A former Florida lawmaker pleaded guilty Tuesday to wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements in connection with Covid-19 relief fraud, according to a news release from the Department of Justice.
Former Republican state Rep. Joseph Harding acquired more than $150,000 in Small Business Administration loans by lying on loan applications, the department said.
Harding is scheduled to be sentenced on July 25, the release said.
A wire fraud conviction carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, while money laundering and making false statements carry a maximum of 10 and five years, respectively.
Peg O’Connor, an attorney for Harding, said in a statement that her client “made the best decision available to him under the circumstances to protect his family and his future.”
She added that she looks forward to providing a “fuller picture” and “insight into who Mr. Harding is as a person” at sentencing.
Prosecutors previously said Harding listed dormant business entities on his applications, fabricated the numbers of people he employed and submitted fake bank statements.
Harding was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2020 and announced his resignation after he was charged in December.
In a statement to The New York Times last year, he said he had pleaded not guilty during an initial court appearance. “I want the public and my constituents to know that I fully repaid the loan and cooperated with investigators as requested,” Harding told the newspaper at the time.
The Florida Republican has drawn the national spotlight before, as a sponsor of the controversial legislation that banned certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom that opponents dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The legislation officially named the “Parental Rights in Education” law, signed by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March 2022, set off a national firestorm and drew immediate pushback from LGBTQ advocates.
Investigators have said that billions of dollars of Covid-19 relief funds have been obtained using fabricated, stolen or fake information. The Justice Department’s Covid-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force has brought several high-profile fraud cases across the country.
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Americans took fewer steps during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and they still haven’t gotten their mojo back, a new study found.
“On average, people are taking about 600 fewer steps per day than before the pandemic began,” said study author Dr. Evan Brittain, associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
“To me, the main message is really a public health message — raising awareness that Covid-19 appears to have had a lasting impact on people’s behavioral choices when it comes to activity,” he said.
The study used data from the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which is focused on identifying ways to develop individualized health care. Many of the 6,000 participants in the program wore activity trackers for at least 10 hours a day over multiple years and allowed researchers access to their electronic health records.
In the new study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, researchers compared steps taken by nearly 5,500 people who wore the program’s activity trackers. Most were White women, with an average age of 53.
Step counts collected between January 1, 2018, and January 31, 2020, were considered pre-Covid. Steps tracked after that date until the end of 2021, which is when the study ended, were considered post-Covid.
Results showed no difference in identified step activity based on sex, obesity, diabetes and other illnesses or conditions such as coronary artery disease, hypertension or cancer.
People who took the fewest steps were socioeconomically disadvantaged, under psychological stress and not vaccinated, the study said.
Age made a difference as well, but in an unexpected manner: People over 60 were not impacted by the pandemic, the study found — they continued to keep their steps up.
Oddly, it was younger people between 18 and 30 whose step counts were most impacted, Brittain said. “In fact, we found every 10-year decrease in age was associated with a 243 step reduction per day.”
“If this persists over time, it could certainly raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, hypertension, diabetes and other conditions strongly linked to being sedentary,” Brittian said. “However, it’s too soon to know whether this trend will last.”
Why would a younger generations lose steps while older people did not?
“I think it’s difficult to interpret because it’s only 600 steps, which you could argue is what some people would get simply walking into work and through their day,” said Dr. Andrew Freeman, director of cardiovascular prevention and wellness at National Jewish Health, a hospital in Denver, who was not involved in the research. “I think the question is who is more likely to work from home?”
Younger generations make up the majority of workers in technology, software and other professions that are able to work from anywhere, “whereas older people may have less of those jobs,” Freeman said.
Whatever the reason, the study data shows that people were not moving as much during the pandemic as they used to. That is worrisome, Freeman added.
“If this trend remains, we should really be cognizant that if you’re going to work from home, use either a standing, treadmill or bike desk,” he said, adding that managers of remote employees should “insist people take periodic breaks for people to do exercise, which also is proven to improve mental clarity and acuity,” he said.
Health professionals should always be talking to their patients about activity levels, but “the impact of Covid-19 might make those kinds of messages all the more important to discuss with patients,” Brittain said.
There’s a tantalizing new clue in the hunt for the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A new analysis of genetic material collectedfrom January to March 2020 at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, has uncovered animal DNA in samples already known to be positive for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. A significant amount of that DNA appears to belong to animals known as raccoon dogs, which were known to be traded at the market, according to officials with the World Health Organization, who addressed the new evidence in a news briefing on Friday.
The connection to raccoon dogs came to light after Chinese researchers shared raw genetic sequences taken from swabbed specimens collected at the market early in the pandemic. The sequences were uploaded in late January 2023, to the data sharing site GISAID, but have recently been removed.
An international team of researchers noticed them and downloaded them for further study, the WHO officials said Friday.
The new findings – which have not yet been publicly posted – do not settle the question of how the pandemic started. They do not prove that raccoon dogs were infected with SARS-CoV-2, nor do they prove that raccoon dogs were the animals that first infected people.
But because viruses don’t survive in the environment outside of their hosts for long, finding so much of the genetic material from the virus intermingled with genetic material from raccoon dogs is highly suggestive that they could have been carriers, according to scientists who worked on the analysis. The analysis was ledby Kristian Andersen, an immunologist and microbiologist at Scripps Research; Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney; Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. These three scientists, who have been digging into the origins of the pandemic, were interviewed by reporters for The Atlantic magazine. CNN has reached out to Andersen, Holmes and Worobey for comment.
The details of theinternational analysis were first reported Thursday by The Atlantic.
The new data is emerging as Republicans in Congress have opened investigations into the pandemic’s origin. Previous studies provided evidence that the virus likely emerged naturally in market, but could not point to a specific origin. Some US agencies, including a recent US Department of Energy assessment, say the pandemic likely resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan.
In the news briefing on Friday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the organization was first made aware of the sequences on Sunday.
“As soon as we became aware of this data, we contacted the Chinese CDC and urged them to share it with WHO and the international scientific community so it can be analyzed,” Tedros said.
WHO also convened its Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of the Novel Pathogens, known as SAGO, which has been investigating the roots of the pandemic, to discuss the data on Tuesday. The group heard from Chinese scientists who had originally studied the sequences, as well as the group of international scientists taking a fresh look at them.
WHO experts said in the Friday briefing that the data are not conclusive. They still can’t say whether the virus leaked from a lab, or if it spilled over naturally from animals to humans.
“These data do not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important in moving us closer to that answer,” Tedros said.
What the sequences do prove, WHO officials said, is that China has more data that might relate to the origins of the pandemic that it has not yet shared with the rest of the world.
“This data could have, and should have, been shared three years ago,” Tedros said. “We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations and share results.
“Understanding how the pandemic began remains a moral and scientific imperative.”
CNN has reached out to the Chinese scientists who first analyzed and shared the data, but has not received a reply.
The Chinese researchers, who are affiliated with that country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, had shared their own analysis of the samples in 2022. In that preprint study posted last year, they concluded that “no animal host of SARS-CoV2 can be deduced.”
The research looked at 923 environmental samples taken from within the seafood market and 457 samples taken from animals, and found 63 environmental samples that were positive for the virus that causes Covid-19. Most were taken from the western end of the market. None of the animal samples, which were taken from refrigerated and frozen products for sale, and from live, stray animals roaming the market, were positive, the Chinese authors wrote in 2022.
When they looked at the different species of DNA represented in the environmental samples, the Chinese authors only saw a link to humans, but not other animals.
When an international team of researchers recentlytook at fresh look at the genetic material in the samples – which were swabbed in and around the stalls of the market – using an advanced genetic technique called metagenomics, scientists said they were surprised to find a significant amount of DNA belonging to raccoon dogs, a small animal related to foxes. Raccoon dogs can be infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 and have been high on the list of suspected animal hosts for the virus.
“What they found is molecular evidence that animals were sold at that market. That was suspected, but they found molecular evidence of that. And also that some of the animals that were there were susceptible to SARS-CoV2 infection, and some of those animals include raccoon dogs,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for Covid-19, in Friday’s briefing.
“This doesn’t change our approach to studying the origins of Covid-19. It just tells us that more data exists, and that data needs to be shared in full,” she said.
Van Kerkhove said that until the international scientific community is able to review more evidence, “all hypotheses remain on the table.”
Some experts found the new evidence persuasive, if not completely convincing, of an origin in the market.
“The data does point even further to a market origin,” Andersen, the Scripps Research evolutionary biologist who attended the WHOmeeting and is one of the scientists analyzing the new data, told the magazine Science.
The assertions made over the new data quickly sparked debate in the scientific community.
Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, said the fact that the new analysis had not yet been publicly posted for scientists to scrutinize, but had come to light in news reports, warranted caution.
“Such articles really don’t help as they only polarise the debate further,” Balloux posted in a thread on Twitter. “Those convinced by a zoonotic origin will read it as final proof for their conviction, and those convinced it was a lab leak will interpret the weakness of the evidence as attempts of a cover-up.”
Other experts, who were not involved in the analysis, said the data could be key to showing the virus had a natural origin.
Felicia Goodrum is an immunobiologist at the University of Arizona, who recently published a review of all available data for the various theories behind the pandemic’s origin.
Goodrum says the strongest proof for a natural spillover would be to isolate the virus that causes Covid-19 from an animal that was present in the market in 2019.
“Clearly, that is impossible, as we cannot go back in time any more than we have through sequencing, and no animals were present at the time sequences could be collected. To me, this is the next best thing,” Goodrum said in an email to CNN.
In the WHO briefing, Van Kerkhove said that the Chinese CDC researchers had uploaded the sequences to GISAID as they were updating their original research. She said their first paper is in the process of being updated and resubmitted for publication.
“We have been told by GISAID that the data from China’s CDC is being updated and expanded,” she said.
Van Kerkhove said on Friday that what WHO would like to be able to do is to find the source of where the animals came from. Were they wild? Were they farmed?
She said in the course of its investigation into the pandemic’s origins, WHOhad repeatedly asked China for studies to trace the animals back to their source farms. She said WHO had also asked for blood tests on people who worked in the market, as well as tests on animals that may have come from the farms.
“Share the data,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said Friday, addressing scientists around the world who might have relevant information. “Let science do the work, and we will get the answers.”
Effie Schnacky was wheezy and lethargic instead of being her normal, rambunctious self one February afternoon. When her parents checked her blood oxygen level, it was hovering around 80% – dangerously low for the 7-year-old.
Her mother, Jaimie, rushed Effie, who has asthma, to a local emergency room in Hudson, Wisconsin. She was quickly diagnosed with pneumonia. After a couple of hours on oxygen, steroids and nebulizer treatments with little improvement, a physician told Schnacky that her daughter needed to be transferred to a children’s hospital to receive a higher level of care.
The physical and mental burnout that occurred during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic has not gone away for overworked health care workers. Shortages of doctors and technicians are growing, experts say, but especially in skilled nursing. That, plus a shortage of people to train new nurses and the rising costs of hiring are leaving hospitals with unstaffed pediatric beds.
But a host of reasons building since well before the pandemic are also contributing. Children may be the future, but we aren’t investing in their health care in that way. With Medicaid reimbursing doctors at a lower rate for children, hospitals in tough situations sometimes put adults in those pediatric beds for financial reasons. And since 2019, children with mental health crises are increasingly staying in emergency departments for sometimes weeks to months, filling beds that children with other illnesses may need.
“There might or might not be a bed open right when you need one. I so naively just thought there was plenty,” Schnacky told CNN.
The number of pediatric beds decreasing has been an issue for at least a decade, said Dr. Daniel Rauch, chair of the Committee on Hospital Care for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
By 2018, almost a quarter of children in America had to travel farther for pediatric beds as compared to 2009, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Pediatrics by lead author Dr. Anna Cushing, co-authored by Rauch.
“This was predictable,” said Rauch, who has studied the issue for more than 10 years. “This isn’t shocking to people who’ve been looking at the data of the loss in bed capacity.”
The number of children needing care was shrinking before the Covid-19 pandemic – a credit to improvements in pediatric care. There were about 200,000 fewer pediatric discharges in 2019 than there were in 2017, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“In pediatrics, we have been improving the ability we have to take care of kids with chronic conditions, like sickle cell and cystic fibrosis, and we’ve also been preventing previously very common problems like pneumonia and meningitis with vaccination programs,” said Dr. Matthew Davis, the pediatrics department chair at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Pediatrics is also seasonal, with a typical drop in patients in the summer and a sharp uptick in the winter during respiratory virus season. When the pandemic hit, schools and day cares closed, which slowed the transmission of Covid and other infectious diseases in children, Davis said. Less demand meant there was less need for beds. Hospitals overwhelmed with Covid cases in adults switched pediatric beds to beds for grownups.
Only 37% of hospitals in the US nowoffer pediatric services, down from 42% about a decade ago, according to the American Hospital Association.
While pediatric hospital beds exist at local facilities, the only pediatric emergency department in Baltimore County is Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, according to Dr. Theresa Nguyen, the center’s chair of pediatrics. All the others in the county, which has almost 850,000 residents, closed in recent years, she said.
The nearby MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center consolidated its pediatric ER with the main ER in 2018, citing a 40% drop in pediatric ER visits in five years, MedStar Health told CNN affiliate WBAL.
In the six months leading up to Franklin Square’s pediatric ER closing, GBMC admitted an average of 889 pediatric emergency department patients each month. By the next year, that monthly average jumped by 21 additional patients.
“Now we’re seeing the majority of any pediatric ED patients that would normally go to one of the surrounding community hospitals,” Nguyen said.
In other cases, it’s the hospitals that have only 10 or so pediatric beds that started asking the tough questions, Davis said.
“Those hospitals have said, ‘You know what? We have an average of one patient a day or two patients a day. This doesn’t make sense anymore. We can’t sustain that nursing staff with specialized pediatric training for that. We’re going to close it down,’” Davis said.
Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise closed its pediatric inpatient unit in July because of financial reasons, the center told CNN affiliate KBOI. That closure means patients are now overwhelming nearby St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital, which is the only children’s hospital in the state of Idaho, administrator for St. Luke’s Children’s Katie Schimmelpfennig told CNN. Idaho ranks last for the number of pediatricians per 100,000 children, according to the American Board of Pediatrics in 2023.
The Saint Alphonsus closure came just months before the fall, when RSV, influenza and a cadre of respiratory viruses caused a surge of pediatric patients needing hospital care, with the season starting earlier than normal.
The changing tide of demand engulfed the already dwindling supply of pediatric beds, leaving fewer beds available for children coming in for all the common reasons, like asthma, pneumonia and other ailments. Additional challenges have made it particularly tough to recover.
Another factor chipping away at bed capacity over time: Caring for children pays less than caring for adults. Lower insurance reimbursement rates mean some hospitals can’t afford to keep these beds – especially when care for adults is in demand.
Medicaid, which provides health care coverage to people with limited income, is a big part of the story, according to Joshua Gottlieb, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
“Medicaid is an extremely important payer for pediatrics, and it is the least generous payer,” he said. “Medicaid is responsible for insuring a large share of pediatric patients. And then on top of its low payment rates, it is often very cumbersome to deal with.”
Medicaid reimburses children’s hospitals an average of 80% of the cost of the care, including supplemental payments, according to the Children’s Hospital Association, a national organization which represents 220 children’s hospitals. The rate is far below what private insurers reimburse.
More than 41 million children are enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data from October. That’s more than half the children in the US, according to Census data.
At Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, about 55% of patients use Medicaid, according to Dr. David Wessel, the hospital’s executive vice president.
“Children’s National is higher Medicaid than most other children’s hospitals, but that’s because there’s no safety net hospital other than Children’s National in this town,” said Wessel, who is also the chief medical officer and physician-in-chief.
And it just costs more to care for a child than an adult, Wessel said. Specialty equipment sized for smaller people is often necessary. And a routine test or exam for an adult is approached differently for a child. An adult can lie still for a CT scan or an MRI, but a child may need to be sedated for the same thing. A child life specialist is often there to explain what’s going on and calm the child.
“There’s a whole cadre of services that come into play, most of which are not reimbursed,” he said. “There’s no child life expert that ever sent a bill for seeing a patient.”
“When insurance pays more, people build more health care facilities, hire more workers and treat more patients,” Gottlieb said.
“Everyone might be squeezed, but it’s not surprising that pediatric hospitals, which face [a]lower, more difficult payment environment in general, are going to find it especially hard.”
Dr. Benson Hsu is a pediatric critical care provider who has served rural South Dakota for more than 10 years. Rural communities face distinct challenges in health care, something he has seen firsthand.
A lot of rural communities don’t have pediatricians, according to the American Board of Pediatrics. It’s family practice doctors who treat children in their own communities, with the goal of keeping them out of the hospital, Hsu said. Getting hospital care often means traveling outside the community.
Hsu’s patients come from parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota, as well as across South Dakota, he said. It’s a predominantly rural patient base, which also covers those on Native American reservations.
“These kids are traveling 100, 200 miles within their own state to see a subspecialist,” Hsu said, referring to patients coming to hospitals in Sioux Falls. “If we are transferring them out, which we do, they’re looking at travels of 200 to 400 miles to hit Omaha, Minneapolis, Denver.”
Inpatient pediatric beds in rural areas decreased by 26% between 2008 and 2018, while the number of rural pediatric units decreased by 24% during the same time, according to the 2021 paper in Pediatrics.
“It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. Those safety net hospitals are the ones that are most at risk for closure,” Rauch said.
In major cities, the idea is that a critically ill child would get the care they need within an hour, something clinicians call the golden hour, said Hsu, who is the critical care section chair at the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“That golden hour doesn’t exist in the rural population,” he said. “It’s the golden five hours because I have to dispatch a plane to land, to drive, to pick up, stabilize, to drive back, to fly back.”
When his patients come from far away, it uproots the whole family, he said. He described families who camp out at a child’s bedside for weeks at a time. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles from home, unlike when a patient is in their own community and parents can take turns at the hospital.
“I have farmers who miss harvest season and that as you can imagine is devastating,” Hsu said. “These aren’t office workers who are taking their computer with them. … These are individuals who have to live and work in their communities.”
Back at GBMC in Maryland, an adolescent patient with depression, suicidal ideation and an eating disorder was in the pediatric emergency department for 79 days, according to Nguyen. For months, no facility had a pediatric psychiatric bed or said it could take someone who needed that level of care, as the patient had a feeding tube.
“My team of physicians, social workers and nurses spend a significant amount of time every day trying to reach out across the state of Maryland, as well as across the country now to find placements for this adolescent,” Nguyen said before the patient was transferred in mid-March. “I need help.”
Nguyen’s patient is just one of the many examples of children and teens with mental health issues who are stayingin emergency rooms and sometimes inpatient beds across the country because they need help, but there isn’t immediately a psychiatric bed or a facility that can care for them.
It’s a problem that began before 2020 and grew worse during the pandemic, when the rate of children coming to emergency rooms with mental health issues soared, studies show.
Now, a nationwide shortage of beds exists for children who need mental health help. A 2020 federal survey revealed that the number of residential treatment facilities for children fell 30% from 2012.
“There are children on average waiting for two weeks for placement, sometimes longer,” Nguyen said of the patients at GBMC. The pediatric emergency department there had an average of 42 behavioral health patients each month from July 2021 through December 2022, up 13.5% from the same period in 2017 to 2018, before the pandemic, according to hospital data.
When there are mental health patients staying in the emergency department, that can back up the beds in other parts of the hospital, creating a downstream effect, Hsu said.
“For example, if a child can’t be transferred from a general pediatric bed to a specialized mental health center, this prevents a pediatric ICU patient from transferring to the general bed, which prevents an [emergency department] from admitting a child to the ICU. Health care is often interconnected in this fashion,” Hsu said.
“If we don’t address the surging pediatric mental health crisis, it will directly impact how we can care for other pediatric illnesses in the community.”
Funding for children’s hospitals is already tight, Rauch said, and more money is needed not only to make up for low insurance reimbursement rates but to competitively hire and train new staff and to keep hospitals running.
“People are going to have to decide it’s worth investing in kids,” Rauch said. “We’re going to have to pay so that hospitals don’t lose money on it and we’re going to have to pay to have staff.”
Virtual visits, used in the right situations, could ease some of the problems straining the pediatric system, Rauch said. Extending the reach of providers would prevent transferring a child outside of their community when there isn’t the provider with the right expertise locally.
Increased access to children’s mental health services
With the ongoing mental health crisis, there’s more work to be done upstream, said Amy Wimpey Knight, the president of CHA.
“How do we work with our school partners in the community to make sure that we’re not creating this crisis and that we’re heading it off up there?” she said.
There’s also a greater need for services within children’s hospitals, which are seeing an increase in children being admitted with behavioral health needs.
“If you take a look at the reasons why kids are hospitalized, meaning infections, diabetes, seizures and mental health concerns, over the last decade or so, only one of those categories has been increasing – and that is mental health,” Davis said. “At the same time, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of mental health hospital resources dedicated to children and adolescents in a way that meets the increasing need.”
Most experts CNN spoke to agreed: Seek care for your child early.
“Whoever is in your community is doing everything possible to get the care that your child needs,” Hsu said. “Reach out to us. We will figure out a way around the constraints around the system. Our number one concern is taking care of your kids, and we will do everything possible.”
Nguyen from GBMC and Schimmelpfennig from St. Luke’s agreed with contacting your primary care doctor and trying to keep your child out of the emergency room.
“Anything they can do to stay out of the hospital or the emergency room is both financially better for them and better for their family,” Schimmelpfennig said.
Knowing which emergency room or urgent care center is staffed by pediatricians is also imperative, Rauch said. Most children visit a non-pediatric ER due to availability.
“A parent with a child should know where they’re going to take their kid in an emergency. That’s not something you decide when your child has the emergency,” he said.
After Effie’s first ambulance ride and hospitalization last month, the Schnacky family received an asthma action plan from the pulmonologist in the ER.
It breaks down the symptoms into green, yellow and red zones with ways Effie can describe how she’s feeling and the next steps for adults. The family added more supplies to their toolkit, like a daily steroid inhaler and a rescue inhaler.
“We have everything an ER can give her, besides for an oxygen tank, at home,” Schnacky said. “The hope is that we are preventing even needing medical care.”
Chinese billionaire and proclaimed dissident Guo Wengui was arrested Wednesday and charged with defrauding thousands of followers out of more than $1 billion through complex investment schemes, US prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Guo, a staunch critic of the Chinese government who is exiled in Manhattan and close to former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, was taken into custody in New York on Wednesday morning. He is charged with defrauding or misappropriating investor money using different schemes, including his media company GTV Media Group, a farm loan program through Himalaya Farm Alliance, and a cryptocurrency called Himalaya Coin.
Guo is also known as Ho Wan Kwok and Miles Guo.
Prosecutors said instead of using the money the way he promised potential investors, Guo directed the funds to invest in a hedge fund to benefit GTV and a relative, to cover the maintenance payments for his $37 million, 145-foot luxury yacht, a New Jersey mansion and a custom-built Bugatti sports car valued at $4.4 million. Prosecutors said in a letter to the judge that they are seeking his detention, arguing he poses a serious risk of flight.
CNN has reached out to Guo’s lawyer for comment.
Guo co-founded two nonprofit organizations, the Rule of Law Foundation and the Rule of Law Society, that prosecutors allege he used to attract a following who believed in many of his ideas.
Those nonprofits were linked to a group promoting the theory that the novel coronavirus was likely engineered in a Chinese lab. The Rule of Law organizations were co-founded by Guo and Bannon.
Bannon has not been charged in this case.
Bannon was arrested in 2020 on Guo’s yacht on unrelated fraud charges stemming from a border wall fundraising effort. Bannon was pardoned by Trump but indicted on similar state charges. Bannon has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors said they have seized $634 million from 21 bank accounts and a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Roadster.
In addition to criminal charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, international money laundering and obstruction of justice, Guo was also sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A Chinese city has sparked a backlash on social media after saying it would consider the use of lockdowns in the event of an influenza outbreak.
The city of Xi’an – a tourism hotspot in Shaanxi province that is home to the famous terracotta warriors – revealed an emergency response plan this week that would enable it to shut schools, businesses and “other crowded places” in the event of a severe flu epidemic.
That prompted a mixture of anxiety and anger on China’s social media websites among many users who said the plan sounded uncomfortably similar to some of the strict zero-Covid measures China had implemented throughout the pandemic and which have only recently been abandoned.
“Vaccinate the public rather than using such time to create a sense of panic,” one user wrote on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.
“How will people not panic given that Xi’an’s proposal to suspend work and business activities were issued without clear instruction on the national level to classify the disease?” asked another.
While cases of Covid in China are falling, there has been a spike in flu cases across the country and some pharmacies are struggling to meet demand for flu remedies.
However, Xi’an’s emergency response plan will not necessarily be used. Rather, it outlines how the city of almost 13 million people would respond to any future outbreak based on four levels of severity.
At the first and highest level, it says, “the city can lock down infected areas, carry out traffic quarantines and suspend production and business activities. Shopping malls, theaters, libraries, museums, tourist attractions and other crowded places will also be closed.”
“At this emergency level, schools and nurseries at all levels would be shut down and be made responsible for tracking students’ and infants’ health conditions.”
The backlash comes as the central government in Beijing has emphasized the need to open the country back up following the removal of all Covid restrictions in January.
Throughout the pandemic, China had enforced some of the world’s most severe Covid restrictions, including lockdowns that stretched into months in some cities. It was also one of the last countries in the world to end measures such as mass testing and strict border quarantine periods, even amid growing evidence of the damage being done to its economy.
Xi’an itself was subject to a draconian lockdown between December 2021 and January 2022, with 13 million residents confined to their homes for weeks on end – and many left short of food and other essential supplies. Access to medical services was also affected. In an incident that shocked and angered the nation, a heavily pregnant woman was turned away from a hospital on New Year’s Day because she didn’t have a valid Covid-19 test, and suffered a miscarriage after she was finally admitted two hours later.
Shortly before China removed its pandemic era restrictions the country had been rocked by a series of demonstrations against its zero-Covid policy.
Memories of being confined to their homes and of panic buying that in some areas led to food shortages remain fresh in people’s minds and the idea of a return to Covid-style measures appears to have hit a nerve.
However, some voices called for calm.
Epidemiologist Ben Cowling, from the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, said he saw the rationale of the move.
“I think it’s quite rational to make contingency plans. I wouldn’t expect a lockdown to be needed for flu, but presumably there are different response levels,” he said.
One user on Weibo expressed a similar sentiment: “It is merely the revelation of a proposal, not putting it in place. It is quite normal to take precautions given this wave of flu is coming at us very strong.”
A Chinese city says it has destroyed a billion pieces of personal data collected during the pandemic, as local governments gradually dismantle their coronavirus surveillance and tracking systems after abandoning the country’s controversial zero-Covid policy.
Wuxi, a manufacturing hub on China’s eastern coast and home to 7.5 million people, held a ceremony Thursday to dispose of Covid-related personal data, the city’s public security bureau said in a statement on social media.
The one billion pieces of data were collected for purposes including Covid tests, contact tracing and the prevention of imported cases – and they were only the first batch of such data to be disposed, the statement said.
China collects vast amounts of data on its citizens – from gathering their DNA and other biological samples to tracking their movements on a sprawling network of surveillance cameras and monitoring their digital footprints.
But since the pandemic, state surveillance has pushed deeper into the private lives of Chinese citizens, resulting in unprecedented levels of data collection. Following the dismantling of zero-Covid restrictions, residents have grown concerned over the security of the huge amount of personal data stored by local governments, fearing potential data leaks or theft.
Last July, it was revealed that a massive online database apparently containing the personal information of up to one billion Chinese citizens was left unsecured and publicly accessible for more than a year – until an anonymous user in a hack forum offered to sell the data and brought it to wider attention.
In the statement, Wuxi officials said “third-party audit and notary officers” would be invited to take part in the deletion process, to ensure it cannot be restored. CNN cannot independently verify the destruction of the data.
Wuxi also scrapped more than 40 local apps used for “digital epidemic prevention,” according to the statement.
During the pandemic, Covid apps like these dictated social and economic life across China, controlling whether people could leave their homes, where they could travel, when businesses could open and where goods could be transported.
But following the country’s abrupt exit from zero-Covid in December, most of these apps faded from daily life.
On December 12, China scrapped a nationwide mobile tracking app that collected data on users’ travel movements. But many local pandemic apps run by the municipal or provincial governments, such as the ubiquitous Covid health code apps, have remained in place – although they are no longer in use.
Wuxi claims to be the first municipality in China to have destroyed Covid-related personal data from citizens. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, users called for other local governments to follow suit.
Yan Chunshui, deputy head of Wuxi’s big data management bureau, said the disposal was meant to better protect citizens’ privacy, prevent data leaks and free up data storage space.
Kendra Schaefer, the head of tech policy research at the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, said the data collection related to local-level Covid apps was often messy, and those apps were difficult and expensive to manage for local governments.
“Considering the cost and difficulty managing such apps, coupled with concerns expressed by the public over data security and privacy – not to mention the political win local governments get by symbolically putting zero-Covid to bed – dismantling those systems is par for the course,” Schaefer said.
In many cases, she added, the big data departments at local governments were overwhelmed dealing with Covid data, so scaling back simply makes sense economically.
“Many cities have not yet deleted their Covid data – or have not done so publicly – not because I believe they intend to keep it, but because it simply hasn’t been that long since zero-Covid was halted,” Schaefer said.
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
Hong Kong CNN
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The US Department of Energy’s assessment that Covid-19 most likely emerged due to a laboratory accident in China has reignited fierce debate and attention on the question of how the pandemic began.
But the “low confidence” determination, made in a newly updated classified report, has raised more questions than answers, as the department has publicly provided no new evidence to back the claim. It’s also generated fierce pushback from China.
“We urge the US to respect science and facts, stop politicizing this issue, stop its intelligence-led, politics-driven origins-tracing,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday.
The Department of Energy assessment is part of a broader US effort in which intelligence agencies were asked by President Joe Biden in 2021 to examine the origins of the coronavirus, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
That overall assessment from the intelligence community was inconclusive, and then, as now, there has yet to be a decisive link established between the virus and a specific animal or other route – as China continues to stonewall international investigations into the origins of the virus.
Four agencies and the National Intelligence Council assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans through natural exposure, while one assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory-related accident. Three other intelligence community elements were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, according to a declassified version of the 2021 report.
The majority of agencies remain undecided or lean toward the virus having a natural origin – a hypothesis also widely favored by scientists with expertize in the field. But the change from the US Department of Energy has now deepened the split in the intelligence community, especially as the director of the FBI this week commented publicly for the first time on his agency’s similar determination made with “medium confidence.”
Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means the information obtained is not reliable enough, or is too fragmented to make a more definitive judgment.
And while the assessment and new commentary has pulled the theory back into the spotlight, neither agency has released evidence or information backing their determinations. That raises crucial questions about their basis – and shines the spotlight back on gaping, outstanding unknowns and need for further research.
Hear FBI director remark on Covid lab leak theory
Scientists largely believe the virus most likely emerged from a natural spillover from an infected animal to people, as many viruses before it, though they widely acknowledge the need for more research of all options. Many have also questioned the lack of data released to substantiate the latest claim.
Virologist Thea Fischer, who in 2021 traveled to Wuhan as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) origins probe and remains a part of ongoing WHO tracing efforts, said it was “very important” that any new assessments related to the origin of the virus are documented by evidence.
“(These are) strong accusations against a public research laboratory in China and can’t stand alone without substantial evidence,” said Fischer, a professor at the University of Copenhagen.
“Hopefully they will share with the WHO soon so the evidence can be known and assessed by international health experts just as all other evidence concerning the pandemic origin.”
A senior US intelligence official told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the new Department of Energy assessment, that the update to the assessment was conducted in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and in consultation with experts outside government.
The idea that the virus could have emerged from a lab accident became more prominent as a spotlight was turned on coronavirus research being done at local facilities, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was further enhanced amid a failure to find a “smoking gun” showing which animal could have passed the virus to people at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market – the location linked to a number of early known cases – amid limitations to follow-up research.
Some experts who have been closely involved in examining existing information, however, are skeptical of the new assessment giving the theory more weight.
“Given that so much of the data we have points to a spillover event occurring at the Huanan market in late 2019 I doubt there’s anything very significant in it or new information that would change our current understanding,” said David Robertson, a professor in the University of Glasgow’s School of Infection and Immunity, who was involved in recent research with findings that supported the natural origin theory.
He noted that locations of early human cases centered on the market, positive environmental samples, and confirmation that live animals susceptible to the virus were for sale there are among evidence supporting the natural origins theory – while there’s no data supporting a lab leak.
“The extent of this evidence continually gets lost (in media discussion) … when in fact we know a lot about what happened, and arguably more than other outbreaks,” he said.
Efforts to understand how the pandemic started have been further complicated by China’s lack of transparency – especially as the origin question spiraled into another point of bitter contention within rising US-China tensions of recent years.
Beijing has blocked robust, long-term international field investigations and refused to allow a laboratory audit,which could bring clarity, and been reticent to share details and data around domestic research to uncover the cause. However, it repeatedly maintains that it has been transparent and cooperative with the WHO.
Chinese officials carefully controlled the single WHO-backed investigation it did allow on the ground in 2021, citing disease control measures to restrict visiting experts to their hotel rooms for half their trip and to prevent them from sharing meals with their Chinese counterparts – cutting off an opportunity for more informal information sharing.
Citing data protection, Beijing has also declined to allow its own investigatory measures, like testing stored blood samples from Wuhan or combing through hospital data for potential “patient zeros,” to be verified by researchers outside the country.
China has fiercely denied that the virus emerged from a lab accident, and has repeatedly tried to assert it could have arrived in the country for the initial outbreak from elsewhere – including a US laboratory, without offering any evidence supporting the claim.
But a top WHO official as recently as last month publicly called for “more cooperation and collaboration with our colleagues in China to advance studies that need to take place in China”– including studies of markets and farms that could have been involved.
“These studies need to be conducted in China and we need cooperation from our colleagues there to advance our understandings,” WHO technical lead for Covid-19 Maria Van Kerkhove said at a media briefing.
When asked about the Department of Energy assessment by CNN, a WHO representative said the organization and its origins tracing advisory body “will keep examining all available scientific evidence that would help us advance the knowledge on the origin of SARS CoV 2 and we call on China and the scientific community to undertake necessary studies in that direction.”
“Until we have more evidence all hypotheses are still on the table,” the representative said.
Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration narrowly voted Tuesday in favor of Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for adults over the age of 60, paving the way for approval of the first nation’s RSV vaccine, despite some safety concerns.
The committee members voted 7-4, with one abstention, that there is adequate data to support the safety and effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine for the prevention of lower respiratory tract disease caused by respiratory syncytial virus among older adults.
The FDA, which typically follows the independent committee’s recommendations, is scheduled to decide on approval of the vaccines by May, ahead of RSV’s typical winter surge. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must then recommend the shot before it becomes available to the public.
Pending those steps, Pfizer’s vaccine – along with GSK’s candidate shot, which will be voted on by the FDA advisory committee on Wednesday – would be the first approved RSV vaccines for adults 60 or older.
RSV is a highly contagious virus that causes flu-like illness in people of all ages that increases in severity with age. It’s is responsible for an estimated 177,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths per year among adults 65 or older, according to the CDC.
The Pfizer vaccine was 66.7% effective at preventing moderated lower respiratory tract illness with two or more symptoms and 85.7% effective at preventing illness with three or more symptoms, according to an FDA briefing document.
Although a majority of the committee voted in favor of the vaccine, some members expressed concerns about the vaccine’s “important potential risk: of Guillain-Barre syndrome. Two adults among the 20,000 vaccine recipients in Pfizer’s Phase 3 clinical trial developed symptoms consistent with the rare neurological disorder within nine days of receiving the shot.
“It seems to me that one case is a red flag. Two cases is very concerning, and it’s concerning to me that Pfizer doesn’t think that there are any safety concerns,” said Dr. Marie Griffin, professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who voted that the data demonstrated the vaccine was effective but not safe.
The FDA has recommended that Pfizer conduct a safety study for further evaluation of Guillain-Barre and other immune-mediated demyelinating conditions after potential vaccine approval, and the company has agreed.
Dr. Daniel Feikin, respiratory disease consultant, who voted that the vaccine was both safe and effective, said that post-marketing safety surveillance will be “critical.”
Some of the vaccine advisers wanted to see more data on effectiveness against hospitalization or death, especially among high-risk people such as older adults or those with other health conditions.
“I think the data does support the effectiveness of this vaccine. It’s just the population was underrepresented by people who could most benefit from the vaccine,” Griffin said.
The available safety and efficacy data from Pfizer’s clinical trial is from the first of two RSV seasons. Some of the experts said that the vote is premature and that they would like to see more data.
“I’m desperately eager to have a vaccine that works for RSV. This has been a terrible disease my whole career. I would love to see it. No doubt about it,” said Dr. Jay Portnoy, professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who voted that the data demonstrated that the vaccine was safe but not effective.
Portnoy says that waiting for a second season of data would provide more robust numbers and complete analysis.
“It’s not an emergency use authorization. We can take the time to finish the studies and get the information we need before licensing this product going forward. So I remain a little bit skeptical, given the data that we have.”
Bird flu, at this point, is somewhat of a misnomer. The virus, which primarily infects birds, is circulating uncontrolled around much of the world, devastating not just birds but wide swaths of the animal kingdom. Foxes, bobcats, and pigs have fallen ill. Grizzly bears have gone blind. Sea creatures, including seals and sea lions, have died in great numbers.
But none of the sickened animals has raised as much concern as mink. In October, a bird-flu outbreak erupted at a Spanish mink farm, killing thousands of the animals before the rest were culled. It later became clear that the virus had spread between the animals, picking up a mutation that helped it thrive in mammals. It was likely the first time that mammal-to-mammal spread drove a huge outbreak of bird flu. Because mink are known to spread certain viruses to humans, the fear was that the disease could jump from mink to people. No humans got sick from the outbreak in Spain, but other infections have spread from mink to humans before: In 2020, COVID outbreaks on Danish mink farms led to new mink-related variants that spread to a small number of humans.
As mammals ourselves, we have good reason to be concerned. Outbreaks on crowded mink farms are an ideal scenario for bird flu to mutate. If, in doing so, it picks up the ability to spread between humans, it could potentially start another global pandemic. “There are many reasons to be concerned about mink,” Tom Peacock, a flu researcher at Imperial College London, told me. Right now, mink are a problem we can’t afford to ignore.
For two animals with very different body types, mink and humans have some unusual similarities. Research suggests that we share similar receptors for COVID, bird flu, and human flu, through which these viruses can gain entry into our bodies. The numerous COVID outbreaks on mink farms during the early pandemic, and the bird-flu outbreak in Spain, gravely illustrate this point. It’s “not surprising” that mink can get these respiratory diseases, James Lowe, a veterinary-medicine professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. Mink are closely related to ferrets, which are so well known for their susceptibility to human flu that they’re the go-to model for flu research.
Mink wouldn’t get sick as often, and wouldn’t be as big an issue for humans, if we didn’t keep farming them for fur in the perfect conditions for outbreaks. Many barns used to raise mink are partially open-air, making it easy for infected wild birds to come in contact with the animals, sharing not only air but potentially food. Mink farms are also notoriously cramped: The Spanish farm, for example, kept tens of thousands of mink in about 30 barns. Viral transmission would be all but guaranteed in those conditions, but the animals are especially vulnerable. Because mink are normally solitary creatures, they face significant stress in packed barns, which may further predispose them to disease, Angela Bosco-Lauth, a biomedical-sciences professor at Colorado State University, told me. And because they’re often inbred so their coats look alike, an entire population may share a similar genetic susceptibility to disease. The frequency of outbreaks among mink, Bosco-Lauth said, “may actually have less to do with the animals and more to do with the fact that we raise them in the same way … we would an intensive cattle farm or chickens.”
So far, there’s no evidence that mink from the Spanish farm spread bird flu to humans: None of the workers tested positive for the virus, and since then, no other mink farms have reported outbreaks. “We’re just not very susceptible” to bird flu, Lowe said. Our bird-flu receptors are tucked deep in our lungs, but when we’re exposed, most of the virus gets caught in the nose, throat, and other parts of the upper respiratory tract. This is why bird-flu infection is less common in people but is often pneumonia-level severe when it does happen. Indeed, a few humans have gotten sick and died from bird flu in the 27 years that the current strain of bird flu, known as H5N1, has circulated. This month, a girl in Cambodia died from the virus after potentially encountering a sick bird. The more virus circulating in an environment, the higher the chances a person will get infected. “It’s a dose thing,” Lowe said.
But our susceptibility to bird flu could change. Another mink outbreak would give the virus more opportunities to keep mutating. The worry is that this could create a new variant that’s better at binding to the human flu receptors in our upper respiratory tract, Stephanie Seifert, a professor at Washington State University who studies zoonotic pathogens, told me. If the virus gains the ability to infect the nose and throat, Peacock, at Imperial College London, said, it would be better at spreading. Those mutations “would worry us the most.” Fortunately, the mutations that arose on the Spanish mink farm “were not as bad as many of us worried about,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean that the next time this happens, this will also be the case.”
Because mink carry the receptors for both bird flu and human flu, they could serve as “mixing vessels” for the viruses to combine, researchers wrote in 2021. (Ferrets, pigs, and humans share this quality too.) Through a process called reassortment, flu viruses can swap segments of their genome, resulting in a kind of Frankenstein pathogen. Although viruses remixed in this way aren’t necessarily more dangerous, they could be, and that’s not a risk worth taking. “The previous three influenza pandemics all arose due to mixing between avian and human influenza viruses,” Peacock said.
While there are good reasons to be concerned about mink, it is hard to gauge just how concerned we should be—especially given what we still don’t know about this changing virus. After the death of the young girl in Cambodia, the World Health Organization called the global bird flu situation “worrying,” while the CDC maintains that the risk to the public is low. Lowe said “it’s certainly not very risky” that bird flu will spill over into humans, but is worth keeping an eye on. H5N1 bird flu is not new, he added, and it hasn’t affected people en masse yet. But the virus has already changed in ways that make it better at infecting wild birds, and as it spreads in the wild, it may continue to change to better infect mammals, including humans. “We don’t understand enough to make strong predictions of public-health risk,” Jonathan Runstadler, an infectious-diseases professor at Tufts University, told me.
As bird flu continues to spread among birds and in domestic and wild animal populations, it will only become harder to control. The virus, formally seasonal, is already present year-round in parts of Europe and Asia, and it is poised to do the same in the Americas. Breaking the chain of transmission is vital to preventing another pandemic. An important step is to avoid situations where humans, mink, or any other animal could be infected with both human and bird flu at the same time.
Since the COVID outbreaks, mink farms have generally beefed up their biosecurity: Farm workers are often required to wear masks and protective gear, such as disposable overalls. To limit the risk to mink—and other susceptible hosts—farms need to reduce their size and density, reduce contact between mink and wild birds, and monitor the virus, Runstadler said. Some nations, including Mexico, Ecuador, have recently embraced bird-flu vaccines for poultry in light of the outbreaks. H5N1 vaccines are also available for humans, though they aren’t readily available. Still, one of the most obvious options is to shut mink farms down. “We probably should have done that after SARS-CoV-2,” Bosco-Lauth, at Colorado State, said. Doing so is controversial, however, because the global mink industry is valuable, with a huge market in China. Denmark, which produces up to 40 percent of the world’s mink pelts, temporarily banned mink breeding in 2020 after a spate of COVID outbreaks, but the ban expired last month, and farms are returning, albeit in a limited capacity.
But mink are far from the only animal that poses a bird-flu risk to humans. “Frankly, with what we’re seeing with other wildlife species, there really aren’t any mammals that I would discount at this point in time,” Bosco-Lauth said. Any mammal species repeatedly infected by the virus is a potential risk, including marine mammals, such as seals. But we should be most concerned about the ones humans frequently come into close contact with, especially animals that are raised in high density, such as pigs, Runstadler said. This doesn’t pose just a human public-health concern, he said, but the potential for “ecological disruption.” Bird flu can be a devastating disease for wildlife, killing animals swiftly and without mercy.
Whether bird flu makes the jump into humans, it isn’t the last virus that will threaten us—or mink. The era we live in has become known as the “Pandemicene,” as my colleague Ed Yong has called it, one defined by the regular spillover of viruses into humans, caused by our disruption of the normal trajectories of viral movement in nature. Mink may never pass bird flu to us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be a risk the next time a novel influenza or coronavirus comes around. Doing nothing about mink essentially means choosing luck as a public-health strategy. Sooner or later, it will run out.
Hong Kong, one of the last major international cities requiring face masks, on Tuesday announced it will end its controversial mandate nearly three years after it was enacted to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
The mandate, enforced through fines that could reach more than $1,000, had required facial coverings in all public spaces including outdoors, indoors and public transport. At one point, it had even been mandatory while exercising outside.
The rule came into effect on July 15, 2020, though the vast majority of people in the city had begun wearing masks months earlier as reports of coronavirus infections spread, leading to panic buying and shortages as early as January that year.
The mandate will be fully lifted on Wednesday, the city’s leader John Lee said at a news briefing Tuesday.
“We are now returning to normalcy,” Lee said, as the Asian financial hub launches a major push to welcome back business travelers and tourists.
Speaking at the same news briefing, Health Secretary Lo Mau-chung said that with the lifting of the mask mandate, “We have now removed all epidemic restrictions.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing a smile on everyone’s face now,” he said. However, he added, there are still some recommendations in place to wear masks at “high risk” areas such as elderly care homes and hospitals.
Most other places in Asia have either fully or partially eased their mask mandates in recent months, including South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
The World Health Organization still recommends health workers wear masks, with Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead of WHO’s Covid response, warning that the virus was “circulating pretty much unchecked around the world at the moment.”
Two sources said that the Department of Energy assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.
The latest assessment further adds to the divide in the US government over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak or whether it emerged naturally. The various intelligence agencies have been split on the matter for years. In 2021, the intelligence community declassified a report that showed four agencies in the intelligence community had assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while one assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident.
Three other intelligence community elements were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, the report said.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new assessment from the Department of Energy. A senior US intelligence official told the Journal that the update to the intelligence assessment was conducted in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and in consultation with experts outside government.
A Department of Energy spokesperson told CNN in a statement: “The Department of Energy continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”
The Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is one of 18 government agencies that make up the intelligence community, which are under the umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing for further investigation into the lab leak theory, while accusing the Biden administration of playing down its possibility.
A spokesperson for House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement that the committee was “reviewing the classified information provided” by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a letter requesting information earlier this month.
One of the sources said that the new assessment from the Department of Energy is similar to information from a House Republican Intelligence Committee report released last year on the origins of the virus.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the intelligence community remains divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.
“Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question,” Sullivan told CNN’s Dana Bash. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”
Sullivan said Biden had directed the national laboratories, which are part of the Department of Energy, to be brought into the assessment.
In May 2020, researchers at the government-backed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory issued a classified report that found it was possible that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, which came at a time when that line of inquiry was considered taboo.
The US began exploring the possibility that Covid-19 spread in a laboratory as early as April 2020, though the intelligence community has noted repeatedly that a lack of cooperation from Beijing has made it difficult to get to the bottom of the question.
But there are fewer US restaurants today than in 2019. It’s not clear when —if ever — they’re coming back.
Last year, there were about 631,000 restaurants in the United States, according to data from Technomic, a restaurant research firm. That’s roughly 72,000 fewer than in 2019, when there were 703,000 restaurants in the country.
That number could fall even further this year, to about 630,000 locations, according to Technomic, which doesn’t foresee the number of restaurants in the US returning to pre-Covid levels even by 2026.
Sit-down restaurants, especially, are at a disadvantage asdelivery and takeout remain popular. And with inflation still high, some potential customers are avoiding restaurants to save money. Meanwhile, restaurant operators are seeing their own costs, like rent and ingredients, rise, and say it’s hard to hire staff.
With conditions so tough, some restaurant owners are advising newcomers to steer clear of the industry altogether.
If someone were to ask David Nayfeld, chef and co-owner of the San Francisco restaurants Che Fico and Che Fico Alimentari, whether to open a new restaurant right now, his answer would be no.
“I would say it is not a good time to go open a restaurant if you are not a seasoned and incredibly durable operator,” he said. Especially now, when restaurant operators need experience and deep pockets in order to succeed, he added.
Even Nayfeld, himself an industry veteran who has worked at the famed Eleven Madison Park, is struggling. The pandemic led to “a really devastating few years that we’re still working our way out of,” he said.
Some have argued that the contraction is a painful but necessary correction.
“The narrative back pre-pandemic was that we were over-saturated … too many restaurants chasing too few consumer dollars,” said David Henkes, senior principal at Technomic.
Indeed, before the pandemic, the number of restaurants was growing between half a percent and one percent each year, he said, adding that therecent decline served to “reset” the size of the market. Without those hurdles, however, that decrease would likely have happened more slowly, he noted.
Daniel Jacobs, a chef and restaurant owner, has seen his own network of restaurants shrink over the past few years.
Prior to the pandemic, he and his business partner Dan Van Rite operated three restaurants and a bakery, plus a catering operation and restaurant consulting business. Today, they are left with two Milwaukee restaurants, DanDan and EsterEv.
“Closing a restaurant is an incredibly difficult decision to make,” Jacobs said. “We did our best during the pandemic to try and keep our teams together … at some point, you just gotta call it.”
DanDan, a Chinese American restaurant, had offered takeout for years. The restaurant “had that customer confidence that we were going to deliver quality products,” he said.
EsterEv is a tasting-menu-only restaurant within a restaurant (functionally, a dining room located inside DanDan) open only on weekends, and “definitely wouldn’t have [made it] if we had to pay rent on a space,” Jacobs said.
The trend toward delivery and takeout has stuck, with restaurants reporting higher levels of off-premise orders. According to Revenue Management Solutions, a restaurant consultancy, delivery was up 11.4% in fast food and fast casual restaurants in January compared to last year.
“We increasingly like to get our food on the go,” said David Portalatin, food service industry advisor for the NPD Group, a market research firm. “We’re still a more home-centric society.”
Plus, sit-down restaurants tend to be more expensive, which could drive cash-strapped customers away, said Portalatin. Even with rising grocery prices, eating at home is generally less expensive than dining out, and restaurants last year saw their foot traffic dip.
Full-service restaurants are also more labor intensive. That’s a problem right now, as restaurant owners report having a hard time hiring staff.
Job openings in accommodation and food services rose by 409,000 in December, the largest increase by sector for the month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in February.
Demand for workers marks a turnaround from early in the pandemic, when restaurants let go of millions of staffers. Some employees also left of their own volition during the pandemic, afraid of getting sick with Covid-19 or tired of dealing with grueling conditions and rude customers.
Today, some of those workers haven’t returned, leaving operators struggling to restaff.
“Fundamentally, the labor situation is one where … there’s just not enough supply of qualified workers,” Henkes said. “And restaurants are particularly vulnerable, because it’s never been the industry of choice for a lot of people.”
Some restaurants, Henkes said, “are very cognizant that they need to improve the working experience and what they’re offering to employees,” he said. “But doing that at scale for an industry is very hard.”
And, of course, some major employers are not interested in higher wages for workers.
Chipotle, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s and KFC-owner Yum Brands, for example, have each donated $1 million to Save Local Restaurants, a coalition opposing a California law that could set minimum wage up to $22 an hour and codify working conditions for fast-food employees in the state.
The Biden administration is planning to roll out a roadmap as early as Thursday on what it will mean for the country when the Covid-19 public health emergency comes to an end later this year, according to a source familiar with the forthcoming announcement.
The administration is supposed to come out soon with more details around the ending of the public health emergency declaration, another source close to the administration’s discussions told CNN.
It will be for “the partners that have supported the response,” the source said.
The White House announced last week that President Joe Biden intends to end the Covid-19 national and public health emergencies on May 11 – a decision that signals that the administration believes the Covid-19 pandemic is now squarely in a different stage than it has been over the past few years.
The goal of the expected roadmap, one source said, is to try to lay out for the public in a clear way what the end of the declaration “does and does not mean,” including for various stakeholders like state health departments and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.
In Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, he said that the United States has “broken Covid’s grip” on the nation.
“Let’s also recognize how far we’ve come in the fight against the pandemic itself,” the President said. “While the virus is not gone, thanks to the resilience of the American people, we have broken Covid’s grip on us. Covid deaths are down nearly 90%. We’ve saved millions of lives and opened our country back up. And soon we’ll end the public health emergency.”
The White House, in a statement of administration policy announcing opposition to two Republican measures to end the emergencies, said the national emergency and public health emergency authorities declared in response to the pandemic would each be extended one final time to May 11.
“This wind down would align with the Administration’s previous commitments to give at least 60 days’ notice prior to termination of the (public health emergency),” the statement said.
The statement added, “To be clear, continuation of these emergency declarations until May 11 does not impose any restriction at all on individual conduct with regard to COVID-19. They do not impose mask mandates or vaccine mandates. They do not restrict school or business operations. They do not require the use of any medicines or tests in response to cases of COVID-19.”
The statement came in response to a pair of measures before the House that would end the public health emergency and the Covid-19 national emergency.
The White House weighed in because House Democrats were concerned about voting against the Republican legislation to end the public health emergency that is coming to the floor this week without a plan from the Biden administration, a senior Democratic aide told CNN.
“Democrats were concerned about the optics of voting against Republicans winding down the public health emergency, absent an understanding of whether and how we intended to do so from the White House,” the aide said. “As soon as we saw this bill, it obviously concerns the White House. So, it was important for them to weigh in.”
The administration argues that the bills are unnecessary because it intends to end the emergencies anyway. The White House also noted the passage of the measures ahead of May 11 would have unintended consequences, such as disrupting the administration’s plans for ending certain policies that are authorized by the emergencies.
The White House said it would extend the Covid-19 emergencies one final time in order to ensure an orderly wind-down of key authorities that states, health care providers and patients have relied on throughout the pandemic.
A White House official pointed to a successful vaccination campaign and reductions in Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths as a rationale for lifting the emergency declarations. The official said a final extension will allow for a smooth transition for health care providers and patients and noted that health care facilities have already begun preparing for that transition.
The administration is actively reviewing flexible policies that were authorized under the public health emergency to determine which can remain in place after it is lifted on May 11.
The aide told CNN that it will be up to every member to decide what is best for their district and how they will vote on the legislation this week. Declaring an end to the public health emergency will also end the border restriction known as Title 42, which will also likely set up a showdown on Capitol Hill.
The public health emergency has enabled the government to provide many Americans with Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines at no charge, as well as offer enhanced social safety net benefits, to help the nation cope with the pandemic and minimize its impact.
“People will have to start paying some money for things they didn’t have to pay for during the emergency,” said Jen Kates, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “That’s the main thing people will start to notice.”
Most Americans covered byMedicare, Medicaid and private insurance plans have been able to obtain Covid-19 tests and vaccines at no cost during the pandemic. Those covered by Medicare and private insurance have been able to get up to eight at-home tests per month from retailers at no charge. Medicaid also picks up the cost of at-home tests, though coverage can vary by state.
Those covered by Medicare and Medicaid have also had certain therapeutic treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies, fully covered.
Once the emergency ends, Medicare beneficiaries generally will face out-of-pocket costs for at-home testing and all treatment. However, vaccines will continue to be covered at no cost, as will testing ordered by a health care provider.
State Medicaid programs will have to continue covering Covid-19 tests ordered by a physician and vaccines at no charge. But enrollees may face out-of-pocket costs for treatments.
Those with private insurance could face charges for lab tests, even if they are ordered by a provider. Vaccinations will continue to be free for those with private insurance who go to in-network providers, but going to an out-of-network providers could incur charges.
Covid-19 vaccinations will be free for those with insurance even when the public health emergency ends because of various federal laws, including the Affordable Care Act and pandemic-era measures, the Inflation Reduction Act and a 2020 relief package.
Americans with private insurance have not been charged for monoclonal antibody treatment since they were prepaid by the federal government, though patients may be charged for the office visit or administration of the treatment. But that is not tied to the public health emergency, and the free treatments will be available until the federal supply is exhausted. The government has already run out of some of the treatments so those with private insurance may already be picking up some of the cost.
The uninsured had been able to access no-cost testing, treatments and vaccines through a different pandemic relief program. However, the federal funding ran out in the spring of 2022, making it more difficult for those without coverage to obtain free services.
Pfizer and Moderna have already announced that the commercial prices of their Covid-19 vaccines will likely be between $82 and $130 per dose – about three to four times what the federal government has paid, according to Kaiser.
The public health emergency has also meant additional funds for hospitals, which have been receiving a 20% increase in Medicare’s payment rate for treating Covid-19 patients.
Also, Medicare Advantage plans have been required to bill enrollees affected by the emergency and receiving care at out-of-network facilities the same as if they were at in-network facilities.
This will end once the public health emergency expires.
But several of the most meaningful enhancements to public assistance programs are no longer tied to the public health emergency. Congress severed the connection in December as part of its fiscal year 2023 government funding package.
Most notably, states will now be able to start processing Medicaid redeterminations and disenrolling residents who no longer qualify, starting April 1. They have 14 months to review the eligibility of their beneficiaries.
As part of a Covid-19 relief package passed in March 2020, states were barred from kicking people off Medicaid during the public health emergency in exchange for additional federal matching funds. Medicaid enrollment has skyrocketed to a record 90 million people since then, and millions are expected to lose coverage once states began culling the rolls.
A total of roughly 15 million people could be dropped from Medicaid when the continuous enrollment requirement ends, according to an analysis the Department of Health and Human Services released in August. About 8.2 million folks would no longer qualify, but 6.8 million people would be terminated even though they are still eligible, the department estimated.
Many who are disenrolled from Medicaid, however could qualify for other coverage.
Food stamp recipients had been receiving a boost during the public health emergency. Congress increased food stamp benefits to the maximum for their family size in a 2020 pandemic relief package.
The Biden administration expanded the boost in the spring of 2021 so that households already receiving the maximum amount and those who received only a small monthly benefit get a supplement of at least $95 a month.
This extra assistance will end as of March, though several states have already stopped providing it.
Congress, however, extended one set of pandemic flexibilities as part of the government funding package.
More Medicare enrollees are able to get care via telehealth during the public health emergency. The service is no longer limited just to those living in rural areas. They can conduct the telehealth visit at home, rather than having to travel to a health care facility. Plus, beneficiaries can use smartphones and receive a wider array of services via telehealth.
These will now continue through 2024.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Former President Donald Trump took aim at Ron DeSantis Saturday, claiming the Florida governor and his team are “trying to rewrite history” regarding their Covid-19 pandemic response, and called the potential presidential run by his GOP rival “very disloyal.”
“There are Republican governors that did not close their states,” Trump told reporters while aboard his plane. “Florida was closed for a long period of time.”
“They’re trying to rewrite history,” he added. CNN has reached out to DeSantis for comment.
In March 2020, the Florida governor issued an executive order closing bars and nightclubs, urging people to follow US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to limit gatherings on beaches to no more than 10 people. By that September, DeSantis signed an order clearing restaurants and bars to fully open, which drew criticism from public health officials due to the Covid-19 spike that fall.
Trump defended his management of the pandemic, saying he left decisions to governors.
“I had governors that decided not to close a thing and that was up to them,” he said. The former president also took aim at DeSantis’ shifting posture on vaccines, saying the Florida governor had “changed his tune a lot.”
That claim comes after DeSantis called on state lawmakers this month to make permanent existing penalties for companies that require all employees get the Covid-19 vaccination.
The rivalry with Trump hangs over every move DeSantis makes. Their relationship traces back to the governor’s 2018 primary campaign, when an endorsement from Trump helped the little-known congressman win the nomination. A viral ad featuring DeSantis and his family, including two young children, highlighted his allegiance to Trump.
But as talk of 2024 swirled in recent months, as Trump again declared his presidential candidacy, and DeSantis won re-election in a 19-point landslide in November, the pair grew increasingly at odds. Before and after the midterm election, Trump derided DeSantis as an “average governor” and mocked him with the would-be nickname, “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
On Saturday, during his first major campaign swing to New Hampshire and South Carolina,Trump took credit again for helping elevate DeSantis during his 2018 bid for governor, saying “Ron would have not been governor if it wasn’t for me.”
“So when I hear he might run, I consider that very disloyal,” Trump said.
While taking aim at DeSantis, Trump told reporters aboard his plane that Nikki Haley – who served as his ambassador to the United Nations – called him in recent days to inform him that she is considering launching a 2024 presidential bid.
“I talked to her for a little while, I said, ‘Look, you know, go by your heart if you want to run,’” Trump said. “She’s publicly said that ‘I would never run against my president, he was a great president.’”
Trump said he told Haley that she “should do it.”
Haley, who recently relocated her top aides to Charleston, is said to be weighing the timing of a campaign launch at this point, not wanting to be the first one to take on Trump by herself. In 2021, she said she would not challenge Trump if he ran again for the White House in 2024.
Editor’s Note: Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank and advocacy group based in Washington, DC. He is also a former senior policy adviser to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
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With only a thin and fractious majority in the House, the GOP is facing two years of struggling to set any kind of positive agenda. But one thing every elected Republican would agree on is the need to scrutinize the Biden administration.
This is, of course, business as usual. The party that doesn’t control the White House will always seek to scorepolitical points on possible bureaucratic scandals. In return, Democrats’ instinctive reaction might be to circle up the wagons and seek to stonewall or downplay as many of these efforts as possible.
But one area of focus for the Oversight Committee deserves to be taken seriously, not just as a political point-scoring operation, but as an earnest attempt to improve how government works. A genuine bipartisan commitment can and should be made to evaluate the extent of fraud in the pandemic-era safety net measures. A better understanding of where the system failed would not only shine a light on how some funds were misspent but also lay the groundwork for better administration of safety-net benefits, in ways applicable and valuable even outside of the unique circumstances of a global pandemic.
Recall that as the initial wave of coronavirus cases hit US shores, economists feared we could be headed for an economic meltdown. People stopped going about their daily lives, stay-at-home orders went into effect and businesses responded by laying off workers left and right. The unemployment rate spiked to 14.7% in April 2020, the highest level in the post-World War II era.
Congress wanted to provide aid as quickly as possible; there simply wasn’t time to sit around and construct the ideal policies. As part of the frenetic response, the federal government used the often-clunky unemployment insurance systems run by states to try to backstop households’ finances.
Fraud became an issue due to a number of factors, according to a June 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office, including unclear federal guidance, ill-equipped state offices and a relaxation of normal eligibility rules. It didn’t help that 32 states run their unemployment insurance systems on outdated infrastructure, often developed in the 1970s and 1980s, according to that same report. These systems make it difficult for states to have the flexibility and responsiveness necessary to run benefit programs efficiently – even when there isn’t a global pandemic.
The underlying structure of unemployment insurance may have been an issue as well – the federal government provides support and technical assistance, while states determine eligibility and ensure accurate payments. The jerry-rigged systems in many states couldn’t handle the surge of applicants and a newly created unemployment insurance program relied on self-certification. Without any requirements to prove lost income, the program opened the door to bad actors.
But some of the headlines about the amount of fraud in pandemic assistance are likely overblown. One widely-repeated claim about the ubiquity of fraud was advanced not by a disinterested party but by a company that sells ID verification systems. The GAO report estimates the amount of unemployment insurance fraud is likely over $60 billion (or about 7% of total $878 billion spent), although the true amount may not be knowable.
$60 billion sounds like a lot of money, but some could argue the result justified the leaky process. Research by the Brookings Institution found that the expanded unemployment benefits delivered the most aid to lower-income workers, stabilizing the broader economy by keeping consumption stable. At the peak of Covid’s impact, millions of workers every week were applying for unemployment insurance; if excessive concern about fraud had prevented rolling out the federal expansion of benefits, it could have taken a lot longer for the economy to recover.
But with the worst of the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, cracking down on people who abused the system and making it harder for future scammers to do the same is an appropriate area for the Oversight Committee to focus on. A full, bipartisan Congressional inquiry could spotlight the weaknesses of the current system and where it was taken advantage of in order to lay the groundwork for future efforts to improve the way benefits are disbursed.
Not doing so would allow distrust around government programs to fester. Some voters who hear stories about fraudsters taking advantage of pandemic-era assistance – especially blatant examples of people who listed their name as “N/A” or claimed that they owned nonexistent farms – may lose faith in government’s ability to function properly. Knowing that the expanded assistance helped the economy does nothing to change or address the fact that some people took advantage of loopholes in the system.
Some initial steps have been taken to address this lingering concern. The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which was created as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2020, has provided publicly available data on how emergency pandemic funds were spent. Last summer, Congress passed bipartisan bills extending the statute of limitations to prosecute individuals who committed fraud through the Paycheck Protection Program or the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program. And Democrats, such as Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who previously served as the chair of a subcommittee on the coronavirus response, have rightly pointed out that small business aid during the pandemic was also plagued by fraud and improper payments.
Yet more could be done. A GAO report in October 2021 made six recommendations about how the Department of Labor could stem fraud in unemployment insurance programs, but a recent follow-up found the department had not implemented any of them. The deluge of cases has left investigators overwhelmed, and Congress could beef up funding for the agents that investigate pandemic fraud.
Last year, the Biden administration announced initial steps to combat fraud and identity theft in pandemic relief, but it hasn’t made a priority of supporting bills like the one introduced in 2021 by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, which would have modernized the unemployment insurance program. Helping states develop better systems of determining eligibility and automating basic safeguards could make it easier to keep scammers out and make sure the truly deserving get the benefits they need.
Republicans are right to put the spotlight on those who took advantage of pandemic-era programs. Democrats should join them. Getting benefits into the hands of people who merit them and keeping them out of the hands of people who don’t should be something both parties agree on. Amid all the other controversies that take up political oxygen, a concerted effort to crack down on wrongdoing and improve how our social safety net functions could be a welcome breath of bipartisan air.
President Joe Biden delivered a Thursday speech to hail economic progress during his administration and to attack congressional Republicans for their proposals on the economy and the social safety net.
Some of Biden’s claims in the speech were false, misleading or lacking critical context, though others were correct. Here’s a breakdown of the 14 claims CNN fact-checked.
Touting the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed in 2021, Biden said, “Last year, we funded 700,000 major construction projects – 700,000 all across America. From highways to airports to bridges to tunnels to broadband.”
Facts First: Biden’s “700,000” figure is wildly inaccurate; it adds an extra two zeros to the correct figure Biden used in a speech last week and the White House has also used before: 7,000 projects. The White House acknowledged his misstatement later on Thursday by correcting the official transcript to say 7,000 rather than 700,000.
Biden said, “Well, here’s the deal: I put a – we put a cap, and it’s now in effect – now in effect, as of January 1 – of $2,000 a year on prescription drug costs for seniors.”
Facts First: Biden’s claims that this cap is now in effect and that it came into effect on January 1 are false. The $2,000 annual cap contained in the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed last year – on Medicare Part D enrollees’ out-of-pocket spending on covered prescription drugs – takes effect in 2025. The maximum may be higher than $2,000 in subsequent years, since it is tied to Medicare Part D’s per capita costs.
Asked for comment, a White House official noted that other Inflation Reduction Act health care provisions that will save Americans money did indeed come into effect on January 1, 2023.
– CNN’s Tami Luhby contributed to this item.
Criticizing former President Donald Trump over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden said, “Back then, only 3.5 million people had been – even had their first vaccination, because the other guy and the other team didn’t think it mattered a whole lot.”
Facts First: Biden is free to criticize Trump’s vaccine rollout, but his “only 3.5 million” figure is misleading at best. As of the day Trump left office in January 2021, about 19 million people had received a first shot of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The “3.5 million” figure Biden cited is, in reality, the number of people at the time who had received two shots to complete their primary vaccination series.
Someone could perhaps try to argue that completing a primary series is what Biden meant by “had their first vaccination” – but he used a different term, “fully vaccinated,” to refer to the roughly 230 million people in that very same group today. His contrasting language made it sound like there are 230 million people with at least two shots today versus 3.5 million people with just one shot when he took office. That isn’t true.
Biden said Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires, “who pay virtually only 3% of their income now – 3%, they pay.”
Facts First: Biden’s “3%” claim is incorrect. For the second time in less than a week, Biden inaccurately described a 2021 finding from economists in his administration that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018; after CNN inquired about Biden’s “3%” claim on Thursday, the White House published a corrected official transcript that uses “8%” instead. Also, it’s important to note that even that 8% number is contested, since it is an alternative calculation that includes unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.
“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, though Gleckman also said we don’t know precisely what tax rates billionaires do pay. Gleckman wrote in an email: “In 2019, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3, or even 8 percent.”
Biden has cited the 8% statistic in various other speeches, but unlike the administration economists who came up with it, he tends not to explain that it doesn’t describe tax rates in a conventional way. And regardless, he said “3%” in this speech and “2%” in a speech last week.
Biden cited a 2021 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy think tank that found that 55 of the country’s largest corporations had made $40 billion in profit in their previous fiscal year but not paid any federal corporate income taxes. Before touting the 15% alternative corporate minimum tax he signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, Biden said, “The days are over when corporations are paying zero in federal taxes.”
Facts First: Biden exaggerated. The new minimum tax will reduce the number of companies that don’t pay any federal taxes, but it’s not true that the days of companies paying zero are “over.” That’s because the minimum tax, on the “book income” companies report to investors, only applies to companies with at least $1 billion in average annual income. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, only 14 of the companies on its 2021 list of 55 non-payers reported having US pre-tax income of at least $1 billion.
In other words, there will clearly still be some large and profitable corporations paying no federal income tax even after the minimum tax takes effect this year. The exact number is not yet known.
Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told CNN in the fall that the new tax is “an important step forward from the status quo” and that it will raise substantial revenue, but he also said: “I wouldn’t want to assert that the minimum tax will end the phenomenon of zero-tax profitable corporations. A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the minimum tax will *help* ensure that *the most profitable* corporations pay at least some federal income tax.”
There are lots of nuances to the tax; you can read more specifics here. Asked for comment on Thursday, a White House official told CNN: “The Inflation Reduction Act ensures the wealthiest corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, precisely the corporations the President focused on during the campaign and in office. The President’s full Made in America tax plan would ensure all corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, and the President has called on Congress to pass that plan.”
Noting the big increase in the federal debt under Trump, Biden said that his administration has taken a “different path” and boasted: “As a result, the last two years – my administration – we cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion, the largest reduction in debt in American history.”
Facts First: Biden’s boast leaves out important context. It is true that the federal deficit fell by a total of $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 – but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction. Biden did not mention that the primary reason the deficit fell so substantially was that it had skyrocketed to a record high under Trump in 2020 because of bipartisan emergency pandemic relief spending, then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned. Independent analysts say Biden’s own actions, including his laws and executive orders, have had the overall effect of adding to current and projected future deficits, not reducing those deficits.
Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.
National Economic Council director Brian Deese wrote on the White House website last week that the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill “facilitated a strong economic recovery and enabled the responsible wind-down of emergency spending programs,” thereby reducing the deficit; David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, told Egan in October that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the recovery that has pushed the deficit downward. And Deese correctly noted that Biden’s signature legislation, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to bring down deficits by more than $200 billion over the next decade.
Still, the deficit-reducing impact of that one bill is expected to be swamped by the deficit-increasing impact of various additional bills and policies Biden has approved.
Biden said, “Wages are up, and they’re growing faster than inflation. Over the past six months, inflation has gone down every month and, God willing, will continue to do that.”
Facts First: Biden’s claim that wages are up and growing faster than inflation is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed. (Biden is right that inflation has declined, on an annual basis, every month for the last six months.) However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in January 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.
There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.
Biden said he was disappointed that the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives “added $114 billion to the deficit.”
Facts First: Biden is correct about how the bill would affect the deficit if it became law. He accurately cited an estimate from the government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The bill would eliminate more than $71 billion of the $80 billion in additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that Biden signed into law in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Congressional Budget Office found that taking away this funding – some of which the Biden administration said will go toward increased audits of high-income individuals and large corporations – would result in a loss of nearly $186 billion in government revenue between 2023 and 2032, for a net increase to the deficit of about $114 billion.
The Republican bill has no chance of becoming law under Biden, who has vowed to veto it in the highly unlikely event it got through the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Biden said that “MAGA Republicans” in the House “want to impose a 30 percent national sales tax on everything from food, clothing, school supplies, housing, cars – a whole deal.” He said they want to do that because “they want to eliminate the income tax system.”
Facts First: This is a fair description of the Republicans’ “FairTax” bill. The bill would eliminate federal income taxes, plus the payroll tax, capital gains tax and estate tax, and replace it with a national sales tax. The bill describes a rate of 23% on the “gross payments” on a product or service, but when the tax rate is described in the way consumers are used to sales taxes being described, it’s actually right around 30%, as a pro-FairTax website acknowledges.
It is not clear how much support the bill currently has among the House Republican caucus. Notably, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN’s Manu Raju this week that he opposes the bill – though, while seeking right-wing votes for his bid for speaker in early January, he promised its supporters that it would be considered in committee. Biden wryly said in his speech, “The Republican speaker says he’s not so sure he’s for it.”
Facts First: This is true. The unemployment rate was just below 3.5% in December, the lowest figure since 1969.
The headline monthly rate, which is rounded to a single decimal place, was reported as 3.5% in December and also reported as 3.5% in three months of President Donald Trump’s tenure, in late 2019 and in early 2020. But if you look at more precise figures, December was indeed the lowest since 1969 – 3.47% – just below the figures for February 2020, January 2020 and September 2019.
Biden said that the unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans are “near record lows” and that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is “the lowest ever recorded” and the “lowest ever in history.”
The Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.7% in December, not far from the record low of 5.3% that was set in August 2019. (This data series goes back to 1972.) The rate was 9.2% in January 2021, the month Biden became president. The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 4.1% in December, just above the record low of 4.0% that was set in September 2019. (This data series goes back to 1973.) The rate was 8.5% in January 2021.
The unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 5.0% in December, the lowest since the beginning of the data series in 2008. The rate was 12.0% in January 2021.
Biden said that fewer families are facing foreclosure than before the pandemic.
Facts First: Biden is correct. According to a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about 28,500 people had new foreclosure notations on their credit reports in the third quarter of 2022, the most recent quarter for which data is available; that was down from about 71,420 people with new foreclosure notations in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 74,860 people in the first quarter of 2020.
Foreclosures plummeted in the second quarter of 2020 because of government moratoriums put in place because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Foreclosures spiked in 2022, relative to 2020-2021 levels, after the expiry of these moratoriums, but they remained very low by historical standards.
Biden said, “More American families have health insurance today than any time in American history.”
Facts First: Biden’s claim is accurate. An analysis provided to CNN by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies US health care, found that about 295 million US residents had health insurance in 2021, the highest on record – and Jennifer Tolbert, the foundation’s director for state health reform, told CNN this week that “I expect the number of people with insurance continued to increase in 2022.”
Tolbert noted that the number of insured residents generally rises over time because of population growth, but she added that “it is not a given” that there will be an increase in the number of insured residents every year – the number declined slightly under Trump from 2018 to 2019, for example – and that “policy changes as well as economic factors also affect these numbers.”
As CNN’s Tami Luhby has reported, sign-ups on the federal insurance exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have spiked nearly 50% under Biden. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan pandemic relief law and then the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act temporarily boosted federal premium subsidies for exchange enrollees, and the Biden administration has also taken various other steps to get people to sign up on the exchanges. In addition, enrollment in Medicaid health insurance has increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, in part because of a bipartisan 2020 law that temporarily prevented people from being disenrolled from the program.
The percentage of residents without health insurance fell to an all-time low of 8.0% in the first quarter of 2022, according to an analysis published last summer by the federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services. That meant there were 26.4 million people without health insurance, down from 48.3 million in 2010, the year Obamacare was signed into law.
Biden said, “And over the last two years, more than 10 million people have applied to start a small business. That’s more than any two years in all of recorded American history.”
Facts First: This is true. There were about 5.4 million business applications in 2021, the highest since 2005 (the first year for which the federal government released this data for a full year), and about 5.1 million business applications in 2022. Not every application turns into a real business, but the number of “high-propensity” business applications – those deemed to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with a payroll – also hit a record in 2021 and saw its second-highest total in 2022.
Trump’s last full year in office, 2020, also set a then-record for total and high-propensity applications. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment to start their own enterprises; Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden; interest rates were particularly low until a series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.
A panel of independent experts that advises the US Food and Drug Administration on its vaccine decisions voted unanimously Thursday to update all Covid-19 vaccines so they contain the same ingredients as the two-strain shots that are now used as booster doses.
The vote means young children and others who haven’t been vaccinated may soon be eligible to receive two-strain vaccines that more closely match the circulating viruses as their primary series.
The FDA must sign off on the committee’s recommendation, which it is likely to do, before it goes into effect.
Currently, the US offers two types of Covid-19 vaccines. The first shots people get – also called the primary series – contain a single set of instructions that teach the immune system to fight off the original version of the virus, which emerged in 2019.
This index strain is no longer circulating. It was overrun months ago by an ever-evolving parade of new variants.
Last year, in consultation with its advisers, the FDA decided that it was time to update the vaccines. These two-strain, or bivalent, shots contain two sets of instructions; one set reminds the immune system about the original version of the coronavirus, and the second set teaches the immune system to recognize and fight off Omicron’s BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, which emerged in the US last year.
People who have had their primary series – nearly 70% of all Americans – were advised to get the new two-strain booster late last year in an effort to upgrade their protection against the latest variants.
The advisory committee heard testimony and data suggesting that the complexity of having two types of Covid-19 vaccines and schedules for different age groups may be one of the reasons for low vaccine uptake in the US.
Currently, only about two-thirds of Americans have had the full primary series of shots. Only 15% of the population has gotten an updated bivalent booster.
Data presented to the committee shows that Covid-19 hospitalizations have been rising for children under the age of 2 over the past year, as Omicron and its many subvariants have circulated. Only 5% of this age group, which is eligible for Covid-19 vaccination at 6 months of age, has been fully vaccinated. Ninety percent of children under the age of 4 are still unvaccinated.
“The most concerning data point that I saw this whole day was that extremely low vaccination coverage in 6 months to 2 years of age and also 2 years to 4 years of age,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Birth Defects and Infant Disorders. “We have to do much, much better.”
Cohn says that having a single vaccine against Covid-19 in the US for both primary and booster doses would go a long way toward making the process less complicated and would help get more children vaccinated.
Others feel that convenience is important but also stressed that data supported the switch.
“This isn’t only a convenience thing, to increase the number of people who are vaccinated, which I agree with my colleagues is extremely important for all the evidence that was related, but I also think moving towards the strains that are circulating is very important, so I would also say the science supports this move,” said Dr. Hayley Gans, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Stanford University.
Many others on the committee were similarly satisfied after seeing new data on the vaccine effectiveness of the bivalent boosters, which are cutting the risk of getting sick, being hospitalized or dying from a Covid-19 infection.
“I’m totally convinced that the bivalent vaccine is beneficial as a primary series and as a booster series. Furthermore, the updated vaccine safety data are really encouraging so far,” said Dr. David Kim, director of the the US Department of Health and Human Services’ National Vaccine Program, in public discussion after the vote.
Thursday’s vote is part of a larger plan by the FDA to simplify and improve the way Covid-19 vaccines are given in the US.
The agency has proposed a plan to convene its vaccine advisers – called the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC – each year in May or June to assess whether the instructions in the Covid-19 vaccines should be changed to more closely match circulating strains of the virus.
The time frame was chosen to give manufacturers about three months to redesign their shots and get new doses to pharmacies in time for fall.
“The object, of course – before anyone says anything – is not to chase variants. None of us think that’s realistic,” said Jerry Weir, director of the Division of Viral Products in the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review.
“But I think our experience so far, with the bivalent vaccines that we have, does indicate that we can continue to make improvements to the vaccine, and that would be the goal of these meetings,” Weir said.
In discussions after the vote, committee members were supportive of this plan but pointed out many of the things we still don’t understand about Covid-19 and vaccination that are likely to complicate the task of updating the vaccines.
For example, we now seem to have Covid-19 surges in the summer as well as the winter, noted Dr. Michael Nelson, an allergist and immunologist at the University of Virginia. Are the surges related? And if so, is fall the best time to being a vaccination campaign?
The CDC’s Dr. Jefferson Jones said that with only three years of experience with the virus, it’s really too early to understand its seasonality.
Other important questions related to the durability of the mRNA vaccines and whether other platforms might offer longer protection.
“We can’t keep doing what we’re doing,” said Dr. Bruce Gellin, chief of global public health strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation. “It’s been articulated in every one of these meetings despite how good these vaccines are. We need better vaccines.”
The committee also encouraged both government and industry scientists to provide a fuller picture of how vaccination and infection affect immunity.
One of the main ways researchers measure the effectiveness of the vaccines is by looking at how much they increase front-line defenders called neutralizing antibodies.
Neutralizing antibodies are like firefighters that rush to the scene of an infection to contain it and put it out. They’re great in a crisis, but they tend to diminish in numbers over time if they’re not needed. Other components of the immune system like B-cells and T-cells hang on to the memory of a virus and stand ready to respond if the body encounters it again.
Scientists don’t understand much about how well Covid-19 vaccination boosts these responses and how long that protection lasts.
Another puzzle will be how to pick the strains that are in the vaccines.
The process of selecting strains for influenza vaccines is a global effort that relies on surveillance data from other countries. This works because influenza strains tend to become dominant and sweep around the world. But Covid-19 strains haven’t worked in quite the same way. Some that have driven large waves in other countries have barely made it into the US variant mix.
“Going forward, it is still challenging. Variants don’t sweep across the world quite as uniform, like they seem to with influenza,” the FDA’s Weir said. “But our primary responsibility is what’s best for the US market, and that’s where our focus will be.”
Eventually, the FDA hopes that Americans would be able to get an updated Covid-19 shot once a year, the same way they do for the flu. People who are unlikely to have an adequate response to a single dose of the vaccine – such as the elderly or those with a weakened immune system – may need more doses, as would people who are getting Covid-19 vaccines for the first time.
At Thursday’s meeting, the advisory committee also heard more about a safety signal flagged by a government surveillance system called the Vaccine Safety Datalink.
The CDC and the FDA reported January 13 that this system, which relies on health records from a network of large hospital systems in the US, had detected a potential safety issue with Pfizer’s bivalent boosters.
In this database, people 65 and older who got a Pfizer bivalent booster were slightly more likely to have a stroke caused by a blood clot within three weeks of their vaccination than people who had gotten a bivalent booster but were 22 to 42 days after their shot.
After a thorough review of other vaccine safety data in the US and in other countries that use Pfizer bivalent boosters, the agencies concluded that the stroke risk was probably a statistical fluke and said no changes to vaccination schedules were recommended.
At Thursday’s meeting, Dr. Nicola Klein, a senior research scientist with Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, explained how they found the signal.
The researchers compared people who’d gotten a vaccine within the past three weeks against people who were 22 to 42 days away from their shots because this helps eliminate bias in the data.
When they looked to see how many people had strokes around the time of their vaccination, they found an imbalance in the data.
Of 550,000 people over 65 who’d received a Pfizer bivalent booster, 130 had a stroke caused by a blood clot within three weeks of vaccination, compared with 92 people in the group farther out from their shots.
The researchers spotted the signal the week of November 27, and it continued for about seven weeks. The signal has diminished over time, falling from an almost two-fold risk in November to a 47% risk in early January, Klein said. In the past few days, it hasn’t been showing up at all.
Klein said they didn’t see the signal in any of the other age groups or with the group that got Moderna boosters. They also didn’t see a difference when they compared Pfizer-boosted seniors with those who were eligible for a bivalent booster but hadn’t gotten one.
Further analyses have suggested that the signal might be happening not because people who are within three weeks of a Pfizer booster are having more strokes, but because people who are within 22 to 42 days of their Pfizer boosters are actually having fewer strokes.
Overall, Klein said, they were seeing fewer strokes than expected in this population over that period of time, suggesting a statistical fluke.
Another interesting thing that popped out of this data, however, was a possible association between strokes and high-dose flu vaccination. Seniors who got both shots on the same day and were within three weeks of those shots had twice the rate of stroke compared with those who were 22 to 42 days away from their shots.
What’s more, Klein said, the researchers didn’t see the same association between stroke and time since vaccination in people who didn’t get their flu vaccine on the same day.
The total number of strokes in the population of people who got flu shots and Covid-19 boosters on the same day is small, however, which makes the association a shaky one.
“I don’t think that the evidence are sufficient to conclude that there’s an association there,” said Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office.
Nonetheless, Richard Forshee, deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance, said the FDA is planning to look at these safety questions further using data collected by Medicare.
The FDA confirmed that the agency is taking a closer look.
“The purpose of the study is 1) to evaluate the preliminary ischemic stroke signal reported by CDC using an independent data set and more robust epidemiological methods; and 2) to evaluate whether there is an elevated risk of ischemic stroke with the COVID-19 bivalent vaccine if it is given on the same day as a high-dose or adjuvanted seasonal influenza vaccine,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
The FDA did not give a time frame for when these studies might have results.
When one by one, the friends of a young woman living in Beijing began disappearing — detained by the police after attending a vigil together weeks earlier — she felt sure that her time was nearing.
“As I record this video, four of my friends have already been taken away,” the woman, age 26, said, speaking clearly into the camera in a video recording from late December obtained by CNN.
“I entrusted some friends of mine with making this video public after my disappearance. In other words, when you see this video, I have been taken away by the police for a while.”
The woman — a recent graduate who is an editor at a publishing house — is among eight people, mainly young, female professionals in the same extended social circle, that CNN has learned have been quietly detained by authorities in the weeks following a peaceful protest in the Chinese capital on November 27.
CNN reporter at site of protest against China’s zero-Covid policy
CNN has confirmed that two of those eight were released on bail Thursday evening and Friday, respectively, just days ahead of the Lunar New Year. One release was confirmed to CNN on Friday by her lawyer, who declined to comment further on whether she had been charged with a crime. The second was confirmed by a source with direct knowledge.
CNN has not been able to confirm whether others were released and if so, how many.
Two of the young women detained, including the editor, have been formally charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” people directly familiar with their cases said Friday — a step that could bring them closer to standing trial, with neither granted bail as of that day.
The overall number of people detained in connection with the protests within China’s notoriously opaque security and judicial systems also remains uncertain.
Beijing authorities have made no official comment about the detentions and the city’s Public Security Bureau did not respond to a faxed request for comment from CNN. There has been no public confirmation from the authorities involved that these or any other detentions were made in connection with the protests.
CNN followed up on Monday with the district branch that is believed to be responsible for those detained following Beijing’s November 27 protest, but the branch didn’t respond prior to publication.
What is known about these detentions, carried out quietly in the weeks after November 27, stands as a chilling marker of the lengths to which China’s ruling Communist Party will go to stamp out all forms of dissent and free speech — and the tactics used to counter perceived threats.
The account that follows has, except where otherwise indicated, been reconstructed from interviews with three separate sources, who each directly know at least one of the people who were detained and are familiar with the circumstances of others within that circle.
CNN has agreed not to name any sources due to their concerns about retribution from the Chinese state and the sensitivities of speaking to foreign media. CNN is also not naming those detained for similar reasons.
Late in the evening of November 27, demonstrators gathered along the banks of Beijing’s Liangma River to remember at least 10 people killed in a fire that consumed their locked-down building in the northwestern city Urumqi. Public anger had grown following the emergence of video footage that appeared to show lockdown measures delaying firefighters from accessing the scene and reaching victims.
Many in the crowd that gathered in the heart of Beijing’s embassy district that night held up blank sheets of white A4-sized paper — a metaphor for the countless critical posts, news articles and outspoken social media accounts that were wiped from the internet by China’s censors. Some decried censorship and called for greater political freedoms, or shouted slogans calling for an end to incessant Covid tests and lockdowns. Others lit their phone flashlights in remembrance of the lives lost in the enforcement of that zero-Covid policy — the lights reflecting on the river flowing below, according to images and reporting by CNN at the time.
While police lined the streets that evening, the mood was largely calm and peaceful.
‘Unbelievable scenes’ in China as protesters speak out against zero-Covid policy
The editor at the publishing house who joined that night did so “with a heavy heart,” after having heard that others would be mourning the Urumqi fire victims near the river that evening, she said in her video message.
Carrying flowers and notes of condolence for the victims, the editor met up with her friends. Among them was a former reporter who had studied sociology overseas and was a community volunteer during the lockdown in Shanghai.
Another friend, a journalist, attended as well as a teacher and a writer — all young women at similar stages of life — university graduates of the past few years, now starting out their careers.
At least some of those in the circle left before the protests ended that night, grabbing some food before returning home for the evening, unaware that their lives were about to change.
In the days that followed, their lives began to unravel.
CNN has previously reported that authorities in Beijing used cellphone data to track down those who demonstrated along the Liangma River and call them in for questioning.
Members of that group of friends were among those brought in. Police confiscated or searched their phones and electronic devices and subjected at least one to a urine test, according to one of the sources. Some, like the editor, were initially brought in for questioning, and held for around 24 hours, before they were released.
CNN’s Beijing reporter breaks down latest police moves to suppress protests
For those in the group, an uneasy calm descended in the days following. For the editor, she said she felt that could have been the end of it. They felt that what they had done was innocuous and no different from others in the crowd that night, according to people familiar with the thinking of some of those detained.
But just over two weeks later, the round-up of these Beijing friends began. Starting from December 18, four women in the group of friends and one of their boyfriends were detained by police over a period of several days. The editor learned of detentions among her friends with a sense of terror, a source said. She decided that if she were going to be taken away too, it would be better from her hometown in central China than a rented flat in Beijing.
In the video recording, she said she attended the gathering with her friends that night because they had the “right to express their legitimate emotions when fellow citizens die” as people who care about the society they live in.
“At the scene, we followed the rules, without causing any conflict with the police … Why does this have to cost the lives of ordinary young people? … Why can we be taken away so arbitrarily?” she asked.
But on December 23, after returning to her hometown, she too was taken into custody, according to two people familiar with her situation. Several days later, her friend, the sociology graduate, was also detained while visiting her hometown in southern China, becoming the seventh person in the circle to be taken in by police.
After their detentions, another friend began reaching out to their families, who were from different parts of the country and not previously in contact, in the hopes of helping coordinate the young women’s defense, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Earlier this month, that friend, too, was detained, according to two sources.
People who know them echoed a sense of confusion over the detentions in interviews with CNN, describing them as young female professionals working in publishing, journalism and education, that were engaged and socially-minded, not dissidents or organizers.
One of those people suggested that the police may have been suspicious of young, politically aware women. Chinese authorities have a long and well-documented history of targeting feminists, and at least one of the women detained was questioned during her initial interrogation in November about whether she had any involvement in feminist groups or social activism, especially during time spent overseas, a source said.
All felt the detentions indicated an ever-tightening space for free expression in China.
“To be honest, I think the logic of arresting them is quite unclear,” said another source who knows them. “Because they are really not particularly experienced (with activism) … judging from this result, I can only say that this is a very ruthless suppression of some of the simplest and most spontaneous calls for justice in society today,” the person said.
“If they were arrested and imprisoned because they went to participate in this peaceful protest, I feel that maybe any young person who loves literature and yearns for a little bit of so-called ‘free thought’ could be arrested,” said an additional person. “This signal is terrifying.”
As popular frustration from three years of zero-Covid lockdowns, mass testing and tracking boiled over into demonstrations of a type not seen since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement of 1989, security forces largely refrained from an immediate overt, public crackdown that could have risked condemnation at home and abroad.
Instead, in the days that followed, security forces were dispatched to the streets en masse to discourage further demonstrations, with police patrolling streets and checking cell phones, while also tracking down participants, warning them not to participate further or bringing some in for questioning, according to CNN reporting at the time.
Why protesters in China are holding up white paper
Even by December 7, as the government, amid mounting economic pressure, relaxed the Covid-19 policies that had sparked those protests, signs had already begun emerging of how much the Party viewed those who had gathered on the streets as a threat.
In what appeared to be the first official acknowledgment of the protests on November 29, China’s domestic security chief, without directly mentioning the demonstrations, called on law enforcement to “resolutely strike hard against infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces,” state-run news agency Xinhua reported.
Not long after, in more pointed comments, China’s envoy in France suggested to reporters — without providing any evidence — that while the demonstrations may have begun due to public frustration with Covid-19 controls, they were swiftly co-opted by anti-China foreign forces, according to a transcript later posted on the embassy’s website.
In his New Year’s Eve address in late December, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said, it was “only natural for different people to have different concerns or hold different views on the same issue” in a big country, and what mattered was “building consensus” — a comment seen by some observers as striking a conciliatory tone, in contrast to its security crackdown.
“The ‘A4 revolution’ really, really shocked the Chinese authorities,” said academic lawyer Teng Biao, a globally recognized expert on defending human rights in China, using a popular name for the nationwide protests that alludes to the blank pieces of paper held by protesters. “And the Chinese government really, really wanted to know who was behind the protest.”
“It’s possible that the Chinese government or the secret police … have some theory that some protesters played an important role,” said Teng, who is currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and has himself been detained in China for his human rights and legal work. “They really want to get evidence of which protesters or participants have connections with the United States, with other countries, maybe foreign foundations, and they have used torture (in the past) to get confessions.”
International human rights groups have repeatedly accused China of extorting confessions from detainees through torture — a practice that is prohibited in China and which officials in the past said had been eliminated.
The University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies on Wednesday also issued a statement saying they were “aware that people, including a former student of the University of Chicago, have recently been detained in China due to their participation in peaceful protests,” and called for their prompt release.
Under Chinese criminal law, prosecutors have 37 days to approve a criminal detention or let the detainees go, and if people are not released within that time, they have little chance to be released before trial — and almost all trials end in a guilty verdict, according to Teng.
One charge, “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” that two of the friends have had formally approved against them, according to people familiar with the cases, carries a maximum sentence of up to five years. A release on bail, meanwhile, though rare, often leads to the dismissal of the case, Teng said.
The handling of political and human rights cases in China, however, “in practice … is totally arbitrary,” he said, adding that while these cases in Beijing had been brought to light there could be dozens, if not several hundred, similar such detentions in cities across the country that remain unreported — with families afraid to hire lawyers or talk to media.
The deep uncertainty of what would come next within China’s opaque system was clearly present in the mind of the editor as she recorded her video message in the days before her arrest. Then, she thought of her family, who would be unsure where she had gone — and what they would do in the situation they now find themselves.
“I guess my mother is now also coming from the south, traveling all the long way to Beijing to ask about my whereabouts,” said the editor, who CNN has confirmed remained in custody as of Friday.
In her final words in the video message, she made a simple call for help: “Don’t let us disappear from this world without clarity,” she said. “Don’t let us be taken away or convicted arbitrarily.”
