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Marine researcher: COVID-19 virus made in Chinese lab as bat vaccine

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Marine researcher: COVID-19 virus made in Chinese lab as bat vaccine
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NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

A Marine Corps officer working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency disclosed in a memorandum last August that his study of the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic concluded that it was produced as part of vaccine research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to documents made public by a conservative investigative group.

Maj. Joseph P. Murphy notified the Pentagon inspector general that his analysis of the virus origin concluded the nongovernment organization EcoHealth Alliance, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology produced the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 through controversial gain-of-function research outlined in a Pentagon grant proposal.

“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus,” Maj. Murphy stated in an August 13, 2021, memo made public this week by Project Veritas. “It was created by an EcoHealth Alliance program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as suggested by the reporting surrounding the lab leak hypothesis.”

Asked about the 24 pages of internal documents made public by Project Veritas, DARPA spokesman Jared Adams told Inside the Ring in an email that federal regulations prohibit the agency from commenting on DARPA programs or documents.

“We are precluded by Federal Acquisition Regulations from discussing who may or may not have bid on a DARPA program, and are unable to confirm the authenticity of the documents Project Veritas has published,” Mr. Adams wrote.

Maj. Murphy and the Office of Naval Research did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

According to Project Veritas, Maj. Murphy declined to discuss the document but told the group: “To those that seek answers I offer encouragement. There are good people striving for truth, working together in and out of government, and they succeed. … Don’t let a lie be our legacy to posterity.”

According to Maj. Murphy, now with the Office of Naval Research, details of the program were hidden since the pandemic began in Wuhan, China in December 2019. New facts were uncovered by Maj. Murphy from a grant proposal made to DARPA by the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance in March 2018 and “not publicly disclosed,” he stated.

The proposal was made in response to DARPA’s Project Defuse, aimed at addressing what the agency called the threat posed by bat-borne coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 is a bat coronavirus.

The proposal lists several U.S. researchers who would take part in the work and included the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city considered the epicenter of the possible pandemic.

China’s government has denied the virus leaked from any of its laboratories, but has refused to provide information about the virus’s origin. Beijing also has accused the U.S. military of launching the pandemic.

The $14 million grant proposal to DARPA was produced by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance who worked closely on dangerous virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Mr. Daszak did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

DARPA rejected the grant as potentially dangerous virus work, despite Mr. Daszak claiming in the proposal that the work would not violate U.S. restrictions on gain-of-function research.

However, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Anthony Fauci, approved a grant for the EcoHealth Alliance, and work on bat coronaviruses continued until halted by the federal government in April 2020.

Dr. Fauci has repeatedly denied during congressional testimony that the U.S. government funded any gain-of-function virus research in China.

In the 2018 proposal, Mr. Daszak stated that “we will intensively sample bats at our field sites where we have identified high spillover risk SARSr-CoVs” – the term for bat coronaviruses.

“We will sequence their spike protein, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays and insert them into bat SARS-CoVs (WIV1, SHC014) backbones (these use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from dual-use and gain of function concerns) to infect humanized mice and assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease,” Mr. Daszak stated.

The work was aimed at developing a vaccine to be sprayed on bats that the researchers believed would prevent another disease outbreak like the first SARS outbreak in China in 2003.

Mr. Daszak said the work would include Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who was to lead research on infecting humanized mice with the lab-created bat vaccine. Ms. Shi has also denied the lab has any role in the origins of COVID-19 or its spread among the local population.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a public assessment last year that the virus was caused by either a leak from a Chinese laboratory or from emergence from an infected animal. The Murphy memorandum reflects the views of a good portion of U.S. intelligence analysts who believe the virus came from the Wuhan institute.

Maj. Murphy stated that his analysis is that the COVID virus likely emerged as a precursor, “deliberately virulent, humanized recombinant” virus that was reverse-engineered into a live bat vaccine.

Regarding efforts to conceal the work, Maj. Murphy said Pentagon officials placed the unclassified EcoHealth Alliance proposal in a top-secret file within DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office.

Maj. Murphy stated that the COVID virus is a synthetic “chimera” or lab-produced virus engineered to infect human cells. The virus is likely a live vaccine that escaped from the  Chinese laboratory before it could be engineered into a less dangerous state, he added.

“It leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves,” Maj. Murphy said, adding that initial escape took place in August 2019. The virus should be called “SARS-CoV-Wuhan,” Maj. Murphy stated.

The document also discloses the identity of a U.S. government team of experts who first concluded the virus came from a leak at the Wuhan lab. The group is called the Decentralized Radical Search Team Investigating COVID-19, or DRASTIC.

“This collection of scientists and sleuths broke open the lab-leak hypothesis into the mainstream and has picked apart Chinese and World Health Organization (WHO) reports on SARS-CoV-2’s origins in Wuhan,” he said.

Warning issued on Russian cyberthreat

Amid heightened tensions over a possible second Russian invasion of Ukraine, federal security agencies warned this week that Moscow could conduct cyberattacks against critical U.S. infrastructure.

The National Security Agency, FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in an advisory issued Tuesday that state-sponsored Russian cyberattacks pose a threat. The three agencies stated that Russian intelligence agencies, the civilian SVR and military GRU, have formidable cyberattack capabilities and have demonstrated their prowess in the past.

Past victims include defense industrial networks, health care providers, energy and telecommunications companies and government networks.

Russian hackers hit “dozens” of state and local governments and aviation networks from September 2020 to December 2020, compromising networks and stealing data from multiple victims. Russian-based hackers also launched a major energy sector intrusion campaign from 2011 to 2018.

“These Russian state-sponsored … actors conducted a multi-stage intrusion campaign in which they gained remote access to U.S. and international energy sector networks, deployed [industrial control system]-focused malware, and collected and exfiltrated enterprise and ICS-related data,” the report said.

The government agencies urged network operators, especially those charged with defending critical infrastructure, to increase security and conduct “proactive threat hunting” in a search for Russian hacker intrusions.

Sophisticated Russian hackers use common but effective tactics to break into networks used by the 16 infrastructure systems considered critical, including computer systems linking energy, communications, transportation, finance, manufacturing, water, health care and food sectors.

Among the types of cyberattacks Russian could launch if the more than 100,000 Russian troops invade Ukraine are “spearphishing” emails, brute force log-in attempts and remote network control through known operating-system vulnerabilities in the accounts of network administrators.

Initial access for the attacks may be attempted through several virtual private networks, Cisco routers, Oracle servers, Citrix software, Microsoft Exchange and several other known avenues of attack.

“Russian state-sponsored [advanced persistent threat] actors have also demonstrated sophisticated tradecraft and cyber capabilities by compromising third-party infrastructure, compromising third-party software, or developing and deploying custom malware,” the warning states.

Industrial control systems used to operate the electric grid, dams and nuclear power plants also could be attacked by the Russians.

Past industrial control attacks linked to Moscow have included the Havex Trojan, which hit systems in the United States, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany beginning in 2014; and the 2015 cyberattacks against Ukrainian power companies that caused blackouts throughout the country.

Virus outbreaks in China threaten Olympics

China‘s anti-pandemic policy dubbed “zero Covid” is collapsing under the weight of mushrooming outbreaks of the omicron variant. Analysts say new outbreaks in several locations could derail the controversial upcoming Winter Olympics set for Beijing next month.

The regime announced in 2020 it experienced a questionable 4,600 deaths from the disease as part of its so-called zero COVID-19 policy.

However, Chinese propaganda outlets were forced to back off less credible assertions that China was free of COVID-19 cases and instead began asserting the government had reached “effective zero COVID.”

With two major cities, Xian and Tianjin, recently on lockdown over new disease outbreaks, the Chinese media are now describing the official government policy as “zero COVID on a societal level.”

That verbal jiujitsu has caused some analysts to scratch their heads in wonder over what that means, because people contract COVID-19, not societies.

The latest lockdown in Tianjin will test whether the virus spreads to Beijing, located about 30 minutes by train from Tianjin, and the host city for the Winter Games. Reports from a person in contact with numerous people inside China indicate the virus is spreading rapidly throughout the country.

Among the locations for new lockdowns by authorities are Shaoxing, a city close to the megacity of Shanghai; in the north at Anyang, and the city of Shenzhen, a large city near Hong Kong.

Chinese authorities already have initiated draconian protocols for Olympic athletes, including 14-day quarantine upon entry into the country and a highly restrictive “bubble” imposed over athletes’ movements and housing during the Games.

The latest outbreaks are likely to prompt new calls by human rights activities already advocating a strict boycott of the Games in response to charges of Chinese genocide against Uyghurs in western China.

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For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.

Senate Dems offer sanctions-lite on Russian pipeline as an alternative to tougher GOP bill

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Senate Dems offer sanctions-lite on Russian pipeline as an alternative to tougher GOP bill
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Sen. Ted Cruz‘s bill to reimpose sanctions on Russia‘s Nord Stream 2 pipeline got some competition Wednesday from a Democratic bill that would threaten, but not impose, new penalties on the project.

The new bill also gives Democrats an alternative to badly embarrassing President Biden for nixing the Trump-era sanctions on the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline. The sanctions, mirroring Mr. Biden‘s stance, would only take effect if Russia invades Ukraine.

Republicans say the U.S. can’t wait until after an invasion to get tough on the Kremlin.

The Biden administration has lobbied against the bill by Mr. Cruz, Texas Republican, that would immediately affect the Russian undersea pipeline into Germany.

The new measure, led by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrat, includes a bevy of threats against Russia should they invade. It would then impose mandatory sanctions against Russian officials and financial institutions as well as measures to bolster Ukrainian defense forces.

“This legislation makes it absolutely clear that the U.S. Senate will not stand idly by as the Kremlin threatens a reinvasion of Ukraine,” Mr. Menendez said.

The bill would express a “sense of Congress that Nord Stream 2 is a tool of the malign influence of the Russian Federation.” It directs the Biden administration to “consider all available and appropriate measures to prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from becoming operational,” and “to review its prior waiver of Nord Stream 2 in light of the Kremlin’s military buildup and aggression of Ukraine.”

The bill’s language on Nord Stream 2 falls well short of the immediate sanctions proposed by Republicans, which Mr. Cruz managed to force to a vote in the Democrat-run Senate by the end of the week.

“It’s political theater,” John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who now serves as senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, said of the Menendez bill.

“Having those sanctions is not a bad thing at all,” he said. “But it is designed to allow the Democratic senators to say, ‘See, we’re tough on Russia too, we just don’t like the bill Cruz put on the floor.’ Menendez‘s bill is all about protecting their flanks on Nord Stream 2.”

The Biden administration waived the Trump-era sanctions against the pipeline in May. It argued that the sanctions would have little effect in curbing progress on the pipeline, which runs through the Baltic Sea.

Critics contend that the natural gas pipeline will increase Moscow’s dominance over European energy markets and put Germany and other countries at risk of energy extortion.

Mr. Cruz got the Senate’s Democratic leaders to schedule a Jan. 14 vote on his sanctions bill in exchange for him releasing holds on dozens of Mr. Biden‘s nominees for ambassadorships.

Mr. Cruz‘s bill needs 60 votes to pass and Republicans have said they are confident they can secure enough support to get it over the finish line.

The vote puts Senate Democrats in a bind over backing tough-on-Kremlin legislation that would embarrass Mr. Biden. The Menendez bill offers a way out.

Mr. Menendez was highly critical of the removing pipeline sanctions but voting to undo Mr. Biden‘s moves would be a rebuke on a much larger scale.

Several Democrats remained on the fence early this week, prompting Biden administration officials to meet with senators to try to walk back support for the Cruz bill, which they say could tank U.S. leverage amid high-stakes negotiations with Russia.

The State Department said Tuesday that it was working with lawmakers “on a package of sanctions that maximizes the potential costs to Russia if they further invade Ukraine which [Mr. Cruz‘s] legislation does not do.”

Mr. Menendez‘s proposal is in line with Mr. Biden‘s stance but does little to quell hawkish Republicans adamant about reimposing sanctions immediately.

Nonetheless, Mr. Menendez rejected the premise that his bill was meant to draw support away from Mr. Cruz‘s bill.

“My focus on my legislation is not to defeat Sen. Cruz,” Mr. Menendez said. “It is to find the most powerful way to deter Russia from considering invading Ukraine. And I think what we have done in this package that I call the mother of all sanctions package is the most powerful way to achieve that.”

The Inequality Crisis Affecting Women Worldwide

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The Inequality Crisis Affecting Women Worldwide

By Ahmad Saed Alzein, Author of The Holy Book of Luck

There is too much inequality in the world resulting in misfortune and poverty for many. The information and statistics are enough to keep many of us awake at night:

•          All the world’s billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion other people – 60 percent of the planet’s population. Global inequality is shockingly entrenched and vast and the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade. The gap between rich and poor cannot be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these.

•          Our sexist economies are fuelling the inequality crisis —enabling a wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of ordinary people and particularly poor women and girls. The 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa. Women and girls put in 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day —a contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry.

•          Getting the one percent of the richest to pay just 0.5 percent extra tax on their wealth over the next 10 years would equal the investment needed to create 117 million jobs in sectors such as elderly and childcare, education, and health.

Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist. Women and girls are among those who benefit least from today’s economic system. They spend billions of hours cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly. Unpaid care work is the ‘hidden engine’ that keeps the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies moving. It is driven by women who often have little time to get an education, earn a decent living or have a say in how our societies are run, and who are therefore trapped at the bottom of the economy.

 Women do more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work. They often have to work reduced hours or drop out of the workforce because of their care workload. Across the globe, 42 percent of women of working age cannot get jobs because they are responsible for all the caregiving, compared to just six percent of men. Women also make up two-thirds of the paid ‘care workforce’. Jobs such as nursery workers, domestic workers, and care assistants are often poorly paid, provide scant benefits, impose irregular hours, and can take a physical and emotional toll.

The pressure on caretakers, both unpaid and paid, is set to grow in the coming decade as the global population grows and age. An estimated 2.3 billion people will be in need of care by 2030 —an increase of 200 million since 2015. Climate change could worsen the looming global care crisis —by 2025, up to 2.4 billion people will live in areas without enough water, and women and girls will have to walk even longer distances to fetch it.

 Governments are massively under-taxing the wealthiest individuals and corporations and failing to collect revenues that could help lift the responsibility of care from women and tackle poverty and inequality. At the same time, governments are underfunding vital public services and infrastructure that could help reduce women and girls’ workload. For example, investments in water and sanitation, electricity, childcare, healthcare could free up women’s time and improve their quality of life. For example, providing access to an improved water source could save women in parts of Zimbabwe up to four hours of work a day, or two months a year.

 Governments created the inequality crisis —they must act now to end it. They must ensure corporations and wealthy individuals pay their fair share of tax and increase investment in public services and infrastructure. They must pass laws to tackle the huge amount of care work done by women and girls and ensure that people who do some of the most important jobs in our society —caring for our parents, our children and the most vulnerable— are paid a living wage. Governments must prioritize care as being as important as all other sectors in order to build more human economies that work for everyone, not just a fortunate few.

Libor, Long the Most Important Number in Finance, Dies at 52

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Libor, Long the Most Important Number in Finance, Dies at 52
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In its early years, Libor was a growing but still adolescent rate, employed for a steadily increasing number of contracts. In 1986, at age 17, it hit the big time: Libor was taken in by the British Bankers Association, a trade group described later by The New York Times as a “club of gentlemen bankers.”

They effectively made it the basis for virtually all the business they conducted. Libor was the interest rate that banks themselves had to pay, so it offered a convenient base line for the rates they charged customers who wanted to borrow cash to buy a home or issue a security to finance a business expansion.

Libor became a number punched into almost any calculation involving financial products, from the humble to the exotic. The British banks used it to set rates for loans across the industry, whether denominated in dollars, British pounds, euros or Japanese yen. Never before had there been such a benchmark, and Libor’s daily movements were the very heartbeat of international finance.

But as Libor approached middle age, troubling health problems began to emerge.

By 2008, regulators in the United States and Britain began receiving information that banks’ rate reports were amiss. Because Libor relied on self-reported estimates, it was possible for a bank to submit a rate that was artificially high or low, thus making certain financial holdings more profitable.

Soon, news media reports cast doubt on Libor’s integrity, and investigators ultimately uncovered blatant misconduct in the rate-setting process. In one email released by regulators in 2012 as part of an investigation into Barclays, a trader thanked a banker at another firm for setting a lower rate by saying: “Dude, I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger” — a reference to the Champagne producer.

The scandal grabbed international headlines, from the Financial Times to The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times. Before long, Libor was the butt of jokes on “The Daily Show.”

‘American Urbanist,’ a Well-Timed Biography of a Man Who Reshaped City Life

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‘American Urbanist,’ a Well-Timed Biography of a Man Who Reshaped City Life
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William H. suffered, too, perhaps, from doing many different things well — defying easy categorization, leapfrogging across disciplines. (“There are no good generalists,” a former boss once darkly remarked to me.) “What are you now?” asked one foundation president, hoping to hire Whyte. “Private eye? Pundit? Consultant?”

Credit…E.E. Whiting

Raised middle class in West Chester, Pa., Whyte, whose parents divorced, had been a distracted pupil at St. Andrew’s, a tiny private school in Delaware, but was nonetheless admitted to Princeton, where he seemed at first to be following the path of F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing a prizewinning play and short stories as W. Hollingsworth Whyte (sometimes appending a III). After graduation, “Holly,” as he was nicknamed, briefly sold Vicks VapoRub before eagerly enlisting in the Marines. To assuage the misery of the Guadalcanal campaign, he smuggled in muslin sheets and made cocktails of Pepsodent and medicinal alcohol, the kind of precise, take-you-there detail that makes one want to dawdle rather than race through Rein’s book. Whyte contributed to the Marine Corps Gazette before proceeding to magazine journalism.

This was the profession’s golden age — so much so that the cover of the 10th anniversary issue of Fortune, then a top-shelf sibling publication to Time whose contributors included James Agee and Alfred Kazin, was printed with actual gold. Whyte considered himself a literary contender, gleefully tweaking The New Yorker, which had a longstanding feud with Time Inc., in the pages of Harper’s and at college before that. He also knew his way around maps, graphs and charts. But more academically credentialed intellectuals sometimes sneered at him for his simplicity and direct style. “An earnest, optimistic Boy Scout,” one Ph.D. dismissed him in The New York Times Book Review. “The trouble is he isn’t really prepared.”

Rein trails his subject with a sure step. He first encountered Whyte’s ideas about challenging the status quo as a freshman at Princeton himself, and reported for Time and People. The two men never met, though Whyte once quoted U.S. 1, a community newspaper Rein founded about the Princeton-Route 1 corridor, praising it as “sprightly.” The threads of commonality between them hoist the story, rather than choke it. That social distancing makes Whyte’s work newly germane is a lucky break.

How to Make Your Own Animated GIFs

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How to Make Your Own Animated GIFs
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Online “visual” reactions have come a long way since the first sideways smiley-face emoticon appeared four decades ago. Animated GIFs — those files showing a few seconds of choppy motion, like the one of Kermit the Frog flailing his arms excitedly — are ubiquitous in text messages, online forums and chat apps, thanks to the internet’s meme culture.

But animated GIFs don’t have to come from the internet: You can make your own GIFs from the photos and videos on your phone. And you may not even need extra software to do so. Here’s a guide.

While they resemble short video clips, animated GIFs have technical differences from videos. Both file types use a series of images to display motion, but GIFs don’t include audio, hence the captions you see on some of them. And the traditional GIF format (which dates back to 1987) supports only 256 colors, which are far fewer than many modern video formats — and even newer competing image formats like AV1, also known as AVIF.

Most GIFs are a few seconds long, play automatically on a loop and have joined emojis as versatile ways to express yourself online.

Credit…Apple; Tenor

And GIFs are image files, which can make them easy to share in mail and messages. Some message and keyboard apps even include a GIF library for quick access in your conversations.

(What’s less clear about GIFs is how you pronounce the acronym. Like the peanut butter brand, or like “gift” without the t? The choice is fraught.)

Third-party programs are plentiful, but before you head to the App Store, you may be able to whip up a GIF with programs already on your iPhone or iPad. For example, if you’ve captured a worthy shot with Apple’s Live Photos feature (which records the action 1.5 seconds before and after the picture) you can add effects and save it as an animated GIF.

Credit…Apple

Just go to the Photos app, open an image from the Live Photos album and tap the gray Live icon in the upper-left corner to add an effect like Loop or Bounce. To convert the live photo to a GIF, open the iOS Shortcuts app for automating actions, or get it from the App Store if you don’t have it already. Search the Shortcuts Gallery for the Make GIF shortcut and add it. Tap the Make GIF icon and select your live photo to convert.

The Shortcuts Gallery also holds a Convert Burst to GIF automation that you can use to transform a series of photos taken in burst mode and another, called Video to GIF, that converts video clips.

Options for making animated GIFs from photos on an Android-based phone can vary based on the hardware, software and carrier in the mix. Those with certain Samsung Galaxy phones may be able to use the GIF-making features for photos and videos in the free Gallery app.

If you use Google Photos on Android (or iOS), you can make an animated GIF from a selection of your pictures. Just tap Library, then Utilities and Create New. Choose Animation, select the photos and tap Create.

Credit…Google

The burstlike “motion photos” captured on some Google Pixel phones can be converted into animated GIFs right on the device or with a third-party app. (Many Samsung Galaxy phones have a similar “motion photo” feature.)

Credit…Google

For example, to make an animated GIF on a Google Pixel 4 XL, open Google Photos and select an image saved as a motion photo, or use the search tool to look for “motion photos.” (The Camera app’s settings need to have the Top Shot or motion setting enabled.) When you find a motion photo you want to use, select it and swipe up or tap the three-dot More menu in the top-right corner of the screen. Next, swipe along the row of icons to Export. Tap Export and select the GIF option to save the new file to your photo library.

The free tools that came with your phone can quickly create a simple GIF, but if you want to add text, have more control over looping or even browse GIF archives for ideas, visit your app store. Many GIF-creation apps available, and the free Giphy software for Android and iOS is one of the best known; Giphy also has a huge archive of animated GIFs, its own GIF-making tutorial and a best practices guide.

Credit…Giphy

If you find Giphy overwhelming, you have plenty of other choices. Many apps are ad-supported but charge a few dollars to ditch the advertisements. They include ImgPlay (for Android and iOS; $8 or less); Video to GIF (iOS; $2) and GIF Maker GIF Editor Pro (Android; $3). You can even make a GIF out of a selfie clip for a truly personal reaction shot — or just have fun with relatable animal behavior.

Media rethink which data to report during Omicron wave

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Media rethink which data to report during Omicron wave
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NEW YORK — For two years, coronavirus case counts and hospitalizations have been widely used barometers of the pandemic’s march across the world.

But the omicron wave is making a mess of the usual statistics, forcing news organizations to rethink the way they report such figures.

“It’s just a data disaster,” said Katherine Wu, staff writer who covers COVID-19 for The Atlantic magazine.

The number of case counts soared over the holidays, an expected development given the emergence of a variant more transmissible than its predecessors.

Yet these counts only reflect what is reported by health authorities. They do not include most people who test themselves at home, or are infected without even knowing about it. Holidays and weekends also lead to lags in reported cases.

If you could add all those numbers up – and you can’t – case counts would likely be substantially higher.

For that reason, The Associated Press has recently told its editors and reporters to avoid emphasizing case counts in stories about the disease. That means, for example, no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable.

Throughout the media, there has been more caution in use of official case counts.

An NBC News story on Monday about the skyrocketing number of COVID cases relied on a one-week average of case counts. A Tuesday story simply referred to a “tidal wave” of cases.

During its coverage of a Senate hearing with health experts on Tuesday, the case counts CNN flashed onscreen were two-week averages. MSNBC used a variety of measurements, including a listing of the five states with highest reported numbers over the past three days.

On its website’s “Guide to the Pandemic,” The Washington Post used a seven-day average of cases and compared that number to last Tuesday’s, showing a 56% increase. The New York Times used a daily count in an online chart, yet also included a two-week trend in both cases and deaths.

An AP story Saturday by Jennifer Sinco Kelleher and Terry Tang headlined, “Omicron explosion spurs nationwide breakdown of services” was full of statistics from across the United States on hospitalization rates or employees calling out sick from work. The case count metric was not used.

“We definitely wanted people to go a little deeper and be more specific in reporting,” said Josh Hoffner, the news editor who helps oversee AP’s virus coverage.

Many news organizations are debating how best to use statistics now during the omicron surge, Wu said. But there are no easy answers.

“It’s how journalism works,” Wu said. “We need the data. We need to show receipts to readers. But I try to do it carefully.”

Hospitalization and death rates are considered by some to be a more reliable picture of COVID-19’s current impact on society. Yet even the usefulness of those numbers has been called into question in recent days. In many cases, hospitalizations are incidental: there are people being admitted for other reasons and are surprised to find they test positive for COVID, said Tanya Lewis, senior editor for health and medicine at Scientific American.

Despite the imperfections, case counts should not be ignored, said Gary Schwitzer, a University of Minnesota School of Public Health instructor and publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, which monitors health coverage in the media.

The numbers illustrate trends, giving a picture of which areas of the country are being hit particularly hard or where the surge may have peaked, he said. They can predict broader societal impacts, like where hospitals are about to be slammed or where there will be worker shortages.

“These are stories that may not be told adequately if only hospitalizations and deaths are emphasized,” Schwitzer said.

That’s a point emphasized in AP’s internal guidance, as well.

“They do have value,” Hoffner said. “We don’t want people to eliminate mention of case counts.”

There are some in public health and journalism who believe the current surge – painful as it is – may augur good news. It could be a sign that COVID-19 is headed toward becoming an endemic disease that people learn to live with, rather than being a disruptive pandemic, wrote David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu in The New York Times.

But if the past two years have taught anything, it’s about the danger in predictions, Lewis said.

“We’ve been surprised time and again,” she said. “We don’t know everything about the course of the pandemic. We still need to be humble and keep an open mind in terms of where things are going.”

Copyright © 2022 The Washington Times, LLC.

Health, The New York Today

Donald Trump slams GOP elected officials who refuse to admit being vaccinated against COVID-19

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Donald Trump slams GOP elected officials who refuse to admit being vaccinated against COVID-19
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Former President Donald Trump criticized Republicans on Tuesday that refuse to admit publicly they are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Mr. Trump, a leading figure within the GOP, told One America News it was “gutless” for elected officials to equivocate when questioned about their vaccination status.  

“I’ve taken it. I’ve had the booster,” said Mr. Trump. “Many politicians–I watched a couple of politicians be interviewed and one of the questions was, ‘Did you get the booster?’ – because they had the vaccine – and they’re answering like–in other words, the answer is ‘yes’ but they don’t want to say it. Because they’re gutless.”

Mr. Trump added that such elected officials were doing their constituents little favor given the success that immunization has had in stymying the pandemic.

“You gotta say it, whether you had it or not,” said Mr. Trump. “But the fact is that I think the vaccines saved tens of millions throughout the world … If they get it, they’re not going to hospitals for the most part and dying.”

Mr. Trump has emerged as a sharp champion of the COVID-19 vaccine, which was developed by his administration through an $18 billion program called “Operation Warp Speed.”

‘No Time to Die: Collector’s Edition’ 4K Ultra HD movie review

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‘No Time to Die: Collector’s Edition’ 4K Ultra HD movie review
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Daniel Craig‘s swan song as the super-agent James Bond finally made it to theaters after a long pandemic pause to reach blockbuster status and now lives on ultra-high definition disc in No Time to Die: Collector’s Edition (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, not rated, 1.37:1 aspect ratio, 119 minutes, $59.95).

The 25th film in the franchise finds 007 now retired and in love with psychiatrist Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) while still hunted by former enemies such as Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) and his Spectre minions.

He’s plucked out of retirement when the revenge-seeking killer Safin (Rami Malik) steals the British-made biological nanoweapon nicknamed Heracles and threatens humanity.

Viewers get another perfectly mixed though uninspired Bond film only taken to a new level of emotion wrapped around the exit of Mr. Craig.

That still translates into extreme action such as motorcycle acrobatics; a spinning Aston Martin BD5 with machine-gun turrets replacing headlights; fierce firefights; close-quarters combat; high-speed car chases; 007 free-falling off the side of an aqueduct; and a high-tech airstrike.

And, more fun, is the return of a familiar supporting cast including Ralph Fiennes as Gareth Mallory aka M (the head of MI6); M’s secretary Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris); tech equipment specialist Q (Ben Whishaw); and Bond’s CIA buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright).

Fans of Mr. Craig‘s final performance will not be disappointed with the results despite its potentially controversial ending for the pop culture icon. I still don’t believe it.

4K in action: As with all of the Bond films released on UHD, viewers get a panoramic, eye-popping travelogue of some of the most beautiful and exotic places on earth as the agent tackles another worldwide threat to humanity.

This time out, the visual quest begins, with help from uber-crisp and high dynamic range enhancements, in a dreamlike snowy Langvann in Norway moving to the ancient cave dwellings of Matera in Southern Italy; London at dusk (as Spectre agents walk down the side of a building); a sunny inlet off the coast of Jamaica; and eventually ending up in the stark concrete confines of the Poison Garden.

The action and nearly three-dimensional locations look so lifelike, rich in clarity and color, that moments literally pop out from a home entertainment screen.

Best extras: Viewers get a quartet of featurettes (roughly 30 minutes). The featurettes explore the use of practical stunts; the epic locations; production design and costuming; a dangerous motorcycle jump; an exploding and sinking ship on the Cuban coast; and the detail poured into building the Havana bar set.

Next, and best of the bunch, is a 47-minute retrospective that originally appeared on Apple TV about Mr. Craig and his 15-year, and five-film career as Bond.

Through an offscreen conversation with producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson and the actor, the trio reminisces over visuals starting with Mr. Craig being selected as the next 007 much to the chagrin of the press (too blond and too dour, too unworthy and too ugly).

They then continue the nostalgia trip with moments from “Casino Royale,” Skyfall,” “Quantum of Solace,” “Spectre” and “No Time To Die,” including Mr. Craig‘s final appearance on the set.

Viewers also get a digital copy of the film that is exclusive to iTunes, a rare decision and not standard in the world of multiple, compatible streaming services with Universal usually aligned with the Movies Anywhere service.

Beal-less Wizards piece together win over Thunder

Enspirers | Editorial Board
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Beal-less Wizards piece together win over Thunder
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A few hours before their game against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Tuesday, the Washington Wizards placed star Bradley Beal in the NBA’s COVID-19 health and safety protocols. Instead of one player stepping up and filling Beal’s large shoes, the Wizards received clutch contributions from several players in a 122-118 win over the visiting Thunder. 

The most important bucket of the game was a banked 3-pointer from Kentavious Caldwell-Pope that put Washington up three points with 31 seconds remaining.

While no Washington player outside of Kyle Kuzma stood out — and no Wizard played inspired defense — Caldwell-Pope, Spencer Dinwiddie, Corey Kispert, Davis Bertans and Montrezl Harrell all made key plays in the final quarter to pull out the victory. 

“It’s invaluable when you have guys who aren’t afraid of the moment,” said coach Wes Unseld Jr. “I give those guys a lot of credit. [Caldwell]-Pope and those guys have done it all year. It’s why they’re here.”

The win is the second straight for the Wizards, who are now 21-20 at the midway point of the season with seven games remaining on its long homestand. 

Kuzma continued his hot streak by scoring 20-plus points for an eighth straight game. The forward in his first year with the Wizards totaled 29 points on 12-of-17 shooting. He also made two lead-changing buckets in the final five minutes and knocked down a late free throw to put the team up four. 

Dinwiddie, who has struggled while playing alongside Beal, shined once again without the Wizards star. The point guard, also in his first year with the team, scored 22 points and dished out 10 assists. Kispert, who started in Beal’s place, scored 12 points, including back-to-back buckets in the third quarter after Oklahoma City took its largest lead in the second half. The rookie also came up with a key block in the final two minutes.

“Corey made big plays tonight,” Unseld said. “He had an all-around great night. It’s good to see him get back and make shots, but for him to make those defensive plays and get in the right spot gives himself confidence and gives us confidence.”

Bertans, the team’s high-paid sharpshooter who has struggled this season, knocked down a trio of 3-pointers in the fourth quarter. Harrell, the team’s sixth man, returned from his bout with COVID-19 to score 12 points, including a rim-shaking, energy-inducing dunk after an offensive rebound in the final minutes. 

“It was great to see him out there,” Unseld said of Harrell. “His energy, his voice, that’s what he does. It’s important, because we haven’t had that in a while.”

Washington is back in action Wednesday against Orlando. The Wizards defeated the Magic 102-100 on Sunday.

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