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February 2021

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk Beijing is obsessed with viruses, but not biosafety. We are paying a high price for its lapses. By Mike Pompeo and Miles Yu

By on February 24th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-reckless-labs-put-the-world-at-risk-11614102828?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with viruses. Its army of scientists claim to have discovered almost 2,000 new viruses in a little over a decade. It took the past 200 years for the rest of the world to discover that many. More troubling is the party’s negligence on biosafety. The costs and the risk to world health are enormous, as evidenced by a novel coronavirus that escaped Wuhan. This situation can’t continue. The world must hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and punish Beijing if it fails to uphold global biosafety standards, including basic transparency requirements.

The most recent example of this malfeasance is playing out around us. The evidence that the virus came from Wuhan is enormous, though largely circumstantial, and most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In America, concern about the site is now broad and bipartisan. The Biden administration stated that it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with the investigators’ work.

The world has known for a long time that WIV poses a huge risk to global health. Two 2018 State Department cables warned of its biosafety problems. They even predicted that SARS-CoV-2’s ACE2 receptor, identified by WIV scientists, would enable human-to-human transmission. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s biosafety level 4 lab, warned, “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edge sword: It can be used for the benefit of humanity, but can also lead to a disaster.” He listed the shortfalls prevalent among China’s biology labs, including a lack of “operational technical support, professional instructions” and “feasible standards for the safety requirements of different protection zones and for the inoculation of microbiological animals and equipment.”

The Chinese public took note, with several bloggers alleging that WIV’s virus-carrying animals are sold as pets. They may even show up at local wet markets. After the Wuhan outbreak, one since-disappeared blogger asked a WIV researcher to debate the lab’s biosafety practices in public. The offer was ignored.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci’s mixed messages, inconsistencies about COVID-19 masks, vaccines and reopenings come under scrutiny A look at Fauci’s mixed messages on masks, vaccines and reopenings By Tyler Olson |

By on February 24th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/faucis-mixed-messages-inconsistencies-about-covid-19-masks-vaccines-and-reopenings-come-under-scrutiny

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci’s often inconsistent comments and mixed messages on the coronavirus pandemic are prompting renewed scrutiny as debate rages over reopening schools and businesses nearly a year after the lockdowns started.

“Dr. Fauci is a very good public-health official. His job is to advise policy makers and inform the public,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said on Tuesday. “But his job is NOT to decide what we can do, where we can go or which places can open or close And his job is NOT to mislead or scare us into doing the ‘right things.'”

“Why should we trust Fauci with a national plan? Back in March, Fauci famously told Americans, ‘There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,'” wrote David Harsanyi in the National Review. “(Fauci now says we should wear two masks. No thanks, Dad.)”

Masks

Fauci in an interview on “60 Minutes” in early March of last year warned of “unintended consequences” of masks, saying “people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.” 

On masks, Fauci and former Surgeon General Jerome Adams – who also warned against buying and wearing masks in spring 2020 – said officials recommended against wearing masks early in the pandemic because at the time there was a massive shortage of PPE for medical workers who needed it most. Further, more evidence of asymptomatic spread of the virus later came out. 

Fauci later enthusiatically embraced wearing masks.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

On Free Speech at Stanford:Scott Atlas, Niall Ferguson, and Victor Davis Hanson *****

By on February 24th, 2021

https://stanfordreview.org/atlas-ferguson-hanson-stanford-free-speech/

What is the purpose of academic freedom?

Is it to allow all kinds of ideas to be expressed and explored, protecting even speech that people in the past considered heretical—protecting free expression that some people today would like to “cancel”? Or is it to allow co-workers in the ideological minority to be personally and selectively disparaged with impunity?

The answer for some faculty at Stanford University would appear to be the latter.

In a recent meeting of the Stanford Faculty Senate, four professors (Joshua Landy, Stephen Monismith, David Palumbo-Liu and David Spiegel) presented and then subsequently published a farrago of falsehoods directed against various fellows of the Hoover Institution. Their complaint was, first, that the Hoover fellows’ views were unapologetically conservative and, second, that they appeared antithetical to the majority of those of the Stanford community—and were therefore properly subject to some sort of institutional and personal censure.

Our faculty accusers failed to achieve both their overt and their implicit goals—creating a faculty-controlled committee to investigate Hoover and intimidating us into silence. Some respected faculty members, including the President, the Provost, and the former Provost all forcefully spoke up for academic freedom in general and defended Hoover in particular. They should be congratulated for doing so in these ideologically polarized times.

Nevertheless, our faculty accusers still succeeded in maligning us as individuals. The impression was left even by the President that we might have “behaved inappropriately” or “spoken untruths.” Unfortunately, this is not the first time such use has been made of the Senate. Indeed, it has happened repeatedly in recent years, for example in February 2019.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

Purim Guide for the Perplexed 2021 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger,

By on February 24th, 2021

1. Purim’s historical background.  The 586 BCE destruction of the 1st Jewish Temple and the expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria – by the Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar – triggered a wave of Jewish emigration to Babylon and Persia.  The latter replaced Babylon as the leading regional power.  In 538 BCE, Xerxes the Great, Persia’s King Ahasuerus, the successor of Darius the Great, proclaimed his support for the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple and the resurrection of national Jewish life in the Land of Israel, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish Homeland.  In 499-449 BCE, Ahasuerus established a coalition of countries – from India to Ethiopia – which launched the Greco-Persian Wars, attempting to expand the Persian Empire westward. However, Persia was resoundingly defeated (e.g., the 490 BCE and 480 BCE battles of Marathon and Salamis), and Ahasuerus’ authority in Persia was gravely eroded.

2. Purim is a Jewish national liberation holiday – just like Passover and Chanukah – which commemorates the transformation of the Jewish people from subjugation to liberty. It is celebrated seven days following the birth and death date of Moses, who is the role model of liberty, leadership and humility.

Purim is celebrated, annually, at a time when the relatively cold and stormy winter shifts into the relatively warm and pleasant spring.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why is Biden going back to the Iran deal? By David Isaac

By on February 24th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/
Why would Biden go back to the Iran deal? Frankly, we’re baffled.

It didn’t make sense in 2015 when Obama did it. It makes even less sense in 2021. The agreement is a proven disaster, its failings exposed, its critics vindicated.

As Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi write in the January Atlantic: “The agreement did not shut down a single nuclear facility or destroy a single centrifuge.

The ease and speed with which Iran has resumed producing large amounts of more highly enriched uranium – doing so at a time of its own choosing – illustrates the danger of leaving the regime with these capabilities.”

Nor did the deal stop Iran from developing advanced centrifuges and ballistic missiles. Nor did it address the Koran-infused ayatollahs’ malignant designs. (Iran’s parliament even debated a bill to set a time limit of 20 years for wiping out Israel.)

All the deal did was limit Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, and that for 10 or so years. That’s not a prohibition, that’s a countdown.

As John Bolton summed it up in The Room Where It Happened: “The deal was badly conceived, abominably negotiated and drafted, and entirely advantageous to Iran: unenforceable, unverifiable, and inadequate in duration and scope. Although purportedly resolving the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, the deal did no such thing.”

If nuclear bombs were skyscrapers, it would be like OK’ing the foundation, superstructure and interior, including the paint – and then telling the builder to hold off on flipping on the electricity until 2026. And here’s $150 million in cash to help you pass the time.

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