Month: December 2020

Summary:

• COVID data delays still plaguing some US states
• Texas reports new daily record cases
• Hospitalizations still at record highs
• 20+ cases of UK COVID mutant discovered in India
• Tokyo Gov warns about possible health-care system collapse
• Germany reports record daily deaths
• China says Sinopharm vaccine 80% effective
• Portugal reports most new cases in 3 weeks

* * *

Yesterday, the state of California extended its lockdown measures for LA County and the San Joaquin Valley as Joe Biden echoed concerns first voiced by Dr. Fauci about the vaccine rollout falling well behind its year-end target (while also warning that the outbreak is expected to worsen in the coming months). Today, Biden followed up by insisting that he will move ahead with ordering Americans to continue to wear masks in public for the first 100 days of his administration.

Once in office, I will be asking the American people to wear a mask for the first 100 days of my administration. Not as a political statement, but as a patriotic duty. pic.twitter.com/0Uayw4sAs7

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 29, 2020

Not much has changed over the last 24 hours in the US. While Texas reported a new daily record number of new cases yesterday (25K+), a holiday induced lag across states means the COVID Tracking Project still doesn’t have a complete picture of how infections, hospitalizations and even, in some cases, deaths have fared over the last few days.

Current hospitalizations remains the most stable state-reported metric during holiday disruptions, according to the CTP, and it will likely continue to be the best guide to reality until states work through all Christmas/New Year’s backlogs.

In Japan, Tokyo’s governor warned that the capital city could see an explosive increase in virus cases at any time, and that everybody is at risk of infection. Gov. Yuriko Koike added Wednesday after Tokyo reported a near-record 940+ new cases that residents must take precautions as Japan heads into the New Year holidays. Meanwhile, a member of a Tokyo panel monitoring the coronavirus outbreak in the capital megalopolis warned that the medical system there could face “collapse” given the pace at which the virus is spreading.

After the first case of the hyper-infectious COVID strain first discovered in the UK was confirmed in Colorado last night, it’s expected that more cases will be discovered in the US as the days go on. Meanwhile, in India, at least 20 such cases have been isolated, all tied to people who were recently in Britain.

With the UK already winning plaudits for its vaccine rollout (remember, it was the first to approve Pfizer’s vaccine for the EUA), regulators followed up on Wednesday by approving the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine. But the UK’s success (it’s expected to ramp up vaccinations to 800K/day) is also drawing more negative attention to the US, which is barely managing to vaccinate an average of only 200K people/day, with many states using only small percentages of their total vaccine store so far.

In other European news, deaths in Germany surpassed 1K in a single day for the first time since the outbreak began on Wednesday. Finally, Chinese state-backed vaccine developer Sinopharm released new data purporting to show its jab to be 80% effective, even as trial data from Brazil has provided some reason for doubts.

Chinese vaccine producer Sinopharm announced the inactivated COVID-19 vaccine it developed has an efficacy rate of 79.34%. Given its safety, easy transportation and storage, this vaccine will be very popular. pic.twitter.com/mNBY5ZT8T0

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) December 30, 2020

Finally, Portugal reported 6.05K new confirmed cases, the highest daily tally in three weeks.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

…the big problem in my view that we face these days is that our media have become one-dimensional, the exact opposite of what they should be. This became clear through the Trump era, and the incessant hammering of one actor vs the deafening silence about all others in the same theater and on the same stage.

And we see that again today: try, if you can, to find in the MSM a critical opinion about lockdowns, or facemasks, or about the newly-fangled vaccines. It’s very hard if not impossible. This one-dimensionality hides behind “the science”. Which is something that doesn’t really exist, as we know because scientists in different countries contradict each other, as do those in the same country, and scientists even often contradict themselves.

If you want people to “follow the science”, you need to convince them that this is the right thing to do. You can’t just force them to do it. Or, rather, you can try that for a short period of time, and then they will come after you. People don’t live their lives in one dimension; they can’t.

Are facemasks useful? Sure, in crowded indoor spaces. But outdoors? I have yet to see the first evidence of that, and I do read an awful lot. Let’s inject some nuance here: if there is a risk of 1 in 100,000 that someone gets infected outdoors, it that worth forcing 99,999 people to put facemasks on? Or would you rather ask them to wear those where it demonstrably matters?

Are lockdowns useful? Sure, but they can only ever be emergency measures, short and “sweet”. Because they risk destroying entire economies and societies. Lockdowns should only be used when there are no other measures available anymore.

But we haven’t exhausted the scope of all other measures, not at all. There are no governments promoting the large scale use of vitamin D, or the proper use of hydroxychloroquine, and Chris Martenson even sees his videos about ivermectin banned from YouTube. As all three substances show great promise in preventing infections, and/or limiting the consequences of being infected.

We’ve been reduced to one-dimensional lives. By now, politicians and “scientists” would rather see everyone be infected, and then “cured” by a vaccine, than not get infected in the first place. In one dimension, the world easily gets turned upside down. You just wouldn’t be able to see it, because you need three dimensions to recognize what “upside down” looks like.

The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines may work very well, but we don’t know, because we haven’t researched that. Which, if you want to “follow the science”, is a very strange thing to do. Of course we would all like the virus to be gone, but ignoring the science doesn’t look like the way to achieve that. And that’s what we’re doing: we’re not following the science, we’re ignoring it where that fits our purposes.

We don’t know if the Pfizer vaccine protects you from being infected, we don’t know if it keeps you from infecting others, but we do know governments and airlines are talking about requiring evidence that you’ve received a dose. But for what purpose, then, exactly? Just to let all the MPs and CEOs people claim they did what they could?

‘Too’ many people have lost their jobs and their businesses without any country seriously having tried to stop people from becoming infected through the use of vit. D, HCQ, ivermectin. Many of these jobs and businesses will never come back. Is this worth it? Maybe if we could say we tried everything we could, but we obviously haven’t.

We sold our souls to the “science” and then to the vaccine. Which are two very very different things.

If there’s ever been a time to ask questions, it must be now. About lockdowns, facemasks and viruses, about people, communities, societies, economies. That we are being pressured into not asking those questions, makes them even more necessary.

Anyway, those are all issues and questions that will need to be addressed in 2021, we’ve run out of 2020 time. It’s just that it wouldn’t have been necessary; we could easily have done much if not most of it this year. But we have become information-poor, and by design to boot.

*  *  *

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Georgia’s January 5th runoff for two US Senate Seats will decide whether Republicans keep the chamber, or cede power to Congressional Democrats – allowing the incoming Biden administration to swiftly execute their agenda.

And thanks to a landslide of absentee voting amid near-record turnout, the special election between Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, and incumbent GOP Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, will likely drag on for days, if not weeks, according to Bloomberg.

In the Nov. 3 contest, the results were so close that it took 10 days before television networks projected that Democrat Joe Biden won Georgia. The state didn’t certify his victory for another week, and it was certified twice more, lastly on Dec. 7.

With the runoff elections expected to be similarly tight, the results are likely to be slow again, leaving control of the U.S. Senate in doubt well into next month. –Bloomberg

“Almost no chance it’s called on election night,” according to political scientist Kerwin Swint of Kennesaw State University.

Bloomberg also predicts that just like the November 3 election, the initial results will swing in favor of the Republicans, with Democrats gaining ground from mail-in and absentee ballots. Notably, former GA gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has bragged that 1.2 million absentee ballots have already been requested.

Meanwhile, Abrams’ sister, Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, ordered that two Georgia counties reverse their decision to remove 4,000 likely ineligible voters from the rolls.

“We know from the numbers that we’re in a good place; 1.2 million absentee ballots have been requested thus far,” she told CNN‘s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” two weeks ago, adding that 85,000 of them were new voters.

According to the latest figures from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, over 2.3 million votes have already been cast, including over 802,000 returned absentee ballots and over 1.5 million people voting in person.

“And then here comes the lawyers on horseback,” predicts Democratic political consultant Rick Dent, who worked for former Georgia Senator Zell Miller (D).

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will travel to Savannah on Sunday to campaign on behalf of Ossoff and Warnock, while President-elect Joe Biden will travel to Atlanta on Monday to do the same.

All eyes on the vote

While Democrats gear up for record mail-in and absentee voting, Republicans will be (or at least, should be) keeping a close eye on the contest amid widespread claims of election fraud in Georgia and other states.

“No matter what shenanigans they did in November, we know what they were up to, and now we’re watching,” Perdue said at a Tuesday rally. “And we’re going to do everything we can to make this election in January clear, transparent and fair.”

One official said Tuesday the state hopes counties will have processed all the absentee ballots they receive up to Jan. 5, so that all they need to process on Election Day will be what arrives that day before 7 p.m.

But the official, who asked not to be identified to speak freely, said that most counties had counted all their absentee ballots before the general election on Nov. 3, and it still took days to process the last-minute arrivals.

Swint said that counting process “will probably be at least a few days, and then very likely court challenges after that.” –Bloomberg

“The process will follow whatever course the process must take,” said Ossoff on Tuesday when asked about potential lawsuits surrounding the runoff. “We will see how the process unfolds to make sure every ballot is counted.”

According to Dent, meanwhile, “It’s going to be the election that never ends.”

Oil prices have rollercoastered in the last 12 hours or so with a surprisingly large crude draw reported by API sparking a bid for WTI overnight which was then monkeyhammered at around 8amET for no good reason, tumbling back below $48 before dip-buyers panic-bought it back up.

Now that the stops have been run, we’ll see what the official inventory data does for the algos.

API

• Crude -4.875mm (-3.1mm exp)

• Cushing +131k

• Gasoline -718k

• Distillates -1.877mm

DOE

• Crude -6.065mm (-3.1mm exp)

• Cushing +27k

• Gasoline -1.192mm

• Distillates +3.095mm

A bigger than expected crude draw was offset by a bigger than expected surprise build in distillates last week…

Source: Bloomberg

Implied Gasoline Demand (4wk average) saw a small uptick last week…

Source: Bloomberg

US Crude Production remained flat at 11mm b/d…

Source: Bloomberg

WTI traded around $48.30 ahead of the official print and chopped lower, then higher after the data…

As Bloomberg notes, the resurgent coronavirus has kept price gains in check in recent days. In the U.S., the governor of Colorado said the Covid-19 strain discovered in the U.K. has been found in the state. Meanwhile, a second cluster of infections emerged in Sydney and cases rose in China, India and South Korea.

The outbreaks come ahead of an OPEC+ meeting early next week, where the group will decide whether to add an extra 500,000 barrels a day of supply to the market.

By Natalie Winters of The National Pulse

A host of corporate media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC have participated in private dinners and sponsored trips with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a Chinese Communist Party-funded group seeking to garner “favorable coverage” and “disseminate positive messages” regarding China, The National Pulse can reveal.

Other outlets involved in the propaganda operation include Forbes, the Financial Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC News, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, AFP, TIME magazine, LA Times, The Hill, BBC, and The Atlantic.

The relationship is revealed in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings, which reveal a relationship spanning over a decade between establishment media outlets and the China–United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

‘Neutralize Opposition.’

CUSEF is a Chinese Communist Party-funded initiative founded by Tung Chee Hwa. The group also targets American universities with offers to fund policy research, high-level dialogues, and exchange programs.

Tung also serves as Vice-Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), identified by the U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission as a key component of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Work Front.

The effort, according to the U.S. government report, aims to “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party.”

“The United Front strategy uses a range of methods to influence overseas Chinese communities, foreign governments, and other actors to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,” it continues.

This strategy appears to have been deployed in conjunction with outlets such as CNN, New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Targeting Reporters, Journalism Students.

A 2011 FARA filing highlighted by Axios detailed CUSEF’s agreement with American lobbying firm BLJ. It outlines how CUSEF set out to “effectively disseminate positive messages to the media, key influencers and opinion leaders, and the general public” regarding China.

To do so, CUSEF targeted working journalists and journalist students:

In order to develop favorable coverage in key national media, BLJ will continue to organize and staff “familiarization trips” to China. This includes recruiting top journalists to travel to China, selected for effectiveness and opportunities for favorable coverage.

In 2009 alone, CUSEF generated 28 media placements as a result of its four journalist visits and BLJ secured “the publication of 26 opinion articles and quotes within 103 separate articles” on behalf of CUSEF.

Outlets included Newsweek, the National Journal, the Nation, Congressional Quarterly, U.S. News, World Report, The Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Note.

“BLJ directly contributed to or influenced” an average of three articles “per week.”

Guilty.

While universities, including the University of Texas at Austin, have divested from CUSEF in light of its Chinese Communist Party ties, the same cannot be said for dozens of Western media outlets.

FARA filings from CUSEF’s American lobbying firm BLJ reveal American media organization participating in “private dinners at BLJ’s CEO’s home on behalf of CUSEF,” trips to China, and meetings with CUSEF officials.

A filing dated January 1st, 2012, show outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNN, and more participating in “private dinners” at the home of CUSEF’s American lobbying firm’s CEO.

The same filing reveals that outlets including National Public Radio (NPR), The Atlantic, MSNBC, and Reuters had journalists visit China to meet with CUSEF officials.

Since then, filings continue to reveal a host of Western outlets attending private dinners and visiting China. Most outlets are included more than once.

In 2013, The Washington Post joined a China-bound journalism delegation, in 2014 Harvard Business Review also joined a delegation, and in 2015, the Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post also visited the communist country.

A 2014 filing reveals that lobbying firm BLJ “arranged private dinners in New York and Washington DC on behalf of CUSEF” with over 20 attendees including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, and more:

Images in CUSEF brochures shed light on the entities visited by journalists.

Between 2011 and 2013 images reveal journalist touring Huawei – a telecommunications firm labeled a “national security threat” and military collaborator by the U.S. government – along with Chinese military bases:

Results.

Following the ongoing pressure campaigns, CUSEF has escaped significant criticism in the corporate press. There have only been a few mentions in broader pieces concerning Chinese Communist Party influence operations on American college campuses.

Such behavior from news outlets implies a conflict of interest, or worse: that the ostensible news outlets have been bought off.

Even when CUSEF is criticized, such as in The Washington Post article “China’s reach into U.S. campuses,” CUSEF’s Executive Director Alan Wong was offered a rebuttal: something that even Americans on the political right fail to obtain from outlets such as the Post.

Vox, another outlet participating in CUSEF’s journalism trips, prefaced an article on President Trump and North Korea by noting author Yochi Dreazen “wrote it while on a trip to China sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF)”:

The author of this article wrote it while on a trip to China sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a privately funded nonprofit organization based in Hong Kong that is dedicated to “facilitating open and constructive exchange among policy-makers, business leaders, academics, think-tanks, cultural figures, and educators from the United States and China.” Vox.com’s reporting, as always, is independent.

The article, which featured quotes from Chinese Communist Party officials, appeared to regurgitate the party line, noting “Beijing won big.”

As Foreign Policy magazine noted, to its credit, CUSEF is scarcely a privately funded non profit but rather is “a registered foreign agent bankrolled by a high-ranking Chinese government official with close ties to a sprawling Chinese Communist Party apparatus that handles influence operations abroad.”