“No Hope”: Canada’s Nursing Homes Prepare For Mass Death
Nursing homes in Canada have been instructed by health officials to ‘keep seniors comfortable’ if they contract COVID-19 and not take them to the hospital due to their high mortality rate, according to Canada’s Global News.
“They’re treating it like a hospice, like there’s no hope like they have stage four brain cancer and they just have to keep them comfortable because there’s nothing they can do,” said Tanya Bartley, whose grandmother died last month at Pinecrest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon, Ontario – where 22 residents have died and 1/3 of the staff are in isolation due to coronavirus.
“They don’t play god. Everybody is the same. I don’t care if it’s a two-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 20-year-old, middle-aged, elderly. I don’t care,” Bartley added.
One dementia-stricken resident, Edna Bowers, was one such coronavirus victim who was treated at the home and not transferred to the hospital.
In a March 23 letter seen by Global News, Dr. Allan Bell – medical director and chief of emergency medicine at Quinte Health Care (QHC) in Belleville, Ontario, outlines suggestions on how long-term care administrators should prepare for potential COVID-19 outbreaks in their facilities.
“Having this conversation pre-emptively is very important. It gives families time to digest the information when they are not in a crisis situation and, should an outbreak happen, it is difficult to manage all of the conversations at once,” reads the letter in part, while also recommending against hospital visits – citing a shortage of medical options for frail patients.
“Our critical care colleagues are of the strong opinion that ventilator treatment will not make a survival difference to patients who are frail and ventilator support is very unlikely to be offered,” the letter continues “for those residents who go on to develop respiratory failure, care needs to focus on the provision of comfort to ease suffering at the end of life.”
When reached by Global News for comment, Ontario’s Health Minister Christine Elliott said she was unaware of the guidelines – adding that nobody would be denied care in an ER.
“If people are ill enough that they have to go to hospital of course they will be transported to hospital. If they’re showing symptoms of COVID-19, they’ve been diagnosed with it but they can be maintained in self-isolation within the home; we’ll do that too but no one is going to be denied health care if they need it,” she said.
Elliott says no patient has been “blocked” from hospitals, adding: “If they need to be taken there they will be taken there.”
It’s unclear where the directive came from, as several complainants came forward to Global News with similar experiences.
One family in southwestern Ontario says their loved one was asked to sign a waiver agreeing to remain at the long-term care home she resides at in the event of an outbreak. –Global News
According to health officials, residents of long-term care homes are being screened twice daily and are subject to more intense screening in order to try and limit the spread of the virus.
“I’d Rather Vote For Trump” – Bernie-Backing Joe Rogan Disses Dems For “Making Us All Look Dumb Over Biden”
Comdeian and host of one of the world’s most popular podcasts, Joe Rogan, has said he would rather vote for Donald Trump than Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, should the former vice-president become the Democratic nominee.
Speaking on April 3 with guest Eric Weinstein, a mathematician, economist, and managing director of Thiel Capital, Rogan said he “could not” vote for Biden, adding that the Democratic Party has “essentially made us all morons.”
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think that in general people, when they are given no choice at all, express themselves moronically.
JOE ROGAN:When they are given no choice at all — How so?
WEINSTEIN: I want a choice of an actual president that’s viable. I don’t have one. Now you’re going to ask me which of the none-viable people do you like best?
ROGAN:This is the real issue with the Democratic Party. They’ve essentially made us all morons with this Joe Biden thing.
WEINSTEIN: Can you imagine?
ROGAN: I can’t vote for that guy.
WEINSTEIN: I can’t vote for him, I can’t vote for Trump.
ROGAN: I’d rather vote for Trump than [Biden]. I don’t think he can handle anything. You’re relying entirely on his cabinet. If you want to talk about an individual leader who can communicate, he can’t do that. And we don’t know what the fuck he’ll be like after a year in office.
Joe Rogan:
The Democratic Party “has made us all morons with this Joe Biden thing… I would rather vote for Trump than him. I don’t think he can handle anything.” pic.twitter.com/IDYJCwRX2F
“The pressure of being the president of the United States is something that no one has ever prepared for. The only one who seems to be fine with it is Trump, oddly enough. He doesn’t seem to be aging at all, or in any sort of decline. Obama, almost immediately, started looking older. George W, almost immediately, started looking older,” Rogan added.
Speaking of Biden, Rogan also noted that the former vice president can “barely talk,” and “forgets what he is saying halfway in the conversation.”
Describing the former vice president’s speech as “not a normal way to communicate unless he’s high as f**k,” Rogan alos pointed out that Biden is “showing actual real deterioration, he is not bouncing back.”
Watch the full podcast here:
Rogan had previously said that he would “probably vote” for Sanders back in January, noting that the Vermont Senator has been “insanely consistent his entire life.”
“I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie. Him, as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him, I like him, I like him a lot,” he told New York Times columnist Bari Weiss in a podcast, which was later retweeted by Sanders.
“He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from,” Rogan added.
“I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie… He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.” -Joe Rogan pic.twitter.com/fuQP0KwGGI
As of April 5, Biden is on track to win the nomination, securing 1,217 of the 1,991 delegates needed in the primaries held up to this point. His socialist rival, Sanders, has 914 delegates. According to the Washington Post, aides and allies of Sanders have advised him to step down from the presidential race after losing hope in his campaign.
‘Modern Piracy’: Germany Joins France & Canada In Accusing Trump Of Stealing Masks
On Friday Germany lashed at the United States for what one top lawmaker in Berlin called “an act of modern piracy” after US authorities “confiscated” a Chinese-manufactured shipment of 200,000 protective masks after they arrived at a port in Thailand while en route to Germany.
In an amazing irony, the masks had actually been purchased by the German government from an American company — though manufactured in China — and yet the US still intercepted them at a moment Trump has warned US companies with factories in China they’ll “have a big price to pay” if they don’t increase supply to the US.
By the end of the week in total three US allies accused Washington of theft over intercepts and seizures of supplies being shipped out of China, namely Canada, France and Germany.
Image via BBC
Berlin Interior Minister Andreas Geisel stated bluntly of Washington’s brazen move: “Even in times of global crisis, we should not be ruled by Wild West methods,” according to Deutsche Welle. The German newspaper explained further:
The state of Berlin had ordered FFP2-class respirators for Berlin police officers, who continue to operate during the crisis.
The chairman of the SPD parliamentary group, Rolf Mützenich, said the confiscation was “illegal” and called for the incident to be clarified.
Interestingly, this whole episode underscores just how desperately strained the US health system is becoming under the COVID-19 panemic, considering the unprecedented lengths the US administration is willing to go, essentially resorting to “piracy” – as Germany put it.
We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. “P Act” all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay!
Canada on Thursday also lashed out after US authorities apparently muscled their way into redirecting a protective gear shipment intended for America’s northern neighbor. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was“concerned” over reports that a crucial major shipment was depleted after “a higher bidder” took advantage of the situation. “We understand that the needs in the US are very extensive, but it’s the same in Canada, so we have to work together,” Trudeau said.
The same allegation was made by French officials. “The leader of the Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris, accused unidentified Americans of swooping in with cash at the last minute to secure shipments already promised to French buyers,” AFP reported.
Valerie Pecresse, government minister over France’s most populous region, said that Washington is “just looking to do business on the back of the whole world’s distress,” in a television interview. Other French ministers reported similar experiences when trying to procure emergency protective gear.
As a planeload of masks was loaded up and prepared for departure from Shanghai to France this week, American buyers turned up on the tarmac at the last minute to purchase the shipment for three times its value. “A French order was bought out with cash by Americans on the tarmac, and the plane that was to fly to France took off for the US instead,”Rénaud Muselier, the head of the southeastern Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region told RT France on Wednesday.
The US side, meanwhile, has vehemently denied the allegations. “The United States government has not purchased any masks intended for delivery from China to France,” a senior Trump administration official told AFP. “Reports to the contrary are completely false.”
However, it’s highly unusual if not unheard of that three close US allies at the same time would come forward to accuse the US of ‘theft’ and even “piracy” — and further of bullying tactics at a moment global crisis. It will be interesting to see if the reports continue and grow into next week as Trump ramps up his rhetoric both against China and domestic companies over-reliant on their foreign-based factories.
Regardless, the damage is done, and US officials should be wary that inevitably in international relations what goes around comes around— meaning the Europeans are no doubt already planning their revenge, and could ‘return the favor’ sometime in the near or distant future, at some crucial moment Washington will be desperate to swing things its way.
Anyone with some basic knowledge in mathematical modeling who had taken a look at the structure of the “Imperial College”-model would have noted the faults of this approach and its exaggerations. The model’s prognosis that the United Kingdom would have to count with more than half a million deaths and a complete overload of its health system reversed the British government’s earlier decision to use prudential surveillance and specifically targeted intervention and to shift to the full-control strategy, which required massive intervention into the public and private life of the nation. The leaders of other countries that were somewhat still in doubt jumped on the bandwagon and the march into a tyrannical State was programmed.
It was too late when the authors of the model finally revised their original estimate from 500 thousand to 20 thousand and later on lowered this number even more. The governments had already set into motion their emergency plans.
After declaring the coronavirus a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), agendas that had been prepared years ago were set into motion and the state agencies followed the procedures that were prescribed by the International Health Regulations (IHR) as the international legal instrument that is binding on 196 countries across the globe, including all the Member States of WHO.
Even now, months after the outbreak of the virus, the true size of the threat remains unclear. The quantitative basis is still too small to make a reliable projection.
If the modelers and the responsible government bodies had looked at the basic numbers instead of elaborating an apparently sophisticated model, they would have noticed that there has been no noticeable rise of the death rate. A look at the overall death statistics shows flat lines with fluctuations within its natural range. Even in Italy, there has not yet been a higher number of deaths than usual in the past couple of months. In absolute numbers, the death count is actually slightly down because of the seasonal factor that wintertime is over.
Figure 1: Pooled number of deaths in reporting countries for age groups
The point to note is that there has been an increased mortality rate in specific areas of Italy yet in relative terms the heightened frequency of deaths is not strong enough to show up in the national statistics. The epicenter of the virus outbreak in Italy is concentrated in its Northern part and there in specific cities. The overall reported death toll of COVID-19 does not appear in a significant measure beyond earlier peaks. (Figure 2).
What makes the coronavirus crisis special is not the number of deaths but the reaction to the outbreak. Out of fear that the epidemic would get out of control and that the health care systems would be over-fraught with cases, governments in Europe, the United States and in many other countries implanted measures to ward off the spread of the coronavirus.
The amazing thing with the reaction is how in unison this was done and how drastic the measures are. When the WHO triggered the alarm bell, governments that had treaties in place to act according to pre-established plans in the case of declared “pandemic” virtually locked-up large parts of the population of whole countries and brought their economies to a standstill. As a consequence, many people suffer from paranoia because of the existential fears that come when economically active people see the source of their incomes vanish and the elderly have to watch how the savings in their pension accounts melts down or when getting sick are put away to eventually die alone in a hospital because visits even of their close relatives are prohibited.
If there had been no media hype about the coronavirus and if the governments had not resorted to drastic measures in foolish obeyance and submission to the commands by the World Health Organization, hardly anyone beyond some specialists probably would have noticed the coronavirus. Mutations of viruses happen all of the time and most of them do not do more harm than the influenza virus. The family of coronavirus is very large and its existence has been known since the 1960s.
Bound by their international legal obligations and confronted with a media hype, governments began to implement ever harsher measures to contain the virus and “flatten the curve” of its dissemination. The media helped to create a reality of its own as Niklas Luhmann had shown in his sociological studies with the difference between the “imagined reality” of the media (Medienwirklichkeit) and the reality of life (Lebenswirklichkeit).
Governments succumbed to the World Health Organization, were brought under the spell of the public hysteria and fell hostage to the medical-industrial complex, whose political arm is the WHO and which rapidly has assumed a role to act as a kind of world government.
In order to justify their draconian measures, governments claim that their policy is about “saving lives”. Yet there is no way “to save lives” for good. The best we can do is to gain a little more time to live and to avoid an early death. Therefore, the question is not whether to save lives or not, but by which measures we will gain more years or may lose time to live. When we close down the economy, those who thereby avoid contagion will gain a few more years. On the other hand, because of the shutdown, millions of people will lose many years of their lifetime. Make your choice.
Not the coronavirus will ruin us you but the coming recession and if the recession does not ruin us, the hyperinflation combined with a depression will do. It is as if the Tower had given the command to the pilot to turn off the engines of the airplane in mid-air because of the presumption that there might be some unknown danger at the destination airport.
We do not know whether the number of infected will decrease because of the measures that are in place now, but we can be certain that the number of suicides, divorces, alcoholics, indebted, impoverished and bankrupt persons will increase.
In a historical perspective, we are currently not experiencing anything new or unusual, and the general human hysteria is nothing other than what has been experienced many times in history. But this should not make us complacent. The hype of public opinion creates a mass psychosis that brings down the fools and wise equally.
Politics always wins. When this panic is over as the rate of contagions slows down and the death toll does no longer rise, governments will claim that this is so because of their measures even when, in fact, these were unnecessary from the beginning and the infection rate would have fallen anyway.
What’s going on? Not a deadly disease is the threat but the global hysteria. If the panic should continue, millions will die, not from COVID-19 but from the economic breakdown.
The panic has no basis in the facts. There are emergencies, but they are locally concentrated such as in specific cities in a specific region of Italy. More than a quarter of the world has opted to lock in their populations and shutdown their economies, among them many European countries, the United States, Canada, and Australia. While this may slow down the spread of the contagion, it will bring down our capacity to deal with our other needs, including the provision of medicine.
No-one knows for sure how deadly the coronavirus really is. The perceived path of contagion is a projection. This will also be the case with a future appearance of new viruses and their modification. Sooner or later, when COVID-19 is over, COVID-20 will show up and thereafter COVID-21 will come.
Our wants are always manifold and therefore require a trade-off. The idea of “saving lives” as an absolute good is absurd and can only gain such prominence in a society that has lost its touch with the elementary truths of human existence.
Tunisia Unleashes ‘Robocop’ To Enforce Virus Lockdown
Like almost every country in the world, the virus crisis has been a cover to usher in a massive surveillance state.
The latest example of this dystopic future coming to realty much quicker than anyone has anticipated is in Tunisia, reported AFP.
Tunisia’s interior ministry has deployed a four-wheeled robot that harasses people if they’re violating the strict public health orders to shelter-at-home.
The robot is known as PGuard, uses infrared and thermal imaging cameras to hunt for people who are violating the public health order. If someone is spotted, the robot will chase them down and ask:
“What are you doing? Show me your ID. You don’t know there’s a lockdown?”
Last week, one unsuspecting man was busted by a PGuard robot. Here’s the video of how it all went down:
As of Saturday morning, Tunisia has confirmed 495 COVID-19 cases and 18 virus-related deaths. The North African country has been under night-time curfew since March 17, and stricter lockdowns were implemented on March 22, with expected lockdowns that could extend through April.
Enova Robotics, the PGuard manufacturer, headquartered in Sousse, Tunisia, told AFP the robot is capable of security patrols via a remote operator or autonomously through artificial intelligence.
Tunisia’s interior ministry is expected to deploy a fleet of PGuard robots in the near term. Some robots will patrol around hospitals, while others will monitor streets for those who violate curfew.
Social media users have referred to PGuard as ‘robocop’ as it patrols streets in the country’s capital.
We’ve noted how ground-based robots and unmanned aircraft have been used across the world to combat the fast-spreading virus. We showed readers last week how “pandemic drones,” used to detect if people have a fever or are sneezing and coughing, are soon going to be deploying in cities to detect virus carriers.
The outbreak is proving to be the Trojan horse that justifies the ushering in of the surveillance state. Governments and corporations are quickly deploying big data and spy tools to monitor people during the pandemic.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, and now the war on COVID-19: All start as legitimate responses but then are used by politicians to increase the surveillance state and erode any freedoms citizens have left.
Russia’s urgent dispatch of counter-COVID aid to America was both symbolic and substantial in the sense that it improved the country’s reputation among average Americans which in turn advances Trump’s years-long case for a “New Detente” between these two Great Powers.
From Russia With Love
Observers could be forgiven for not believing it when they first heard the news, but Russia just urgently dispatched counter-COVID aid to America in a real-life scene that seems ripped from the pages of political fiction. Had anyone speculated about this scenario just a few short months ago, practically nobody would have believed them, butWorld War C is truly turning the world upside down faster than anyone could have expected. This humanitarian assistance was sent after Trump agreed to his Russian counterpart’s proposal during a phone call earlier this week, with President Putin likely offering his country’s aid in order to help the American people caught in the new global epicenter of this crisis and also to show his unwavering solidarity with the US during this time of need just like how he reacted immediately after he found out about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Looking beyond his noble intentions, it’s clear that this move was both symbolic and substantial in the sense that it improved the country’s reputation among average Americans which in turn advances Trump’s years-long case for a “New Detente” between these two Great Powers.
Soft Power…
Regarding the soft power angle, Russia killed several birds with a single stone, though it should always be remembered that it wouldn’t have been able to do this had Trump not approved. The fake news that up to 80% of its earlier aid to Italy was “useless” has now been debunked and all but forgotten after a country much more powerful than the Southern European one (and which arguably exerts a strong degree of hegemonic control over its affairs) accepted President Putin’s similar proposal for humanitarian assistance.
Seeing as how the planet is now fighting World War C, this could serve to remind the average American of their country’s wartime alliance with the USSR during World War II against the shared scourge of fascism. Not only could that improve Russia’s overall standing in their eyes following four years of interconnected fake news scandals, but it could also have the effect of getting them to passively agree to any forthcoming moves that Trump might eventually propose related to easing the sanctions regime against that country.
While their geopolitical rivalry still undoubtedly exists and probably won’t go away anytime soon (if at all), now is the perfect time for these two to consider the wisdom of more closely cooperating with one another on all fronts.
…And Substance
Their joint struggle against COVID-19 has captivated the world’s attention precisely because of how unexpected it was that Russia of all countries would end up sending humanitarian assistance to America. Trump willingly gave Russia an historically unprecedented soft power victory, but he did so with keen strategic calculations in mind. He’s been facing intense opposition from some of his permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) over the past few years over his desire to enter into a “New Detente” with Russia, which the author explained more in detail in his August 2019 analysis about how “The ‘New Detente’ Is Proceeding Apace, And China Should Be Very Concerned“.
In a nutshell, the US believes that reaching a series of “pragmatic compromises” with Russia over Syria, Ukraine, and other issues could facilitate that country’s rapprochement with the West and thus comparatively lessen its growing strategic dependence on China by default, which Moscow turned to more out of necessity than choice following the sudden commencement of the New Cold War in 2013-2014.
The problem, however, is that so-called “Cold Warriors” and other anti-Russian hawks believe that this strategy is fated to fail because they simply don’t trust Moscow.
Defying The “Deep State” (With Saudi Help?)
Therein lays one of the geneses of the Russiagate conspiracy (the other being to discredit Trump’s populist policies at home), but Trump brilliantly realized the mutual benefits of letting President Putin score a soft power victory in order to advance their countries’ shared strategic interests related to the “New Detente”.
With Americans now more aware than ever before that Russia isn’t the “dastardly villain” that many of them have been brainwashed by the “deep state” and its surrogates (both in Congress and the Mainstream Media) into believing, they might naturally be more in support of Trump’s original promise to enter into a meaningful rapprochement with the country after Moscow sent them aid that literally saved people’s lives.
Before getting to that point, however, Trump and President Putin appear to be on the verge of a “goodwill experiment” to test one another’s true intentions given what the American leader said about his country potentially joiningrumored Russian-Saudi oil talks to reverse the recent price crash that devastated the global economy at its most vulnerable moment. Should this initiative succeed and all three countries establish a mechanism (whether formal or informal) to restore the oil price, then the next phase of the “New Detente” might begin shortly after.
Concluding Thoughts
The US and Russia are already in talks on a wide array of issues including energy geopolitics in Europe, NATO, Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, et al., so it’s only natural for them to finally make some progress on reaching the long-awaited series of “pragmatic compromises” that Trump originally wanted to clinch during the first year of his presidency but was prevented from doing so by his “deep state’s” fake news Russiagate scandals. Now is the perfect time for defying the “deep state” with the support of the American people after they’ve come to suddenly have a much more favorable view of their country’s rival after it urgently dispatched humanitarian assistance to them with Trump’s support in order to help everyone improve their odds of surviving World War C.
This soft power “coup” was made possible by Presidents Trump and Putin cooperating in pursuit of their shared interests, but it might (inadvertently in terms of Russian motivations) have the potential to become a strategic “coup” with time if Russia’s eventual rapprochement with the West lessens its growing dependence on China and thus places the People’s Republic in a comparatively more disadvantageous position than before.
That’s certainly not Russia’s intent, but few doubt that it’s the US’.
On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks.
The Gates interview is the second in a new series of daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews focused on COVID-19. The series’s website says that:
TED Connects: Community and Hope is a free, live, daily conversation series featuring experts whose ideas can help us reflect and work through this uncertain time with a sense of responsibility, compassion and wisdom.”
“You wrote that this could be the once-in-a-century pandemic that people have been fearing. Is that how you think of it, still?” queried Anderson.
“Well, it’s awful to say this but, we could have a respiratory virus whose case fatality rate was even higher. If this was something like smallpox, that kills 30 percent of people. So this is horrific,” responded Gates.
“But, in fact, most people even who get the COVID disease are able to survive. So in that, it’s quite infectious – way more infectious than MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] or SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] were. [But] it’s not as fatal as they were. And yet the disruption we’re seeing in order to knock it down is really completely unprecedented.”
Gates reiterates the dire consequences for the global economy later in the interview.
“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But … bringing the economy back and doing [sic] money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in disease and death dimension.”
However, this goes directly against the imperative to balance the benefits and costs of the screening, testing and treatment measures for each ailment – as successfully promulgated for years by, for example, the Choosing Wisely campaign – to provide the maximum benefit to individual patients and society as a whole
As noted in an April 1 article in OffGuardian, there may be dramatically more deaths from the economic breakdown than from COVID-19 itself.
“By all accounts, the impact of the response will be great, far-reaching, and long-lasting,”
Kevin Ryan wrote in the article. Ryan estimated that well over two million people will likely die from the sequelae of the lock-downs and other drastic measures to enforce ‘social distancing.’
Millions could potentially die from suicide, drug abuse, lack of medical coverage or treatment, poverty and lack of food access, on top of other predictable social, medical and public-health problems stemming from the response to COVID-19.
Gates and Anderson did not touch on any of those sequelae. Instead, they focused on rapidly ramping up testing and medical interventions for COVID-19.
Gates said at 30:29 in the interview that he and a large team are moving fast to test anti-virals, vaccines and other therapeutics and to bring them to market as quickly as possible.
The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust with support from Mastercard and now others, created this therapeutic accelerator to really triage out [candidate therapeutics]…
You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, ‘Try this, try that.’ So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be done all over the world.”
Not long before that, on January 23, Gates’s organization the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it will fund three programs to develop COVID-19 vaccines. These are the advancing of DNA-vaccine candidates against MERS and Lassa fever, the development of a “‘molecular clamp’ platform” that “enables targeted and rapid vaccine production against multiple viral pathogens,” and the manufacture and Phase 1 clinical study of an mRNA vaccine against COVID.
“The programmes will leverage rapid response platforms already supported by CEPI as well as a new partnership. The aim is to advance nCoV-2019 vaccine candidates into clinical testing as quickly as possible,” according to a news release.
Then at 32:50 in the video, Anderson asked whether the blood serum from people who have recovered from a COVID infection can be used to treat others.
“I heard you mention that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the blood serum of people who had had the disease and then recovered. So I guess they’re carrying antibodies,” said Anderson.
“Talk a bit about that and how that could work and what it would take to accelerate that.”
[Note that Anderson did not ask Gates about, instead, just letting most of the population – aside from people most vulnerable to serious illness from the infection, who should be quarantined — be exposed to COVID-19 and as a result very likely recover and develop life-long immunity. As at least one expert has observed, “as much as ninety-nine percent of active cases [of COVID-19] in the general population are ‘mild’ and do not require specific medical treatment” to recover.]
“This has always been discussed as, ‘How could you pull that off?’” replied Gates.
“So people who are recovered, it appears, have very effective antibodies in their blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out white cells, the immune cells.”
However, Gates continued, he and his colleagues have dismissed that possibility because it’s “fairly complicated – compared to a drug we can make in high volume, you know, the cost of taking it out and putting it back in probably doesn’t scale as well.”
Then a few seconds later, at 33:45, Gates drops another bomb:
We don’t want to have a lot of recovered people…
To be clear, we’re trying – through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million [people or approximately one percent of the U.S. population being infected with COVID-19 and the vast majority recovering]. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.”
It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.
And then, when the virus comes back again a few months later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, again selling billions of test kits and medical interventions.
Right after that, at 34:14, Gates talked about how he sees things rolling out from there.
Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…
…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly.
You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.
So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”
[Some time on the afternoon of March 31 the last sentence of this quote was edited out of the official TED video of the interview. Fortunately, recordings of the complete interview are archived elsewhere.]
In the October 2019 Event 201 novel-corona virus-pandemic simulation co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a poll that was part of the simulation said that 65% of people in the U.S. would be eager to take a vaccine for COVID-19, “even if it’s experimental.”
This will be tremendously lucrative.
Vaccines are very big business: this Feb. 23 CNBC article, for example, describes the vaccine market as six times bigger than it was 20 years ago, at more than $35 billion annually today, and providing a $44 return for every $1 invested in the world’s 94 lowest-income countries.
Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2000, according to a 2017 Politico article. (While over the same time frame countries have reduced their contributions to the world body, particularly after the 2008-2009 depression, and now account for less than one-quarter of the WHO’s budget.) The WHO is now coordinating approximately 50 groups around the world that are working on candidate vaccines against COVID-19.
The Politico article quotes a Geneva-based NGO representative as saying Gates is “treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” and that Gates is one of the most influential people in global health.
Meanwhile, officials around the world are doing their part to make sure everyone social distances, self-isolates and/or stay locked down.
For example, here’s Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Eileen DE Villa, at her and Toronto Mayor John Tory’s March 30 press briefing:
“We find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. We should expect some more people will get sick – and for some, sadly, will die.
This is why it is so important to stay at home to reduce virus spread. And to protect front-line workers, healthcare workers and our essential workers, so they can continue to protect us. People shouldn’t have to die, people shouldn’t have to risk death taking care of us because others won’t practice social distancing or physical distancing.”
Yet look how close Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, is sitting to Haley Chazan, Senior Manager, Media Relations, for Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health of Ontario.
This was on Friday, March 27, just before the start of that day’s daily press conference by Dr. Williams and Ontario’s Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe:
They were sitting two seats, or just a couple of feet, apart. A short time later Chazan got up and stood even closer to Dr. Williams for a little while:
Dr. Williams and Chazan do not live together. Rather, Dr. Williams very likely knows – just as Gates knows – that there is little any reason to worry about being in close contact with other people unless you or they are vulnerable to developing a severe illness from COVID-19. He surely knows, also, that if you contract COVID-19 and you’re otherwise healthy you’ll very likely have few symptoms, if any, and recover quickly. And that this exposure in fact is beneficial because in the process you will develop antibodies to the virus and have natural, long-lasting immunity to it.
Yet in the March 27 press conference, just like all the others he has participated in during the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Williams lectured the public about maintaining social distancing. He told people not to go outside on the coming weekend to enjoy the nice weather because, otherwise, they might walk past someone and not be two metres apart.
Dr. Williams is among the large cadre of powerful officials who’ve crashed the global economy by forcing tens of millions of small- and medium-sized businesses to close in the name of the need for forced, severe, social distancing and lock-downs.
They’ve shattered society, suspended most civil liberties and prohibited most activities and connections that kept people mentally and physically healthy. At the same time the officials have prioritized COVID-19 care over everything else and, as a result, severely limited billions of people’s access to life-saving healthcare services ranging from acquiring medication and blood transfusions to having organ transplants and cancer surgeries.
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Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a freelance medical journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist in Canada. You can find her recent detailed investigative analysis of COVID here and follow her on Twitter.
Mysterious Colorado Doomsday Shelter For When “Law & Order Breaks Down” Sees Spike In Interest
As the pandemic unfolds across the US, city dwellers are getting the hell out of dodge and escaping to rural areas. We noted this last week, with many leaving large metro areas in California, fleeing for the mountains and rural communities to limit their probabilities of contracting COVID-19. Now it appears the virus crisis is evolving, as fears of social unrest across large US metro areas are spiking interest in doomsday shelters.
The Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned last week that a “social bomb” is getting ready to explode across Western cities amid the collapse of economies and high unemployment. This has forced many people to request information about a mysterious doomsday ranch in Colorado, called Fortitude Ranch, stockpiled with food, weapons, ammo, and designated bunkers, reported CBS4 Denver.
The ranch describes itself as “a survival community equipped to survive any disaster and long-term loss of law and order,” and its actual location is unknown to non-members.
“Fortitude Ranch is a survival community equipped to survive any type of disaster and long-term loss of law and order, managed by full time staff. Fortitude Ranch is affordable (about $1,000/person annually) because of large numbers of members and economies of scale. Fortitude Ranch is especially attractive to join because it doubles as a recreation and vacation facility as well as a survival retreat. Members can vacation, hunt, fish and recreate at our forest and mountain locations in good times, and shelter at Fortitude Ranch to survive a collapse,” the company’s website said.
Drew Miller, a retired Air Force Colonel, operates several ranches in Colorado and West Virginia, with ten more locations expected in the near term.
“If law and order breaks down, then by all means, we will open and ask our members to come, but thus far our members pretty well understand that they really don’t need to be at Fortitude Ranch now,” Miller said.
The beginning innings of social unrest could be unfolding in the US. President Trump signed an executive order last Friday that could call up as many as one million reserves, not to fight the virus solely, but to maintain social order.
If an economic crisis collapses the US government, the doomsday ranch states that it will operate a “fleet of aircraft” that can travel to and from other sites, as it says, “overland travel may be unsafe for a long time.”
And for years, mainstream media laughed at the prepper community – calling anyone who preps a “tin foil hat conspiracy theorist,” but, in a few short months, it’s those who bashed preppers are the crazy ones as they frantically storm big-box retailers without 3M N95 masks for food.
The virus storm has triggered the next big shift: a mass exodus of cities as lockdowns Martial law has confined people to their studio apartments, with no security of land, no weapons for protection, and limited food. And where are the people that manage to escape the city going? Well, besides a doomsday ranch, there is also a huge demand for “prepper properties…”
The next chapter of the virus crisis could be here in a matter of weeks, as lockdowns are being extended across the Western world, now till the end of April, people are now starting to get frustrated with governments.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson’s retweet of an article blaming the US for infecting Wuhan with coronavirus went viral, viewed 160 million times within hours. But where did the story come from?
By now, the early history of Covid-19 is well known, if not clear in its details. The virus was first detected somewhere around Wuhan, in Hubei province, then appears to have entered the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, from where it infected many others. Doctors in Wuhan first noticed the novel coronavirus in December and began exchanging urgent warnings.
Local government authorities set out to silence them; some were detained and made to sign documents admitting wrongdoing.Meanwhile, Wuhan officials went about business as usual, which included a disastrous Lunar New Year banquet attended by about 40,000 families. Soon, many more thousands around Wuhan were infected, with hundreds dead or dying, including ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who had been punished for trying to raise the alarm.Realising it was in the firing line not just for running the nation that had unleashed the deadly virus on the world but also for ignoring, covering up and denying its spread, China’s Communist Party moved into damage-control mode. This included suggesting it was the United Statesthat was responsible for the virus.
Chinese state media regularly tweet propaganda and what many describe as “fake news”. Global Times has 1.7 million followers on Twitter; China Xinhua News, 12.6 million; People’s Daily, 7.1 million; China Daily, 4.3 million; and China Global Television Network (CGTN), 14 million.
Zhao Lijian, spokesman and deputy director general of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Photo: Kyodo
Zhao Lijian, spokesman and deputy director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ information department, had 287,000 followers when he tweeted a link to a conspiracy website alleging the US was responsible for the virus. (Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying had 146,700 followers; the ministry’s “spokesperson” account, used by Geng Shuang, had 61,000; and Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of Global Times, had 175,000.)
With the outbreak of an epidemic, one of the first jobs of scientists and doctors, even while they fight to save lives, is to identify its source. This is critical in the search for medicines to combat a virus and a vaccine to prevent its spread.
On January 24, an article written jointly by 29 Chinese medical doctors and scientists was published in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals. The authors shared their findings from a study of patients who were suspected of having been infected with 2019-nCoV and had been admitted to a Wuhan hospital. The report said that by January 2, 41 of them had been “laboratory-confirmed” as infected with the virus – which causes Covid-19 – and two-thirds of those infected “had been exposed to the Huanan market”.
The findings appeared to support anecdotal evidence that the source of the virus was the market, which had been closed by city officials on January 1. This had been often repeated by Chinese authorities and reported widely in the global media. The Lancet article gave scientific currency to this narrative.
Then, on February 19, another study – this time published on ChinaXiv.org, an open repository and distribution website used by scientific researchers – suggested the market was likely not ground zero for the virus, but rather that it had been “imported”from outside.
The study was by a team of scientists from several institutions: Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences; South China Agricultural University; and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research. It was revised on February 21. Neither version of the study suggested Covid-19 had originated outside China.
But the fake news machine was about to go to work.
On February 23, the People’s Daily’s English-language site reprinted a February 22 Global Times article titled, “Japanese TV report sparks speculations in China that Covid-19 may have originated in US”. The original Global Times article, which is no longer available online, began: “A report from a Japanese TV station that suspected some of the 14,000 Americans died of influenza may have unknowningly [sic] contracted the coronavirus has gone viral on Chinese social media, stoking fears and speculations in China that the novel coronavirus may have originated in the US.
“The report, by TV Asahi Corporation of Japan, suggested that the US government may have failed to grasp how rampant the virus have gone [sic] on the US soil.”
The article continued: “The story sparked various conspiracy theories on [sic] Chinese cyberspace.
“The Military World Games were held in Wuhan in October. ‘Perhaps the US delegates brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, and some mutation occurred to the virus, making it more deadly and contagious, and causing a widespread outbreak this year,’ a user posted on China’s Twitter-like Weibo.
“[An] international relations professor at the Shanghai-based Fudan University, noted that global virologists are working to track the origin of the virus, including the intelligence agencies. Netizens are encouraged to actively partake in discussions, but preferrably [sic] in a rational fashion.”
The original Global Times article appears to have been replaced with one about the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s denial of the TV Asahi report.
On March 4, the People’s Daily reprint of this article was used as the basis for a piece published on conspiracy website GlobalResearch.ca, titled “China’s Coronavirus: A Shocking Update. Did The Virus Originate in the US?” It was the first of two articles on the website that would lead to Zhao’s tweet nine days later suggesting the US Army had brought the virus to Wuhan.
The March 4 article begins: “The Western media quickly took the stage and laid out the official narrative for the outbreak of the new coronavirus which appeared to have begun in China, claiming it to have originated with animals at a wet market in Wuhan.”
This omits a few salient facts: that China’s state-controlled media had also “laid out the official narrative”; that reporters had received that narrative from the Chinese government; and that in the early days of the outbreak, the majority of evidence, including the Lancet article by 29 Chinese doctors, pointed to the Wuhan market.
The Global Research article continues: “In fact the origin was for a long time unknown but it appears likely now, according to Chinese and Japanese reports, that the virus originated elsewhere, from multiple locations, but began to spread widely only after being introduced to the market.
“More to the point, it appears that the virus did not originate in China and, according to reports in Japanese and other media, may have originated in the US.”
Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times. Photo: SCMP / Simon Song
The article then presents a subheading that inflates “may have originated in the US” to “Chinese Researchers Conclude the Virus Originated Outside of China”. Underneath, it quotes two reports – a February 22 article in Global Times and a February 23 article in CGTN – both about the ChinaXiv study, which did not suggest the virus originated outside China.
But Global Research wanted readers to draw the conclusion that it did, and so it created some dots to be connected: “Chinese medical authorities – and ‘intelligence agencies’ – then conducted a rapid and wide-ranging search for the origin of the virus, collecting nearly 100 samples of the genome from 12 different countries on 4 continents, identifying all the varieties and mutations. During this research, they determined the virus outbreak had begun much earlier, probably in November, shortly after the Wuhan Military Games.
“They then came to the same independent conclusions as the Japanese researchers – that the virus did not begin in China but was introduced there from the outside.”
That was not the “conclusion” of the scientists who posted their research on ChinaXiv.
Next, citing a February 27 story on Xinhuanet, Global Research invokes a Chinese national hero, Zhong Nanshan, who led the fight to contain severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003. “China’s top respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan said on January 27 … ‘Though the Covid-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China’.”
Global Research translates this for its readers: “But that is Chinese for ‘it originated someplace else, in another country’.”
Zhong did not say that. Neither did Xinhuanet. And the “Japanese researchers” Global Research refers to are never identified. The only reference to a Japanese source is: “In February of 2020, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China …”
Global Research offers no link to Asahi, only a link to the February 23 People’s Daily article, which also has no Asahi link but was a reprint of the Global Times story, which appears to have been revised on February 22, and – you guessed it – provides no Asahi link.
An online search for “Asahi news coronavirus originated in the US” from February 1 to 29 reveals no link to any such Asahi article. Neither does a search of the Asahi news website, which returns 688 articles containing the word “coronavirus” through March 4. But not this one.
Global Research also cites the Fudan University quote in Global Times: “[The professor] stated that global virologists ‘including the intelligence agencies’ were tracking the origin of the virus. Also of interest, the Chinese government did not shut the door on this. The news report stated: ‘Netizens are encouraged to actively partake in discussions, but preferably in a rational fashion.’
“In China, that is meaningful. If the reports were rubbish, the government would clearly state that, and tell people to not spread false rumours.”
Ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded by the police after alerting colleagues to a Sars-like virus and who later died of Covid-19. Photo: Weibo
The final piece of “evidence” in Global Research’s March 4 article is headed “Taiwan Virologist Suggests the Coronavirus Originated in the US”, and includes an embedded video of a Taiwan television show, identified as This! Is Not News, and a screenshot of a man with a pointer giving a colourful lecture about the origins of the virus. “The man in the video is a top virologist and pharmacologist who performed a long and detailed search for the source of the virus,” claims the article.
Except the man in the video – whom the report does not name – is not a virologist at all. He is a politician from the pro-Beijing New Party and a member of the Taipei City Council, who, before entering politics full time in 2002, was a pharmacology professor.
The clip opens with an introduction from a man in a crew cut, who talks about China and Russia and Georgian defectors carrying American biowarfare secrets, and mosquitoes and bats developed by the US for diabolical purposes. As he talks, tabloid-sized purple characters scroll along the bottom of the screen, punctuated with question marks and exclamation marks, and the one English acronym every conspiracy theorist worldwide knows: “CIA!”
Capping his performance is a 1981 analysis purported to have been carried out by the US Army that showed the attraction of “entomological warfare” to the US military and American taxpayers: 50 per cent of a city of 1.2 million people could be wiped out at a per-corpse cost of 29 cents.
Military Personnel stand guard outside the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. Photo: AFP
Up next, “the man in the video”notes that, while the man with the crew cut had been talking in terms of Cold War-style geopolitics where everybody fears and loathes everybody else, he is there solely to discuss science. Then he waves a pointer with a plastic yellow index finger at its tip, indicating diagrams of multicoloured circles. As the most complex diagram arrives on screen, he reassures the show’s hostess, “The next slide will make it very clear.”
Such was Global Research’s Taiwan “expert evidence”. Undaunted, the article continues: “The Taiwanese doctor then stated the virus outbreak began earlier than assumed, saying, ‘We must look to September of 2019’.
“He stated the case in September of 2019 where some Japanese travelled to Hawaii and returned home infected, people who had never been to China. This was two months prior to the infections in China and just after the CDC suddenly and totally shut down the Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab claiming the facilities were insufficient to prevent loss of pathogens.”
The introduction of the US Army’s Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab is a solid piece of conspiracy theory craftsmanship. The “man in the video” had not mentioned Fort Detrick – Global Research did, in an apparent attempt to tie the Taiwanese “virologist’s” Japanese travellers who visited Hawaii in September to a US Army bioweapons lab.
The Fort Detrick facility had not been “suddenly and totally shut down” – it ceased research in mid-July (and not in September). And how one of the most contagious viruses in history travelled from Maryland to Hawaii over a six- to eight-week period, leaving no trail of illness and death, goes unexamined by Global Research.
Renowned Chinese respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan. Photo: Xinhua
For good measure, the article closes by listing six outbreaks in 2018, 2019 and 2020 of “pandemics” that “sickened” and “killed” people, chickens and pigs in China. Each includes notes such as, “China needs to purchase US agricultural products,” suggesting that as part of the trade war, the US has been unleashing pathogens in the mainland for more than two years in order to make China buy American.
In summary, the March 4 article invokes mainland hero Zhong, the “Japanese” and the “Taiwanese” – two American allies with no reason to lie – and adds the “CIA” and a leaky US bioweapons research lab for spice. All independent and none really confirming the others while appearing to come close. Perhaps most impressive of all, the author produced almost 2,000 America-bashing words, and not one of them was “Trump”.
On March 5, without citing the Global Research March 4 piece or any of the underlying Chinese media articles, Zhao tweeted: “Confirmed cases of #COVID19 were first found in China, but its origin is not necessarily in China. We are still tracing the origin.”
On March 11, Global Research published a follow-up: “COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US”.
The story begins by recapping the March 4 article, upgrading the never-found Japanese Asahi broadcasters and the “man in the video” to “Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists and pharmacologists [who] have determined that the new coronavirus could have originated in the US”. The “man in the video” was now also a “physician” and a “scientist”.
Personnel working inside Fort Detrick. Photo: AFP
Recalling his attempt to place the first Covid-19 case in the US, Global Research again points out, “immediately prior to that, the CDC totally shut down the US Military’s main bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to an absence of safeguards against pathogen leakages, issuing a complete ‘cease and desist’ order to the military”.
As evidence, Global Research had posted a screenshot of an August 5 New York Times headline, “Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns; Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefence centre”.
In fact, the New York Times article had not stated the centre had been “totally shut down”. It had reported that 900 people worked at the facility and, “Although many projects are on hold, [a facility spokeswoman] said scientists and other employees are continuing to work, just not on select agents”. Both TheNew York Times and a local newspaper that first reported the cessation of the research noted that no pathogens had escaped the facility.
Global Research’s March 11 story continues: “We also had the Japanese citizens infected in September of 2019, in Hawaii, people who had never been to China, these infections occurring on US soil long before the outbreak in Wuhan but only shortly after the locking down of Fort Detrick.
“Then, on Chinese social media, another article appeared, aware of the above but presenting further details. It stated in part that five ‘foreign’ athletes or other personnel visiting Wuhan for the World Military Games (October 18-27, 2019) were hospitalised in Wuhan for an undetermined infection.”
The opening ceremony of the CISM Military World Games, in Wuhan. Photo: Reuters
That other article is a blog on Chinese social media, identified only by a QR code, that began: “Because there have been so many American dogs recently, in consideration for my account’s safety, [I must write] ‘some country’ or ‘M Country’ [when referring to America].”
The blog entry, which appeared to be a work in progress and is no longer online, recycled much of Global Research’s March 4 article, adding screenshots of local news stories about US military personnel in Wuhan for the October military gameswho were hospitalised.
According to Global Research: “The article explains more clearly that the Wuhan version of the virus could have come only from the US because it is what they call a ‘branch’ which could not have been created first because it would have no ‘seed’. It would have to have been a new variety spun off the original ‘trunk’, and that trunk exists only in the US.”
So there it was. A post on “Chinese social media” about “‘foreign’ athletes or other personnel visiting Wuhan for the World Military Games” in October completed the conspiracy’s journey. The fake news world had rewritten the origin of Covid-19: it was not due to a catastrophic natural occurrence somewhere in or around Wuhan, as the world’s scientists believed, but to a bioweapon brought to Wuhan by the US Army.
At the end of its March 11 article, Global Research returned to January, citing two articles in Science magazine for further “evidence” of its conspiracy – neither of which states the origin of the virus was, as Global Research puts it, “Not in Wuhan” – tying a bow around the package Zhao would soon forward to hundreds of thousands, who would forward it to hundreds of millions.
This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US. https://t.co/LPanIo40MR
On the morning of March 13, Zhao tweeted links to the Global Research articles: “This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US. It would be useful to read this prior article for background: China’s Coronavirus: A Shocking Update. Did The Virus …”
Followed by:
“Just take a few minutes to read one more article. This is so astonishing that it changed many things I used to believe in. Please retweet to let more people know about it. China’s Coronavirus: A Shocking Update. Did The Virus Originate in the US? – Global Research: The Western media quickly laid out the official narrative for the outbreak of COVID-19 which appeared to have begun in China …”
By late afternoon, the South China Morning Post reported that the hashtag topic “Zhao Lijian sent out five consecutive tweets questioning the US” had been viewed more than 4.7 million times on Weibo. Twelve hours later, The New YorkTimes reported it had been viewed more than 160 million times.
Zhao’s Twitter followers have increased from 287,000 to more than 500,000. Media worldwide carried stories about his tweets, putting them in front of millions more readers, most of whom would never have seen them on Twitter or Weibo. Fake virus news had gone viral.
In October, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted in the first line of its report on Russia’s use of social media to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election, that “information warfare [is] designed to spread disinformation and societal division”. Zhao’s tweets accomplished both. The disinformation was obvious. Critical thinking in abeyance, plenty of people will believe a claim that the US Army planted Covid-19 in Wuhan; even more will want it to be true.
When US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others began fighting back by loudly and repeatedly calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus”, social division in the US grew, if that is possible. The media accused Trump of being racist and xenophobic, and inciting more of the same towards Chinese-Americans. This only caused Trump to say it louder and more often.
One wonders how much longer Washington will continue fighting the information war against Beijing with one arm tied behind its back. Chinese media enjoy free run of the US, including on Twitter. The US has no such freedom in China.
Not a few pundits in these past few weeks have predicted Covid-19 will end globalisation, or even “life as we know it”. That seems unlikely, given the short-term nature of people’s memories and how profitable “life as we know it” has been for so many. But given the mischief Zhao’s tweets caused, Beijing’s days on Twitter might be numbered.
Putin: Oil Glut Is Really About Saudi Desire To Crush US Shale
While it appears an expected emergency virtual OPEC+ meeting planned for Monday has been postponed, pushed back to later in the week to allow more time for negotiations, it’s likely that we’ll actually see the heated blame-game for the collapse in oil prices ratchet up — and oh,in the meantimeoil is set to crater come Monday as the feud is only expected to get uglier.
Indeed the aggressive war of words has started, with Putin offering a biting Russian narrative aimed at the Saudis in remarks Friday: “It was the pullout by our partners from Saudi Arabia from the OPEC+ deal, their increase in production and their announcement that they were even ready to give discounts on oil” that drove the crash alongside the double-whammy of the coronavirus-driven drop in demand, Putin said according to Bloomberg.
“This was apparently linked to efforts by our partners from Saudi Arabia to eliminate competitors who produce so-called shale oil,” Putin continued. “To do that, the price needs to be below $40 a barrel. And they succeeded in that. But we don’t need that, we never set such a goal.”
Via Daily Mail
Thus in one fell swoop Putin, ironically enough, framed the new ‘war on US shale’ as in reality a Saudi dirty little secret and motive despite all spin to the contrary, perhaps also seeking to inject division and tension in the close Washington-Riyadh alliance.
Both Russia and the Saudis opened the taps and prices soared following Russia’s early March declaration that it would be quitting the OPEC plan to slash output by 1 million bpd, conditioned also on Russia-led non-OPEC countries cutting 500,000 bpd. Moscow reasoned that ultimately US shale-oil producers would be the ones benefiting as they had previously, filling the gaps in earlier curtailments.
Putin’s attack has for the time being had the immediate effect of forcing Riyadh into the awkward position of having to deny it could have been a willing participant in deeper machinations to crush US shale producers in a price war. This as already the steep drop-off in prices have left some US shale producers saying they’re ready to initiate voluntary production cuts amid the ballooning oil glut, as the WSJ reported Friday.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan responded to Putin in early Saturday comments, blasting the allegations as “fully devoid of truth.”
“Russia was the one that refused the agreement” the Saudi foreign ministry statement said. “The kingdom and 22 other countries were trying to to persuade Russia to make further cuts and extend the agreement.”
Energy minister and half-brother of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman said something similar, noticeably without taking the shale angle to the Russian accusations head-on.
“The Russian Minister of Energy was first to declare to the media that all the participating countries are absolved of their commitments,” he said. “This led to the decision by countries to raise their production in order to offset lower prices and compensate for their loss of returns.”
Interestingly, Bloomberg’s own summary of the OPEC+ unraveling tacitly admits what few pundits are ready to do, namely that the Saudis for all practical purposes have appeared ‘equal partners’ in squeezing US shale: “The Saudis, who have ramped up production to a record 12 million barrels a day in the past month and massively discounted the price of their oil, have insisted a new agreement must involve significant contributions from all OPEC+ nations and major producers outside the coalition, including the U.S. and Canada,” as the report puts it.
