Dear Friend,
Remember. Governments have resolved that by 2050 fossil fuels will be outlawed completely. By 2050 the conditions for forests and grasslands to spread across the earth once more will be realised and biodiversity will recover. Mankind will understand that food and medicine are inextricably linked and forests are more beautiful and healthy for all living and non living beings than tilled soils. Wishing Long Life to All! Happy International Biodiversity Day! The past was a mess. The present and the future look beautifully, diversely green
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Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
Happy International Biodiversity Day
by Anandi Sharan
Remember. Governments have resolved that by 2050 fossil fuels will be outlawed completely. By 2050 the conditions for forests and grasslands to spread across the earth once more will be realised and biodiversity will recover. Mankind will understand that food and medicine are inextricably linked and forests are more beautiful and healthy for all living and non living beings than tilled soils. Wishing Long Life to All! Happy International Biodiversity Day! The past was a mess. The present and the future look beautifully, diversely green
The National Green Tribunal had asked all States to finish preparing People’s Biodiversity Registers by end of January 2020. This made various States make greater efforts to mobilise volunteers in local government in Taluk Panchayat.
Collecting and documenting wild plants is a beautiful task and a never ending one, as new species are added to these registers every day by observant and knowledgable humans.
The members of local biodiversity management committees and those contributing their knowledge are very precious comrades.
Their shared knowledge contributes to making humans once again aware of the need to obliterate industrial man’s distinction between food and medicine.
Modern man may be good at surgery, and many have of course benefited. But pharmaceuticals come a poor second compared to using the raw, dried, fresh and in other ways directly consumed parts of plants as food.
Food is medicine for preserving and restoring health. Not only is health wealth, nature is health and wealth!
On International Biodiversity Day let us resolve to eat, drink, apply, compound, the natural biodiversity in its natural form and support the millions of cultivators and forest dwellers on earth who are switching from tilling to forests, or who never gave up on their forests in the first place !
Let us be conscious producers, consumers and distributors and sharing humans, who eat and grow and share diverse foods from forests.
Let us keep our loved ones healthy and happy from birth by conserving nature and living in submission to her wisdom!
Boost memory, energy, passion and live a long life.
Remember. Governments have resolved that by 2050 fossil fuels will be outlawed completely. By 2050 the conditions for forests and grasslands to spread across the earth once more will be realised and biodiversity will recover. Mankind will understand that food and medicine are inextricably linked and forests are more beautiful and healthy for all living and non living beings than tilled soils.
Wishing Long Life to All! Happy International Biodiversity Day!
The past was a mess. The present and the future look beautifully, diversely green.
Anandi Sharan was born in Switzerland, educated in the UK, lived in Karnataka villages for many years, now lives in Bangalore and last year worked in Araria District in Bihar. She works now on trying to find the best money system to help people adapt to climate change especially in India.
10C Above Baseline !
by Robert Hunziker
Earth at 10°C above pre-industrial is unimaginable. It’s a deadly horrifying thought, but as shall be explained herein, it should not be dismissed out of hand. The following
story might be labeled as reckless, and it might be criticized as a fearmongering piece of journalism and probably will be. Nevertheless, “10C Above Baseline” explores a dystopian world envisioned by John Doyle, Sustainable Development Policy Coordinator of the European Commission in Brussels.
Earth at 10°C above pre-industrial is unimaginable. It’s a deadly horrifying thought, but as shall be explained herein, it should not be dismissed out of hand.
The following story might be labeled as reckless, and it might be criticized as a fearmongering piece of journalism and probably will be. Nevertheless, “10C Above Baseline” explores a dystopian world envisioned by John Doyle, Sustainable Development Policy Coordinator of the European Commission in Brussels.
Doyle’s thesis of a 10C world, within current lifetimes, is based upon sober-minded analysis. Of course, it envisions a planet of few or maybe no humans. Granted, it is hard to believe, very hard to accept.
Whereas, the Paris Agreement of 2015 officially set goals amongst the nations of the world to employ mitigation measures to hold global temperatures to 2C but preferably 1.5C above pre-industrial, which is mid 18th century (1750s), except for IPCC measurement purposes, which are markedly different from the 18th century pre-industrial baseline, to wit: ”The baseline period from which climate change is expressed has also moved on (a common baseline period of 1986–2005 is used throughout, consistent with the 2006 start-point for the RCP scenario).” (Source: AR5 Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Hmm!
Meanwhile, 1.5C has become a cause célèbre among climate activists. But, there’s a rub: In order to stay below 1.5C, greenhouse gas emissions, like CO2, need to fall off a cliff, decreasing by 15% per year, starting in year 2020. (Doyle)
Categorically, that’s impossible to achieve for a host of reasons.
Not so long ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report about 2C versus 1.5C. Its findings were grim, namely: At 2˚C (3.6˚F) rather than at 1.5˚C (2.7˚F) the danger to ecosystems increases several fold.
As things stand, the world has a comfort zone of 1.5C to 2.0C with 1.5C the clear preference. But still, at 2.0C all kinds of bells and whistles go off, e.g., (1) severe heat events increase by 2.6xs (2) the Wet Bulb Temperature WBT-impact (3) 2xs vertebrate species loss and (4) 90% of coral reefs gone for good, etc., etc., etc. as key ecosystems that support and originate life suffer.
Keeping in mind (lest you forget) there is no Planet B.
So then, what of 10C?
John Doyle, a climate resilience analyst, has studied the climate system and discussed findings at a UN Aid Agencies meeting, John Doyle, Sustainable Development Policy Coordinator of the European Commission, Information Society and Media Directorate-General.
Doyle is working on mainstreaming Sustainable Development in the Information Society Directorate General with special emphasis on business partnerships to address energy and climate security.
A synopsis of Doyle’s disturbing analysis and speech follows herein:
In brief, Doyle’s presentation consists of horrifying expectations. More to the point, Doyle’s presentation is a daunting wake up call above and beyond all wake up calls, as video-recorded by ScientistsWarning.org, Stuart Scott, Executive Director:
One of the video power-point headlines boldly proclaims: “Science… We’re heading fast for 10C degrees, 4C is extinction.”
Doyle: “Roughly speaking, you’ve been told that we may be heading for 1.5c or 2c degrees above pre-industrial temperature. That’s not true. That’s basically very old science, and it’s essentially inaccurate. There isn’t a single independent scientist of the world that would support that position now. We’re actually heading for 10 degrees warming that could happen within 20 to 30 years. And, on the way to 10 degrees, we pass 4 degrees. Now, four degrees is interesting because that’s extinction for our species. So keep that one in mind. I’m not just making this up.”
All of which prompts a question: Along the way to 10C, when does 4C happen? If 10C is on the docket within 20-30 years, as explained by Doyle, then it’s probably safe to assume 4C within 8-15 years. Regrettably, that’s within the lifetimes of pretty much the entire world population now approaching 8B. Talk about impact!
Predicting a 10C uplift in global temperatures beyond pre-industrial is a stunning proposition, absolutely stunning! Indeed, his speech is a death-defying prognostication, but truth be told, nobody will believe it!
A review of literature of other climate scientists adds some dimension to Doyle’s work, to wit: In December 2019, the Potsdam Institute For Climate Research, one of the world’s premier climate research orgs, caused an international stir with a paper published in Nature: “Climate Tipping Points – Too Risky To Bet Against.”
A very interesting statement is found within the Potsdam paper, as follows: “The Earth system has been unstable across multiple timescales before, under relatively weak forcing caused by changes in Earth’s orbit. Now we are strongly forcing the system, with atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature increasing at rates that are an order of magnitude higher than those during the most recent de-glaciation… Atmospheric CO2 is already at levels last seen around four million years ago, in the Pliocene epoch. It is rapidly heading towards levels last seen some 50 million years ago — in the Eocene — when temperatures were up to 14 °C higher than they were in pre-industrial times.”
Here’s more Doyle: “Since the last International Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report AR5 was published… All of this has come to light since then. We’ve realized that we have been living in a fool’s paradise, thinking that nice gentle reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and maybe changing to electric cars should see us over the bump. This is simply not the case.”
Doyle’s outlook darkens, as he declares the geo-engineering concept of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere nowhere near ready for deployment and likely not possible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which essentially says: “You cannot build a machine to clean up the mess you made making the machine.”
Heaven forbid! People are depending upon geo-engineering to bail us out. What if it doesn’t?
Here’s more Doyle: “In the last 30 years we’ve been able to measure that the total amount of vertebrate life on this planet has collapsed by 99%. And, what’s left, at least from the tiny human being up to the big elephant are found loads of cows, loads of humans, and virtually no wild animals. It’s way worse than that. There are no wild animals. There are no fish. There are no insects. Your microbiome inside your own body is collapsing, at least 20% to 30% down over the last 20 to 30 years… We are not on the verge of the sixth mass extinction; we’re in the middle of it. And very likely to be part of it.”
Additionally, the Wet Bulb Temperature effect received mention: “This gives you the temperatures that living creatures can survive… on the left hand side you can see 42C (107.6F) degrees. Human beings can easily survive well over that. But there’s a catch… The fittest human being on the planet, if he is in a temperature of 36C degrees (96.8F) where there’s 100% relative humidity, he dies in six hours.”
“I (Doyle) was in a city (Brussels) in Europe in August. The temperature was 36C degrees and the relative humidity was 40. It only needed to be one and a half degrees higher and about 20% extra humidity for tens of thousands of people to be dying in the streets.”
Doyle provided additional evidence of the ongoing extinction event. Flying insect populations have crashed by 80% in Europe over the past 40 years. We don’t survive without insects… no questions asked!
But, there is one question: What causes 80% of flying insects to drop dead within a half-lifespan of an average human? Something is horribly wrong!
Solutions? Eliminating fossil fuels in enough time to stem excessive warming will not work for numerous reasons. Not only that, fossil fuels account for approximately 80% of all energy production, and there’s no way that’ll change soon enough to help within the next 10 years.
As an aside to Doyle’s terrifying speech, according to the IEA (International Energy Agency) fossil fuel producers, like the U.S., Russia, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, plan on increasing oil and gas production by 120% by 2030, continuing to emit CO2 of ever-higher levels, bringing on more blanketed heat. China is embarking on mega-mega construction of new coal-burning power plants, and so is India, and Japan recently announced its intention to build 22 new coal-burning plants over the next 5 years, continuing to emit CO2 in ever-larger numbers, bringing on more blanketed heat. All of that in the face of irrefutable evidence of acceleration of climate change well beyond the influence of natural events. Maybe the world really is crazy after all.
According to Doyle: “The only option for “getting out of this mess is to stop pretending that we are going green.” To survive as a species, we must switch to local production and forget globalized growth. It’s over. The economic growth paradigm of neoliberal capitalism is incompatible with human survival, especially for life-supporting ecosystems.
It is worth noting that two respected French climate research organizations reached conclusions somewhat similar to Doyle’s but with much less gusto in their numbers. National Centre for Meteorological Research (CNRM) and Institute Pierre Simon Laplace Climate Modelling Centre in Paris contend, if CO2 emissions continue “business as usual,” then temperatures could increase by 7°C by 2100.
Still, it is incomprehensible, not impossible, that temperatures skyrocket 10C over the next 20-30 years. Is Doyle’s assessment realistic? What if it is?
Yet, Doyle’s thesis need not be 100% correct to disrupt and destroy ecosystems and cause panic amongst humankind. If he is 50% correct, large portions of the planet become uninhabitable. That’s just for starters.
And, if Doyle’s daunting analysis is only 25% correct, hard-charging 2C-plus circumstances will change life forever, less agricultural land, higher tidal flooding, and eco migrants by the hundreds of millions roaming countryside in massive waves of human flesh, searching for anything edible.
Indeed, it’s always instructive to look at other viewpoints, for example, the prestigious Met Office Hadley Centre/UK, assuming “business as usual” expects 4C by 2055. That’s more than enough to do the dirty work.
An International Panel on Climate Conference at Oxford University conducted a program entitled “4 Degrees and Beyond” that examined the likelihood of 4C, if “business as usual.” Their conclusion: Half of the planet turns uninhabitable.
All of which highlights a problem. “Business as usual” is thriving!
(… already looking past the speed bump COVID19)
According to Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, CO2 emissions for the month of April 2020 were 416.18 ppm versus 413.52 ppm for the month of April 2019. And, for added context, readings of 371.66 ppm were recorded for the month of April 2000.
“Business as usual” has not slowed down one iota in 62 years ever since Mauna Loa Observatory started collecting CO2 data in 1958 Noticeably, it has already accelerated+60% this century.
Maybe Doyle is onto something!
Robert Hunziker, MA, economic history DePaul University, awarded membership in Pi Gamma Mu International Academic Honor Society in Social Sciences is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has over 200 articles published, including several translated into foreign languages, appearing in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He has been interviewed on numerous FM radio programs, as well as television.
Coronavirus pandemic will contract India’s economy in 2020-21, warns central bank
by Countercurrents Collective
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has slashed its growth forecast for this financial year and warned of inflation uncertainties as India’s economy suffers due to the Covid-19, pandemic. While the country’s GDP growth is set to “remain in the negative territory with some pick up in second half” of the 2020-21 fiscal year, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das did not give any specific figures, citing difficulties in data collection.
Politics At The Eye Of The
Cyclone: Collision/Coalition?
by Shamayita Sen
I live in North Kolkata, West Bengal. I stand witness to the damaging consequences of Amphan, the strongest storm ever recorded in the Bay of Bengal.
How many –
by Mitali Chakravarty
How many people cried?
How many people died?
Indian contributions to British Music
by Bhabani Shankar Nayak
The Beatles were influenced by Indian music and exponent of Indian sitar. George Harrison has added sitar to John Lennon’s ‘Norwegian Wood’ (1965) for the first time. He later used north Indian ragas, sitar and tabla in songs like, ‘Love You To’ and ‘Within You Without You’. Jess Beck has simulated India sitar to give a psychedelic feeling to songs like; ‘Heart Full of Soul’ (1965) and ‘Shapes of
Things’ (1966). Brian Jones has borrowed the droning effects in the songs like; ‘Paint It Black’ (1966), ‘See My Friends’ (1965) and ‘Fancy’ (1966) from Indian sitar. The Kinks, the Rolling Stones and other music bands were not only influenced by Indian folk and classical music but also used it creatively to add exotic romantic feelings to their songs.
Remembrances of Meeting Cult Novelist Andrzej Kusniewicz in Warsaw
by Gaither Stewart
The Polish word, jestem—‘I am’, ‘here I am’, ‘present’—seems to define the life of the writer and cult figure for a generation, Andrzej Kusniewicz. On an overcast, pollution-infested Warsaw afternoon over thirty years ago in his crowded study in a surprisingly bourgeois apartment in a quiet residential area of the capital city, the poet-novelist insisted on the Polish word and the multiple occasions of his life
when he answered jestem. I, the interviewer, came to feel he had earned a right to the word. For all his life he had been ‘present’—so in contrast to the past about which he wrote.
The Impact of Unplanned Lockdown on Migrant Workers
Co-Written by Abass Rather & Aqib Yousuf
Covid-19 Pandemic has brought the world under a precarious situation as the millions of people have been rendered jobless. Over 122 million people in India lost their jobs in April, according to estimates from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Around 75% of them were small traders and wage-labourers.
Children Fundraisers Of Kashmir
by Z.G.Muhammad
Stories about the thirties, in our childhood, were not that old. Every elder in the family had a story to tell about one or the other martyr of July 31, 1931, buried just three hundred yards
from our house. They remembered stories of the movement against the Maharaja like textbook lessons. Even an old small earthen pitcher painted green had a story to tell about fundraising for the movement against the monarchy its discriminatory rule.
The Half Mother as a Narrative of Pain and Trauma of Kashmiri Women
by Bilal Ahmad Dar
The Half Mother is one of the important polemical Kashmiri narratives in English that explicitly documents the trauma and pain of Kashmiri women who live under the debilitating shadows of military oppression and violence. This article attempts to argue, in the light of Shahnaz’s novel, how the conflict and army atrocities have unleashed an unmitigated crime on Kashmiri women and has led to their trauma and ceaseless suffering.
A Weaver of Borderless Dreams: Mutiu Olawuyi
Mutiu Olawuyi in conversation with Mitali Chakravarty
‘70% of India’s coal-fired power stations may not meet environmental norms by 2022’
by Jose Kalathil
The sector must meet the environmental norms to ensure ‘our right to breathe in clean air,’ says CSE report
The sector must meet the environmental norms to ensure ‘our right to breathe in clean air,’ says CSE report
New Delhi: With barely two years to go before the deadline hits India’s coal-fired power plants to meet the stringent new emission norms by 2022, which were set in December 2015 by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), almost 70 per cent of the plants will not meet the emission standards. This was revealed in a study, Coal-based Power Norms: Where do we stand today, by the Centre for Science and Environment here on Wednesday. The report was released at an online event anchored by CSE director general Sunita Narain.
The study report presents a comprehensive assessment of the progress in implementation of the environmental norms for coal-based thermal power plants. Given the thrust of the Indian government to expedite and enhance coal mining in the country, “our study gains urgency”, say CSE researchers. “We cannot accept that we will continue to use coal without emission control. We want growth post-lockdown, but it has to be a growth which comes with our right to clean air. This must be equally important.”
Says Narain: “Our assessment finds that even after seven years since the notification and even after the agreed five-year extension given to this sector in 2017, most of the total installed coal-fired capacity will not be compliant with the crucial sulphur dioxide (SO2) standards by 2022.” Furthermore, there is little information in the public domain about compliance with PM or NOx standards and certainly, there is no direction to the thermal power plants that they must meet the crucial water standards, which would make this water-guzzling sector more responsible on its usage.
“Coal-fired power plants are some of the most polluting industries in the country. They account for over 60 per cent of the total particulate matter (PM) emissions from all industry, as well as 45 per cent of the SO2, 30 per cent of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and over 80 per cent of the mercury emissions. Therefore, even as we continue using coal, India’s thermal power sector must clean up its act. This is absolutely non-negotiable,” adds Narain.
The report says, with 56 per cent of generation capacity being based on it, coal is the mainstay of India’s power sector. Besides being accountable for emissions of pollutants like SO2 etc, the sector is also extremely water-intensive – it is responsible for 70 per cent of total freshwater withdrawal by all industries in the country.
A 2015 CSE study called Heat on Power had highlighted the huge scope for improvement in the sector’s environmental performance and had recommended tightening of norms to bring down pollution levels. In December 2015, the MoEF&CC introduced stricter environmental standards.
Says the CSE report: “The 2015 standards are in line with global regulations. According to rough estimates, their implementation can cut down emissions of PM by 35 per cent, SO2 by 80 per cent, and NOx by 42 per cent. They can also bring down freshwater use by the industry.”
The sector, however, has been far from forthcoming in accepting the norms. The industry tried to first obstruct and prevaricate on the 2015 standards. The deadline for meeting them was moved from 2017 to 2022 – but the sector continues to remain in its state of sloth.
The report has given 4 recommendations. They are:
1. The environment ministry should issue directions and impose hefty fines on the plants which clearly will not meet the 2022 deadline. High penalties/closure notices should be issued for non-compliant Delhi-NCR air-shed plants at least for the peak winter pollution months.
2. Take urgent decision regarding the older plants which cannot meet the already lax emission standards. These must be retired/refurbished to use alternative fuels or move towards using the plants for biomass gasification or ultra-modern municipal waste processing units. Finance minister Sitharaman, in her 2020 budget speech, had discussed the need to close these plants.
3. The deadline should be non-negotiable for plants which came up after the notification – the report says many of them are still not compliant.
4. Take urgent action on the implementation of water standards by issuing directions and improvement in the monitoring framework so that plants are held accountable.
Says Narain: “We know that this sector, which provides energy to the country’s industry and households, is difficult to shut down. Therefore, there is insufficient deterrence which is clearly derailing the implementation efforts – as a result of which power plants continue to flout all directions. We are suggesting that there should be changes in the merit order dispatch system so that it provides an effective tool to incentivise the cleaner plants and reward the best performers, while also dis-incentivising units that do not adhere to standards.”
Jose Kalathil is a senior journalist based in New Delhi Email: Kalathil.jose@gmail.com
Solidarity Message to Trade Union Protest Day on May 22, 2020
Press Release
We urge civil society organisations and peoples movements in India to express unconditional solidarity and support to the Central Trade Unions in India as they observe the nationwide protest on May 22, 2020 against the draconian changes in labour laws being brought about by various State Governments in India.
Down with Modi regime’s
move to attack Labour Laws!
Press Release
In Solidarity with the All India Protest organised by Central Trade Unions on 22nd May ’20 the New Socialist Alternative will be participating, demanding the immediate reversal of policy proposals by the Modi government attacking the laws and legislations concerning the welfare of the Working Class of India.
COVID-19 and the Need for the Immediate Nationalisation of the Indian Healthcare Sector
Co-Written by Asmita Verma, Surabhi Agarwal and Bobby Ramakant
Politics is the ultimate determinant of the health outcomes of a society. This crisis must be met with a strong political will to bring quality healthcare services to all those affected, irrespective of their social and economic location. The profit-motive has no role to
play in the achievement of this objective. The decades of caste-discrimination and lack of public civility that have characterised the development of India’s healthcare sector cannot be undone overnight, but the nationalisation of private healthcare facilities and resources and their deployment for the benefit of all Indians is the best way forward at this critical time. It could also be the beginning of a decisive reversal of the wrongs of the past.
The Deaths of Migrant Workers in India : Moral distancing in the time of social distancing
by Umang Kumar
How should ordinary citizens understand the nature of responsibility in the case of the recurring deaths of migrant workers that they are witnessing? So many have died on the road, absolutely needlessly, in the process of trying to escape death by hunger which the Indian Covid-19 lockdown was making a
reality. India has a very large number of (internal) migrant workers, especially from its more rural areas, who travel to more urban centers, looking for work. How does one even begin to view such instances, say, as a matter of ethics?
Two Christian Families Attacked In Chhattisgarh
by Shibu Thomas
On the night of the 20th of May 2020, a group of religious fanatics broke into the homes of 2 Christian families who live in a village in Chhattisgarh. The group wielded lathis (wooden clubs) and bows and arrows. At roughly 9pm, the families woke up to a nightmare. A total of 10 people including 5 children were brutally attacked and warned not to return to the village.
The Soul Shall Rise
by Sheikh Javiad Ayub
y. If human ‘I’ is satisfied it means a virtual end. Dissatisfaction is progress, movement is life; cease the
movement life automatically comes to a halt. Satisfaction strengthens status quo and blocks revolutions. It gives the oppression and the colonization a license to operate till eternity. It justifies the sufferings and miseries of the oppressed. It makes fate a stumbling block, an impediment in the road of revolution. Revolutions demand a revolutionary outlook, a critical thinking and an endeavor to carry it to the logical conclusion. The soul shall rise for such and endeavor.
How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus
by Jane Qiu
Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there.
Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there.
Scientificamerican.com Editor’s Note (4/24/20): This article was originally published online on March 11. It has been updated for inclusion in the June 2020 issue of Scientific American and to address rumors that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab in China.
The mysterious patient samples arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says.
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
While Shi’s team at the Wuhan institute, an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, raced to uncover the identity of the contagion—over the following week they connected the illness to the novel coronavirus that become known as SARS-CoV-2—the disease spread like wildfire. By April 20 more than 84,000 people in China had been infected. About 80 percent of them lived in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, and more than 4,600 had died. Outside of China, about 2.4 million people across 210 or so countries and territories had caught the virus, and more than 169,000 had perished from the disease it caused, COVID-19.
Scientists have long warned that the rate of emergence of new infectious diseases is accelerating—especially in developing countries where high densities of people and animals increasingly mingle and move about.
“It’s incredibly important to pinpoint the source of infection and the chain of cross-species transmission,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit research organization that collaborates with researchers, such as Shi, in 30 countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East to discover new viruses in wildlife.
An equally important task, he adds, is to hunt down other pathogens to “prevent similar incidents from happening again.”
To Shi, her first virus-discovery expedition felt like a vacation. On a breezy, sunny spring day in 2004, she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bat colonies in caves near Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Her inaugural cave was typical of the region: large, rich in limestone columns and—as a popular tourist destination—easily accessible. “It was spellbinding,” Shi recalls. Milky-white stalactites hung from the ceiling like icicles, glistening with moisture.
But the holidaylike atmosphere soon dissipated. Many bats—including several insect-eating species of horseshoe bats that are abundant in southern Asia—roost in deep, narrow caves on steep terrain. Often guided by tips from local villagers, Shi and her colleagues had to hike for hours to potential sites and inch through tight rock crevasses on their stomachs. And the flying mammals can be elusive. In one frustrating week, the team explored more than 30 caves and saw only a dozen bats.
These expeditions were part of the effort to catch the culprit in the SARS outbreak, the first major epidemic of the 21st century. A Hong Kong team had reported that wildlife traders in Guangdong first caught the SARS coronavirus from civets, mongoose-like mammals that are native to tropical and subtropical Asia and Africa.
Before SARS, the world had only an inkling of coronaviruses—so named because their spiky surface resembles a crown when seen under a microscope, says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School.
Coronaviruses were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” Wang says. It was the first emergence of a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential. The incident helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans. Shi was an early recruit of that effort, and both Daszak and Wang have been her long-term collaborators.
With the SARS virus, just how the civets got it remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Wang found that both diseases were caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts. Bats in the Guangdong market also contained traces of the SARS virus, but many scientists dismissed this as contamination. Wang, however, thought bats might be the source.
In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.
But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow.
“Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought maybe bats had nothing to do with SARS.” The scientists were about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed them a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.
There was no guarantee that the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies to the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. The diagnostic kit, therefore, offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.
Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down the list of locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in most of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave, on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons over five consecutive years.
The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish and cause SARS-like diseases in mice.
In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat-borne viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain that came from horseshoe bats with a genomic sequence nearly 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.
A DANGEROUS MIX
In many bat dwellings Shi has sampled, including Shitou Cave, “constant mixing of different viruses creates a great opportunity for dangerous new pathogens to emerge,” says Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the vicinity of such viral melting pots, Shi says, “you don’t need to be a wildlife trader to be infected.”
Near Shitou Cave, for example, many villages sprawl among the lush hillsides in a region known for its roses, oranges, walnuts and hawthorn berries. In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonialike symptoms. Only one had traveled outside of Yunnan prior to the sampling, and all said they had seen bats flying in their village.
Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonia-like diseases and two died.
After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses.
“The mine shaft stunk like hell,” says Shi, who, like her colleagues, went in wearing a protective mask and clothing. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.” Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would have been only a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.
With growing human populations increasingly encroaching on wildlife habitats, with unprecedented changes in land use, with wildlife and livestock transported across countries and their products around the world, and with sharp increases in both domestic and international travel, pandemics of new diseases are a mathematical near certainty.
This had been keeping Shi and many other researchers awake at night long before the mysterious samples landed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on that ominous evening last December.
More than a year ago Shi’s team published two comprehensive reviews about coronaviruses in Viruses and Nature Reviews Microbiology. Drawing evidence from her own studies—many of which were published in top academic journals—and from others, Shi and her co-authors warned of the risk of future outbreaks of bat-borne coronaviruses.
NIGHTMARE SCENARIO
On the train back to Wuhan on December 30 last year, Shi and her colleagues discussed ways to immediately start testing the patients’ samples. In the following weeks—the most intense and the most stressful time of her life—China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years.
Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction(PCR), which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the team found that samples from five of seven patients had genetic sequences present in all coronaviruses.
Shi instructed her group to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another facility to sequence the full viral genomes.
Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal.
Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
By January 7 the Wuhan team had determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered—a conclusion based on results from analyses using polymerase chain reaction, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish.
The genomic sequence of the virus, eventually named SARS-CoV-2, was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan. Their results appeared in a paper published online on February 3 in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.
Since then, researchers have published more than 4,500 genomic sequences of the virus, showing that samples around the world appear to “share a common ancestor,” Baric says. The data also point to a single introduction into humans followed by sustained human-to-human transmission, researchers say.
Given that the virus seems fairly stable initially and that many infected individuals appear to have mild symptoms, scientists suspect that the pathogen might have been around for weeks or even months before severe cases raised the alarm. “There might have been mini outbreaks, but the viruses either burned out or maintained low-level transmission before causing havoc,” Baric says. Most animal-borne viruses reemerge periodically, he adds, so “the Wuhan outbreak is by no means incidental.”
Do We Also Owe An Internal Apology? A Reflection on Racism, Gender and Stereotyping in Response to Web series ‘Paatal Lok’
by Rinzing Ongmu Sherpa
A particular scene in Paatal Lok, which is a series in Amazon Prime used a racist and a sexist remark on a Khasi woman calling her a “Nepali whore” (in Hindi). This was followed by uproar and petitions from Nepalies across India demanding to mute that particular line followed by an apology for the same. This recent incident further triggers on the already underlining questions on racism, gender and stereotyping.
Historic World Health Assembly ends with global commitment to COVID-19 response
by Countercurrents Collective
The Indian media projected as if a resolution blaming China and demanding an international probe on how it manipulated the origin, data, misinformation and handling of Covid-19 was adopted.
The news Release has none of it. The resolution, WHO said, co-sponsored by more than 130 countries, was adopted by consensus.
The above is the title of news release by WHO. The two-day meeting of the 73rd World Health Assembly (WHA) was held in Geneva on May 18-19, discussed Covid-19 and how the world is coping with that. Even as the media in India is engaged 24×7 on Covid-19, this historic session was given poor coverage, and many of those that covered gave highly distorted reports, with an anti-China bias. wion.com, for instance, led the misinformation: WHA meet came to an end …with considerable scrutiny of China …Distorting China’s announcement of help to the tune of $ 2 billion, especially meant for developing countries, it said: Many will see it as blood money given that the world sees China as the source of the crisis.Most of Indian TV channels are using wion.com as their source.
The WHA is the decision making body of the WHO, held annually in Geneva, Switzerland, is attended by WHO’s 194 member states to discuss health agendas set by the body’s Executive Board, set new goals and assign tasks to fulfill these goals. Due to Covid-19, the Assembly was held virtually this year, and has been fit into a two-day schedule from a three-week schedule.
“Let our shared humanity be the antidote to our shared threat.” – Dr Tedros, said the brief News release by WHO from Geneva 19 May 2020:
The resolution, co-sponsored by more than 130 countries, was adopted by consensus.
It calls for the intensification of efforts to control the pandemic, and for equitable access to and fair distribution of all essential health technologies and products to combat the virus. It also calls for an independent and comprehensive evaluation of the global response, including, but not limited to, WHO’s performance.
As WHO convened ministers of health from almost every country in the world, the consistent message throughout the two-day meeting—including from the 14 heads of state participating in the opening and closing sessions —was that global unity is the most powerful tool to combat the outbreak. The resolution is a concrete manifestation of this call, and a roadmap for controlling the outbreak.
In his closing remarks, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “COVID-19 has robbed us of people we love. It’s robbed us of lives and livelihoods; it’s shaken the foundations of our world; it threatens to tear at the fabric of international cooperation. But it’s also reminded us that for all our differences, we are one human race, and we are stronger together.”
The World Health Assembly will reconvene later in the year.
Attempts to isolate and damn China and WHO ended in failure
Thus all attempts by a group led by USA and President Trump, and including QUAD and Modi’s India, to isolate and damn China and WHO ended in failure.
The Indian media projected as if a resolution blaming China and demanding an international probe on how it manipulated the origin, data, misinformation and handling of Covid-19 was adopted. The news Release has none of it. The resolution, WHO said, co-sponsored by more than 130 countries, was adopted by consensus.
ThePrint.in, 18 May, 2020 reported: In a decisive shift in stance, India has joined 62 other countries in backing a draft resolution that seeks to probe the Covid-19 outbreak and its origin even as China continues to vehemently resist such a move.
While it is true that India joined hands, as part of QUAD, with EU and others who initiated the move, China’s role was otherwise, as can be seen below:
indiatoday.in May 20, 2020 reported:
The EU-draft resolution which was co-sponsored by EU member states and Australia finally saw the support of close to 140 member states, including China, before it was adopted on Tuesday at the 73rd World Health Assembly (WHA).
“China has co-sponsored the draft resolution backed by 120 countries. We hope the draft resolution can be adopted by consensus at the 73rd WHA and will be implemented accurately and comprehensively,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said during the daily briefing on May 19.
The agenda of the WHA’s first-ever virtual session was to discuss and adopt the resolution in finding a way to battle the global health pandemic that has claimed over 3,00,000 lives and infected 4.8 million people worldwide.
The resolution does not mention China, or its Lab as an alleged source. Instead,
The resolution has called on the WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to “continue to work closely with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and countries, as part of the One-Health Approach to identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population, including the possible role of intermediate hosts.”
Further, the resolution states, “Initiate, at the earliest appropriate moment, and in consultation with Member States, (1) a stepwise process of impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation, including using existing mechanisms, (2) as appropriate, to review experience gained and lessons learned from the WHO-coordinated international health response to COVID-19.”
Germany apparently demarcated itself : Chancellor Angela Merkel said “no country can solve this problem alone” and backed the WHO’s efforts to combat the outbreak. Merkel added that countries should “work to improve procedures” and the WHO should ensure its funding is sustainable.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said in a TV appearance that the China sent “hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed” it.
On May 18 night Trump posted on Twitter his letter to the WHO Chief that accused the WHO of being “curiously” insistent on praising China and for its “alleged transparency”.
On May 19, he threatened to permanently cut funding to the WHO. Trump put the WHO DG on a 30-day notice seeking action within that time period for USA to resume funding, suspended last month, WHO.
The resolution of May 19 made no mention of China, set no time frame, is not binding. Instead it called for nations to commit to ensuring “transparent, equitable and timely access” to any treatments or vaccines developed against Covid-19.
China announced a $2 billion donation to the UN
On May 18 Monday, China’s Chief Xi Jinping announced a $2 billion donation to the United Nations, which is over twice the amount the US contributed before Trump cut off funding. It also offered to set up hospitals and health infrastructure in Africa.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the WHA, Xi said China “supports” the idea of a comprehensive review of the global response towards Covid-19 after it was brought under control. The focus now should be to tackle the pandemic and save lives.
In his opening remarks Dr.Tedros promised to initiate an independent evaluation at the earliest so that recommendations can be made to improve national and global pandemic preparedness and response. At the same time, stressed that such an evaluation must encompass the entirety of the response by all actors. By implication he rejected the alleged complicity of China and WHO, as blamed by Trump:
Dr.Tedros remarked, “WHO is committed to transparency, accountability and continuous improvement. For us, change is a constant. In fact, the existing independent accountability mechanisms are already in operation, since the pandemic started. The Independent Oversight Advisory Committee has today published its first report on the pandemic, with several recommendations for both the Secretariat and Member States.” He added, “In that spirit, we welcome the proposed resolution before this Assembly, which calls for a step-wise process of impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation. To be truly comprehensive, such an evaluation must encompass the entirety of the response by all actors, in good faith.”
Interestingly, while China endorsed the resolution, the US did not object to its adoption, but expressed certain reservations, in a written explanation of its position:
While the US applauded the call for an “impartial, independent, and comprehensive review of the WHO’s response”, it disassociated itself from the language in some areas of the resolution related to “access to abortion” and language in the “World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) and the Doha Declaration of 2001”
“We do not accept references to “sexual and reproductive health,” or other languages that suggests or explicitly states that access to abortion is included in the provision of population and individual level health services,” the written statement said.
The WHA also elected ten new member states in the executive board of the WHO. India was one of the ten nations to join the executive board of the World Health Organisation for a period of three years.
The other new members include South Korea, Russia and UK.
The WHO Executive Board comprising 34 individuals holds two meetings annually — the first one in January and a shorter meeting in May — immediately after the World Health Assembly.
At the 147th session of the executive board on May 22, the election of the chair, vice-chairs, and rapporteurs will take place. India will take over as chairperson. Currently, Dr. Hiroki Nakatani of Japan is the Chairman of the WHO Executive Board.
There were rumors in social media that China knew medicines for Covid-19, but did not share it to the world. This was refuted by Xi Jinping at the meet. See this report by a Latin American news agency:
‘China responsibly fights against Covid-19,’ assures Xi Jinping
Beijing, May 18 (Prensa Latina) President Xi Jinping assured this Monday on the 73rd World Health Assembly that China has been responsibly fighting against the Covid-19 disease with transparency since Wuhan’s outbreak, detailing proposals to overcome the current pandemic.
On the inauguration of the virtual meeting, the president indicated that in a timely and open manner, his country provided the World Health Organization (WHO) and other nations with the information collected on the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the cause of pneumonia.
‘We share with the world the accumulated experience of control and treatment, without reservation. We have done everything possible to support and assist the most needy States’, affirmed Xi, unfolding China’s efforts to contain the disease.
In that sense, the leader promised that China will make available to all countries if any of its vaccines, currently under clinical trial, prove to be effective against Covid-19.
The president also mentioned Beijing’s plans to work with the G-20 on debt suspension initiatives to very poor countries and the willingness to be one of the global providers of health materials with rapid transportation and customs’ permits.
Xi Jinping announced that by 2022 China will allocate 2 billion dollars to support the socioeconomic development of pandemic-affected States and establish a mechanism for Chinese hospitals to collaborate with 30 healthcare centers in Africa to strengthen the response to communicable diseases.
He advocated that WHO always lead the global fight against Covid-19 and strengthen governance in public healthcare.
Another report from Zurich, in ThePrint.in said:
China pledged to make its coronavirus vaccine a global public good once one is available, with President Xi Jinping seeking to defuse criticism…Xi’s comments come amid growing concern that countries will put national interests first in the quest for a protective shot, seen as the key to getting economies moving again.
“Covid-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, will be made a global public good, which will be China’s contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries,” Xi said in his speech to the WHA.
Among the dozens of vaccine projects under way worldwide, China has five candidates already in human trials. More will enter such tests next month.
China acted with transparency and responsibility all along, and provided information to the WHO and countries in the most timely fashion,said Xi. China will provide $2 billion over two years to support the fight against the pandemic, especially in developing countries, he said.
The European Union’s own proposal to the assembly struck a similar tone, highlighting the need for all countries to have “unhindered timely access” to shots, medicines, diagnostics and any other technologies needed to fight the pandemic.
The WHO said this month that it’s considering a new mission to China to seek the source of the virus. International experts were part of a previous delegation to the country in February, at the height of China’s outbreak.
“We need to pursue international cooperation on testing methods, clinical treatment, and vaccine and medicine research and development,” Xi said. “We need to continue supporting global research by scientists on the source and transmission of virus.”
The WHO has also faced criticism from the Trump administration that it was too deferential to China over its handling of the crisis. The EU’s draft resolution, backed by countries including Brazil, Japan and Canada, suggested evaluating the WHO’s response to the pandemic “at the earliest appropriate moment.”
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he welcomed calls for an impartial independent and comphrehensive evaluation.
“It must encompass the entirety of the response by all actors in good faith,” he said in a speech. “So I will initiate an independent evaluation at the earliest appropriate moment to review the experience gained and lessons learned and to make recommendations to improve national and global pandemic preparedness and response.”
India to chair the executive board
The WHA also elected ten new member states in the executive board of the WHO. India was one of the ten nations to join the executive board of the WHO for a period of three years.
The other new members include Botswana, Colombia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Oman, Republic of Korea, Russia, and the UK.
The WHO Executive Board comprising 34 individuals holds two meetings annually — the first one in January and a shorter meeting in May — immediately after the World Health Assembly.
At the 147th session of the executive board on May 22, the election of the chair, vice-chairs, and rapporteurs will take place. India’s Dr Harsh Vardhan will take over as chairperson. Currently, Dr. Hiroki Nakatani of Japan is the Chairman of the WHO Executive Board.
US lobby tried to push Taiwan into the WHA, and India was sought to be roped in.But Taiwan did not make it as an observer to the World Health Assembly.
All Board members are highly qualified individuals in the field of health. The election of the member states is for three years and the Board meets at least twice a year. It is responsible for finalising the decisions and policies of the Health Assembly.
The post is held by rotation for one year among regional groups. Each member of the board is designated by a member state elected to do so by the World Health Assembly.
The Wuhan Hoax: Covid-19 and Trump’s War on the U.S. Intelligence Community
by Bob Dreyfuss
Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to
notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.
There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.
This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.
Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.
Iraq Redux?
Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated to fabricating intelligence on Iraq.
Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.
In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.
To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.
To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.
Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.
It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.
The Wuhan Lab Lies
As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.
On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared in London’s Daily Mail the previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.
A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus. Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index.)
Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, while he began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”
Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”
On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.
A Finger on the Scale
The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, and bioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.
Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.
There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.
Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.
Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.
John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”
Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.
Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.
By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.
Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published in TomDispatch
Copyright 2020 Bob Dreyfuss
Encounter In Srinagar’s Nawakadal And The Blasting Of Houses
by Hamaad Habibullah
As the recent encounter at Nawakadal in old city of Srinagar came to an end, more than fifteen houses were damaged by the action of Indian Security Forces while killing two armed rebels. As soon as the encounter started, the internet and mobile services were snapped in the city (the internet services are still suspended in the Srinagar city), removing any chance of information leaving the encounter site. According to the local newspaper, several loud blasts were heard during the 14 hour long encounter. During this time houses were blasted at a regular interval. Less help was taken of other tactics to fight the rebels.
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