Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Petition Calls For Investigation Into Twitter Censorship After Hiring Of Li Fei-Fei

By Keoni Everington, of the Taiwan News
A White House petition was created last week after news broke that the Twitter accounts of Chinese dissidents started to disappear after a controversial Chinese-American artificial intelligence (AI) expert was hired to serve on the company's board.
On May 11, Twitter announced in a press release that it was hiring Li Fei-Fei (李飛飛), an AI expert and former vice president of Google, to its board of directors as a "new independent director" with immediate effect. Li quit Google in 2018 after a trail of leaked internal emails revealed that she appeared to be more concerned about the public relations damage to Google's image if news broke about the company's work on Project Maven than the ethical issues raised by over 3,000 Google employees.
Project Maven is a U.S. Department of Defense AI project that seeks to use the technology to help military drones select targets from video footage.
During her tenure at Google, there is no public record of Li objecting to the controversial Project Dragonfly, which was meant to be a search engine that would suit China's censorship rules, as she opened an AI research facility in Beijing.
When she took the helm of Google's new AI center in Beijing, Li was quoted in Chinese media as using the CCP slogan "stay true to our founding mission" and said that "China has awakened." In addition, Li allegedly has ties to a student association that is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) United Front, according to Radio Free Asia.
A week after Li joined Twitter, a Chinese writer who goes by the handle Caijinglengyan (財經冷眼), discovered that four of his accounts were simultaneously deleted on May 18. He did not receive an explanation until May 23, when he was told his accounts had been taken down for violating Twitter's rules against posting identical content on duplicate accounts.
财经冷眼2.0@caijinglengyan
我是财经冷眼，可能因做了深挖李飞飞红色背景的节目，导致财经冷眼、冷山时评、自由风等4个推号同时封杀！新官上任，果然越来越红了！
希望大家帮忙转发，找回失去的网友！同时我也在申诉，并联系媒体报道！不排除法律起诉的选项！ 今天封我，后面可能会封任何批评中共的平台！希望推特作恶不要太离谱
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He countered that he had only posted content on one of the accounts and used the other to retweet the original post. He pointed out that Twitter does not have a policy precluding a person from having more than one account.
The writer stated that he believes the real reason for his account cancellations was that, on May 17, he tweeted that Twitter's new board member has a "red background." In the post, he alleged that she is a member of a student association affiliated with the CCP's United Front and has close ties with "Second Generation" and "Third-Generation Reds."
Caijinglengyan claimed that many other Twitter accounts used by Chinese dissidents were suddenly suspended without notice. After he contacted them, he found that they had also criticized Li or started commenting about Li just before their accounts were banned.
The writer listed @beacon__news (灯塔爆料社) and @kevinheaven9 (Calvin看美国) as other Twitter users who found their Twitter accounts suddenly shut down. He claimed that one Twitter user simply wrote "Li Fei-Fei is coming, I have to run," and soon found that both his primary account and secondary account had been suspended.
French-based Chinese dissident Wang Longmeng (王龍蒙) wrote that Twitter's ban on those who criticized Li and exposed her background "was undoubtedly related to Li Feifei's appointment as a director, because criticism and negative information were banned, which is Beijing characteristic," reported Liberty Times. He believes that Twitter was quickly "dyed red" after Li took charge.
On May 20, a petition was created on the White House website titled "Call for a thorough investigation on Twitter's violation of freedom of speech." The creator of the petition wrote that Twitter is suppressing criticism of the CCP and suspending dissident accounts while pro-Beijing accounts remain unscathed.
The petition listed May 18 as a date when many "anti-CCP" Twitter users found their accounts permanently suspended. The author of the document pointed out Li's involvement with Project Maven and alleged that she was engaged in extensive military-technical programs while running Google's AI center in Beijing.

The document then alleged that Li continues to have "close ties with top leaders of the CCP." The petition closed by calling on the U.S. government to investigate "Twitter's violation of freedom of speech, and on Dr. FeiFei Li's collaborations with the CCP, a threat to national security."
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Trump ban on fetal tissue research blocks coronavirus treatment effort

From Wapo March, 2020:
A senior scientist at a government biomedical research laboratory has been thwarted in his efforts to conduct experiments on possible treatments for the new coronavirus because of the Trump administration’s restrictions on research with human fetal tissue.
The scientist, Kim Hasenkrug, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, has been appealing for nearly a month to top NIH officials, arguing that the pandemic warrants an exemption to a ban imposed last year prohibiting government researchers from using tissue from abortions in their work.
According to several researchers familiar with the situation, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive internal dispute, such experiments could be particularly fruitful. Just months ago, before the new coronavirus began to infect people around the world, other U.S. scientists made two highly relevant discoveries. They found that specialized mice could be transplanted with human fetal tissue that develops into lungs — the part of the body the new coronavirus invades. These “humanized mice,” they also found, could then be infected with coronaviruses — to which ordinary mice are not susceptible — closely related to the one that causes the new disease, covid-19.
Outside researchers said the scientists who created those mice have offered to give them to the Rocky Mountain Lab, which has access to the new virus that causes covid-19, so the mice could be infected with the source of the pandemic and experiments could be run on potential treatments. Candidates include an existing drug known to boost patients’ immune systems in other circumstances, as well as blood serum from patients recovering from covid-19.
“Kim Hasenkrug is one of the world experts in immune responses to persistent viral infection, including HIV and a whole bunch of other viruses,” said Irving Weissman, a leading stem cell researcher at Stanford University. In addition, the Montana NIH site has a biosafety lab equipped with high-level protections for experiments with dangerous microbes.
“It isn’t clear if this added layer of urgent investigations will find more effective” treatments for people infected in the pandemic than other approaches being tried, Weissman said, “but it’s stupid not to try.”
No therapies or vaccines for the new coronavirus exist yet.
The inability of the Montana lab, part of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to pursue these experiments on the coronavirus is the latest example of disruptions to scientists’ work caused by the administration’s restrictions on research involving fetal tissue.
“When I hear the vice president saying [they’re] doing everything they can to find vaccines [and treatments], I know that is not true,” said one scientist familiar with the situation, referring to Vice President Pence’s daily news briefings of the White House’s coronavirus task force. “Anything we do at this point could save hundreds of thousands of lives. If you wait, it’s too late.”
Caitlin Oakley, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes NIH, said, “no decision has been made” about Rocky Mountain’s request. She added that the administration’s “bold, decisive actions” to respond to the pandemic include “kick-starting the development of vaccines and therapeutics through every possible avenue.”
Hasenkrug has been forbidden by federal officials to talk publicly since the administration began to reconsider fetal tissue funding rules in the fall of 2018 at the prodding of social conservatives who oppose abortion and are part of President Trump’s political base.
The fetal tissue is donated by women undergoing elective abortions, and critics say that it is unethical to use the material and that taxpayer money should not be used for research that relies on abortion.
“Promoting the dignity of human life from conception to natural death is one of the very top priorities of President Trump’s administration,” HHS said in announcing its revised policy late last spring.
Under the policy Trump announced then, university researchers or other outside scientists face new restrictions on federal funding of such work. If an NIH grant proposal is approved through the normal scientific review process, it must then be evaluated by a new ethics advisory board that was announced months ago but does not yet exist. This winter, NIH officials officially invited nominations to the panel for the current year, but its members have not yet been determined, and no date has been set for it to convene.
The restrictions for government researchers such as Hasenkrug — known as NIH’s intramural scientists — are more severe. Those scientists have been banned from pursuing studies that involve fetal tissue. Hasenkrug was at the time of the ban collaborating on humanized mouse research aimed at a possible cure for HIV.
According to the scientists familiar with the events, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last month offered to send to Rocky Mountain nearly three dozen mice implanted with the human lung tissue that he and colleagues had recently shown could be infected with coronaviruses. There are enough of them for experiments with three or four potential treatments, the scientists said.
The offer came six months after the UNC scientists published their findings in the journal Nature Biotechnology about having succeeded in implanting human fetal lung tissue into mice with their own immune systems removed. The mice then grew human lung structures and were able to be infected with coronaviruses and other viruses to which mice ordinarily are not susceptible.
A senior UNC scientist, who has been cautioned by the university not to speak publicly about the research, according to other scientists familiar with the situation, did not respond to requests for comment.
On Feb. 19, two people said, Hasenkrug wrote to a senior NIH official, asking for permission to use those mice and run experiments related to covid-19. He eventually was told that his request had been passed on to senior HHS officials.
Since then, he has written repeatedly to NIH, laying out in greater detail the experiments he wants to undertake and why several alternatives to the fetal tissue-implanted mice would not be as useful. In one appeal to NIH, Hasenkrug wrote that the mice he was offered are more than a year old and have a relatively short time remaining to live, so they should be used quickly, according to Kerry Lavender, a Canadian researcher familiar with the correspondence.
Hasenkrug has not received an answer as to whether the administration will allow him to proceed, scientists familiar with his request said.
A person familiar with where things stand, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the internal dynamic, said the requests had been forwarded about two weeks ago to the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and that HHS and NIH were waiting for a decision there.
Late last week, Lavender, a former postdoctoral trainee at Rocky Mountain who helped develop a technique to implant mice with fetal tissue, heard from Hasenkrug, her mentor, asking whether she might undertake the coronavirus research that he was not allowed to do.
Lavender, an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan, said in an interview that she moved back to her native Canada less than two years ago because she wanted to continue pursuing fetal tissue studies and could see that the Trump administration was hostile to such research.
She said she is scrambling to try to carry out the experiments but is uncertain whether “we can pull it off. . . . I’m a new investigator with only so much funding,” she said, adding that she does not have immediate access to the kind of biohazard containment facility needed to do the work safely.
“If we were able to do this within the NIH, we would be able to do this much more quickly,” Lavender said. “Because the NIH budget all comes through the government, they can easily collaborate and fund what they are doing. . . . It’s much harder when we’re all separate entities to try to arrange the funding.”
According to one of the scientists, an experiment would take perhaps a week or 10 days to show whether a potential treatment was effective in the mice. Any promising therapy would then require testing in humans and approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Stanford’s Weissman said one potential therapy that should be tried is a drug, already FDA-approved, that he developed initially for cancers that he and Hasenkrug more recently have found to be effective in boosting immune response in mice. People with weakened immune systems are particularly vulnerable to severe illness or death from covid-19.
“Will it work? We don’t know that,” Weissman said. But, he said, “this is a way to bring more minds and more hands” to the search for a treatment for the new pandemic.
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Much-hyped Moderna mRNA-1273 Covid-19 Vaccine Uses Aborted Fetal Cells -- Sanofi Pasteur's Version Does Not

CLEARWATER, Fla. -- In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, pharmaceutical companies are racing to provide a vaccine to prevent further spread of the disease. Unfortunately, Moderna, the company that has been recently touted in news headlines for its developing mRNA-1273 vaccine to fight the virus, uses aborted fetal cells.
Debi Vinnedge, Executive Director of Children of God for Life, a prolife organization whose mission is to end the use of aborted fetal material in vaccines and medicines, said her suspicions were raised after checking Moderna's patents and in particular, the use of the Spike (S) protein.
The idea behind using this Spike protein in a vaccine with messenger RNA (mRNA) is to teach the patient's immune system to produce its own protein antibodies to block and destroy the virus so the person will not become infected. Unfortunately, Vinnedge said her heart sank when she discovered that Spike protein was produced using HEK 293 aborted fetal cells.
"It was detailed in several science publications," she said. "And in light of the public fear and panic, I did not want to be the bearer of bad news." Vinnedge said the heavy burden of revealing that knowledge made her dig further into others' research. That's when she found another well- known pharmaceutical company had a better solution.
Enter, Sanofi Pasteur which is using its own recombinant DNA platform to produce a Covid-19 vaccine. According to the Department of HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) reports, Sanofi is using the DNA of the baculovirus expression platform, which is also used in their licensed Flublok Quadrivalent vaccine.
As in most seasonal flu vaccines, the need to produce large quantities of vaccine quickly has been a problem for many years as pharmaceutical companies used chicken eggs to cultivate their viruses. It takes several months and millions of eggs needed to produce the vaccines and so many companies began to turn to other cell lines for faster production.
One such company was Protein Sciences whose recombinant DNA platform is based on insect cells. Their Sf9 cell line comes from the fall armyworm and is highly susceptible to infection. It has been used for several years in producing influenza vaccines. In 2017, Sanofi Pasteur bought Protein Sciences and is using this same platform for their newly developing Covid-19 vaccine which will allow them the flexibility to make millions of doses of vaccine quickly.
"This is great news for millions of people world-wide who are concerned with the use of aborted fetal material in life-saving treatments or vaccines," stated Ms. Vinnedge. "There is a multitude of moral options that are safer and quite frankly, utilize a more modern technology."
Vinnedge said she was particularly annoyed to see a recent article in the Washington Post trying to assert that President Trump's ban on the use of aborted fetal tissue was blocking important research and treatments for Covid-19 virus.
"That accusation is laughable at best and nothing more than a political maneuver," stated Vinnedge. "In fact, we have morally produced treatments for patients who are already infected, notably Hydroxychloroquine or Plaquenil. And there are more promising treatments on the way to prevent infection entirely. President Trump has done a great job of promoting morally responsible research ensuring that all Americans can have the protection they need."
"It is deplorable that anyone would want to exploit the remains of aborted babies for financial profit especially when so many people will refuse to use those products because of their deeply held religious, moral and pro-life convictions?" she added. "We applaud the efforts of companies such as Sanofi Pasteur who are providing morally acceptable options!"
https://www.fda.gov/media/123144/download (Sanofi Flublok Quadrivalent pack insert)
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French Intelligence Warned Of 'Catastrophic Leak' From Wuhan Lab

From Zero Hedge: 

Eleven years before the joint construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, French intelligence services warned Paris that China's reputation for poor bio-security could lead to a 'catastrophic leak,' according to the Daily Mail.
In 2004, the EU's chief brexit negotiator, Michael Barnier, ignored those warnings - signing off on the lab's construction when he was the French foreign minister.
According to the report, French intel also warned that Paris could lose control of the facility, and that Beijing could even use it to make biowarfare weapons. And in 2015, as the laboratory prepared to open, those concerns were realized after the French architects of the project said the CCP had shut them out. In fact, 50 French scientists were supposed to help the Chinese run the laboratory properly, but never ended up going.
The Mail discovered Barnier's involvement in the Wuhan Institute of Virology during an in-depth investigation into French connections to the lab - where many believe the coronavirus escaped from, as the WIV housed a group of scientists who received international condemnation for creating chimeric strains that could infect humans. Under the 'escaped' scenario, an infected WIV employee unknowingly brought it into the Wuhan wet market, exposing what would become roughly half of the first known cluster of cases.
Biologists who carried out a landmark study say they were ‘surprised’ to find the virus was ‘already pre-adapted to human transmission’.
Jacques Chirac, the French president at the time of the deal, pushed for the Wuhan institute to be set up after the 2003 SARS outbreak, which affected 26 countries and resulted in more than 8,000 cases and 774 deaths. Mr Chirac, along with his pro-Beijing prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, promised French funding and expertise in return for a share of the intellectual copyright on the lab’s discoveries. -Daily Mail
France's Chirac government saw the deal to construct the WIV as a way to strengthen trade with China, despite warnings from its own intelligence, the French equivalent to MI6, which repeatedly raised concerns over lack of international control and 'transparency' issues.
"What you have to understand is that a P4 [high-level bio-security] laboratory is like a nuclear reprocessing plant. It’s a bacteriological atomic bomb," said one source, adding: "The viruses that are tested are extremely dangerous – diving suits, decontamination airlocks etc must be followed to the letter."
Alain Merieux, the French billionaire who was instrumental in setting up the Wuhan laboratory in partnership with his Institut Merieux in Lyons, abandoned the project in 2015, saying: ‘I am giving up the co-chairmanship of [the] P4 [laboratory], a Chinese tool. It belongs to them, even if it was developed with technical assistance from France.’
According to Le Figaro, a diplomat with a close knowledge of the deal added: ‘We knew the risks involved and thought that the Chinese would control everything and quickly eject us from the project.
‘We believed that providing this cutting-edge technology to a country with an endless power agenda would risk exposing France in return.’ -Daily Mail
And in 2015, concerns were validated after China implemented their new policy of 'dual use' technologies, which allows for the military use of civilian technology.
"The aim was to develop vaccines following the SARS crisis between 2002 and 2004," said the Mail's source. "There was much co-operation on a range of issues between France and China at the time, and Michel Barnier was implementing government policy."
"The issue of bio-security was certainly a cause for concern within agencies including the DGSE," the source added.
Meanwhile, the WIV's Shi Zhengli - known as "bat woman" for her controversial experiments creating bat coronaviruses that can infect humans - and who swore 'on her life' that the COVID-19 isn't from her lab, said in a recent interview on Chinese state television that viruses being discovered now are "just the tip of the iceberg."
"If we want to prevent human beings from suffering from the next infectious disease outbreak, we must go in advance to learn of these unknown viruses carried by wild animals in nature and give early warnings," Shi told CGTN, adding "If we don’t study them there will possibly be another outbreak."
Will be, or won't be another outbreak?
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Leading coronavirus vaccine development uses cells of aborted babies

From Preciouslife.com

As the lockdown continues across the world, pharmaceutical companies are accelerating their efforts to provide a vaccine to prevent the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, Moderna, the company which has gained prominence in news headlines for developing Mrna-1273 vaccine to fight the disease, uses cells of aborted babies.
Although alternatives exist which could be considered morally acceptable, they are not getting as much coverage as Moderna's vaccine work.
Suspicions about the vaccine were raised after checking Moderna’s patents and in particular, the use of the Spike (S) protein.
The idea behind using this Spike protein in a vaccine with messenger RNA (mRNA) is to teach the patient’s immune system to produce its own protein antibodies to block and destroy the virus so the person will not become infected. However, as detailed in several science publications, Spike protein is produced using HEK 293 aborted fetal cells.
Bernadette Smyth of Precious Life slammed the use of aborted babies in the production of a coronavirus vaccine. She stated: “It is horrifying that companies would seek to exploit the remains of aborted babies for financial gain, especially when so many people are totally opposed to such a vaccine because of their moral, ethical and pro-life convictions. We must seek morally sound and ethical solutions, as opposed to this grave violation of human dignity which capitalises off of the death and destruction of aborted babies.”
Since the 1960s, several commonly used vaccines have been researched and manufactured using aborted tissue or cell lines originating from aborted babies. The common vaccines using aborted cell lines today include chickenpox, shingles, hepatitis A, and Rubella (MMR).
The use of such vaccines is a deeply troubling moral and ethical violation for people across the world who understand abortion for what it is; the deliberate killing of living human children in the womb. With the panic and fear created by the Coronavirus Pandemic, it can be expected that pressure will mount (social, and perhaps, governmental) for as many people as possible to be vaccinated for Coronavirus.
There have been increasingly frequent claims from scientists and some in the government that life won’t return to normal until a vaccine is available.
Professor Neil Ferguson - of Imperial College London, which is advising the government on its coronavirus response, warned that a vaccine would be necessary.
"We will have to maintain some form of social distancing, a significant level of social distancing, probably indefinitely until we have a vaccine available," he told BBC Radio 4.
As calls for a vaccine, which could be mandatory for some, increase, many who are opposed for ethical, moral or religious reasons are speaking out.
Yesterday (Sunday 19th April), Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic has said that his opposition to vaccines may prevent him from returning to tennis after the coronavirus pandemic.
There have been calls for all tennis players to be vaccinated when the season eventually resumes, but such a plan would leave World No. 1 Djokovic facing a dilemma.
“Personally I am opposed to vaccination and I wouldn’t want to be forced by someone to take a vaccine in order to be able to travel,” Djokovic said in a live Facebook chat with several fellow Serbian athletes on Sunday
“But if it becomes compulsory, what will happen? I will have to make a decision,” he added.
There are also many who would like to have the protection of a coronavirus vaccine for themselves or loved ones, but will be unable to participate if any part of the research or manufacture of the vaccine has been done with aborted tissue or cell lines originating from abortions.
Other well-known pharmaceutical companies could offer this, however, these solutions are getting notably less press. For instance, Sanofi Pasteur is using its own recombinant DNA platform to manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine. Another company offering an alternative to fetal cell lines was Protein Sciences whose recombinant DNA platform uses insect cells. Their Sf9 cell line comes from the fall armyworm and has been used effectively for several years in producing influenza vaccines.
In 2017, Sanofi Pasteur bought Protein Sciences and is using this same platform for their newly developing Covid-19 vaccine which will allow them the flexibility to make millions of doses of vaccine quickly.
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