Stuff that's been in the news since March 6th

 Xi Jinpingpong blamed the US for the first time for his domestic failures, according to the Wall Street Journal. He's a commie reactionary with Chinese characteristics. Not a good sign of what's to come.

Some cracker Republican in Florida wants bloggers to register like lobbyists, and Ron DeSantis finally came out against that, thankfully. A little late, though. Newt beat him to it.

Vivek Ramaswamy says CPAC shook him down for $$$$ in exchange for which they'd see to it he did better in the straw poll. There's no report that Matt Schlapp also asked for a reach-around.

LIBOR surpassed 5% for the first time in 15 years on Monday.

Georgia fired up a nuclear power reactor this week. The country now has 93 operating. 67 were never finished after Three Mile Island. 

A dog and her pups were rescued alive and well from a basement in Turkey more than a month after the Feb 6 earthquake. The death toll is up to 52k.

Thousands of Iranian schoolgirls are being systematically poisoned in Iran. There was a similar incident in Afghanistan during the first Obama administration. Rag-headed heathen bastards.

South Africa is going the way of Rhodesia. 

The UST yield curve aggregate made a new high 4.674% Wednesday v Fed Funds Effective Rate 4.57.

The Obama of Big Oil said peak production from 2019 will never be surpassed.

Pundits who predict inflation won't spiral like the 1970s fail to understand that the price of energy inputs is determinative. Unless energy costs come down big, we're in for it.

Cumulative deaths per million from C-19 in the US are 3,285. In Africa just 181. Follow the science.

The tide is turning on the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory of the origin of C-19 in the press.

Anthony Fauci has authored a paper in CELL which calls for better vaccines than the ones we've got, whether experimental or not. No kidding.

Silicon Valley Bank failed today, the first failure since 2020 when there were four. There was a huge flight to safety. Stocks sold off and longer dated Treasuries rallied 3.45%. The yield curve aggregate plunged 230bp, 3.82%.

Full time employment rose a little in Feb to 49.66% of civilian population. The average last year was 50.1%. 

This is the third anniversary of Andersen telling Fauci that some of the features of the virus look engineered and that Andersen and three others doubted the genome evolved

The virus was most likely illegally engineered at Wuhan in sub-standard lab conditions funded against the rules in part by Fauci's NIH, subsequently accidentally escaped, and went on to kill millions and destroy the economies and livelihoods of millions more.

I think one low-level guy went to jail for the 2008 financial crisis, but so far no one is even being investigated for the travesty which occurred under Fauci.

Thankfully @R_H_Ebright of Rutgers University won't let go of this story.

 

Booster protection against Omicron is four times lower than against Delta, and basically non-existent if you've had only two shots

Those who received the second dose did not have any neutralization ability against the variant, while they continued to have some ability against Delta and even the original Wuhan strain.

“There was no neutralization ability whatsoever, and that is very worrisome,” said Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Unit at the hospital, in a briefing on Saturday night, adding that these people might also be exposed to serious disease. ...

On the other hand, the Sheba study found that the booster dose does increase the ability of the vaccine to work against Omicron by about 100-fold, meaning that there is “significant protection,” Regev Yochay said. “It is lower than the neutralizing ability against the Delta – about four times lower. But it is very optimistic.”

Story.

Compared to the same period last year, the last seven months have seen a huge increase in C19 cases despite the mass vaccination effort, with deaths down only 14%

Year over year Apr-Oct 2021 US COVID-19 cases are up 71% from 9.02m to 15.45m; deaths are down 14% from 226,208 to 193,877.

Are cases up so much because vaccinated people keep spreading it asymptomatically?

 

Why is the white tail deer population in the US so badly infected now when the Chicoms couldn't find any infected animals to blame in the wet market in Wuhan in early 2020?

 

Are the deaths down because of vaccines? Better clinical practices in hospital? Monoclonal antibodies? A less deadly variant? Fewer vulnerable older people?

In California to date, just 10% of the cases have been 65+ years of age, but those account for 71% of the deaths, down from 74% at the beginning of May.

 

The number of people who received retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration rose 900,000 to 46.4 million in March, the smallest year-over-year gain since April 2009. ... the year-over-year change appears to reflect excess deaths. About 447,000 people who died from the virus were 65 or older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or about 80% of total deaths.

More.

 

 

Peter Daszak & Company just coincidentally proposed to insert novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab in 2018, and presto! in late 2019 one suddenly gets loose in the world

Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research

The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses:

“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.

“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. 

 

“This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”

 

The leaked grant proposal is here, naming all the principals, in the US, Singapore, and the Bat Lady at the Wuhan Institute of Virology: Baric, Wang, Shi, Rocke, and Unidad.

They laid out the road map, and it looks like Wuhan Institute of Virology followed it. Or maybe Daszak and Company did, but without the federal funding. Still "no smoking gun", but an awful lot of dead bodies involving the very thing they proposed to work on.

AP story about coronavirus in China is a contemptible load of rot

China has 4.4 times more people per square mile than the USA, but we are supposed to believe these ridiculous numbers and claims:

China’s worst coronavirus outbreak since the start of the pandemic a year and a half ago escalated Wednesday with dozens more cases around the country ...

Since that initial outbreak was tamed last year, China’s people had lived virtually free of the virus ... 

As of Tuesday, China has given more than 1.71 billion vaccine doses to its population of 1.4 billion. ...

China has reported 4,636 deaths and 93,289 cases of COVID-19 overall, most of them from the original outbreak in Wuhan that peaked early last year.

 

 

FOIA'd Fauci email shows his top people informed him 31 Jan 2020 that the coronavirus looked engineered and was inconsistent with evolutionary theory

In other words, it might have come out of a lab, not out of nature by crossing from bats to some unknown animal intermediary found at the Wuhan wet market.

 

WAPo calls Chicom propaganda that coronavirus came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, "baseless"

 I don't think so.

This is the same WAPo which highlighted an unexplained outbreak of a respiratory virus in Virginia, just across the border from the Fort Detrick biodefense facility, in June-July 2019, which killed 3 and hospitalized and sickened dozens more. The CDC concluded in late July 2019 that a "common cold" virus was to blame in the outbreak.

Hm, imagine that. But don't think about it too long. The investigative reporting on the right wants us to concentrate on a possible outbreak at the Wuhan lab, which, by the way, wasn't a Wall Street Journal scoop. An Australian journalist had the story already in March.

Meanwhile the CDC temporarily shut down the US Army part of the Fort Detrick operation in August 2019, just a month after the Virginia outbreak, for numerous safety and other violations, not the least of which was an incomplete inventory of agents. The latter problem seems to be chronic at Fort Detrick. The place was similarly cited way back in 2009.

And Congress was deliberately kept out of the loop.

What else is Fort Detrick famous for, besides bioweapons research long ago supposedly abandoned by the US government? 

In 2001 a bunch of people were killed by anthrax mailed in letters shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick.

Robert Mueller and James Comey infamously fingered the wrong guy for those anthrax attacks, who was later compensated millions and exonerated. The true culprit was a senior scientist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 before our incompetent FBI could arrest him, seven years after the crimes.

What other nutjobs are still working in sensitive positions in our government? 

In light of recent testimony by Anthony Fauci to Congress that he couldn't guarantee that NIH funds awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party were not used for gain of function research to weaponize viruses, you have to open your eyes to the fact of long-standing and intimate cooperation of US researchers with their Chinese counterparts. Chinese "scientists" are all over the place at American universities and research institutions, including at Fort Detrick, where their American counterparts seem all too often unruffled by the security implications. They are all also all dependent on US government, including military, funding for their livelihoods, as well as on funding from what President Eisenhower once warned us about, the military-industrial complex.

I don't believe any of these people as far as I can throw them.

We know the Chicoms were working on coronavirus. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that one of the inventory lacunae at Fort Detrick was the coronavirus, too. Was it just a coincidence that there was an outbreak of coronavirus-like disease in Virginia in the summer of 2019? CDC should be forced to reveal more.

The American elites who work on this stuff have all the same incentives to keep it all secret as the Chinese do. American scientists are thick as thieves with the Chinese. The fact is they are in this together, and we are the helpless bystanders on the outside. My estimation is they have too much to lose to tell the truth to the American people. Money trumps patriotism. 

As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base:

Zhao, one of the country’s most notoriously hawkish diplomats, referenced a U.S. military location that has been baselessly linked to the coronavirus outbreak by Chinese media.

That lunatic billionaire Ronald Unz not only thinks America developed COVID-19 as a bioweapon, but released it in Wuhan

 

 He also believes the China data:

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.

CNN: Wuhan coronavirus cases more like 500k not 50k

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/29/asia/china-coronavirus-seroprevalence-study-intl-hnk/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_term=image&utm_source=twCNN&utm_content=2020-12-29T09%3A30%3A05

China has been lying about everything for a long time, like a rug.

Its coronavirus statistics flatlined long ago.

95k cases total to date? Fewer than 5k deaths? C'mon man!

The infection rate quoted in the article implies 260k infections in Hubei apart from the 500k in Wuhan.

At a current global case fatality rate running to 2.18% and 1.75% in the US, you're talking deaths anywhere between 17k and 13k, not 4,777. But honestly, even that is low-balling it. China has 1.4 billion people in it. 17k deaths there compared with 337k in the US? Seriously? 

The biggest joke here isn't China's numbers. It's the people who believe them.

Rush Limbaugh lies about COVID-19 right up to the bitter end

 Today, here:

Even with flu shots, the number of people who die every flu season is stunning. It is shockingly high. It’s greater numbers than people are dying of COVID. 

It is shocking, really. The Wuhan virus is the third leading cause of death in the US in 2020, 5.7 times worse than the flu, and there's Rush telling his listeners flu deaths are worse.

The federal government could have read the news wires in Jan and Feb like the rest of us and learned that the coronavirus spread asymptomatically, but no, that was too hard

As coronavirus threatened invasion, a new 'Red Dawn' team tried to save America:

'In some cases, government officials appeared to be learning about developments for first time from the Red Dawn emails. In one exchange, Eva Lee, the director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare at Georgia Tech, flagged a study showing a 20-year-old woman left Wuhan with no symptoms and had infected five family members.

'Dr. Robert Kadlec, the Trump administration’s Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, appeared surprised. “Eva is this true?!” Kadlec replied. “If so, we have a huge [hole] on our screening and quarantine effort.”'

Anyone carefully following the news about coronavirus knew there already were confirmed reports of asymptomatic spread by air travelers before the end of Jan: to Japan, Washington State, and Germany, but a week before Feb ended the Trump administration and many US health authorities were still clueless about them.

And then this curious story about the 20-yr old Wuhan woman came out on Feb 21/22, long after the fact refocusing attention on the issue of asymptomatic spread, curious mostly because she infected others far away from Wuhan around Jan 10 but a month later was herself still symptom-free.

But did it do anything to get the feds to move? Obviously not.

It took another almost four weeks from Feb 22 before the US instituted the half-hearted stay-at-home advisory, triggered mostly by community spread in Washington State. And air travelers didn't abandon flying until after Mar 15, when they finally realized the feds were taking the epidemic sort of seriously and the threat was real.

Meanwhile the disease is obviously still spreading asymptomatically in the United States like wildfire, and the feds are doing . . . what exactly to stop it? The weakness and incompetence the Trump administration has shown have only encouraged the nay-sayers to masks and social distancing.

The stay-at-home period should have been used to mobilize production of adequate masks for the population and to prepare schools to social distance, at a minimum, but now we're at war over both of those, too.

Sad!

Reuters had the Wuhan woman story on Feb 22 and it was picked up immediately by The Straits Times in Singapore:

Wuhan woman with no symptoms infected five relatives with coronavirus: Study:

"A 20-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, travelled 675km north to Anyang where she infected five relatives, without ever showing signs of infection, Chinese scientists reported on Friday (Feb 21), offering new evidence that the virus can be spread asymptomatically."

Why do Drudge's "bombshell" stories always seem to end up coming from titty-rags?

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/coronavirus-began-months-earlier-not-21882132

The referenced study isn't even peer-reviewed yet, either.

"Coronavirus began months earlier and not in Wuhan, bombshell UK report claims"

 

LOL: It's been "wuhan virus numbers" in Singapore at the Straits Times since the beginning of this outbreak, but the Brits gotta apologize

https://www.straitstimes.com/multimedia/graphics/2020/02/wuhan-virus-numbers/index.html?shell

British scientific journal Nature has apologised for associating Covid-19 with China in its reporting, saying that early coverage of the global health crisis by itself and other media had led to racist attacks on people of Asian descent around the world.

More here.

How Wuhan/Hubei deaths from coronavirus might have been 27,000 or 33,000 not 3,177

From the story here:

Urns are reportedly being distributed at a rate of 500 a day at the mortuary until the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday, which falls on April 4 this year.

Wuhan has seven other mortuaries. If they are all sticking to the same schedule, this adds up to more than 40,000 urns being distributed in the city over the next 10 days.

Already on Jan 26 there was evidence, quickly removed, that China deaths from coronavirus had reached 81% of the official figure as of Mar 28. Remember that the closing of Hubei Province didn't occur until Jan 23, so on Jan 26 there was still chaos in China as authorities scrambled to secure the actual as well as the information environments.

Based on widely discussed figures, if one assumes Wuhan's 11 million population normally experiences a death rate of 0.7%, then 77,000 residents die annually from all causes under normal conditions. This yields 211 deaths per day on average and 6,417 deaths per month, or 12,833 over the two-month epidemic. Call it 13,000. 40k-13k = 27k dead from COVID-19.

The problem is that it was asserted that as many as 5 million residents of Wuhan had already departed the city for Chinese New Year of the Rat celebrations ahead of the Jan 23 closing of the city. These remained outside Wuhan during the epidemic because they were not permitted to return. If you leave 6 million in the city, the normal mortality rate of 0.7% yields 42,000 deaths annualized, or 3,500 a month. So there would have been just 7,000 deaths normally over the two-month period of the epidemic from non-epidemic causes. 40k-7k = 33k dead from COVID-19.  

But we'll probably never really know.

Coronavirus spread in the US and in Michigan

On Tuesday morning there were still 0 cases in my state of Michigan. Late Tuesday there were two. Yesterday we found out there were 12, and this morning we wake up to 25, according to this NYT map.

News broke yesterday that 3 of the cases were right here in my own county of Kent, 2 women and a man, all over 60, all three travelers to international hot spots. Gee what a shock.

At least one of these cases had been up and down a main shopping drag where I do some of my shopping. He or she went to the gym, a pizza joint, a steakhouse, and two (!) submarine sandwich shops between March 6-8. How pedestrian the tastes of these jet-setters.

Trump is criticized by Democrats because of his Feb 1 travel restrictions on China.

I fault him for not going far enough. He has brought Wuhan into my backyard because of what he has not done and easily could have done.

Trump should have shut down all travel on Feb 1, especially by air, to protect America from the spread of this disease and its impact, which has been enormous. Every plane was a missile. Every passenger was a warhead, and now they are all going off all over the place. 

Local and state governments are scrambling to shut down everything they can, disrupting the lives of millions because Trump couldn't bring himself to disrupt the privilege of a class of jet-setting globalists, elites and wannabes, among whom the disease is spreading, according to the headlines and in fact. Trump himself may come down with it because of this.

I carry no brief for the Chicoms, but Xi Jinping is the great man Trump only wishes he could be because he did what he had to do to protect his country from the virus by locking down Hubei Province. Who cares what the motivation was, whether it was saving face, saving the power and privilege of the communist party, saving his economy, or some other more broadly understood conception of patriotism. In the end Xi Jinping understood what he had to do to survive and prevail before it was too late for China. It took him about one month. We are going on two months, have an Emergency declaration as of yesterday, but you are still free to move about the country, spreading the disease.

There were just over 1000 cases in the US on Wednesday. This morning over 2000, which will be 4000 in a few days, then 8000, then 16000, and so on. The time for locking down travel is long past, but locking it down even now would help. 

University of Washington researchers are finding 7-9% positivity results for coronavirus in their daily testing of sample lots approximating 1000. If that turns out to be the morbidity rate and this virus spreads like the common cold, our country could easily have 30 million SARS-CoV-2 infections, 20% of which will be serious. Those 6 million serious cases will overwhelm our healthcare infrastructure, and many will die because of that. There will simply be too many people to treat effectively.

All for muh freedom.

Monday situation summary 3/9/20

The CDC basically urged people 60 and over to become hermits at home to avoid infection with SARS-CoV-2. High blood pressure appears to be the one thing most who die of the virus have in common.

The COVID-19 outbreak in Italy is killing off parents and grandparents at an alarming level because the healthcare system, though quite advanced up north, is overwhelmed by the disease outbreak. Reports say many patients die in hospital untreated, just as in China in the early days of the epidemic there, because of inadequate infrastructure and doctors for so many patients. The quarantine has been extended now to the entire country. That is not being done to make Donald Trump look bad. 

Stock market losses today were sizable. The decline in the S&P 500 made the top 20 list for daily percentage losses. The stock market is a confidence game, and valuation has grown to outrageous levels and stayed there for a couple of years already, so it has been vulnerable to a confidence shock. People just didn't believe it was. The virus hysteria is undercutting that confidence. 

The price of oil plunged as OPEC failed to agree to production cuts. Expect big trouble for the economy as a result, which was already in decline, which is why OPEC wanted the cuts. Declining demand. Max von Sydow died to mark the occasion. Hint: He played Joubert.

People are afraid to fly and some flights are nearly empty. It's a good thing, too, because a study from China is out indicating infected persons can infect others in enclosed, air conditioned spaces like buses, even after they've disembarked. One person infected 11 this way. This also happened in Japan you will recall, where a bus driver was infected by tourists from Wuhan on his bus.

US cases of COVID-19 soared to 654 from the 15 President Trump said back in February were headed to zero. Can't make this go away with the Power of Positive Thinking.

In Hubei Province, where ground zero Wuhan is located, the coronavirus death rate is 3.88%

Coronavirus death rate climbs to 3.3%, just shy of minimum estimated Spanish flu pandemic death rate 100 years ago

A minimum of 17 million died worldwide in the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago when 500 million globally were infected, yielding a minimum death rate of 3.4%.

The estimates of deaths go up from there, some claiming as many as 50 million or even 100 million died.

CNBC reports this morning that total infections from Wuhan, China coronavirus number 79,400 and deaths 2,621.

The numbers are puny by comparison, but the death rate is not: 3.3%.

Absent draconian restrictions on movement and assembly this virus could kill millions similar to the Spanish flu pandemic.

The new outbreaks outside the Chinese mainland will foretell the true future for the world as many doubt the veracity of the Chinese numbers, both death counts and case counts.

Coronavirus death rate rises again, to 2.93%

76,700+ cases

2,249 dead

The virus has now spread to Iran, where four have died, and to Lebanon.

A passenger returned from the Diamond Princess cruise ship has brought it to Israel. 

A person in Chengdu, China, almost 700 miles from Wuhan, who recovered from the infection and was discharged on Feb 10, went into quarantine at home for 14 days but re-presented with the infection this week.