NTD Staff
China’s deception over COVID-19’s origins gets more outrageous every day
The former leader of the State Department’s task force investigating the origins of COVID-19 not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but also that it was the result of bioweapons research. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” says David Asher. “It was operating a…
Pope, citing pandemic effect, cuts pay for cardinals, others
VATICAN CITY — Trying to save jobs as the pandemic pummels Vatican revenues, Pope Francis has ordered pay cuts for cardinals and other clerics, including priests and nuns, who work at the Holy See.
In a decree published online Wednesday by the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Francis said that starting in April cardinals’ salaries will be reduced 10%. Superiors of the Holy See’s various departments, who, with few exceptions, are clerics, will be hit by 8% cuts while lower-ranking priests and nuns will see 3% vanish from their paychecks.
In the decree he signed on Tuesday, the pope noted that the Holy See’s finances have been marked by several years of deficit. Worsening those financial woes, the pope wrote, was the COVID-19 pandemic, “which has impacted negatively on all the sources of revenue of the Holy See and Vatican City State.”
The belt-tightening “has the aim of saving current job positions,” Francis wrote.
Lower-ranking lay-workers at the Vatican aren’t affected by the salary reductions, but their pay raises, due every two years, are being temporarily frozen under the austerity measures. The lowest-paid lay workers will still get raise, though.
Bans on tourism by many countries and other pandemic restrictions have severely reduced revenues at the Vatican Museums, which, with its Sistine Chapel, is a perennial money-maker for the Vatican,
The Museums opened for some weeks during the pandemic when the situation in Italy improved. But with tourists from the United States and some other countries banned from entering Italy, the museums’ cavernous rooms were eerily uncrowded in the pandemic.
The Museums are currently closed and will stay closed at least through the upcoming Holy Week, which normally is one of Rome’s heaviest periods for tourism.
Earlier this month, the Vatican said it has nearly used up its financial reserves from past donations to cover budget deficits over recent years. It has predicted a 50-million-euro ($60 million) deficit for this year.
Pandemic safety measures have seen many churches shuttered or limiting the number of faithful — many of whom leave monetary donations during services — who can enter.
The Vatican’s economy minister has said that the dwindled Museums revenue, as well as a drop in what Catholics donate, would contribute to a projected 30% reduction in revenue this year.
The pay cuts also apply to several Vatican basilicas in Rome as well as to the Vicariate, or diocese of Rome, which is under the pope’s direction.
Cardinals, other clerics and well as nuns in Rome generally don’t have expenses most lay people have, like market-value rents or mortgages, utility and heating bills, since many reside in housing owned by the Vatican or religious orders.
Some cardinals have spacious, well-appointed apartments in historic palazzi in Rome. A cardinal on the Vatican staff could earn close to 5,000 euros (($6,000) monthly, according to those familiar with Holy See hierarchy.
In any case, Francis noted, the salary reductions won’t apply to anyone who can document that the cuts will make it “impossible to meet fixed expenses related to their health conditions or those of their relatives.”
Commentary: The Nature of Chinese Communist Party’s Contempt for Us
by Victor Davis Hanson
Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Biden Administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the Chinese broadsides.
Apparently, as elite Americans readily confess to inherent white supremacy and racism—highlighting the complaints of BLM and Antifa—the Chinese are happy to agree that such admittedly toxic Americans should not dare to criticize China’s racist policies.
Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Cold War Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.
China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials.
New York University students, at an overseas satellite Shanghai China campus, were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities. Not long ago U.S. diplomats in China were subject to Chinese COVID-19 anal swab testing—supposedly “in error.”
These examples of continued humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. Yet they are simply the current public face of China’s insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, as well as manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, cyber-assaults, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19.
If China gives out money, it logically believes it owns the recipient. New York University in the last five years has received some $47 million in Communist Chinese-affiliated gifts. So Beijing apparently believes that it now “owns” NYU, and can send any message it likes to its clients.
Stanford University recently was cited by the U.S. Department of Education for failing to report over $64 million from Chinese sources since 2010. No surprise that China, in a demonstration of their contempt, recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford, who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military.
Hollywood claims that it is woke. But recently it was disclosed that some directors had selected their actors on the basis of skin color. They were obeying China’s requirements for American films to enter the lucrative Chinese film market, slated to become the world’s largest in 2021.
The NBA—both players and coaches—loudly condemns their supposedly racist American homeland. Yet they self-censor any criticism of massive human rights violations by the Chinese communists—given a $5 billion NBA Chinese market.
Lots of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe have signed up with the Chinese “Belt and Road” initiative to develop ports, harbors, rail, and freeways. They are now rereading the contractual fine print. Chinese multibillion dollar investments do not come without strings. The price of borrowing from China is tough terms of repayment and political subservience.
China is also the world’s greatest and most effective propagandist. Its intelligence services and disinformation efforts make the Cold War effort of the communist Soviet Union seem amateurish in comparison. China’s third of a million students who attend American universities and annual 3 million tourists to the United States soak up and master American popular culture.
As dutiful communist subjects, many are attuned to the self-loathing apparent in American universities, corporations, entertainment, and the media. In reaction, some seek to master and manipulate that sentiment in various ways and to China’s benefit.
China may have destroyed the culture of Tibet, destroyed democracy in Hong Kong, put Muslim minorities in detention camps, and systematically discriminated against African visitors, but the victimizer nonetheless plays the “victim” of American “racism.”
At best, its failed containment of the COVID-19 pandemic was criminally negligent. At worst, it was a hostile act. Yet each time China hears prominent Americans damn the United States as racist, Chinese racists chime in “Amen!”
China welcomes U.S. self-loathing that it interprets as weakness and decadence to be exploited—not as self-reflection to be admired, much less emulated.
In Chinese zero-sum thinking, if elite Americans themselves admit to systemic racism, sexism, and nativism, then they have already done most of the work for Chinese propagandists. China merely recycles such domestic charges to prove that a pathological America has no right to allege others to be racists—as it bullies neighbors with boasts that a dissolute and divided United States is in decline and cannot be counted as a reliable ally.
China is in a race to achieve global hegemony. For a while longer, it seeks sympathetic world opinion—at least until it has achieved unquestioned superior military and economic power.
So for now, China feigns victimhood. And it seeks solidarity with others inside the United States and abroad who claim to be fellow victims of American racism.
Such naked artifice and hypocrisy may seem crazy, given China’s atrocious human rights record. But China views our own exploding budget deficits, staggering national debt, open borders, disingenuous “1619 Project,” the violence of the summer riots, and the epidemic of race-based reeducation workshops as all far crazier—and most welcome supplements to their efforts.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.
Photo “Xi Jinping” by Narendra Modi. CC BY 2.0.
The post Commentary: The Nature of Chinese Communist Party’s Contempt for Us appeared first on The Georgia Star News.
Sinopharm Chairman Claims He Received COVID-19 Vaccine One Year Ago, Has Antibodies
Yu Qingming, party chief and chairman of Sinopharm, told Chinese state media on March 4 that he and others at the firm’s management received CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus vaccines a year ago and still have a high level of antibodies. His claim ignited a heated discussion over the origins of the virus strains and the timeline of China’s vaccine development. Sinopharm is also known as China National Pharmaceutical Group Corporation, a Beijing-based Chinese state-owned enterprise. Yu, who is also a deputy to China’s National People’s Congress, told the People’s Daily during the Two Sessions—the CCP’s most important annual political conference from March 4 to 11—that in March 2020, Sinopharm management received COVID-19 vaccines and still have high levels of antibodies after one year of continuous monitoring. COVID-19 is the disease the CCP virus causes. He also touted his pharmaceutical group as the world’s largest manufacturer of COVID-19 vaccines so …
Happiness Report: World shows resilience in face of COVID19
The editors of the 2021 World Happiness Report found that while emotions changed as the pandemic set in, longer-term satisfaction with life was less affected.
STOCKHOLM — The coronavirus brought a year of fear and anxiety, loneliness and lockdown, and illness and death, but an annual report on happiness around the world released Friday suggests the pandemic has not crushed people’s spirits.
The editors of the 2021 World Happiness Report found that while emotions changed as the pandemic set in, longer-term satisfaction with life was less affected.
“What we have found is that when people take the long view, they’ve shown a lot of resilience in this past year,” Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the report’s co-author, said from New York.
The annual report, produced by the U.N Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks 149 countries based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy and the opinions of residents. Surveys ask respondents to indicate on a 1-10 scale how much social support they feel they have if something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt their society is and how generous they are.
Due to the pandemic, the surveys were done in slightly fewer than 100 countries for this year’s World Happiness Report, the ninth one compiled since the project started. Index rankings for the other nations were based on estimates from past data.
The results from both methods had European countries occupying nine of the top 10 spots on the list of the word’s happiest places, with New Zealand rounding out the group. The top 10 countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria.
It was the fourth consecutive year that Finland came out on top. The United States, which was at No. 13 five years ago, slipped from 18th to 19th place. On a shortened list ranking only those countries surveyed, the U.S. placed 14th.
“We find year after year that life satisfaction is reported to be happiest in the social democracies of northern Europe,” Sachs said. “People feel secure in those countries, so trust is high. The government is seen to be credible and honest, and trust in each other is high.”
Finland’s comparative success in curbing COVID-19 may have contributed to the enduring trust the country’s people have in their government. The country took rapid and extensive measures to stop the spread of the virus and has one of Europe’s lowest COVID-19 mortality rates.
“In Finland as well, of course, people have been suffering,” Anu Partanen, author of “The Nordic Theory of Everything” said on Friday in Helsinki. “But again in Finland and the Nordic countries, people are really lucky because society still supports a system buffering these sorts of shocks.”
Overall, the index showed little change in happiness levels compared to last year’s report, which was based on information from before the pandemic.
“We asked two kinds of questions. One is about the life in general, life evaluation, we call it. How is your life going? The other is about mood, emotions, stress, anxiety,” Sachs said. “Of course, we’re still in the middle of a deep crisis. But the responses about long-term life evaluation did not change decisively, though the disruption in our lives was so profound.”
Issues that affect the well-being of people living in the United States include racial tensions and growing income inequality between the richest and poorest residents, happiness experts say.
“As for why the U.S. ranks much lower than other similarly or even less wealthy countries, the answer is straightforward,” said Carol Graham, an expert at The Brookings Institution who was not involved in the report. “The U.S. has larger gaps in happiness rankings between the rich and the poor than do most other wealthy countries.”
Report co-author Sonja Lyubormirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, noted that American culture prizes signs of wealth such as big houses and multiple cars more so than other countries, “and material things don’t make us as happy.”
Conversely, people’s perception that their country was handling the pandemic well contributed to an overall rise in well-being, Columbia’s Sachs said. Several Asian countries fared better than they had in last year’s rankings; China moved to 84th place from 94th last year.
“This has been a difficult period. People are looking past it when they look for the long term. But there are also many people that are suffering in the short run,” he said.
Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, who was not involved in the report, thinks the Finnish character itself might help explain why the country keeps leading the index.
“I think Finns are pretty kind of content on some level at being just what we are,” he said. “We don’t really have to be more.”
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Seth Borenstein in Washington D.C. contributed to this report.
Judicial Watch Sues for NIH Funding and Other Records Tied to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for National Institutes of Health (NIH) records of communications, contracts and agreements with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:21-cv-00696)). The lawsuit specifically seeks records about NIH grants that benefitted the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The lawsuit was filed against Health and Human Services after the NIH denied an April 22, 2020, FOIA request, for:
- All internal NIAID communications regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China;
- All agreements, contracts and related documents between NIAID and the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and
- All records, including agreements, funds disbursement records and related NIAID communications regarding a reported $3.7 million in grants provided by NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In April 2020, the Daily Mail reported that documents “show the Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan – funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.”
The NIH in April 2020 suspended funding a grant to the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance that “had previously established a partnership with a virology laboratory in Wuhan, China” but in August gave the EcoHealth Alliance a grant of $7.5 million. The grant will reportedly “focus on Southeast Asia and the emergence of coronaviruses; filoviruses, the family responsible for Ebola; and paramyxoviruses, a family of viruses that includes measles and mumps.”
“For almost a year now, Dr. Fauci’s agency has stonewalled Judicial Watch’s lawful request for information about the agency’s connections to the controversial Wuhan lab,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The American people have a right to know about Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ involvement with the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
In March 2021, Judicial Watch uncovered HHS/NIH records that show NIH officials tailored confidentiality forms to China’s terms and that the World Health Organization conducted an unreleased, “strictly confidential” COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in January 2020. Additionally, the records reveal an independent journalist in China pointing out the inconsistent COVID numbers in China to NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects Cliff Lane.
In October 2020, Judicial Watch received records from the HHS that show Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, approved a press release supportive of China’s response to the 2019 novel coronavirus.
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1 report, 4 theories: Scientists mull clues on origin of COVID-19
GENEVA — A team of international and Chinese scientists is poised to report on its joint search for the origins of the coronavirus that sparked a pandemic after it was first detected in China over a year ago — with four theories being considered and one the clear frontrunner, according to experts. The lengthy report…
China’s COVID-19 Timeline Questioned After Official Claims to Be Vaccinated in March 2020
The timeline of the COVID-19 outbreak published by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been questioned by experts after an official claimed on March 5 that many executives in his company took an experimental CCP virus vaccine in March 2020. Yu Qingming, party secretary and CEO of Sinopharm Group Co., Ltd. (Sinopharm) claimed that executives and senior leaders of China National Pharmaceutical Group (CNPG), the parent company of Sinopharm, had received the vaccines developed by the group as early as March 2020. Sinopharm is a Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical company. Yu also claimed that the antibody level remains high after one year. His statement is completely incompatible with the CCP’s previous propaganda about the source of the virus and the development of vaccines. According to the CCP’s official statements, the CCP virus was first discovered in December 2019 and the Wuhan epidemic broke out in early January 2020. The Chinese CDC first isolated …
Before COVID Outbreak, Gates Planned Social Media Censorship of Vaccine Safety Advocates With Pharma, CDC, Media, China and CIA
Over the last two weeks, Facebook and other social media sites have deplatformed me and many other critics of regulatory corruption and authoritarian public health policies. So, here is some fodder for those of you who have the eerie sense that the government/industry pandemic response feels like it was planned — even before there was a pandemic.
The attached document shows that a cabal of powerful individuals did indeed begin planning the mass eviction of vaccine skeptics from social media in October 2019, a week or two before COVID began circulating. That month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates organized an exercise of four “table-top” simulations of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic with other high-ranking “Deep State” panjandrums. The exercise was referred to as Event 201.
Gates’ co-conspirators included representatives from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum (Great Reset), Bloomberg/Johns Hopkins University Populations Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various media powerhouses, the Chinese government, a former Central Intelligence Agency/National Security Agency director (there is no such thing as a former CIA officer), vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson, the finance and biosecurity industries and Edelman, the world’s leading corporate PR firm.
At Gates’ direction, these eminences role-played members of a Pandemic Control Council, wargaming government strategies for controlling the pandemic, the narrative and the population. Needless to say, there was little talk of building immune systems, off-the-shelf remedies or off-patent therapeutic drugs and vitamins, but lots of chatter about promoting uptake of new patentable antiviral drugs and vaccines.
But the participants primarily focused on planning industry-centric, fear-mongering, police-state strategies for managing an imaginary global coronavirus contagion culminating in mass censorship of social media.
Oddly, Gates now claims that the simulation didn’t occur. On April 12, 2020, Gates told BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
Unfortunately for that whopper, the videos of the event are still available across the internet. They show that Gates and team did indeed simulate health and economic policies. It’s hard to swallow that Gates has forgotten.
Gates’s Event 201 simulated COVID epidemic caused 65 million deaths at the 18-month endpoint and global economic collapse lasting up to a decade. Compared to the Gates simulation, therefore, the actual COVID-19 crisis is a bit of a dud, having imposed a mere 2.5 million deaths “attributed to COVID” over the past 13 months. . . .
Segment four of the script — on manipulation and control of public opinion — is most revealing. It uncannily predicted democracy’s current crisis:
- The participants discussed mechanisms for controlling “disinformation” and “misinformation,” by “flooding” the media with propaganda (“good information”), imposing penalties for spreading falsehoods and discrediting the anti-vaccination movement.
- Jane Halton, of Australia’s ANZ Bank, one of the authors of Australia’s oppressive “no jab, no pay” policy, assured the participants that Gates Foundation is creating algorithms “to sift through information on these social media platforms” to protect the public from dangerous thoughts and information.
- George Gao, the prescient director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, worries about how to suppress “rumors” that the virus is laboratory generated: “People believe, ‘This is a manmade’… [and that] some pharmaceutical company made the virus.”
- Chen Huang, an Apple research scientist, Google scholar and the world’s leading expert on tracking and tracing and facial recognition technology, role-plays the newscaster reporting on government countermeasures. He blames riots on anti-vaccine activists and predicts that Twitter and Facebook will cooperate in “identify[ing] and delete[ing] a disturbing number of accounts dedicated to spreading misinformation about the outbreak” and to implement “internet shutdowns … to quell panic.”
- Dr. Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at Bloomberg School of Health’s Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, worries that pharmaceutical companies are being accused of introducing the virus so they can make money on drugs and vaccines: “[We] have seen public faith in their products plummet.” She notes with alarm that “Unrest, due to false rumors and divisive messaging, is rising and is exacerbating spread of the disease as levels of trust fall and people stop cooperating with response efforts. This is a massive problem, one that threatens governments and trusted institutions.”
The post Before COVID Outbreak, Gates Planned Social Media Censorship of Vaccine Safety Advocates With Pharma, CDC, Media, China and CIA appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.
WHO Delays Report On COVID’s Origins As China ‘Fights Tooth & Nail Over Each Sentence,’ WHO Advisor Says
WHO investigators ‘won’t be able to publish findings without official Chinese concurrence’.
- China has delayed the release of a World Health Organization report on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic as it reviews the document, according to a WHO advisor.
- The Chinese are fighting “tooth & nail over each sentence,” a WHO advisory committee member said.
- Several groups have called for a separate, more independent investigation of COVID’s origins.