This caught my eye:
China has delayed at the last minute the release of eagerly anticipated third quarter economic data, including its closely watched gross domestic product growth rate, which were due to be issued in the middle of the 20th communist party conference.
No explanation for the postponement was given in an update to an official statistics calendar and no new dates were provided. . . .
The latest figures were originally set to be published on Tuesday at a politically sensitive time, with China’s president Xi Jinping expected to use the party congress to extend his powers for a third term and outline the country’s overarching policy approach.
The economic data were expected to highlight China’s continued economic weaknesses, including a worsening property crisis and the impact of strict zero-Covid policies that this year locked down dozens of big cities, stifled consumption and effectively closed the country off from the rest of the world.
Cover-up?
Here’s another story:
Research at Boston University that involved testing a lab-made hybrid version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is garnering heated headlines alleging the scientists involved could have unleashed a new pathogen.
There is no evidence the work, performed under biosecurity level 3 precautions in BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, was conducted improperly or unsafely. In fact, it was approved by an internal biosafety review committee and Boston’s Public Health Commission, the university said Monday night.
But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.
I find the media response to both stories to be quite revealing. For years, the media has been telling us that China fakes its GDP figures to make the government look good. In that case, why weren’t these figures also faked? Why withhold the data? It makes no sense to me . . . unless . . . perhaps China’s National Statistics Bureau doesn’t fake the data. That would explain why the data was withheld at a sensitive time.
The BU gain of function story is also confusing. For several years, we’ve been bombarded with stories that the Chinese were doing risky gain-of-function research on the Covid virus. After all of this negative publicity, we find that the US is doing the same sort of research? And yet it doesn’t seem to be a major story. Why?
Am I drawing a moral equivalence between the US and China? No, we don’t have the sort of wild animal markets that the Chinese have. And these animal markets have produced two epidemics since 2002. That is how we differ from China.