Jts5665

TO BELIEVE IT WON’T IS TO BELIEVE THAT NO ONE DIES OF ANYTHING ELSE, EVER. THAT JOBS AREN’T EVER NECESSARY. THAT … WELL, THAT WE CAN LIVE ON RAINBOWS AND MAGIC UNICORN FARTS:  Will the Shutdown Cause More Deaths Than It Saves?

THE BURDEN OF PROOF SHOULD BE ON THOSE WANTING THE REGULATIONS REINSTATED: A Fresh Start: How to Address Regulations Suspended during the Coronavirus Crisis.

H. R. MCMASTER: How China Sees the World.

Leaving China, I was even more convinced than I had been before that a dramatic shift in U.S. policy was overdue. The Forbidden City was supposed to convey confidence in China’s national rejuvenation and its return to the world stage as the proud Middle Kingdom. But for me it exposed the fears as well as the ambitions that drive the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to extend China’s influence along its frontiers and beyond, and to regain the honor lost during the century of humiliation. The fears and ambitions are inseparable. They explain why the Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with control—both internally and externally.

The party’s leaders believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor—before China’s economy sours, before the population grows old, before other countries realize that the party is pursuing national rejuvenation at their expense, and before unanticipated events such as the coronavirus pandemic expose the vulnerabilities the party created in the race to surpass the United States and realize the China dream. The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China’s overall strategy relies on co-option and coercion at home and abroad, as well as on concealing the nature of China’s true intentions. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous is the integrated nature of the party’s efforts across government, industry, academia, and the military.

And, on balance, the Chinese Communist Party’s goals run counter to American ideals and American interests.

Well then, we’d better get back to pursuing our own interests with vigor.

CORONAVIRUS KILLS SENIORS WHILE CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN KILLS KIDS: Issues & Insights finds multiple unintended consequences with lethal effects on children. Somehow, I doubt such consequences were in the mix of assumptions for those coronavirus models.

ESCAPE FROM L.A.: Proud mayor of California’s biggest sanctuary city urges residents to ‘report non-essential businesses that are operating illegally.’

STILL MORE REASONS TO BOYCOTT CHINA: Hong Kong: High-profile democracy activists arrested.

The post Pompeo: China Not Letting Scientists Into Wuhan Lab appeared first on The Bongino Report.

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department inspector general found that companies selling Medicare Advantage policies had added diagnoses not supported by the customer's medical records in 99.3 percent of the cases it examined. The federal government pays these companies based on a risk score for each customer. The more medical problems the customer has, the higher the payment. The report found that the added diagnoses resulted in the companies getting an extra $6.7 billion in payments from the government.

Here’s how bizarre BizarroWorld has become: in some California counties, you can be fined $1,000 for being out in public without wearing a mask. In Michigan, the governor decided seeds and hardware supplies are non-essential and people can’t go out to buy them … but alcohol and lottery tickets are essential, so it’s okay to go buy those. Meanwhile, people all over the nation are calling the police to rat out fellow citizens who fail to observe mandated social distancing. Sig Heil.

This is nuts. People are acting as if the coronavirus is airborne HIV or the Super Flu from the Stephen King novel The Stand. By gosh, if someone doesn’t properly social distance himself, he’ll spread the disease to all of us and we’ll all die. Honey, that man is playing basketball in a public park with his friends! Call the police before he kills us all!

The insanity is continuing even though the death toll is a mere fraction of what various governments and experts predicted. Dr. Fauci, the head of the coronavirus task force, initially suggested COVID-19 could kill as many as 240,000 Americans. Now he’s downgraded that prediction to 60,000. As I write this post, the reported number of deaths in the U.S. is around 33,000. Yes, that’s a lot of deaths. But keep in mind, the CDC estimates at least 60,000 and perhaps 80,000 Americans died from influenza during the 2017-2018 flu season.

And there’s a good chance the number of COVID-19 deaths has been exaggerated. Here’s a quote from a Fox News article:

The federal government is classifying the deaths of patients infected with the coronavirus as COVID-19 deaths, regardless of any underlying health issues that could have contributed to the loss of someone’s life.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, said the federal government is continuing to count the suspected COVID-19 deaths, despite other nations doing the opposite.

“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem,” she said during a Tuesday news briefing at the White House. “Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.

“The intent is … if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that,” she added.

A Minnesota senator who also happens to be a doctor reported that he received a seven-page document from the MN Department of Health advising him to fill out death certificates with a diagnosis of COVID-19 whether the person actually died from COVID-19 or not. It’s almost as if governments are so heavily invested in convincing us the coronavirus is especially deadly, they’ll fudge the numbers if necessary.

It’s not just the death toll that’s been far lower than originally predicted. The number of hospital beds, ventilators, etc., we were told we’d need was way off as well. New York, which originally said it was desperately short of the ventilators it would need, is now apparently shipping excess ventilators to other states.

Well, that just proves social distancing worked!

Uh … no. Here’s a quote from an article in National Review:

There is no shortage of government spin, regurgitated by media commentators, assuring us that the drastic reductions in the projections over just a few days powerfully illustrate how well social distancing and the substantial shuttering of the economy is working. Nonsense. As Alex Berenson points out on Twitter, with an accompanying screenshot data updated by IHME on April 1, the original April 2 model explicitly “assum[ed] full social distancing through May 2020.”

The model on which the government is relying is simply unreliable. It is not that social distancing has changed the equation; it is that the equation’s fundamental assumptions are so dead wrong, they cannot remain reasonably stable for just 72 hours.

It simply doesn’t make sense that the drastically reduced death toll is all because of social distancing. Let’s not forget what flattening the curve means. Better yet, let’s start by explaining what the theory behind social distancing doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean “we avoid contact with each other, and therefore most people are never exposed to the virus, and far fewer people die.”

The virus is going to spread through population eventually. Social distancing was mandated to slow down the rate at which it would spread. The fear was that if too many people became sick within a short span, there wouldn’t be enough hospital beds and ventilators to save people who could be saved with medical intervention. Flatten the curve means we slow down the rate of exposure so the medical system isn’t overwhelmed. That’s all it means. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick made that point in a recent post.

It may well seem that all this suffering was…well, for what, exactly? To simply prevent a surge of cases. This government, all governments, must be honest about this and admit that in the longer term we cannot prevent almost everybody getting infected and acknowledge that a proportion of those infected will die.

When lockdown restrictions are lifted this does not mean that the virus has gone. It does not mean that people cannot infect each other. It does not mean we can simply carry on as before. It means that we have kept the first surge under control.

The big social-distancing lockdown was never about stopping the spread the of virus. That’s not possible. So unless you believe more than 100,000 Americans were saved from death because medical intervention was available thanks to social distancing, the logical conclusion is that the lethality of the virus was wildly overestimated.

So how deadly is the virus? We still don’t know exactly, because we don’t know how many people have been exposed to it. We won’t know until antibody tests are available and given to large, random samples of the population in different areas. But there’s growing evidence that the virus has already spread more than government officials first believed. Here’s a quote from Chicago City Wire:

A phlebotomist working at Roseland Community Hospital said Thursday that 30% to 50% of patients tested for the coronavirus have antibodies while only around 10% to 20% of those tested have the active virus.

Sumaya Owaynat, a phlebotomy technician, said she tests between 400 and 600 patients on an average day in the parking lot at Roseland Community Hospital. Owaynat said the number of patients coming through the testing center who appear to have already had coronavirus and gotten over it is far greater than those who currently have the disease.

Here are some quotes from an article in The Los Angeles Times:

A man found dead in his house in early March. A woman who fell sick in mid-February and later died.

These early COVID-19 deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest that the novel coronavirus had established itself in the community long before health officials started looking for it. The lag time has had dire consequences, allowing the virus to spread unchecked before social distancing rules went into effect.

I disagree with that last sentence. The virus is going to spread. Social distancing only slows down the spread. So if San Francisco’s hospitals weren’t overwhelmed, it’s good news that the virus has already spread more than officials estimated. More on that later. Back to the article:

“The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time,” Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of Santa Clara County government, told county leaders in a recent briefing.

How long? A study out of Stanford suggests a dramatic viral surge in February.

But Smith on Friday said data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local health departments and others suggest it was “a lot longer than we first believed” — most likely since “back in December.”

“This wasn’t recognized because we were having a severe flu season,” Smith said in an interview. “Symptoms are very much like the flu. If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn’t really notice. You didn’t even go to the doctor. The doctor maybe didn’t even do it because they presumed it was the flu.”

The virus that has people ratting out fellow citizens for playing basketball in a park is sooo freakin’ deadly, by gosh, millions of people may have already been exposed and failed to notice.

Even the CDC’s own data suggests coronavirus was here far earlier than we thought:

CDC Data supports theory of much earlier COVID infection than has been reported. Data shows a dramatic spike in “Influenza Like Illness” in certain states as early as November of 2019. A number of states appear to have already experienced an ILI and made it through to a more stable ILI footing for this time of year.

The US Military participated in the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan, China between October 18 and October 27 of 2019. Their chartered flights arrive and depart from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Washington is one of the earliest states to show a spike in ILI, corresponding with the incubation period should the virus have been introduced as the military traveled through Washington to other destinations.

If the virus has been around longer than officials originally believed, and if tests eventually show far more of us have been exposed than originally believed, that’s very, very good news. Two infectious disease researchers I saw interviewed in YouTube videos both made the same point: a virus like this spreads until it runs out of new, vulnerable hosts. If millions of us have already been exposed, the virus is running out of those hosts. One of the researchers, in fact, said that social distancing may just ensure a second wave of deaths, because new hosts are being held in reserve.

An article in The Economist quotes researchers who believe the virus is about as deadly as the flu:

Despite initially being warned about deaths in the “millions” if Americans didn’t subject themselves to business killing closures and “social distancing,” the coronavirus, while it has spread faster than normal viruses do has actually been less deadly, according to the Economist, citing a new study.

Last Saturday, the Economist said that it is actually somewhat of a blessing that the coronavirus’ spread across the United States as it did, in fact calling it “good news.”

“If millions of people were infected weeks ago without dying, the virus must be less deadly than official data suggest,” the magazine reported, while utilizing graphs that suggest the faster the disease spreads and hits its peak, in fact the fewer people that will die from it.

Citing a new study by Justin Silverman and Alex Washburne, the Economist says that data shows the coronavirus is currently widespread in America, which is quite obvious.

In a somewhat surprising conclusion, the two researchers found that the mortality rate of coronavirus could be as low as 0.1 percent, or similar to the mortality rate of the flu.

Okay, any mortality figure is a best-guess until we really and truly know how many people have already been exposed. But considering how many people have tested positive and never felt sick (ABC’s George Stephanopoulos being a recent example), I find it difficult to believe that this virus is soooo deadly, we all have to avoid each other and kill the economy in the process.

Yes, the virus is deadly for a small subset of vulnerable people. The vast majority of us aren’t in that subset.  As this study put it:

People <65 years old have very small risks of COVID-19 death even in the hotbeds of the pandemic and deaths for people <65 years without underlying predisposing conditions are remarkably uncommon. Strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should be considered in managing the pandemic.

Most of the people who’ve died from COVID-19 died were elderly and had existing health problems. I suspect many of them would have died from ordinary influenza if COVID-19 hadn’t gotten them first. After all, influenza kills more than 30,000 Americans in a typical year, and (at the risk of repeating myself) killed perhaps 80,000 Americans in 2017-2018.  If the death toll from that flu had been the lead story every night on the news, people would have been just as scared.

I think it’s time we start operating on what Lierre Keith called adult knowledge in her wonderful book The Vegetarian Myth. She was referring to vegans who want to believe nothing dies to put food on their plates. Adult knowledge of how food is grown and harvested says otherwise. As adults, we simply have to accept that things aren’t always as nice and pretty as we’d like.

Adult knowledge says the coronavirus will spread … and the most social distancing can do is slow the spread. Adult knowledge says the virus will kill people – just like the flu kills people — whether we shut down the economy or not. Adult knowledge says we’re not going to save millions of lives by sheltering at home for months on end – but we will bankrupt thousands of businesses and put millions of people in debt.

I agree with Dr. Malcolm Kendrick:

So, what is the exit strategy? The answer is that we don’t have one. We have a strategy of delay and mitigation which will continue until… when? Until everyone has been infected? Until we have an effective treatment? Until we have an effective vaccine? Until enough people have been infected that we have achieved herd immunity?

The Government must tell us the truth and be clear about what end point they are seeking to achieve. Only then can we have an exit strategy. One thing for sure is that this lockdown is not a way to defeat the virus.

BizarroWorld has been kind to me. I’m still employed, my expenses have gone down, I get to spend more time with my daughters because they’re not in school, and I get to work from home every day, which I prefer. But we need to leave BizarroWorld behind.

ANY WORLD THAT I’M WELCOME TO: New Earth-size planet discovered 300 light-years away could support life.

The post CDC Now Including “Probable” Coronavirus Deaths in Tally – Bringing U.S. Total to 600k Cases, 30k+ Deaths appeared first on The Bongino Report.

FROM AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: Obama: ‘Biden Has Touched Us All.’ “Many were worried Obama wasn’t going to endorse Biden, but he came through for the DNC establishment, telling everyone how deeply and personally Biden has touched everyone he has ever worked with.”

The post WHO Director Was Exposed for Covering Up Epidemics in 2017 appeared first on The Bongino Report.

WELL, JOY REID.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE STATES AND HOSPITALS INCENTIVE FOR FUDGING THE NUMBERS BY HAVING THE FEDS PAY FOR WINNIE THE FLU CASES:  Literally no one has any idea how many people COVID-19 has killed.

When Irene Li started selling select grocery items at Mei Mei, the Boston restaurant she co-founded, she assumed she was providing a public service. 

"When I drive to work every day, I pass by a Trader Joe's that almost every single time I've gone by has at least 20 people standing in line outside," Li says, noting the health implications of shopping in crowded stores amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Boston bureaucrats disagreed. An inspector with the Health Division of Boston Inspectional Services on Monday ordered Li to immediately desist, because she lacks the proper license to sell groceries.

"We were essentially just told that we don't have the correct permit," says Li. "So none of the sales are permitted."

City officials did not provide her—or any other Boston restaurateurs—a way forward for obtaining the proper permissions.

"Food services and food retail are two different licenses that we issue," Lisa Timberlake, a spokesperson for Boston Inspectional Services, tells Reason. "Restaurants have food service licenses, which require submission of new plans and procedures if the business is going to deviate from the original plans. It's not as simple as lifting the zoning restrictions on takeout that we've done. It's more complicated than that."

Is it?

Over the course of the same conversation, Timberlake pivoted from the city's original justification for ordering Li to stop selling groceries (lack of the proper permit) and laid the responsibility on grocery packaging regulations.

"The City of Boston as well as businesses, we're required to comply with state laws regarding the change in plans, they must adhere to the federal laws regarding packaging of raw animal products or what have you, so the authority to lift or soften any regulations would require compliance with the state and federal laws," Timberlake says. "That's above us."

But that's not true, according to Nick Zaiac, a resident fellow in transportation and infrastructure at the R Street Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

"Primarily, this is a part of local zoning code," Zaiac says. Restaurants selling groceries "is certainly not something that is barred by the state. [The city's] hands are not tied."

Consider the situation in Los Angeles, which I wrote about a couple of weeks back. Health inspectors there temporarily shuttered a slew of restaurants-turned-grocery stores, citing their lack of grocery licenses. Officials eventually backtracked, allowing restaurant establishments to sell grocery items if offered for takeout and delivery. 

That move did not require any permission from the state of California.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued official guidance "allowing restaurants to sell bulk retail products from restaurant supply chain distributors directly to consumers provided that such foods are in their original condition, packaging, or presented as received by the restaurant."

Compare that with Boston's actions. "The regs on this particular function, they haven't softened," says city spokesperson Timberlake. "In order to sell raw meat or raw animal products, the USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] actually requires labeling including safe food handling instructions."

But if Texas didn't need special permission from the federal government to let restaurants sell pre-packaged food, one wonders why Boston would need approval from the USDA to do the same thing. Restaurant owners like Li were attempting to sell grocery items that had already been packaged and labeled by their various distributors. What's more, Timberlake noted that Boston restaurants would likely not be permitted to sell things like toilet paper and cleaning supplies, yet clearly neither of those items falls under any USDA packaging requirements.

In short, this is a licensing issue, not a question of federal or state oversight, and it could be easily resolved in favor of both public health and struggling restaurants. As Li mentioned, restaurants-turned-grocery stores offer a number of genuine public health benefits. They are less crowded with shoppers and are often well-stocked with essential items. That's a win-win.

Licensing laws are often put in place in the name of protecting consumers. But it's clear that consumer safety is not at the foreground of what's happening in Boston.

In this post, I wrote about parallels between climate and COVID alarm and related issues of computer modelling.  I realized I left out at least one parallel.

In the world of climate, computer model results are often used as the counterfactual case.  Let me give you an example.  The world has warmed over the last 100 years at the same time atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased.  Obviously, to truly judge the effect of CO2 on temperatures, we would like to know what the temperatures would have been over the last 100 years without rising CO2 concentrations.  But we don't have thermometers that read "with" and "without" CO2.

I remember I got caught up in this years ago when I published an analysis that showed that estimates of temperature sensitivity to CO2 concentrations used in projections going forward greatly over-predicted the amount of warming we have seen already.  In other words, there had not been enough warming historically to justify such high sensitivity numbers.  In response, I was told that alarmists considered the base case without CO2 increases to be a cooling world, because that is what some models showed.  Compared to this cooling counterfactual, they argued that the warming from CO2 historically had been much higher.

By the way, this argument always gets to be very circular.  When you really dig into the assumptions of the counter-factual models, they are based on assumptions that temperature sensitivity to CO2 is high.  Thus models predicated on high sensitivity are used to justify the assumption of high sensitivity.

I thought of all this today when I saw this post on COVID models and interventions from Kevin Drum.  I read Drum because, though I don't love his politics, he is more likely than most team-politics writers from either the Coke or Pepsi party to do a reasonable job of data analysis and interpretation.  But I have to fault him for this post, which I think is just terrible.  You can click through to see the chart but here is the text:

At the end of March, the highest estimate for [NY State] hospitalizations was 136,000+. Today the peak is estimated at about 30,000. That’s a difference of 5x. Did the modelers screw up?

Not really. Remember the Imperial College projections for the United States? They estimated about 2 million deaths if nothing was done; 1 million deaths if some countermeasures were taken; and 200,000 deaths if stringent countermeasures were taken. That’s a range of 10x. If you figure that we’ve taken fairly stringent countermeasures but not the maximum possible, then a reduction of 5x is about what you’d expect. Alternatively, if you ignore the Columbia University projection as an outlier, the IHME estimate has only gone down by about 2x. That’s what you’d expect if we took countermeasures that were just a little more stringent than their model assumed.

At the end of March it was still not clear how stringent and how effective the coronavirus countermeasures would be. In the event, it looks like they worked pretty well, cutting cases by at least 2x and possibly more. This is why the model estimates have gone down: because we followed expert advice and locked ourselves down. Just as we hoped.

Treating the early model estimates as if they are accurate representations of the "no intervention" counter-factual is just absurd.   It is particularly absurd in this case as he actually quotes a model -- the early Imperial College model -- that is demonstrably grossly flawed.  He is positing that we are in the Imperial College  middle intervention case, which estimated a million deaths in the US and is likely to be off by more than an order of magnitude.  Given this clear model/estimate miss, why in the world does he treat early Columbia and McKinsey models as accurate representations of the counter-factual?  Isn't it at least as likely that these models were just as flawed as the Imperial College models (and for many of the same reasons)?

The way he uses the IHME model results is also  flawed.  He acts like the reductions in the IHME estimates are due to countermeasures, but IHME has always assumed full counter-measures so it is impossible to use the numbers the way he wants to use them.

In the halcyon days of yore—you know, 10 weeks ago—budget hawks were fretting about the return of trillion-dollar deficits, with the Congressional Budget Office's latest 10-year projection showing that the annual budget deficit would hit $1.7 trillion by 2030.

Today, that projection is not even worth the paper it is printed on.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that has already prompted Congress to hike spending by $2.2 trillion (with more likely on the way), and with revenue collections likely to drop in a big way as a result of the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown, the federal government is facing the prospect of a budget deficit of nearly $4 trillion this year. That's according to several independent projections made by various organizations over the past week.

The numbers are truly staggering. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonpartisan group that advocates for lower deficits, the budget deficit will hit $3.8 trillion this year—that's four times larger than the $984 billion deficit recorded last year. The exploding deficit will cause the national debt to exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy this year, something that has not happened since the height of World War II.

And it is almost certainly a best-case scenario. "These projections almost certainly underestimate deficits, since they assume no further legislation is enacted to address the crisis and that policymakers stick to current law when it comes to other tax and spending policies," the CRFB said in a statement. "The projections also assume the economy experiences a strong recovery in 2021 and fully returns to its pre-crisis trajectory by 2025."

If that happens, annual budget deficits will fall to about $2 trillion next year and to $1.3 trillion in 2025. For comparison's sake, the largest since-year deficit during the Great Recession that followed the 2008 economic crisis was $1.3 trillion.

But even if deficits recede to merely pre-coronavirus record highs, the national debt will continue to exceed the size of the U.S. economy for the immediate future, the CRFB projects.

Other budget-watchers have come to similar conclusions. Investment bank Goldman Sachs is now expecting a $3.6 trillion federal deficit this year. G. William Hoagland, a senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Senate GOP budget aide, told Roll Call that he expects a deficit of $3.9 trillion. Romina Boccia, research director for the Heritage Foundation's Center for the Federal Budget, told Fox News that the deficit will likely exceed $3.5 trillion.

"There's the real risk, of course, that we might be teeing up a public debt crisis on the other end of this," Boccia told Fox. That, she added, would likely mean higher taxes, reduced government services, inflation, and economic stagnation.

Just as the heavy borrowing that took place during the Great Depression and World War II was followed by a period of fiscal restraint to bring deficits back in line, the CRFB says, so too must policy makers prioritize deficit reduction once the current public health crisis has passed. "Putting long-term deficit reduction measures in place sooner rather than later would allow policymakers to phase in changes more gradually and give those affected more warning and ability to prepare," the CRFB advises.

The CBO has yet to publish an updated projection that takes last month's passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act into account. By the time it does, that projection might be out of date, too. Already, President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) are discussing plans for another trillion-dollar (maybe $2 trillion) stimulus package.

And the coronavirus is expected to wreak havoc on state budgets as well, raising the prospect that the federal government may have to use its credit card to bail out some states too. The National Governors Association is already asking for $500 billion.

In other words, 10 weeks from now, we might be wishing for the days when the federal deficit was only $4 trillion.

"The $5 trillion number, adjusted for inflation, would also be more than five times the amount spent on the entire New Deal in the 1930s."

And I got pummeled ???? by Republicans and Democrats for suggesting this should be a recorded vote! ????‍♂️ https://t.co/zFuz2SMLD7

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 10, 2020

The post Daily Caller and Citizens United Sue for Records From DOJ’s FISA Abuse Report appeared first on The Bongino Report.

OH FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: You Might Go to Prison for Singing in a Livestream Church Service in This California County. “Banning music sounds like something out of a dystopian nightmare, but in a northern California county, singing or playing wind instruments — even a harmonica — during a livestream video event can get citizens fined or thrown in prison.”

These petty local tyrants are the very definition of non-essential.

SO THE CLAIM THAT THE WUHAN CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC MAY COME FROM A CHINESE LAB HAS GONE FROM CRAZY RIGHT-WING THEORY TO WAPO STANDARD IN RECORD TIME: U.S. Diplomats Warned about Safety Risks in Wuhan Labs Studying Bats Two Years before Coronavirus Outbreak.

U.S. officials warned in January 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work on “SARS-like coronaviruses in bats,” combined with “a serious shortage” of proper safety procedures, could result in human transmission and the possibility of a “future emerging coronavirus outbreak.”

In a series of diplomatic cables, one of which was obtained by The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, U.S. Embassy officials warned their superiors that the lab, which they had visited several times, posed a serious health risk that warranted U.S. intervention. The officials were concerned enough about their findings to categorize the communications as “Sensitive But Unclassified,” in order to keep them out of the public eye.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable reads.

“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official told Rogin. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”

While China has stated the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan, U.S. officials are skeptical of the claim, with National Review detailing how the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted jobs in November and December of last year to show how they had been working on “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses,” which had “confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases” in December.

“The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” a U.S. official told Rogin.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety, known as BSL-4. But its work on bats — led by Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species — is conducted at the lower protection level of BSL-2.

The 2018 cable confirms that Shi — whose team published research in November 2017 revealing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003 — was then working on “SARS-like coronaviruses.” Shi’s team was also the first to reveal in February that the new outbreak was a bat-derived coronavirus.

A smart friend of mine is convinced that there’s a connection to the arrest of Harvard chemist Charles Lieber for undisclosed ties to China. I remain skeptical: Lieber’s work — which is on nanotechnology and virus detection — seems a far cry from bat viruses, but who knows at this point? Stay tuned.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MANCHURIAN MEDIA: NO biggie, just Bloomberg News killing investigation into Chinese Ruling elites, firing the reporter, and trying to silence his wife.

The post State Department Warned of Safety Issues in Wuhan Lab – in 2018 appeared first on The Bongino Report.

SOCIAL MEDIA ASTROTURF: Chinese Twitter accounts masquerading as Taiwanese offered fake apologies to Dr. Tedros. “So not only did China back up Dr. Tedros’ vague claims (presented without evidence), it seems the CCP may have also generated fake apologies to further solidify the idea that Taiwan was guilty of racist attacks. It’s very similar to the backlash China helped stoke last month over the phrase ‘Chinese virus.’ For what it’s worth, an Ethiopian doctor who trained in Taiwan said over the weekend that Dr. Tedros’ claims portraying Taiwan as a hotbed of racism didn’t ring true.”

NIH IN 2005: “Chloroquine, a relatively safe, effective and cheap drug used for treating many human diseases including malaria, amoebiosis and human immunodeficiency virus is effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. The fact that the drug has significant inhibitory antiviral effect when the susceptible cells were treated either prior to or after infection suggests a possible prophylactic and therapeutic use.”

WELL, YES. IT WAS A POLITICALLY MOTIVATED HIT JOB: AN “INSURANCE POLICY.” It’s Official: Every Aspect of Crossfire Hurricane Was Shady.

At the height of the Russia-collusion hysteria, anyone who theorized that Crossfire Hurricane had been sparked by the Steele dossier — a document paid for by the political party running against target of the investigation — would be rigorously fact-checked.

Mainstream reporters covering the story would authoritatively inform their audience that it was evidence gleaned from a conversation with then-20-something former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos that had triggered the investigation. They knew, of course, that if the FBI had relied principally on the dossier, the investigation would look transparently and problematically partisan. The Papadopoulos conversations, on the other hand, sounded pretty damning, even though journalists didn’t know exactly what they entailed.

Well, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz recently told the Senate that those FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign were “entirely” predicated on information from that dossier. And we now know that virtually every one of those applications to spy on American citizens was rife with errors, misleading information, and “fraudulent” evidence. You know, just some endemic, comprehensive, and highly targeted “sloppiness.”

We now learn from a new CBS News report that the Papadopoulos evidence was also misrepresented in applications. Two weeks before Election Day, in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign, the Obama administration’s DOJ filled out surveillance warrant applications without including contradicting evidence — and then left out that evidence again on three subsequent renewals. Just another mishap.

And yes the whole thing does “reek of corruption” — because it was entirely corrupt.

Governments cant seem to decide if they’re supposed to free people from jail to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, or put them in jail to stop the spread

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