Category: US Politics

The Chinese government has come under fresh scrutiny over accusations that officials scrubbed crucial online data about the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the controversial laboratory suspected of being the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Daily Mail, "hundreds of pages of information" spanning over 300 studies conducted by WIV have been wiped from a database, including some which discuss passing diseases from animals to humans – which were published online by the state-run National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and are no longer available.

The deletion of key evidence has reignited fears that China is trying to whitewash the investigation into the origins of the virus.

It comes after President Xi Jinping last week blocked investigators from the World Health Organisation entering the country in a move that drew international condemnation. Meanwhile, state media outlets have published hundreds of stories claiming that the virus did not even originate in the city of Wuhan.

As part of the NSFC’s purge of online studies, it has deleted all reference to those carried out by Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan-based virologist who has earned the nickname Batwoman for her trips to gather samples in bat caves.

Studies key to any investigation into the source of the virus, including one into the risk of cross-species infection from bats with Sars-like coronaviruses, and another looking at human pathogens carried by bats, have also disappeared. –Daily Mail

Zhengli came under fire in 2015 over her controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research creating chimeric bat viruses designed to infect humans (but suggesting that an emergent coronavirus that’s over 96% similar to a bat coronavirus could have escaped from Zhengli’s lab is a conspiracy theory).

According to former UK Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith – a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, the revelations are yet another example of a Chinese coverup.

"China is clearly trying to hide the evidence," he said, adding "It is vital that there is a thorough investigation into what happened but China seems to be doing all it can to stop that happening. We don’t know what was going on in that laboratory. It may well be the case that they played around with bat coronaviruses and made some kind of mistake. Unless China opens itself up to scrutiny, the world will assume they have something to hide."

The Mail notes that this isn’t the first time the WIV has been accused of suppressing critical evidence regarding the origins of the virus.

Days before the WHO was alerted to the outbreak of Sars-like pneumonia cases in Wuhan in December 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology began altering its database of viral pathogens.

The Wildlife-borne Viral Pathogen Database was unique because it included information on virus variants in other wild animals.

Among the changes, which experts believe were made to throw investigators off the scent, keywords such as ‘wildlife’ or ‘wild animals’ were deleted.

The title was changed from Wildlife-borne Viral Pathogen Database to Bat And Rodent-borne Viral Pathogen Database. The term ‘wild animal’ was replaced with ‘bat and rodent’ or ‘bat and rat’. –Daily Mail

Notably, the alteration occurred two days before a gene sequencing lab was reportedly ordered by the Health and Medical Commission of Hubei Province to destroy samples of the new disease and withhold information.

According to the report, the alterations – conducted on the evening of Dec. 30 – were substantial, and occurred the day before the CCP notified the World Health Organization about the outbreak of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan.

The primary database contact is none other than Zhengli – who was in Shanghai for a conference in late 2019 when she was summoned back to Wuhan to deal with the outbreak which had been detected in two pneumonia patients. While on the overnight train back to Wuhan, the database was altered.

"It looks like a rushed, inconsistent effort to disassociate the project from the outbreak by ­rebranding it," according to the UK intelligence analyst who discovered the alterations. "It’s a strange thing to do within hours of being informed of a novel-coronavirus outbreak."

"If the WIV had found the missing link between bat virus RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 [the coronavirus that causes COVID-19] from an animal vector, it would have been in Shi’s database," he added.

Purged records and destroyed samples don’t exactly instill confidence.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Social media platform Gab reported on Saturday a huge increase in traffic as users migrate from Twitter amid widespread bans.

“Our traffic is up 753% in the past 24 hours. Tens of millions of visits,” Gab said in a social media statement, responding to a user who said he wasn’t able to make an account.

“Please be patient, we aren’t going anywhere. Spinning up 10 new servers tonight. This takes time,” Gab added.

The company also reported over 500,000 new users on Saturday.

Twitter on Friday permanently banned President Donald Trump and a slew of other users, including attorney Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. That triggered an exodus to alternative sites such as Gab and Parler.

Parler is facing immense pressure to implement harsher moderation policies. Google and Apple removed the application from their online stores and Amazon plans to remove Parler from its web hosting service. Parler CEO John Matze told The Epoch Times that the company is prepared to take legal action.

Gab is pushing for people to use its platform, noting that Trump is already on there. The president is not yet on Parler.

A screenshot shows the social media platform Gab on Jan. 10, 2020. (Screenshot/Gab)

The company has also noted that it was removed from Apple and Google stores years ago and doesn’t rely on a third-party cloud hosting provider, such as Amazon.

“Over the past four years we have been banned from multiple cloud hosting providers and were told that if we didn’t like it we should ‘build our own.’ So, that’s exactly what we did,” CEO Andrew Torba wrote in a blog post last year.

“Gab isn’t just building an alternative social network. We’re building an alternative internet. From hosting infrastructure to web browsing and more: Gab is the market leader when it comes to defending free speech against Silicon Valley tyranny online.”

In a new statement on Saturday, Torba said:

“If your business is built on the backs of Silicon Valley tyrants (Apple, Google, et al) they can and will attempt to destroy you if and when you become a threat to their interests. They did this to Gab. Then Fortnite. Now Parler.”

“Terrible content of all kinds is available on Twitter and Facebook. Everyone on the planet knows this fact. Yet both companies are on both App Stores. Apple banning Parler is not the neutral implementation of some objective standard, but rather a cynical, politically motivated gesture and evidence of Silicon Valley elites’ disdain for ordinary Americans. The solution, as always, is not government. It is to build your own. People mock this meme, but Gab lives it. While others whine, we build,” he added.

Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Google said in a statement when it banned Gab that “social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people,” to remain on its online store. Apple initially said the ban was because Gab didn’t automatically censor pornographic content but after Gab made changes on that matter, the company said it would uphold the ban because Gab “includes content that could be considered defamatory or mean-spirited.”

In a letter to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, responding to his request to preserve data, Torba said Gab does moderate speech. He said it has a zero-tolerance policy towards threats of violence and unlawful speech but safeguards speech that may be controversial but is legal.

Last Monday, we published the first weekly warm up note from Morgan Stanley equity strategist Michael Wilson who in addition to warning that the "market is ripe for a drawdown" as the "risk/reward has deteriorated materially", ( a prediction which has yet to pass) laid out his most contrarian view about 2021, namely that "the big surprise of 2021 could be higher inflation than many, including the Fed, expect. Currently, the consensus is expecting a gradual and orderly increase in prices as the economy continues to recover. However, the move in asset prices like Bitcoin suggest markets are starting to think this adjustment may not be so gradual or orderly."

Fast forward to today, when in Morgan Stanley’s Sunday Start periodical, the bank’s global head of economics, Chetan Ahya, doubles down on this topic and in "Five Reasons why we are inflation bulls" lists all the reasons why not only are 10Y yields set to rise (perhaps violently), but why runaway inflation may be just months away, an assessment which both 5Y5Y fwds and 5Y breakevens, both at 2 year highs, are in agreement with.

Below we excerpt from his full note:

In the spring of 2020, even when the world was clearly entering the deepest recession in a generation, we argued that the recession would be sharper but shorter. We forecast that the global economy would embark on a V-shaped recovery and that the recession had unleashed forces that would alter inflation’s dynamics.

The consensus was and remains on a different page. Last year, it underestimated the rebound in growth and overestimated the disinflationary impact of COVID-19. This year, it is underestimating both growth and the upside to inflation. We differ with consensus on how the following five factors will shape the inflation outlook.

• 1. First, private sector risk appetite has experienced limited scarring: As we have argued at length, the pandemic was an exogenous shock. Policy-makers were unfettered by moral hazard concerns and had little hesitation about underwriting household and corporate income losses to an unprecedented degree. In particular, while unemployment cost US households US$330 billion in wage income, they have already received US$1 trillion in aggregate in transfers, a figure that will rise as the second round of fiscal stimulus kicks in. The excess saving of about US$1.4 trillion will provide the fuel for pent-up demand to drive a sharp rebound in growth once economies fully reopen. We forecast GDP growth of 5.9%Y for the US in 2021, a full 2 percentage points above the consensus. With the Democrats taking control of the Senate, hopes of further fiscal stimulus have risen (we expect an additional US$1 trillion for COVID-19 aid in the near term and further healthcare/infrastructure spending initiatives later in 2021), along with prospects for an even stronger recovery.
  
• 2. Second, the loss from unemployment overstates the economic loss: Like our growth expectations, our unemployment rate forecasts are more bullish than the consensus. As things stand, about 78% of US job losses have come in COVID-19- sensitive sectors, which will rebound rapidly once the economy fully reopens. Moreover, 68% of the job losses from February-April 2020 are in low-income segments, and one should not overstate the impact on aggregate growth, notwithstanding the need for additional policy support targeting low-income households.
  
• 3. Third, policy-makers are attempting to run the economy red-hot, with the aim of returning the economy to its pre-COVID-19 unemployment rate. However, accelerated restructuring in the economy will mean that displaced workers will need time for retraining. As this process unfolds, the labor market may tighten even earlier than the headline unemployment rate implies. While this dynamic was also at play following the 2008 recession, the recovery was more gradual, which crucially gave businesses and the labor market ample time to adjust.
   
• 4. Fourth, policy-makers are pushing for further transfers to low-income segments, and they are likely to continue reining in the trio of tech, trade and titans in an effort to mitigate the impacts of a lower wage share and higher income inequality. The recession’s disproportionate impact on lower-income households has exacerbated the pre-existing issue of inequality, increasing the impetus for policy-makers to act. Further transfers, especially given how they are now in excess of lost income, will impart an inflationary impulse. Disrupting the trio of tech, trade and titans, which have played an important disinflationary role for the past 30 years, will dampen their disinflationary impulse.
  
• 5. Finally, the Fed is committed to its 2%Y average inflation goal: The consensus believes that it is one thing to target a 2%Y average inflation goal and another to actually get it. But in previous cycles, the Fed had tightened monetary policy well before inflation moved above 2%Y sustainably. This is unlikely to be the case this time, hence any initial rises in inflation will have more time to take hold.

Our chief US economist Ellen Zentner forecasts US core PCE inflation to end 2021 at 2%Y and overshoot 2%Y on a sustained basis from 2022 onwards. The risk to our inflation outlook in the near term is a more severe COVID-19 outbreak, which may constrain activity and inflationary pressures.

Beyond the near term, we see two additional risks:

• First, the inflation overshoot may not be as moderate as we expect. If inflation momentum indicates that it could potentially breach 2.5%Y, we could see a sharp swing in expectations for Fed policy, with attendant financial market volatility.
• Second, if the supply side is more flexible than we think, it may help to keep inflation at bay but risks stoking asset bubbles. In that case, financial stability would outweigh price stability concerns.