Did the coronavirus leak from a Wuhan lab?

By the time you start reading this post or watch the latest podcast, your mind has probably been bombarded by an extraordinary amount of disinformation from the U.S. and China over whether the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese virology lab? China obviously denies this possibility but the US isn’t so sure.

The global dispute resulted in an extraordinarily rare statement from the director of national intelligence confirming the U.S. is exploring claims the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

My independent investigation reveals that while the virus appears to be naturally occurring, it likely originated from cultures in the high security P4 laboratory in Wuhan.

These are my findings.

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There is much more to the disinformation war than meets the eye. Trump’s claims are also a strategic attempt to paint Democrats and Joe Biden as soft on China.

“This is what happens in a disinformation war. Two sides that are involved in something together start pretending to fight with each other. We saw it in Syria when Russia accused Turkey of profiting off the sale of ISIS oil. The truth is that faux fight was a smokescreen to hide the fact that they were both profiting off the sale of ISIS oil in Syria. The same thing is happening here.”

“What Happened in Wuhan?”

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The symmetry between Chinese President Xi and Donald Trump’s strategies is too hard to ignore. Are the two leaders intentionally sickening the world?

Over the last four years, many of us who write about the Trump administration have suspected that behind the Russian interference and the Saudi connection is a China rising story. Beijing’s involvement has been visible on the fringes, but there were limited apparent ties to the Trump Administration to arrive at a conclusive collusion story. 

As #COVID-19 has become an everyday reality for most of us, the symmetry between Trump and Xi’s strategy has become more apparent. In the latest podcast, I break down why I think Xi and Trump are deliberately sickening the world and why America remains completely divided by it. 

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Does SARS-CoV-2 slow down during Summer?

The National Academy of Sciences‘ Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats has weighed in on the question: Does the spread of the Coronavirus slow down in warmer conditions?

NAS claims studies have shown reduced transmission of the virus under warmer and humid conditions in the lab. One study found the virus does survive longer than other known pathogens like flu, monkeypox, tuberculosis or the 2002 SARS but still less than in colder conditions.

Out of the lab, the virus still spreads in countries with warmer weather but the countries with the biggest outbreaks all occurred during the northern Winter and early Spring and have subsided as the temperatures climbed.

More people are outside in the Summer which may help social distancing.

The unknown factor is the limited research into the two strains of SARS-CoV-2. One strain appears to have been more dominant in Europe and the East Coast of the USA and the other in Asia.

Here’s the National Academy of Sciences report on the Coronavirus survival in Summer.

Google has published a fully interactive map which allows local newsrooms (and anyone else frankly) access to a real-time visualization of COVID-19’s contagion in their local districts or anywhere in the U.S.

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As COVID-19 came to America, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner saw dollars not deaths.

For three critical weeks beginning in February, the White House could have stopped the spread of the coronavirus.

My investigation reveals Intelligence and National Security Council officials briefed Donald Trump about the scale and severity of the looming outbreak in January. Yet he officially failed to react and publicly denied the threat.

By February 24, as the stock market tumbled on the news the coronavirus had spread outside of China’s borders, to South Korea, Iran, and the U.S., Trump remained inexplicably in denial.

It took Trump until March 13 for Trump to declare the pandemic a national emergency, 19 days after the financial markets began their retreat.

Instead of putting America on a war footing, Trump kept talking down the severity of the coronavirus, calling it a hoax and downplaying the actual numbers and projections his advisers were giving him.

Those 19 days when Trump fiddled, could have saved America from this crisis.

TRUMP IN DENIAL AS COVID-19 SPREAD

On February 24, there were 15 confirmed cases of Americans with COVID-19. By March 13, the figure was 2163. There is no doubt that a more prompt and deliberate response to contain the virus would have suppressed its growth trajectory significantly.

South Korean officials acted decisively after their first COVID-19 case on January 20, diagnosed on the same day the U.S. had its first confirmed case.

The South Koreans began testing symptomatic cases, contact tracing anyone who was potentially infected and isolating suspected cases. As a result, the spread of the virus in South Korea was dramatically slowed.

The opposite was playing out in the United States. Trump declared the coronavirus “very much under control in the U.S.A.” when in reality it was spreading without any attempts to contain it on the ground. A ban on travel from China was instituted.

Yet even as he was downplaying the virus publicly, Trump was engaged behind the scenes as American pharmaceutical companies were bidding to acquire test manufacturers and vaccine makers. One of those companies doing the buying was Thermo Fisher Scientific.

On March 3, Thermo Fisher Scientific completed a $10 Bn acquisition of Qiagen, A Dutch company that developed a COVID-19 test.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Ten days later, On March 13, Trump’s opinion of the looming crisis suddenly shifted, and he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency.

The declaration allows the FDA and other government agencies to circumvent usual regulations for drug and test approvals.

Trump mentioned Thermo Fisher by name when he announced the national emergency, adding that FDA approval would not be far behind. It wan’t. Thermo Fisher’s test kits were approved by the FDA within 24 hours.

There are troubling murmurs of a conflict of interest but nothing iron-clad.

Trump owned shares in Thermo Fisher before becoming president. He says he divested them in 2017, but Trump may still hold them via a trust.

The CEO of Thermo Fisher’s China division, Gianluca Pettiti, was also one of 20 U.S. business leaders who attended a banquet for Trump and Melania during their 2017 state visit. In a social media post, President Xi is visible just feet away from Pettiti and Trump.

It’s hard to account for Trump’s coronavirus about-face: from hoax to national emergency within days. Some argue Trump was just being overly reassuring to Americans in the early stages, but how does that account for his lack of attention to disaster prevention?

The coronavirus and other bio-agents represent a brand new multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical sector. Thermo Fisher for example, intends to make 5 million COVID-19 tests a month. They will charge medicare $51 for each test (up from the CDC’s $31). That’s $3 Billion per year based on the Medicare price alone, which is vastly lower than other providers. And the taxpayers will shoulder the difference in cost.

Interestingly, Thermo Fisher also has ties to the Koch Brothers. Tyler Jacks headed the late David Koch’s cancer foundation at MIT. Jacks sits on the board of directors and the advisory board of Thermo Fisher.

Beyond testing, vaccines, masks, protective equipment, and surveillance tech represent other potential growth markets in this new sector. It’s not hard to see how the war against viruses will become the new war against terror.

While Trump managed Thermo Fisher’s FDA approval, he was also actively pursuing potential suitors of vaccine makers from around the world.

The CEO of Germany’s CureVac visited the White House on March 2. A visit arranged with just 24 hours notice. He was publicly fired a week later amid allegations Trump tried to buy the company’s vaccine production for the exclusive use of Americans, a claim which has been widely disputed.

It’s unlikely that CureVac will sell its entire vaccine supply to any country, let alone America. Still, there are 51 other vaccine studies around the world, and the first to market stands to make its owners a fortune. This is the race to watch as the sector heats up.

We also found out this week, Jared Kushner’s much-vaunted Google website initiative was neither successful nor Google’s. Jared’s brother’s health care company, Oscar, developed the site. Jared was a shareholder in the company until he allegedly disinvested from it.

While Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19 has been an unmitigated disaster, an unmistakable pattern of Trump’s hyper-focus on dealmaking rather than disaster response has emerged.

Trump is so fixated on being America’s CEO; he’s failed at the most crucial role of being its president: saving American lives.

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Exclusive: The U.S. Navy is investigating whether a cyber attack on the USS John McCain’s steering controls may have led to the destroyer’s crash with an oil tanker. Could China or Russia be involved?

The USS John McCain was on a routine voyage to Singapore through the Straits of Malacca on Saturday after conducting a sensitive “freedom of navigation mission” in the South China Sea. The Malacca Strait connects the Pacific and Indian Oceans and is the main thoroughfare for trade between the world’s biggest economies. Nearly 100,000 vessels pass through it each year, accounting for about one-quarter of the world’s traded goods. With so much traffic, it’s not the kind of route one sails without every precaution.

“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs told McClatchy.

As the USS John McCain, entered the strait, the 338-man crew on the bridge faced multiple system failures. First the main steering mechanism failed to respond. Then, the back up system failed. The ship’s rudder was completely unusable.

Still, the experienced crew on board should have been able to guide the ship by altering the speed of the ship’s propellers. Perhaps they were trying that when the unthinkable happened. The 600-ft Liberian flagged oil tanker Alnic MC smashed into the warship’s rear left. The “rear-end collision” is an indicator the US vessel was not at fault. Satellite tracking also shows the Alnic MC unexpectedly veered sharply left at around that time.

The Alnic MC ripped into the USS John McCain’s side below the waterline and bore into the warship’s hull. Water flooded the machinery, communication rooms, sleeping quarters and an area on the vessel known as “shaft alley”. Ten crew members were reported missing, presumed drowned. Four injured sailors were medically evacuated to Singapore with non-life threatening injuries. The fifth sailor did not need further medical attention.

After the McCain limped back to shore, the US navy called for a rare one or two day pause in operations.

This is the third major accident involving a naval vessel from the Japanese-based Seventh fleet and the fourth incident involving U.S. vessels in the Pacific Ocean around Japan Singapore and China:

• On January 31, the USS Antietam ran aground while sailing along the Japanese coastline.
• On May 9, the USS Lake Champlain was struck by a South Korean fishing boat.
• On June 17, seven US sailors died after a container ship collided into the USS Fitzgerald into the USS Fitzgerald.

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Itay Glick, a cybersecurity expert and former Israeli intelligence agent told Australian media. “Both USS McCain and USS Fitzgerald were part of the Seventh Fleet, there is a relationship between these two events and there may be a connection.” he said.

Russian-based hackers recently tested a GPS “spoofing” device to trick 20 ships in the Black Sea into believing they were somewhere else.

Surprisingly, hacking a marine vessel is relatively easy. A group of cybersecurity researchers recently discovered “the configuration of certain ships’ satellite antenna systems leaves them wide open to attack,” Jack Morse wrote in Mashable. “Anyone who gained access to the system in question, and was so inclined, could manually change a ship’s GPS coordinates or possibly even brick the boat’s navigation system entirely by uploading new firmware.”

On June 22, a Russian-based hacker was able to infiltrate the GPS systems of 20 vessels in the eastern part of the Black Sea. The hackers were able to reprogram the ships’ navigation equipment, making it appear that the vessels were 20 miles inland, near an airport.

“We saw it done in, I would say, a really unsubtle way, a really ham-fisted way. It was probably a signal that came from the Russian mainland,” says Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas. On June 27, a worldwide hack of shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersklead forced the company to deploy manual tracking of vessels.

Even car and passenger planes can be easily hacked and controlled remotely. Security experts recently took control of a Jeep Cherokee from ten miles away; the hackers were able to turn off the engine and apply the brakes, veering the car off the road. They did this via the software built into the dashboard of the manufacturer Fiat Chrysler’s cars. “There is already a lot of interest in cyber protection of cars and autonomous vehicles. We can deduce from that, there might be a way to control ships and airplanes,” Mr Glick told Australian media. “Whenever control of the vessel is done by computer, or navigation is done by computer, there is a big risk for a cyber attack on that computer.”

The US Defense Department is under constant attack by enemy hackers and utilizes vulnerable software.

The U.S. military is a tougher nut for hackers to crack than a car or plane, but it hasn’t stopped many from trying and succeeding. The Department of Defense alone experiences 41 million scans, probes and attacks per month. “The Navy Networking Environment consists of more than 500,000 end user devices; an estimated 75,000 network devices (servers, domain controllers); and approximately 45,000 applications and systems across three security enclaves,” Vice Adm. Jan Tighe, commander of U.S. Fleet Cyber Command told congress in 2015.

In recent years, the military has sought an operational advantage over its enemies by creating a more connected eco-system. It has contracted private Silicon Valley companies to link formerly isolated systems together. Once independent systems now rely on each other to link together our warfighters, ships, submarines, aircraft, land-based command centers and distant satellites.

One such system is Palantir, which has close ties to former National Security Adviser Lt-General Michael Flynn (a compromised Russian asset) and is founded by Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder who is allied to mercenary Erik Prince. Palantir has been criticized for its security vulnerability.

Speaking at a defense conference in 2015, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said, “We’ve got to pay a whole lot of attention to this, cyber is in everything now,” he said. “It’s not just weapons systems. It’s in every system because we are so networked.” Mabus said the navy intended to replace IBM servers used for its Aegis combat system after China’s Lenovo bought IBM. “If there’s a danger or potential danger with a platform, you’ve got to take a look at that.”

In March, U.S. counterintelligence officials warned that Russians had embedded malware into messages sent to the Defense Department’s 10,000 Twitter users. The message topics were specifically targeted to users’ unique interests – from sports to entertainment – but when clicked, the links took users to a Russian-controlled server that downloaded a malware allowing Russian hackers to take control of the victim’s phone or computer. The Department of Defense until recently also used Kaspersky Lab, a Russian built anti-virus software which has a built-in “back door” allowing Russian Intelligence to access vital networks.

China and Russia have the capability to carry out a hack on a vessel; US Navy investigates possibility of cyber attack.

It’s not just Russia which has the capability of hacking navigation systems, as it did in the Black Sea last month. The location of the recent U.S. naval crashes in the Pacific Ocean suggest a possible link to China. When the USS John McCain was struck in the Straits of Malacca on Saturday, it was returning from a what the navy terms a “freedom of navigation” mission. This means it came within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built by China in the “South China Sea”.

Nine days before the crash of the USS John McCain which may have killed 10 sailors, a US Navy official told Reuters the warship traveled close to Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands. China has territorial disputes with its neighbors over the area, and the U.S. considers the man-built island an attempt to impede global trade and travel. The “freedom of navigation” mission undertaken by the USS John McCain was the third this year and comes at a time that the U.S. is seeking China’s help in North Korea.

Itay Glick, the cybersecurity expert and former Israeli intelligence agent believes countries like Russia and China may have the capability to launch an attack on the warships. “China has capabilities, maybe they are trying things, it is possible,” he said.

While the U.S. Navy initially dismissed the idea of a cyber attack, CBS News now reports Admiral Scott Swift told a news conference the navy is looking at “all possible causes for the collision…including a cyber attack on the ship’s controls”. Chief of Naval Operations US Admiral John Richardson also tweeted “[Regarding the] possibility of cyber intrusion or sabotage, [there are] no indications right now … but review will consider all possibilities,” he tweeted.

Any investigation would have to consider two possible cyber attacks. The first on the navigation system of the oil tanker Alnic MC’s navigation system would have veered the ship off path and into the USS John McCain. The second would have disabled the USS McCain’s steering capability and its backup prior to the crash.

Who would have the capability of such a coordinated dual attack? Likely only a nation state like Russia or China with grudges to bear and the cyber warfare capability to expedite such an attack. Why? Other than the human, financial and tactical toll, such an attack would weaken America’s resolve at a time of crisis or could even provoke U.S. retaliation.

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Amidst all the squabbling about numbers, are we missing what’s really going on in our country?

The idyllic 90’s alt rock-band, “Counting Crows” is best known for its catchy hit “Mr Jones.” You know the one? “Sha, la, la, la, la, la, la”? The Crows took flight in an era of ironically worn lumberjack shirts and work boots set against a soundtrack of “Nirvana” and a backdrop of the Gulf War and AIDS. The band took its name from an old English nursery rhyme which dates back to the early 1800’s about predicting the future by counting the number of magpies, or crows, which crossed your path.

“One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told, eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten for a time of joyous bliss,” the rhyme goes. Of course, there’s no actual basis for this type of prophecy, but in an unsure time, when science and logic weren’t plentiful, counting crows was a good a method, as any, of predicting the future.

As the 45th president of the United States was being sworn in on Friday, we were all aflutter over a different count. This time we were counting attendance as if it foretold a President’s success. How many people showed up? Counting crowds, not crows, is the fashion of the day.

One concludes that democracy is alive and well in the Republic, but all is not well. Crows are symbolic harbingers of change in many of the world’s mythologies, and it struck me, amid all the squabbling over numbers, we may be missing ours. So just for a minute, let’s put aside the partisan squabbling, and look at what President Trump is doing that many would agree on –  even Bernie Sanders.

To be sure, Trump’s inauguration address, was dark. After 8 years of remarkable hope and progress under President Barack Obama, the idea of America as a dystopian wasteland littered with empty “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” is hard to fathom, but it’s as true as the remarkable legacy of the outgoing president.

While America has prospered and our standard of living has improved, free trade has filled our homes and stores with cheap Chinese goods but it has also come at a cost – ripping out our nation’s heart. It has robbed us of a vibrant industrial sector, left hundreds of thousands in poverty and created an epidemic killing Americans at an alarming rate. Mostly in states in the middle of the country. States Trump won. States you need to win to be president.

How did we get here?  Ask any two economists whether global trade costs US jobs, and you’re likely to get an argument. Economists, like crows, are not always accurate foretellers of things to come.

The US runs large trade deficits with almost every one of our trading partners – 90%, to be sure. The largest deficits are with China, Mexico, Japan and Germany.  The U.S.-Mexico trade balance, for example,  swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. Economists will argue endlessly about the cause and effect of NAFTA, but while modernization has made up for some of those lost jobs, the economy in parts of the country have been obliterated.

Mexico’s deficit pales in comparison to China’s $318 billion, “The deficit is five times bigger, says Wharton’s Mauro Guillen. For every job we have lost in the U.S. to Mexico, five [jobs] were lost to China.”

Respected economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson published a study last year called “The China Shock” analyzing the cost to Americans of China’s trade explosion.  They found, “wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated” a decade after China’s global trade boom.

You’re not at fault for not knowing this. No-one reports it. It’s easier to count crowds than actually travel to Idaho to show a rusted factory. Anyone who has worked in a network newsroom, as I have, will tell you if it can’t be reported in the Tri-State region, it rarely gets coverage. Consequently, the networks have missed what’s been going on in the rust belt. The people who elected President Trump are not all racists, misogynist or narrow-minded people the media would like you to think.  They are our fellow Americans crying out for work.

Yes, the unemployment rate is at an all time low but it doesn’t tell the whole story Basically, if you’re not getting unemployment help, you don’t get counted. In most cases, government insurance lasts 26 weeks. If you’ve run out of insurance, you’re considered out of the labor force. Consequently, almost a quarter of 25-54 year olds (the prime working years) are not working and the labor participation rate is down 4%, from 66% in 2006 to 62% now.

Along with this jobs flight, a despondent and disheartened population has turned to drugs. The Opioid crisis in the heartland is out of control. 55,403 people died from drug overdoses in 2015, more than guns or car crashes. The second biggest killer, suicides, are also up. (For white men aged 35-64 suicides are up 40% between 1999-2010.) Families have been broken apart, children left homeless, dreams shattered.

When President Donald J. Trump talks of “neighborhoods blighted by crime, drugs and gangs,” he is not wrong.  Whether it’s drugs, suicides or malaise, America’s white uneducated men are dying at increasing rate. Since 1999, the number of deaths of middle-aged, uneducated white American men has increased 22%, while dropping for other demographics.

This is not a moral issue, it’s economics. Restarting a pointless war on drugs with draconian measures and incarceration will reinforce a cycle of suffering. If President Trump brings purpose and jobs back to the heartland, he’ll stem the crisis, as Portugal did when it decriminalized drugs and invested in jobs (The number of overdose deaths plummeted to among the lowest in the EU).

We are witnessing the rise of the Precariat, as British economist Guy Standing calls it. “A multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them.”

This week, President Trump will meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May.  She leads a country which, like ours, is moving away from large economic unions. Brexit is Trump for the same reasons. A disconnect between the elite and the middle class in the middle of the country. Trump and May will likely forge a new type of economic union which encourages what she describes as an “active industrial strategy” or bringing manufacturing back home.

Yesterday, Trump withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership and is promising to renegotiate NAFTA. He’s threatening to increased tariffs, reduce corporate taxation and slash regulation (worryingly at the EPA if it hurts the environment). It may not work, but it’s the best plan America’s heartland has heard for a long time.

The Counting Crows imagine a better world in “Mr. Jones” as they sing about a different time with equally despairing prospects.

“Believe in me because I don’t believe in anything
and I want to be someone to believe.”

Trump is not perfect, and untested in public life, but he has responded to a yearning cry from our fellow Americans who are suffering. If this was happening in other parts of the world, our compassion would stir us to action. Yes, we have to be watchful of allowing the new administration to roll back rights, enter thoughtless wars for enrichment or cozy up to corrupt dictators but we’d be hurting our brothers and sisters if we didn’t seek to help them now as they try to bring their lives back. What could be more American than that?

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