly well adapted. “By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV,” they wrote.

Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are remarkably uniform. Baric writes that “early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.”

A single source would of course be compatible with lab escape, less so with the massive variation and selection which is evolution’s hallmark way of doing business.

The uniform structure of SARS2 genomes gives no hint of any passage through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been identified in nature.

Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties. Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.

All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of a lab leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from the start because it was grown in humanized mice or in lab cultures of human cells, just as described in Daszak’s grant proposal. Its genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is uniformity.

Proponents of laboratory escape joke that of course the SARS2 virus infected an intermediary host species before spreading to people, and that they have identified it — a humanized mouse from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

3) The furin cleavage site. The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.

The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to the cell, to fuse with the cell’s membrane. After the virus’s outer membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and forces it to generate new viruses.

But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly the right place.

The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2’s furin cleavage site.

Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2 junction in a gain-of-function experiment.

Consider natural origin first. Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation and by recombination. Mutation is the process of random change in DNA (or RNA for coronaviruses) that usually results in one amino acid in a protein chain being switched for another. Many of these changes harm the virus but natural selection retains the few that do something useful. Mutation is the process by which the SARS1 spike protein gradually switched its preferred target cells from those of bats to civets, and then to humans.

Mutation seems a less likely way for SARS2’s furin cleavage site to be generated, even though it can’t completely be ruled out. The site’s four amino acid units are all together, and all at just the right place in the S1/S2 junction. Mutation is a random process triggered by copying errors (when new viral genomes are being generated) or by chemical decay of genomic units. So it typically affects single amino acids at different spots in a protein chain. A string of amino acids like that of the furin cleavage site is much more likely to be acquired all together through a quite different process known as recombination.

Recombination is an inadvertent swapping of genomic material that occurs when two viruses happen to invade the same cell, and their progeny are assembled with bits and pieces of RNA belonging to the other. Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site.

Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related beta-coronaviruses evidently don’t need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, so there’s no great likelihood that any in fact possesses one, and indeed none has been found so far.

The proponents’ next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to break out as a pandemic.

If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and “no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed.”

So it’s hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2 may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no problem at all. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

4) A question of codons. There’s another aspect of the furin cleavage site that narrows the path for a natural emergence origin even further.

As everyone knows (or may at least recall from high school), the genetic code uses three units of DNA to specify each amino acid unit of a protein chain. When read in groups of 3, the 4 different kinds of DNA can specify 4 x 4 x 4 or 64 different triplets, or codons as they are called. Since there are only 20 kinds of amino acid, there are more than enough codons to go around, allowing some amino acids to be specified by more than one codon. The amino acid arginine, for instance, can be designated by any of the six codons CGU, CGC, CGA, CGG, AGA or AGG, where A, U, G and C stand for the four different kinds of unit in RNA.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Different organisms have different codon preferences. Human cells like to designate arginine with the codons CGT, CGC or CGG. But CGG is coronavirus’s least popular codon for arginine. Keep that in mind when looking at how the amino acids in the furin cleavage site are encoded in the SARS2 genome.

Now the functional reason why SARS2 has a furin cleavage site, and its cousin viruses don’t, can be seen by lining up (in a computer) the string of nearly 30,000 nucleotides in its genome with those of its cousin coronaviruses, of which the closest so far known is one called RaTG13. Compared with RaTG13, SARS2 has a 12-nucleotide insert right at the S1/S2 junction. The insert is the sequence T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. The CCT codes for proline, the two CGG’s for two arginines, and the GC is the beginning of a GCA codon that codes for alanine.

There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. So how did SARS2 acquire a pair of arginine codons that are favored by human cells but not by coronaviruses?

Proponents of natural emergence have an up-hill task to explain all the features of SARS2’s furin cleavage site. They have to postulate a recombination event at a site on the virus’s genome where recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly expand the virus’s infectivity.

“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory. “Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”

Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too far. For instance, any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. And the numbers game can be played the other way. For the furin cleavage site to arise naturally in SARS2, a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed.

For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so.

A third scenario of origin. There’s a variation on the natural emergence scenario that’s worth considering. This is the idea that SARS2 jumped directly from bats to humans, without going through an intermediate host as SARS1 and MERS did. A leading advocate is the virologist David Robertson who notes that SARS2 can attack several other species besides humans. He believes the virus evolved a generalist capability while still in bats. Because the bats it infects are widely distributed in southern and central China, the virus had ample opportunity to jump to people, even though it seems to have done so on only one known occasion. Robertson’s thesis explains why no one has so far found a trace of SARS2 in any intermediate host or in human populations surveilled before December 2019. It would also explain the puzzling fact that SARS2 has not changed since it first appeared in humans — it didn’t need to because it could already attack human cells efficiently.

One problem with this idea, though, is that if SARS2 jumped from bats to people in a single leap and hasn’t changed much since, it should still be good at infecting bats. And it seems it isn’t.

“Tested bat species are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2 and they are therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection,” write a scientific group skeptical of natural emergence.

Still, Robertson may be onto something. The bat coronaviruses of the Yunnan caves can infect people directly. In April 2012 six miners clearing bat guano from the Mojiang mine contracted severe pneumonia with COVID-19-like symptoms and three eventually died. A virus isolated from the Mojiang mine, called RaTG13, is still the closest known relative of SARS2. Much mystery surrounds the origin, reporting and strangely low affinity of RaTG13 for bat cells, as well as the nature of 8 similar viruses that Shi reports she collected at the same time but has not yet published despite their great relevance to the ancestry of SARS2. But all that is a story for another time. The point here is that bat viruses can infect people directly, though only in special conditions.

So who else, besides miners excavating bat guano, comes into particularly close contact with bat coronaviruses? Well, coronavirus researchers do. Shi says she and her group collected more than 1,300 bat samples during some eight visits to the Mojiang cave between 2012 and 2015, and there were doubtless many expeditions to other Yunnan caves.

Imagine the researchers making frequent trips from Wuhan to Yunnan and back, stirring up bat guano in dark caves and mines, and now you begin to see a possible missing link between the two places. Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Technology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.

The direct-from-bats thesis is a chimera between the natural emergence and lab escape scenarios. It’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. But against it are the facts that 1) both SARS2 and RaTG13 seem to have only feeble affinity for bat cells, so one can’t be fully confident that either ever saw the inside of a bat; and 2) the theory is no better than the natural emergence scenario at explaining how SARS2 gained its furin cleavage site, or why the furin cleavage site is determined by human-preferred arginine codons instead of by the bat-preferred codons.

Where we are so far. Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.

That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.

It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2’s creation?

Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell. The plausibility of their case rests on a single surmise, the expected parallel between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But none of the evidence expected in support of such a parallel history has yet emerged. No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities.

The records of the Wuhan Institute of Virology certainly hold much relevant information. But Chinese authorities seem unlikely to release them given the substantial chance that they incriminate the regime in the creation of the pandemic. Absent the efforts of some courageous Chinese whistle-blower, we may already have at hand just about all of the relevant information we are likely to get for a while.

So it’s worth trying to assess responsibility for the pandemic, at least in a provisional way, because the paramount goal remains to prevent another one. Even those who aren’t persuaded that lab escape is the more likely origin of the SARS2 virus may see reason for concern about the present state of regulation governing gain-of-function research. There are two obvious levels of responsibility: the first, for allowing virologists to perform gain-of-function experiments, offering minimal gain and vast risk; the second, if indeed SARS2 was generated in a lab, for allowing the virus to escape and unleash a world-wide pandemic. Here are the players who seem most likely to deserve blame.

1. Chinese virologists. First and foremost, Chinese virologists are to blame for performing gain-of-function experiments in mostly BSL2-level safety conditions which were far too lax to contain a virus of unexpected infectiousness like SARS2. If the virus did indeed escape from their lab, they deserve the world’s censure for a foreseeable accident that has already caused the deaths of three  million people. True, Shi was trained by French virologists, worked closely with American virologists and was following international rules for the containment of coronaviruses. But she could and should have made her own assessment of the risks she was running. She and her colleagues bear the responsibility for their actions.

I have been using the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a shorthand for all virological activities in Wuhan. It’s possible that SARS2 was generated in some other Wuhan lab, perhaps in an attempt to make a vaccine that worked against all coronaviruses. But until the role of other Chinese virologists is clarified, Shi is the public face of Chinese work on coronaviruses, and provisionally she and her colleagues will stand first in line for opprobrium.

2. Chinese authorities. China’s central authorities did not generate SARS2, but they sure did their utmost to conceal the nature of the tragedy and China’s responsibility for it. They suppressed all records at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and closed down its virus databases. They released a trickle of information, much of which may have been outright false or designed to misdirect and mislead. They did their best to manipulate the WHO’s inquiry into the virus’s origins, and led the commission’s members on a fruitless run-around. So far they have proved far more interested in deflecting blame than in taking the steps necessary to prevent a second pandemic.

3. The worldwide community of virologists. Virologists around the world are a loose-knit professional community. They write articles in the same journals. They attend the same conferences. They have common interests in seeking funds from governments and in not being overburdened with safety regulations.

Virologists knew better than anyone the dangers of gain-of-function research. But the power to create new viruses, and the research funding obtainable by doing so, was too tempting. They pushed ahead with gain-of-function experiments. They lobbied against the moratorium imposed on Federal funding for gain-of-function research in 2014, and it was raised in 2017.

The benefits of the research in preventing future epidemics have so far been nil, the risks vast. If research on the SARS1 and MERS viruses could only be done at the BSL3 safety level, it was surely illogical to allow any work with novel coronaviruses at the lesser level of BSL2. Whether or not SARS2 escaped from a lab, virologists around the world have been playing with fire.

Their behavior has long alarmed other biologists. In 2014 scientists calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged caution on creating new viruses. In prescient words, they specified the risk of creating a SARS2-like virus. “Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns,” they wrote. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control.”

When molecular biologists discovered a technique for moving genes from one organism to another, they held a public conference at Asilomar in 1975 to discuss the possible risks. Despite much internal opposition, they drew up a list of stringent safety measures that could be relaxed in future — and duly were — when the possible hazards had been better assessed.

When the CRISPR technique for editing genes was invented, biologists convened a joint report by the US, UK and Chinese national academies of science to urge restraint on making heritable changes to the human genome. Biologists who invented gene drives have also been open about the dangers of their work and have sought to involve the public.

You might think the SARS2 pandemic would spur virologists to re-evaluate the benefits of gain-of-function research, even to engage the public in their deliberations. But no. Many virologists deride lab escape as a conspiracy theory, and others say nothing. They have barricaded themselves behind a Chinese wall of silence which so far is working well to allay, or at least postpone, journalists’ curiosity and the public’s wrath. Professions that cannot regulate themselves deserve to get regulated by others, and this would seem to be the future that virologists are choosing for themselves.

4. The US role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology. From June 2014 to May 2019, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to unsafe foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.

The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance, there was a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. Why didn’t the two agencies therefore halt the federal funding, as apparently required to do so by law? Because someone wrote a loophole into the moratorium.

The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS, or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on page 2 of the moratorium document states that “[a]n exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seems to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to Shi’s gain-of-function research.

“Unfortunately, the NIAID director and the NIH director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause—preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’ — thereby nullifying the Pause,” Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.

When the moratorium was ended in 2017, it didn’t just vanish but was replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund.

According to Ebright, both Collins and Fauci “have declined to flag and forward proposals for risk-benefit review, thereby nullifying the P3CO Framework.”

In his view, the two officials, in dealing with the moratorium and the ensuing reporting system, “have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern.”

Possibly the two officials had to take into account matters not evident in the public record, such as issues of national security. Perhaps funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is believed to have ties with Chinese military virologists, provided a window into Chinese biowarfare research. But whatever other considerations may have been involved, the bottom line is that the National Institutes of Health was supporting gain-of-function research, of a kind that could have generated the SARS2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions. The prudence of this decision can be questioned, whether or not SARS2 and the death of 3 million people were the result of it, which emphasizes the need for some better system of control.

In conclusion. If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

Nor have other scientists stepped forward to raise the issue. Government research funds are distributed on the advice of committees of scientific experts drawn from universities. Anyone who rocks the boat by raising awkward political issues runs the risk that their grant will not be renewed and their research career will be ended. Maybe good behavior is rewarded with the many perks that slosh around the distribution system. And if you thought that Andersen and Daszak might have blotted their reputation for scientific objectivity after their partisan attacks on the lab escape scenario, look at the second and third names on this list of recipients of an $82 million grant announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in August 2020.

The US government shares a strange common interest with the Chinese authorities: Neither is keen on drawing attention to the fact that Shi’s coronavirus work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation in which the Chinese government says, “If this research was so dangerous, why did you fund it, and on our territory too?” To which the US side might reply, “Looks like it was you who let it escape. But do we really need to have this discussion in public?”

Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with integrity under President Trump and has resumed leadership in the Biden Administration in handling the COVID-19 epidemic. Congress, no doubt understandably, may have little appetite for hauling him over the coals for the apparent lapse of judgment in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

To these serried walls of silence must be added that of the mainstream media. To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces. One might think that any plausible origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit a serious investigation. Or that the wisdom of continuing gain-of-function research, regardless of the virus’s origin, would be worth some probing. Or that the funding of gain-of-function research by the NIH and NIAID during a moratorium on such research would bear investigation. What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity?

The virologists’ omertà is one reason. Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won’t help, these journalists are at a loss.

Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of national intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored. This is not to argue that editors should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should have explored the possibility fully and fairly.

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

And then let the reckoning begin.

Acknowledgements

The first person to take a serious look at the origins of the SARS2 virus was Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur in Russia and Canada. In a long and brilliant essay, he dissected the molecular biology of the SARS2 virus and raised, without endorsing, the possibility that it had been manipulated. The essay, published on April 22, 2020, provided a roadmap for anyone seeking to understand the virus’s origins. Deigin packed so much information and analysis into his essay that some have doubted it could be the work of a single individual and suggested some intelligence agency must have authored it. But the essay is written with greater lightness and humor than I suspect are ever found in CIA or KGB reports, and I see no reason to doubt that Deigin is its very capable sole author.

In Deigin’s wake have followed several other skeptics of the virologists’ orthodoxy. Nikolai Petrovsky calculated how tightly the SARS2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptors of various species and found to his surprise that it seemed optimized for the human receptor, leading him to infer the virus might have been generated in a laboratory. Alina Chan published a paper showing that SARS2 from its first appearance was very well adapted to human cells.

One of the very few establishment scientists to have questioned the virologists’ absolute rejection of lab escape is Richard Ebright, who has long warned against the dangers of gain-of-function research. Another is David A. Relman of Stanford University. “Even though strong opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out with currently available facts,” he wrote. Kudos too to Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told CNN on March 26, 2021 that the “most likely” cause of the epidemic was “from a laboratory,” because he doubted that a bat virus could become an extreme human pathogen overnight, without taking time to evolve, as seemed to be the case with SARS2.

Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe.

In June 2020 Milton Leitenberg published an early survey of the evidence favoring lab escape from gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Many others have contributed significant pieces of the puzzle. “Truth is the daughter,” said Francis Bacon, “not of authority but time.” The efforts of people such as those named above are what makes it so.

Nicholas Wade is a science writer, editor, and author who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science, and, for many years, the New York Times

Alongside Interstate 71, there sits thousands of Ford Super Duty trucks, parked in rows and waiting on parts.

The scene is the latest sign of an ongoing semiconductor crisis that has stung not only the entire auto industry – but Ford specifically, who was the latest auto manufacturer to slash its expectations for full year production as a result of the shortage.

As a result, “thousands” of America’s best selling pickup trucks can be seen sitting along the highway near Sparta, Kentucky. There were 22,000 vehicles awaiting installation of chip related components, the Detroit Free Press reported this week.

Kelli Felker, Ford global manufacturing and labor communications manager said this week: “Ford will build and hold the vehicles for a number of weeks, then ship the vehicles to dealers once the modules are available and comprehensive quality checks are complete.”

“The semiconductor shortage and the impact to production will get worse before it gets better,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said during the company’s earnings call last week. 

Wall Street has been, and will continue to “pay attention” to the lots, and specifically America’s best selling pickup truck apparently hitting a full-on production stand still. 

Ford claims its shortage is no different than many other domestic manufacturers. “All automakers will be dramatically impacted by the chip shortage so it sure seems off that Ford got punished for its transparent honesty,” one analyst commented, supporting that view. Jennifer Flake, executive director of global product communications, said: “The global semiconductor shortage is affecting automakers around the world — as well as other industries, including consumer electronics companies.” 

The Detroit Free Press estimates that lost vehicle production globally this year has been projected to be:

• Ford, 362,663 fewer vehicles
• General Motors, 326,651
• Renault Nissan Mitsubishi, 284,948
• Volkswagen, 207,521
• Stellantis, 202,486
• Toyota, 113,555
• Honda, 82,482

Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, concluded: “This is a growing concern. Like COVID last year, from the beginning it seemed like it would go away in the near term but as the months go by, it’s growing into a bigger and bigger issue.”

He continued: “It takes so long to get a plant up and running that’s dedicated to these particular chips. With the increased computerization of vehicles, these chips are the lifeblood. They operate the powertrain control unit, the infotainment. You can drive a car without the infotainment system but you can’t sell a car without an infotainment system. You can’t run an engine without certain chips. They’re the nerve center of different sections of the vehicle.”

“Estimates project the full recovery of the auto chip supply will stretch into the fourth quarter of this year and possibly even into 2022, making industry volume recovery in the second half of the year even more challenging,” Farley concluded. 

Authored by Bowen Xiao via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As more and more states start easing pandemic restrictions, restaurants large and small are grappling with a widespread problem: hiring employees.

Owners and managers from New York, California, Washington, and Chicago told The Epoch Times hiring woes have become a nightmare amid a litany of other challenges like indoor occupancy rules. They say the federal unemployment bonuses handed out during the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic incentivized people to stay home instead of working.

Now, restaurants are starting the long, hard, and costly climb back to profitability. The lockdowns imposed across the country a year ago have since put out of business over 110,000 eateries, some of them permanently.

It’s become so dire that one McDonald’s location in Florida started paying $50 to anyone who would show up for a job interview. Other franchises like Taco Bell, which needs at least 5,000 new employees, are holding hiring events in parking lots.

Hiring difficulties have long existed in the service industry, even before the pandemic. But Hudson Riehle, the senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association said it’s reaching unprecedented levels.

“When it comes to recruiting workforce, in January, 7 percent of restaurant operators rated recruitment and retention of workforce as their top challenge; by April that number had risen to 57 percent,” Riehle told The Epoch Times.

“With fewer people in the workforce, the stimulus supports still in place, worker safety concerns, the need for caregivers to remain at home, and much greater competition with other industries for workers, operators are returning to pre-pandemic recruitment techniques for hiring,” he said.

‘An American Tragedy’

Mark Fox, a Dublin native who lives in New York City, owns four restaurants in the Big Apple. While business is now finally starting to pick up, hiring troubles have slowed down the momentum.

“We have difficulty hiring hourly workers, bartenders, servers, bar-backs, busboys, runners, overnight cleaning staff,” Fox told The Epoch Times inside his flagship restaurant, The Ragtrader & Bo Peep Cocktail and Highball Store.

“We are probably 60 employees short,” he said. “I have one restaurant in Greenwich Village that I haven’t reopened yet because they don’t have the manpower.”

The Ragtrader, a 300-seat restaurant in its fourth week of reopening, was hit hard last year. Fox said he lost a “devastating” amount of money. He said revenue levels currently are half of what he made in 2019 but that the needle is “moving in the right direction.”

According to Fox, the biggest factor behind the difficulty in hiring is the enhanced unemployment benefits, which now extend until the beginning of September. While he stressed it was necessary earlier in the pandemic, he believes the federal government has continued it for too long.

“It’s not financially beneficial for [people] to return to work,” he said. “So we’re in a real crisis with respect to labor shortfall.”

As Fox told his story, he described the emotional struggle he dealt with as he was forced to lay off workers on a long-term basis. At the time, they had no other resources to pull money from and Fox felt powerless to help them.

While he is an advocate of responsible social distancing and hygiene practices, Fox believes the lockdown restrictions in the city were arbitrary and not based on evidence.

“I think there was a distrust from the state government. A lot of people lost their businesses and lost their livelihoods and their dreams because of it,” he said. “And I think it’s an American tragedy, to be perfectly honest with you.”

New York City and New York state had different restrictions last year. Fox pointed out one that made him scratch his head: guests were not allowed to sit at the bar counter in New York City but they were in New York State. Restaurants in New York City tend to be smaller and the rule made it impossible for a lot of places to stay open.

And while New York state has been allowed a 50 percent occupancy right through to today, New York City closed down twice and restaurants were given 25 percent occupancy mandates for many months. Fox described how he had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to bring in protective equipment, sanitizing equipment, temperature checkers, and more.

People spent money they didn’t have, and ended up closed again, he said. He also called the 10 p.m. curfew “ridiculous.”

“I believe our state and city leaders didn’t do their job,” he said. “I think that they made arbitrary decisions based on hunches. I hope that they’re held to account for it.”

Andrew Rigie the executive director at the NYC Hospitality Alliance, a nonprofit association representing eating and drinking establishments, said restaurants are facing a “complex labor shortage” on top of an economic crisis.

“We need a plan and policies to help get more people back to work,” Rigie told The Epoch Times via email.

Unemployment Checks

Jim Walker, a local restauranteur in California and former president of the Newport Beach Restaurant Association, said the entire industry has been thrown into disarray.

“People are staying home because they can make more money from stimulus extension than if they go back to work,” he said.

“Those coming across the border who might normally immediately become part of the labor market are not doing so because of all the government aid currently being handed out,” he added. “They are not motivated or desperate to get a job once they are in the U.S.”

New York City, for example, has set aside $2.1 billion in funds from the state budget to pay illegal immigrants who lost work during the pandemic.

Walker’s wife recently went to a restaurant in San Juan Capistrano. When the bill came there was a 4 percent “Kitchen Appreciation Fee.” Some restaurants, according to Walker, are now charging a “COVID Recovery Fee” as well, and many consumers are not even noticing the extra charges.

One chef and owner of a seafood restaurant franchise in California summed up the dismal situation in a now-viral Twitter post.

“There are no employees available in California,” Andrew Gruel wrote on April 29. “We are paying dishwashers $21 to start. The two main reasons people tell me they won’t work: They are making enough on unemployment and would rather not work; 2. With schools closed, they can’t pay someone to watch their children.”

Gruel added in a follow-up post that not a single person he spoke to said they were scared of the virus.

Out of Options

Keisha Rucke, owner of The Soul Shack, said her restaurant is short-staffed and she is always on the lookout for new hires.

Rucke told The Epoch Times she needs four more servers, a line person for the day and one for the evening, and another cleaning crew. Her cooking staff, however, have stayed with her through everything over the last two years since they opened.

“I just hired two cashiers. I couldn’t get cashiers for a month,” she said. “I literally had people here multitasking. I was cashiering, I actually had to hire my daughter to come in.”

Two of her friends who own restaurants in the area told her they had to adjust their hours for dine-in because of a lack of servers. Rucke said she now is paying a higher hourly rate for her own servers in order to entice them into work.

She believes there are multiple reasons why hiring is hard, including that people are still taking in unemployment checks that are probably higher than the paychecks they would get from working, or they are still afraid of coming out due to the pandemic.

“I don’t know what is that we can do,” she said. “I see so many signs where people are looking for servers and line persons and cashiers that I don’t think it’s only a restaurant industry thing at this point.”

Unpredictability

Eric St. Clair, manager at Proper 21, a bar located in Washington, said the hardest part of hiring for them was the unpredictability. One day they would be super busy all day, and then the next they would be understaffed.

They closed entirely for 3 months last year, and while they had a few former employees come back, some went to other industries like beauty and construction. While hiring is a factor, the biggest issue the bar is facing now is the restaurant restrictions imposed by Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser.

“It’s just kind of crippling restaurants now,” he told The Epoch Times. “They are still keeping us at 25 percent when other states have lifted outdoor masks and Virginia is going back to bar seating.”

“I wish she would open it up,” he said. “A bunch of bars have sent her letters recommending opening back up, but she’s just not budging right now.”

St. Clair noted that smaller restaurants were hurt much harder than corporate restaurants or chains. He described how for the longest time, their restaurants would just have one manager and one bartender doing everything.

Emel Akan, Cara Ding, and Lynn Hackman contributed to this report