What Happened Today: January 12, 2022
COVID whistleblower; Israel arrests spies; New inflation record
The Big Story
What are purported to be leaked internal military documents that were recently released to the public claim that COVID-19 was deliberately created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with U.S. government funding and caused the current pandemic when it escaped from the lab. Among the documents—which are marked “unclassified” but were allegedly stored in a top-secret share drive, according to Project Veritas, the right-wing news site that published them—the most damning is a memo written by U.S. Marine Corps officer Major Joseph Murphy. On August 21, 2021, while he was still working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), essentially the military’s research and development lab, Murphy sent a letter to the inspector general of the Department of Defense alleging that after DARPA refused to fund a top-secret research project for “Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses” because it violated government prohibitions against gain-of-function research, the same project was approved by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which at the time was run by Dr. Anthony Fauci. In congressional testimony Tuesday, Fauci did not deny the authenticity of the leaked documents but claimed they were being misinterpreted. He claimed that the initial DARPA proposal was not the same project subsequently funded by NIAID. “We have never seen that grant, and we have never funded that grant,” Fauci said of the DARPA proposal, calling claims to the contrary “completely and unequivocally incorrect.” But in his memo, Murphy alleges that the work done in Wuhan was a continuation of the original DARPA proposal and that in 2019, the novel coronavirus “leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves,” adding that “the reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins hitchhiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm.”
Read more: https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2022/01/11/new-us-military-report-states-covid-19-was-created-by-a-us-funded-ecohealth-alliance-program-at-wuhan-institute-of-virology-n504679
Today's Back Pages: An Israeli Immunologist Blasts His Country’s COVID-19 Policy
The Rest
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The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, has arrested five people on charges of spying for Iran, the agency revealed on Tuesday. The people arrested include four women and one man, all Jewish Israelis of Iranian descent. They were allegedly recruited online by an Iranian intelligence operative who claimed he was Jewish, and they proceeded to provide him with photographs of strategic locations and other information, despite some of the suspects harboring suspicions that he was in fact an agent of the Iranian government.
Read more: https://www.timesofisrael.com/shin-bet-arrests-5-jewish-israelis-suspected-of-spying-for-iran/
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Inflation hit a new high when the consumer price index reached 7% in December, a 0.4% gain over November and the largest year-over-year gain since 1982. Much of the rise was driven by increases in the costs of housing, food, and used vehicles. With prices continuing to go up, analysts are predicting that the Fed will be forced to raise interest rates, which could bring inflation under control but is also likely to increase economic hardship in the short term as household debt such as mortgages become more expensive.
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President Biden gave a speech in Georgia Tuesday that attempted to muster support for stalled bills relating to election procedures popular with the Democrats’ liberal base, but he faces a hard time getting them passed in Congress. The president’s pitch could be valuable politically, regardless of the legislative outcome, as a way to maintain credibility within his party’s activist wing.
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With implications for the current COVID-19 wave in the United States, there’s more evidence that the Omicron surge may be peaking in England. The United Kingdom just experienced its sixth straight day of falling infection rates, down 45% this week from last week. This suggests that England is following the same course as South Africa, where the variant was first detected and cases peaked after roughly a month. In the United States, an influential model developed by the University of Washington to forecast the spread of the novel coronavirus suggests that cases in the United States will peak by Jan. 19 and then begin to fall sharply.
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Despite a year of stringent regulation from the Chinese government aimed at curbing technology companies’ social influence, China’s tech industry continued to grow in 2021, earning a record $131.6 billion in funding from venture capitalists—roughly 50% more than it received in 2020.
Read more: https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/china-tech-startups-2021
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Under China’s “zero COVID” approach to containing the pandemic with a semi-permanent militarized lockdown, some 20 million people are currently confined to their homes in the cities of Anyang, Xi’an, and Yuzhou.
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Tesla has now added an “assertive” option to its vehicles’ self-driving mode that emulates the habits of more aggressive drivers with features such as narrowing the gap between vehicles and staying in the left passing lane. The electric car company Tesla has grown at a furious pace over the past two years, but it has also started to attract more regulatory backlash related to safety, with particular focus on the self-driving feature. In a new challenge for the company, a 19-year-old independent security researcher named David Colombo tweeted on Monday that he had exploited a security flaw to hack into 25 Teslas around the world, gaining partial control over the vehicles.
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Following up on yesterday’s dispatch about growing Sino-Israeli strategic ties, an article in Tuesday’s English-language edition of Haaretz, co-authored by Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, describes China’s efforts to recruit talent inside Israel. Orion, the director of the Israel-China program at Tel Aviv University’s National Institute of Strategic Studies, notes that two Chinese recruitment arms have been set up in the cities of Tel Aviv and Be’er Sheva and that “apparently, Israel’s academic institutions do not require their members to declare their participation in such ventures.”
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Doctors in Maryland successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig’s heart into a man’s chest last Friday, in a first-of-its-kind procedure. David Bennett, 57, who had been ineligible for a human heart transplant, is doing well at the moment, according to doctors. Past attempts to transplant animal organs into human bodies failed after the human hosts rejected them, but doctors hope that the genetic editing will have made the pig more suitable as an organ donor. For Bennett, it was an easy call. “It was either die or do this transplant,” he said the day before surgery.
An Israeli Immunologist Blasts His Country’s COVID-19 Policy
No other country has embraced the belief that scientific and government interventions can end COVID-19 the way that Israel has. For many Israelis—who pride themselves on the “startup nation’s” talent for innovating new technologies—new drugs, testing methods, and COVID-19 surveillance techniques became articles of the civic religion.
It’s hard to blame them. For all the distortions and obsessive slanders directed at Israel by the press and chattering classes in Europe and the United States, here finally was some good publicity. How much more difficult, then, to admit that much of the “war” against COVID-19—vaccine mandates and lockdowns—has been an abject failure at stopping the spread of the disease and, worse, was in many cases based on claims that could charitably be called deeply flawed.
Now a leading Israeli immunologist, Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University, has published an open letter excoriating Israel’s Ministry of Health. At the moment, Israel is pushing for a fourth round of vaccine doses even as overwhelming evidence shows that they do not stop transmission of the disease and that excessive booster shots can weaken the immune system. In his letter, originally republished by the Swiss Policy Research and later reposted by the Brownstone Institute, Qimron claims that the whole edifice of COVID-19 policy, which appeared so promising early on before spiraling into its current interminable cycle of drugs and restrictions that fail to prevent new waves, has been based on an anti-scientific dogma.
In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic—we told you so.
Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.
You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.
You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26). You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination—and you failed in that as well.
You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020 …
Read the rest here:https://brownstone.org/articles/ehud-qimrons-powerful-letter-to-the-israeli-ministry-of-health/
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