Monday, December 13, 2021

Biden White House Censors Taiwan at Democracy Summit

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, December 13, 2021

 

Remember when so many of our leaders thought greater interaction with China was going to make them more like us? And yet the reverse seems to have occurred. Just take for example the NBA banning pro-Tibet, pro-Hong Kong, and pro-Uyghur banners in its arenas. Instead of American values taking root in China, the values of the Chinese Communist Party started taking root in the United States.

 

Well, now the White House is cutting video feeds at a “Democracy Summit,” lest the Taiwanese representative’s map irk the Chinese:

 

A video feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy last week after a map in her slide presentation showed Taiwan in a different color to China, which claims the island as its own.

 

Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Friday’s slide show by Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang caused consternation among U.S. officials after the map appeared in her video feed for about a minute.

 

The sources, who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the video feed showing Tang was cut during a panel discussion and replaced with audio only — at the behest of the White House.

 

Our leaders are such damnable wimps. We say we want to stand up for democracy and that we won’t get bullied by authoritarians. And then we bend over backwards to avoid offending the far-reaching and ever-changing sensitivities of the brutes in Beijing. There’s no need for China to censor what our leaders can say to us. Our leaders are now preemptively censoring themselves.

 

If you’re afraid of the Taiwanese representative showing a map that indicates Taiwan is a separate country at your much-touted “Democracy Summit,” why did you invite her? And if you’re afraid to have a Taiwanese representative speaking her mind in a way that might irk the Chinese government — keeping in mind that Taiwanese representatives irk the Chinese government by existing — why are you hosting a much-touted “Democracy Summit”?

 

Oh Look, Another Lab Leak!

 

One of the dumbest arguments against the lab-leak theory in early 2020 was the argument that the scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were just too careful and professional to ever have a lab leak. To this day, WIV deputy director Yuan Zhiming contends that his institution’s biosafety-level-4 labs has never seen any laboratory leaks or human infections since it began operating in 2018.

 

There is a long, long list of accidental leaks and releases of pathogens from labs. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists summarized in 2014 that, “SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing.”

 

Speaking of Taiwan, the Taiwanese just announced an accidental SARS-CoV-2 infection in a research lab either from mice bites or contamination in areas where technicians remove their personal protective equipment:

 

Taiwan’s latest local COVID-19 case had likely contracted the virus at work at an Academia Sinica laboratory, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday.

 

The woman, who is in her 20s, worked as a research assistant at the Genomics Research Center in Taipei’s Nangang District until Friday last week, where tests on mice using the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 are conducted, the center said.

 

The genome of virus samples taken from her and the genome of the virus tested at the lab were found to correspond, it said.

 

Her genome sequencing results showed that she was infected with the virus used for testing at the lab, Chen said.

 

Her virus’ genome differed from that of Delta cases reported between June and September, he added.

 

“We can determine that the case’s source of infection is the laboratory, not the local community,” Chen said.

 

Academia Sinica Department of Academic Affairs and Instrument Service Director-General Chen Chien-Chang said the woman in October reported to her supervisor that she had been bitten by a lab mouse.

 

However, the incident was not reported to the institution’s dedicated department as required by its standard operating procedure of disaster response, he said.

 

Last month, the woman was again bitten by a lab mouse infected with the Alpha variant, he said.

 

The fact that this poor woman was bitten twice by lab mice raises the question of how often lab technicians get bitten by mice being used in experiments and how often those bites spread pathogens. The article continues:

 

Chen Shih-chung said that it is unlikely that she contracted the virus from mouse bites, but added that she might have contracted the virus in a contaminated laboratory environment, for example the area where workers remove personal protective equipment.

 

He said environmental surface testing was yesterday performed in the building that houses the lab, and preliminary results showed that COVID-19 was detected in a few spots in the laboratory, including on doorknobs and desktops, but the virus was not detected anywhere outside the lab.

 

And lest you think American laboratories don’t have accidents worth our attention, this past summer, a Los Alamos National Laboratory plutonium facility accidentally spilled 200 gallons of contaminated, “mildly radioactive” water. Thankfully, the subsequent safety report concluded that, “There was no risk to employees, public health and safety, or the environment. The majority of cleanup is complete, and the laboratory is conducting a fact-finding mission to determine the cause of the incident and will develop appropriate corrective actions.”

 

The answer to this is not to never conduct scientific research, although I think you have to look far and wide to find someone who wants to shut down all biological-research labs, national energy labs, etcetera. Virologist Michael Worobey complains that, “Loud voices with little sense of proportion but a high degree of certainty that a lab error led to the pandemic are being given undeserved credibility. Their predictable calls to burn the virology house down risk hobbling our ability to fight future pandemics.”

 

When those anti-science luddites in the, er, Obama administration placed a nationwide halt on gain-of-function research from 2014 to 2017, was that “burning the virology house down”? Or is it that different researchers have different thresholds of acceptable risk, and those who are willing to accept a higher level of risk prefer to paint their critics as anti-science?

 

I suspect that Worobey and his colleagues probably run a tight ship in their labs. But that doesn’t mean I have the same faith in the 59 biosafety-level-4 labs all around the world.

 

Last month, The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy article contending that whether or not the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from a leak at the Wuhan labs, nothing has changed to reduce the risk of another leak from some other lab:

 

When I asked Rocco Casagrande, the study’s lead author and a former United Nations weapons inspector, what we don’t know about the global risks of high-containment labs, he ticked off a long list. “Well, it’s still almost everything,” he said. “We don’t know how often incidents happen, or how often those incidents lead to exposures. We don’t know what factors are driving those exposures and incidents. We don’t know what features, like training or extra containment equipment or engineering controls, are effective at mitigating those incidents. So we have no idea if we’re spending way too much on biosafety or way too little or just the right amount. And if we should spend more, what should we spend it on?”

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