Exclusive-U.S. probe of beagle breeder Envigo scrutinizes top animal welfare officials' inaction

Owners of Envigo beagles meet up for a reunion in Charlottesville

Thu, March 9, 2023 
By Sarah N. Lynch and Rachael Levy

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top animal welfare officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) were subpoenaed last year by a federal grand jury seeking to establish why they took no action against animal research breeder Envigo, despite repeatedly documenting the mistreatment of thousands of beagles, according to several people familiar with the matter.

A deputy administrator of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Dr. Elizabeth Goldentyer, and its animal welfare operations director, Dr. Robert Gibbens, were ordered to appear before a grand jury in the Western District of Virginia as part of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) into Envigo, the sources said.

Envigo, a major U.S. animal research breeder, shuttered its Cumberland, Virginia facility last year after the Justice Department searched it and seized more than 4,000 beagles in May 2022. The company later settled civil charges alleging it had shown a “disregard” for the dogs’ welfare, and agreed to forfeit the beagles.

The Justice Department’s decision to subpoena government witnesses who would normally testify voluntarily to help build the government’s criminal case was highly unusual, according to a half-dozen legal and animal welfare experts.

The decision to exclude APHIS - the federal regulatory agency responsible for conducting compliance inspections at animal facilities across America - from the May 2022 search of the Envigo facility was also extraordinary, the experts said.

“That is not only unheard of, that is orders of magnitude out of normal,” said V. Wensley Koch, a retired 30-year veteran of APHIS.

Prosecutors asked Goldentyer and Gibbens, who appeared in November and August, respectively, about their management of the Envigo inspections and why they did not take any action against the company, despite the extensive documented evidence of violations, several of the sources said.

Reuters was not able to determine how they responded to the questions.

Spokespeople for the USDA and APHIS declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

Goldentyer and Gibbens declined to comment through an APHIS spokesperson, but in a previously unreported October letter to U.S. senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia, the agency said it had "worked diligently to improve animal welfare at Envigo."

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney's office for the Western District of Virginia declined to comment, as did the USDA inspector general's office.

To piece together a picture of how APHIS operates, Reuters relied on more than 800 pages of internal documents obtained through a public records request by the animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), public government watchdog reports, inspection records, and interviews with animal welfare experts.

The documents, which have not been previously published, show a sharp divide between top officials and inspectors over how to handle the litany of problems that successive inspections found at the Envigo facility over a period of months.

The inspectors wanted APHIS to take a tougher stance against the company for the mistreatment of the beagles.

It is too early to determine where the subpoenas will lead since the grand jury's primary goal is to determine whether to bring criminal charges against Envigo or its executives for animal welfare violations, obstruction of the USDA, making false statements and defrauding the United States, according to a court filing.

The subpoenas and the nature of the questions show that prosecutors are also investigating possible wrongdoing by APHIS leaders, including Goldentyer and Gibbens, several of the sources said.

The APHIS inspectors who documented dozens of violations at Envigo in 2021 and 2022 were also compelled last year to appear before the grand jury, where they were asked about possible flaws with the inspection process and were ordered to provide all records related to Envigo, according to sources who spoke anonymously because the matter is not public.

The actions by those inspectors are not under scrutiny, one of the sources added.

INTERNAL STRIFE

Between July 2021 and March 2022, inspectors documented more than 60 violations during four visits to Envigo's Cumberland facility, public records show. More than half were deemed "direct” or “critical" violations. Direct violations indicate an animal is facing immediate harm.

Problems included dangerous flooring, failing to provide veterinary care, unsanitary conditions, euthanizing dogs without anesthesia, under-feeding mothers nursing puppies and failing to document the cause of death for hundreds of puppies.

APHIS policy states that inspectors who find a "direct" violation must return for a follow-up inspection within 14 days.

Yet, this did not happen with any of the agency's inspections of Envigo, public records show.

APHIS leaders and inspectors sometimes disagreed about what details should be included in their reports and how resources should be deployed, emails show.

Lead inspector Rachel Perez-Baum asked APHIS leaders in September 2021 to increase staffing and send four or five inspectors for a planned October inspection due to problems such as "uncooperative facility management” and “poorly managed and incomplete records.”

But Gibbens and other APHIS leaders declined, saying in an email that due to “optics" and the risks of COVID-19, the team needed “to be limited to three.”

Her supervisor, Dana Miller, agreed with Perez-Baum, and made a final plea to send inspectors in pairs, after Envigo's staff “attempted to recant” their statements by claiming inspectors misunderstood them.

The three inspectors found more "direct" violations in the October inspection, public records show.

Perez-Baum and Miller declined to comment.

Daphna Nachminovitch, a senior vice president at PETA, warned APHIS that month about problems at Envigo following an undercover investigation by the animal rights group. She now says she believes the agency failed to do its job.

APHIS "must be held accountable for its failure to enforce the law," she said.

A spokesperson for biopharmaceutical company Inotiv, which acquired Envigo in November 2021, said the company is “fully cooperating” with the Justice Department and no longer sells or breeds dogs.

Envigo “places the highest priority on the welfare of the animals in our care and looks forward to an appropriate resolution of DOJ's ongoing investigation,” the spokesperson said, declining to discuss the probe or prior USDA inspections.

TENSIONS RISE

Tensions between Gibbens and Miller escalated shortly after Envigo appealed some of the findings from the October inspection, emails show.

Miller expressed concerns after learning that Gibbens and other appeal review team members planned to side with Envigo by striking two of four contested citations from the final report.

One removed citation faulted Envigo for interfering with the inspection by providing "false information" and ordered the company not to "interfere with, threaten, abuse ... or harass any APHIS official."

Gibbens told Envigo APHIS would strike the citation because the company ultimately provided the requested information.

Less than a year later, however, federal investigators told a judge they had probable cause to believe the company made false statements and obstructed the USDA in their search warrant application.

Reuters could not determine why APHIS never took action against Envigo, nor referred it to the Justice Department. APHIS has authority to confiscate animals, revoke or suspend licenses, and pursue fines through negotiated settlements or administrative proceedings.

Internal records show APHIS initiated a probe into Envigo in 2021. In early 2022, APHIS leaders discussed entering a civil settlement with Envigo, emails show, but no action was ever taken.

TEAM LEADER REMOVED

Tensions peaked between APHIS leaders and inspectors after a 107-page report from a third inspection in November 2021 was rescinded by APHIS managers, who ordered the inspection team to edit it down to 22 pages.

The move caused consternation among some inspectors and led several employees to file complaints to the USDA's inspector general, sources familiar with the matter said.

One of the complaints, seen by Reuters, alleged the report was cut after lawyers for Envigo contacted Deputy Administrator Goldentyer. Reuters was unable to determine why the report was trimmed.

While the final public report contains the same citations as the 107-page draft, it is missing many of the details to back them up, a comparison of the two documents show.

Among the cuts: graphic details about faulty euthanasia practices and detailed accounts of dog-fighting behavior deemed "extremely abnormal for the breed."

As inspectors prepared for another inspection last March, Miller emailed staff to tell them Goldentyer was removing her from supervising Envigo inspections. Miller said she was disappointed but offered no explanation.

“O.M.G,” inspector Kelly Maxwell responded in an email, adding that removing Miller was "pretty extreme."

Maxwell declined to comment.

The March 2022 inspection uncovered five violations, two of which were “direct.”

APHIS did not follow up until May 3, when inspectors cited Envigo for one violation: Failing to fix the dangerous flooring.

Two weeks later, federal agents executed the search warrant where they found 446 dogs in "acute distress" and in need of immediate veterinary treatment.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Rachael Levy in Washington, editing by Ross Colvin)

Turkish earthquake survivors reconsider election loyalty to Erdogan


A Turkish flag with the Bosphorus Bridge in the background flies 

on a passenger ferry in Istanbul

Tue, March 7, 2023
By Can Sezer and Jonathan Spicer

KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan could have relied on strong voter backing from Cigdemtepe and other villages and towns across southeast Turkey in the past, but a huge earthquake and a slow rescue response has made once loyal support more uncertain.

There are signs his AK Party (AKP) is increasingly aware that it cannot take past votes for granted, as officials talk of accelerating rebuilding plans before elections in May, which may prove the toughest of Erdogan's more than two decades in power.

"This whole village has voted AKP even though no one knows why," said a truck driver in Cigdemtepe, which is perched above cotton and garlic fields in Kahramanmaras province, a region where whole urban centres were destroyed.

"The earthquake definitely changes our opinion because the first responders and tents were very late to arrive," he said.

How big a challenge Erdogan faces is difficult to determine, given the lack of polling in the region. In addition, the opposition has dithered before finally agreeing on a candidate to challenge Erdogan, unsettling voters, while experts say those affected by the quake could swiftly change their minds.

But Reuters interviews with nearly 30 residents in the past week in Kahramanmaras, Adiyaman and Gaziantep - provinces where white tents dot the landscape of buckling or collapsed buildings - suggest political loyalties, even among once diehard Erdogan backers, are shifting.

"My mind is completely changed," said a student in rural Kahramanmaras, who like others was reluctant to give their name. "We breathe AKP here but this earthquake changed everything for us. These people don't know what they are doing."

The deadliest disaster in Turkey's modern history devastated cities and towns and killed tens of thousands of people a month ago, mostly in a conservative stronghold that has heavily backed Erdogan and the AKP for two decades.

While only a tiny sample of the 14 million people affected by the earthquakes in southeastern Turkey, the opinions of those interviewed shed light on how these mostly rural and working class voters could affect presidential and parliamentary polls.

Many resented years of permissive AKP construction policies that allowed up to eight-storey concrete apartments to be built - thousands of which were destroyed in the tremors.

Some were irked by what they saw as insensitive statements by political leaders including Erdogan, who asked for forgiveness last week for a response to the earthquake that could have been faster, while some others ridiculed the government's plan to rebuild the region in just a year.

But people also struggled to imagine voting for opposition parties and their newly-named candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

The AKP has ruled Turkey with little serious electoral challenge since 2002, and party insiders told Reuters they are aware of the anger among their voter base in the southeast but confident a combination of swift rebuilding and a confused opposition will deliver victory.

One party official said they would "re-direct" residents' focus to efforts to rebuild and stress no one but Erdogan could do this quickly. Another said they would showcase reconstruction in an area where 227,000 buildings collapsed or face demolition.

Pollsters have mostly avoided surveying those in the disaster zone, while national surveys found the AKP has maintained its support. They point to a tight election contest despite a cost-of-living crisis that had gripped Turks long before the magnitude 7.8 quake and aftershocks brought more criticism of the government.

UNCONVINCING OPPOSITION

The centrist opposition bloc finally on Monday named former civil servant Kilicdaroglu, leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP) since 2010, as its candidate.

The region voted 65% or more for the AKP and its nationalist ally the MHP in the last election in 2018. Many residents told Reuters that opposition parties were late to name a candidate and that they would only support one with nationalist roots, such as Ankara mayor Mansur Yavas - who is slated to be one of Kilicdaroglu's vice presidents should he win.

One construction materials trader in Adiyaman, a city of 650,000 whose downtown is a wasteland of crumbled concrete, laughed at the idea of Kilicdaroglu as president.

Umur, a young accountant in the city, said he intended to cast his first-ever ballot for the opposition but only if the candidate was "a low-profile and effective person like Yavas".

'NOT WISE TO HOLD ELECTIONS'

Officials briefly floated the idea of delaying elections - before backtracking and pressing ahead with a date of May 14, a decision some find hard to comprehend.

"It is not wise to hold elections in May. People hurt, we still hurt," said Mahmut, an insurance worker in the town of Besni, where after the quake he said he could hear his cousins under the rubble for two days before their voices stopped.

Erdogan's request for forgiveness had been poorly received, he said, adding he normally votes for the MHP.

"There are many who want to vote for the opposition...and I could too, but I wouldn't vote for Kilicdaroglu because he has not won a single election," he said.

Mehmet, 52, a construction subcontractor living with his wife and child in a tent in Adiyaman, said "everyone" votes for Erdogan as president and he would too, but he would punish the AKP party by voting for the MHP.

Mehmet Ali Kulat, chairman of MAK polling company, said based on previous earthquakes survivors tend to blame the government at first, then later back whomever rebuilds homes.

There are only about 55 buildings in Igdeli, where villagers erected their own tents and intend to rebuild themselves.

"The government of the past 20 years is not working for the people," said 70-year old farmer Mehmet. "I don't believe the opposition is up to the task either. But we need fundamental change."

(Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun in Ankara; Writing by Jonathan Spicer, Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

Pakistani police probe officers over women’s march violence

Activists from the group 'Women Democratic Front' take part in a rally to mark International Women's Day, in Lahore, Pakistan, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. The day officially recognized by the United Nations in 1977, is celebrated around the world on March 8. 

(AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary) 

Thu, March 9, 2023

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani police are investigating officers after violence at a march to mark International Women's Day in Islamabad, a spokesman said Thursday. Three constables have been suspended from duty for misusing their authority.

Hundreds of people gathered in a central area of the city to mark the occasion on Wednesday, amid tight security. Organizers said the event was aimed at seeking rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Some conservative groups last year threatened to stop similar marches by force.

The demonstrators faced strong resistance from police, who charged at them with batons as they tried to enter the rally area, which was blocked off by shipping containers.

“The constables involved in the baton charge have been suspended from their duties on charges of misuse of authority,” Islamabad police spokesman Taqi Jawad said.

There was no official order to use force against rally-goers, and the officers involved in the violence “acted in the heat of the moment,” he said.

The inspector general of Islamabad Police, Akbar Nasir Khan, has ordered an inquiry into three constables and there is an investigation to see if more officers were involved in the violence. A report will be submitted in the coming days, according to Jawad.

Islamabad police apologized Wednesday to the women’s march protesters for the "unacceptable use of violence." It said police stood in solidarity with the rally participants and their struggle for the protection of women’s rights.

Academic and gender studies expert Dr. Farzana Bari, one of the protest’s main organizers, condemned the violence.

She suffered scratches to the face and a ligament injury to the hand after being pushed by police onto barbed wire.

She said officers failed to protect women on the internationally observed day.

“Police baton-charged us and two transgender people who suffered injuries were shifted to hospital due to bleeding,” she told The Associated Press. “The police earlier issued us warnings to call off the march in view of the possible attacks by religious fanatics, however (they) indulged in violence themselves.”

In the eastern city of Lahore, Punjab Police on Wednesday registered a case against former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s political party after one of his supporters died at a rally. The case is based on a complaint about the death.

Police used water cannons and fired tear gas to disperse Khan’s supporters, with more than 40 arrested for defying a government ban on holding rallies in the city.

Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI, blamed the police for the death of its activist in the security crackdown near the former premier’s house in an upscale part of Lahore.

A spokesman for Punjab police Agha Ehtesham denied Thursday that officers were responsible for the death. He blamed the casualty on stone-throwing protesters.

The inspector general of Punjab Police, Dr. Usman Anwar, has set up an inquiry committee to investigate the matter, said Ehtesham.

—-

Associated Press writer Babar Dogar contributed to this report from Lahore, Pakistan.

How Japanese electric car makers took wrong turns while China plotted to rule the roads

Howard Mustoe
Wed, March 8, 2023 

Workers perform an inspection on a completed Haval F7 crossover sport utility vehicle (SUV) - Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

When they were asked to jump-start the UK’s ailing car industry in the 1980s, Japanese car makers helped turn an industry marred by strikes and unpopular vehicles back into an export market for the UK, bringing faster and more efficient car building methods.

Toyota and Nissan still build thousands of cars in the UK, and brought some of the first hybrid and battery-powered cars to British motorists with the Prius and Leaf.

But now signs are emerging that the giant car makers are starting to struggle with the global push to electrification, particularly Toyota, which has long resisted the move.

As recently as December, executives at the company were wavering over the push to battery-powered cars, with Akio Toyoda, the company's president and grandson of its founder Kiichiro Toyoda insisting that a “silent majority” of car companies is concerned that electric vehicles will not alone be able to end reliance on fossil fuels.

Former president of Japanese automaker Toyota, Akio Toyoda - BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP via Getty Images

Mr Toyoda steps aside at the end of this month in favour of Koji Sato.

Mr Sato has promised to jump-start the company’s electrification after the company spent years touting its hybrid Prius as the answer to decarbonisation, together with the long-term plan of using hydrogen, a strategy not matched by rival car companies.

Meanwhile, Nissan’s problems are more financial. Yesterday, its credit rating was cut to junk status by S&P Global, which said profits will come under pressure in another tough year for the carmaker.

Yet Japan’s car makers are still large and profitable. Nissan returned to profit last year with a surplus of 385bn yen (£2.37bn) after two years of losses. Toyota made a pre-tax profit of 3.99 trillion yen and Honda booked 1.07 trillion yen.

The country is number two in global rankings in car production and it has maintained its place since 2019.

But challenges from close neighbour China and other rising electric car makers are on the horizon.

Production dipped from 8.3m in 2019 to 6.6m in 2021, a loss of 21pc, much less than major European competitor Germany’s 34pc fall in the same period.

But at the same time, Chinese production held steady at 21m from 2019 to 2021, according to the latest figures gathered by the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers.

And no Japanese car maker is in the top-20 electric car makers, a list topped by Tesla, relative newcomer BYD, which is Chinese, and Volkswagen, according to Bloomberg data.

Nissan’s Leaf is a popular car in the UK and when it was launched more than a decade ago, the company had much of the battery-powered market to itself.

A charging cable is attached to a Nissan Leaf electric car - REUTERS/Edgar Su/File Photo

In the fuel-efficient hybrid arena, Toyota’s Prius has dominated for more than 20 years. But the carmakers have not capitalised on this lead.

In the EV market in the UK, the Leaf was the fifth-best seller, beaten by the Volkswagen ID.3, the Kia e-Niro And Teslas Model 3 and Y.

Former Nissan boss and Leaf backer Carlos Ghosn told Bloomberg in January that the company “lost its early-mover advantage” in the technology, although he made the comments after dodging an arrest warrant in Japan over financial misconduct at the car firm, charges he denies from his hideout in Lebanon.

Early efforts at rival Toyota have not run entirely smoothly. Last year in the US, Toyota launched its first mainstream battery car in the US, the BZ4X SUV. Toyota has now fixed the problem, but early buyers were told to return their cars to dealers because the wheels could fall off.

The companies must avoid the kind of malaise they were key to ending in the 1980s, when Toyota, Honda and Nissan set up factories in the UK, says Prof David Bailey, a car industry expert at Birmingham University.

“Toyota got its strategy badly wrong in terms of hybrid short term, hydrogen long term. They're now having to reorientate pretty quickly towards pure EVs,” he said, while Nissan must reinvigorate its relationship with partner firm Renault to seize the day, he said.

Renault and Nissan formed an alliance in the wake of the French company’s rescue of its Japanese partner, with a view to sharing costs which never quite got going, says Bailey.

The pair recently renewed this arrangement, evening out the shareholdings they have in each other and promising closer cooperation.

But China looms as a challenger to the firms, with dozens of car brands eyeing Toyota, Honda and Nissan’s markets, including the UK.

Up to 30 new electric vehicle brands are eyeing up the UK car market, most of them Chinese, according to an industry report seen in January by The Telegraph.

They are particularly interested in the cheaper end of the market, preparing to sell mass market battery-powered cars to Britain. This is a field being vacated by many western incumbents as they pursue more affluent and profitable motorists.

Visitors look at BYD ATTO 3 electric cars on display at the EV Station on the first day of the Bangkok EV Expo 2023 - DIEGO AZUBEL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Companies like BYD and Ora, which already have agreements in place with UK dealers, will be joined by a raft of other car makers including Chery, Dongfeng and Haval, a pattern likely to be repeated elsewhere.

While China is still making more than 21m cars a year, domestic demand is stalling and the country’s access to lithium supply and processing means it can undercut the competition.

“China is going to set the global standard in terms of making cheap electric cars. So unless the Japanese industry, US industry, the European industry adapts quickly, I think that the mass car industry risks being wiped out by the Chinese in terms of cheap electric cars,” says Bailey.

Yet the advantages Nissan, Toyota and Honda brought to European and US car buyers 40 years ago should not be forgotten, says Bailey, especially in an era where if consumers are paying more for cars – which they are – they will demand durability as well as economy.

“That big trump card I think for all of them is quality,” says Bailey.

New electric brands like Tesla and Polestar have made exciting cars to drive, but their fast development has led to teething issues.

Last year, US data company JD Power said new vehicle quality fell 11pc in 2022, led by Polestar, while Tesla was seventh from the bottom when it came to problems per 100 vehicles.

Japanese car makers have time to catch up with them, if they seize the chance, said Bailey.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; BIG PHARMA

Poisonous cough syrup killed 300 children across the world – officials fear more could soon die

Samaan Lateef
Wed, March 8, 2023 

Safitri Puspa Rani cries as she holds a picture of her late son Panghegar Bhumi in Jakarta. The boy died from fatal acute kidney injury days after a doctor prescribed him cough syrup linked to more than 200 child deaths in Indonesia 

- BAY ISMOYO/AFP via Getty Images

International investigators probing the fatal poisoning of 300 young children with deadly cough syrup fear the lethal ingredient may still be circulating in global supply chains.

There is frustration that authorities in India, where two separate batches of the syrups came from, are putting the country’s commercial interests above patient safety by withholding vital information.

It is understood that the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Substandard and Falsified Medical Products team has yet to receive any data or documents collected by Indian officials investigating the production of cough syrup at Marion Biotech – one of two Indian pharmaceuticals embroiled in the scandal.

This is despite products made by the company being linked to the deaths of 20 children in Uzbekistan and the WHO appealing to the Indian authorities for information.

“We would have expected and hoped for a much quicker response from the Indian authorities,” said a source close to the WHO investigation.

Getting information about the manufacturing companies involved is vital so it can be understood whether or not there are tainted or mislabeled raw ingredients circulating in international supply chains, which could be used by other manufacturers unwittingly.

“This is the nightmare scenario,” said the source. “If we don’t get to the bottom of this, it could pop up again later.”

A photograph shows collected cough syrups in Banjul, The Gambia 

- MILAN BERCKMANS/AFP via Getty Images

The cough syrup deaths, which occurred in Uzbekistan, the Gambia and Indonesia, have become the biggest tainted medicine scandal since contaminated cough syrup killed 365 people in Panama in 2006.

The latest disaster has seen hundreds of small children – most of them under five – die of kidney failure after being given over-the-counter cough syrups by their parents.

In each case, there has been confirmed or suspected contamination of the medicines with solvents called diethylene glycol (DEG) or ethylene glycol (EG).

These chemicals can be toxic in even small amounts, initially causing abdominal pain, headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea and acute kidney damage that often proves fatal.

Penny Ward, a visiting professor in pharmaceutical medicine at King’s College London, said initial gastrointestinal symptoms “can be overlooked or put down to other causes in countries where such problems are often seen in children.”

“Hence these kids then present in the later phases when renal failure has occurred and … [by then] it may be too late,” she added.

In the UK and other developed countries, it is rare for children to die in these circumstances, not only because drug regulation is stronger, but because dialysis and transplantation are available.

But in those nations where such services are hard to access, such as the Gambia or Uzbekistan, poisoning of this type can be terribly drawn out, eventually culminating in a painful death.

‘He fell into a coma and died’

Ebrima Sagnia, from Old Yundum in Gambia, west Africa, witnessed his two-year-old son Lamin die over five heart wrenching days in September last year.

He had given the little boy syrup purchased at a local pharmacy because he was feeling out of sorts.

But after being given the medicine, Lamin’s condition worsened and he didn’t appear to be passing urine. He was taken to hospital but doctors found his kidneys had failed.

“They said they suspect the cause of the kidney failure is due to the paracetamol syrup that we gave him,” Mr Sagnia told the Telegraph. “My child eventually died in the hospital after being admitted for five days.”

Gambia’s parliament estimates at least 70 children died in the country of cough syrup poisoning between June 4 and November 6 last year.

An inquiry concluded “all the cases of acute kidney injury are linked to the consumption of the contaminated medical products imported” from India.

Riski Agri holds a bottle of cough syrup consumed by his Farrazka at their house in Jakarta. The five-year-old underwent dialysis for his failing kidneys after he took the medicine - BAY ISMOYO/AFP via Getty Images

Five thousand miles away in the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan, another 20 children died in frighteningly similar circumstances.

Jasur Lafasov’s 18-month-old son, Ilhom Khayrullaev, passed away just after Christmas.

The toddler had developed a nasty cough and the local doctor prescribed cough syrup. Initially the cough improved but he then fell ill and stopped passing urine.

“On December 28, after work I went to see my son and his condition improved a little”, said Mr Lafasov. “He looked at me when I called his name. After that, he fell into a coma and died on the same day.”

Tests showed his kidneys and liver had both failed. Doctors at the hospital in Karshi said he had been poisoned by the cough syrup – again imported from India.

The third country to record deaths is Indonesia, where as many as 200 children have died.

Tainted cough syrups have also recently turned up in Senegal, Philippines, and East Timor, according to the WHO, although no deaths have yet been reported.
Spotlight on ‘the world’s pharmacy’

It is not known, but investigators suspect that some or all of the poisoning cases may be connected.

Respectable pharmaceutical manufacturers rigorously test the raw materials they purchase for toxins and they also test samples of their finished medicines.

This should be enforced by regulation in the country of manufacture but it is evident that it does not always happen.

“The international system pharmaceutical market works on the principle of reliance,” said an expert close to the WHO. A regulator in one country should be able to rely on the checks and assessments made by regulators in other WHO member states. If this doesn’t happen, the system starts to break down.

“This situation we have now is putting the system of reliance within the WHO under stress,” the source added.

The first Indian firm in the spotlight is Maiden Pharmaceuticals, which is based in the northern state of Haryana. It manufactured the syrup medicine that has been blamed for the deaths in Gambia.

Only last month two of its executives were sentenced to two-and-half years in jail for exporting substandard drugs to Vietnam a decade ago.

“This court has come to the conclusion that the complainant/prosecution has duly proved the charge ... beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt,” the judge, Sanjeev Arya, told the court.

A member of the Gambian Red Cross looks through sacks of seized cough syrups in Banjul - MILAN BERCKMANS/AFP via Getty Images)

Despite its track record, the Indian authorities allowed Maiden to continue to trade and to export products internationally, including to Gambia.

Officials only launched an investigation into the company after four of its medicines exported to Gambia (Promethazine Oral Solution, Kofexmalin Baby Cough Syrup, Makoff Baby Cough Syrup and Magrip N Cold Syrup) were found by the WHO to be contaminated.

India’s drug watchdog, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), said it found multiple violations of good manufacturing practices and testing at Maiden but then claimed that the cough syrups themselves were clean.

This is despite independent laboratories in Switzerland, Ghana, and France all finding high levels of toxins in the syrups taken by the Gambian children.

“The Indian government has taken an appalling position of shielding the company rather than doing a transparent and thorough investigation of the international incident,” said Malini Asoila, of the All India Drug Action Network (AIDAN), a patients’ rights campaign group.

Despite India boasting of having become “the world’s pharmacy” due to the scale of its medicines exports, it is unclear if useful information will ever be recovered from Maiden.

When the Indian regulator visited the company in the wake of the Gambia deaths, inspectors found the premises were undergoing “renovation”.

Equipment used for manufacturing and testing cough syrups was alleged to have gone missing. And key information on batch numbers and manufacturing and expiry dates could not be found, according to a report seen by the Telegraph.

The inspectors wrote: “Complete plant is found under renovation. The firm failed to produce the log books of equipments and instruments regarding manufacturing and testing for the drugs in question.”

Police is seen at the gate of an office of Marion Biotech, a healthcare and pharmaceutical company and a part of the Emenox Group, whose cough syrup has been linked to the deaths of children in Uzbekistan, in Noida, India - Anushree Fadnavis/REUTERS

The second Indian company caught up in the scandal is Marion Biotech, which operates out of Uttar Pradesh, a state in the north. The WHO said two of its medicines, Ambronol syrup and DOK-1 Max syrup, were found to have unacceptable levels of EG and or DEG after the deaths in Uzbekistan.

Last month the firm told the government of Uttar Pradesh that it was being blamed for the deaths in Uzbekistan “to malign the image of India and the company”.

However, three Marion Biotech employees have since been arrested after Indian government testing found that 22 out of 36 cough syrup samples taken from the company contained EG and DEG.

This includes samples of drugs which were exported to Uzbekistan and consumed there, said Vaibhav Babbar, an inspector involved in the Marion probe.

“Because Marion’s drugs have gone to so many countries, I pray nothing happens elsewhere,” he told Reuters on Saturday. “The health ministry could issue an alert. They may do it. It will be good to issue an alert.”

A senior police officer involved in the arrests told local reporters: “These people were engaged in preparation and sale of fake drugs which caused serious harm to the public.

“Besides three suspects who have been arrested, there are two more directors of the company for whom searches are underway and they will be also arrested soon.”

The WHO is understood not to have received any information from the Indian authorities about the company despite asking for information.

“This has been going on for several months now and we are still struggling to find the contaminated material,” said the expert source.

Appealing for assistance from regulators globally, they added: “What we have is a spider’s web …. we have hundreds of deaths.”

While Marion Biotech and Maiden Pharmaceuticals have been linked to the deaths in Gambia and Uzbekistan, the fatalities in Indonesia have been tied to local companies.

The WHO and Indonesian authorities issued recall warnings in November for cough syrups made by four Indonesian manufacturers: PT Yarindo Farmatama; PT Universal Pharmaceutical; PT Konimex; and PT AFI Pharma.

The Indonesian companies involved have either denied that their products have been contaminated or declined to comment while investigations are ongoing.

But a lawyer for PT Universal Pharmaceutical Industries, Hermansyah Hutagalung, last month blamed the firm’s suppliers.

“Chase the suppliers, they’re the real criminals,” he said at the time. “They’re the ones that forge raw ingredients by falsifying raw ingredient documents all the way to pharmaceutical companies.”
‘Culprits must be punished’

The recent tragedies in Gambia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia are far from unique. Mass medicine poisonings involving DEG or EG contamination have a history going back nearly a century.

The first was in the United States in 1937 when DEG was used as a solvent in a liquid antibiotic, killing 100 people – a third of them children. The catastrophe ultimately led to the creation of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Yet in the last 30 years alone, there have been similar poisonings in Panama, China, Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria, and India.

The problem is not typically caused by the active pharmaceutical molecules in medicines, say experts, but with the industrially-produced chemicals used to bulk up and stabilise the medicinal mixture, such as glycerine and propylene glycol.

These solvents can be contaminated, or even totally replaced, with DEG which has similar chemical properties. This can happen either through mislabeled products, human error or intentional adulteration.

Smita Salunke, chief scientific officer with the European Paediatric Formulation Initiative (EuPFI), which works to make children’s medicines better and safer, told the Telegraph that DEG-contaminated glycerine had been responsible for many previous poisoning incidents.

parents of children, who they alleged were either killed or left sickened by tainted cough syrups, attend a hearing as part of a lawsuit at the South Jakarta district court, while wearing black shirts reading "I thought it was medicine, it was poison" to the court - GEMMA CAHYA/AFP via Getty Images

“Similar chemical properties of glycerine, propylene glycol and DEG make it possible for DEG to be passed as counterfeit chemicals deliberately or sometimes accidently,” she said.

Naresh Goyal, director of Maiden Pharmaceuticals, told the Telegraph he thought suppliers should be investigated for possible contamination.

He said: “There might be some intermediate which has come and is used by the companies. This may be one reason for the contamination, possibly.

“We are getting a quantity of 20 or 50 drums of propylene glycol and we are not testing every drum. We are testing the batches. It is possible that a contaminated batch has come which has been used somewhere.”

India’s drug regulator is reported to be investigating whether propylene glycol and glycerine used in the manufacture of cough syrup at Maiden might have been the source of the EG or DEG contamination.

The WHO last month also advised cough syrup manufacturers to check contamination in a number of ingredients, including propylene glycol and glycerine.

“The key question is this: Is the contaminated product in the supply chain or is it a simple substitution or accident?” said the expert source close to the WHO.

Enforcing standards in India’s drug industry can prove especially challenging due to the shadowy nexus of corrupt drug officials and pharmaceutical companies that has emerged within the country.

“Across India, there are drug officials who help the pharma companies to push through the substandard or fake medicines. The government needs to increase surveillance and monitoring systems,” a retired senior government drug official told The Telegraph.

“Culprits must be punished in faster ways so that no one can think of compromising the quality of drugs,” said Dr GN Singh, a former drugs controller general. “There is laxity on part of the whole system.”

Maiden Pharmaceuticals, Marion Biotech, India’s Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, and the Indian health ministry were all approached for comment but did not respond.

Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security

How flowers show climate change impacts as Spring 2023 arrives 'earlier than we’ve ever seen' in some places

Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA TODAY
Thu, March 9, 2023 

Daffodils, violets and other flowers are arriving early in many gardens and fields this spring, unfurling lovely colors and shedding light on how plants are adapting to climate change.

Observers are reporting very early leaf outs of the common lilac in Pennsylvania, the brilliant yellow blossoms of forsythia in Maine and American witch hazel in New York, said Theresa Crimmins, director of the USA National Phenology Network at the University of Arizona.

Ecologist Matt Austin examined more than 140 years of pressed flowers and plants in the Missouri Botanical Garden collection to track how violets changed over time. He found the flowers — widely known as one of the first harbingers of spring — are responding to both increased rainfall and warmer temperatures.

Recent studies in China, Canada and the Himalayas also show earlier starts to spring seasons.

Daffodils peek through the snow in Vermont in early March 2023.

When is spring? Flower blooms come early this year

Spring officially starts March 20, 2023, although meteorologists define spring as March, April, and May. However, signs of spring like flower blooms and warmer weather can show up even earlier — and this year they did.

Spring is early across much of the United States, Crimmins said, “but it’s arriving in certain locations earlier than we’ve ever seen it arrive in the 40 years that we have data where we’re tracking things.”

The Network's Nature’s Notebook program gathers information from observers across the nation, who have helped amass more than 30 million records since 2009, Crimmins said.

"This year, a really mild winter has been followed by persistent warm temperatures," she said. "The earlier springs really stand out in places like New York City.”

These early blooming and budding plants and trees cause allergies earlier in the year and are disrupting years of synchronicity between pollinators and plants that need them for reproduction, she said.

DEFINITIONS: Is climate change the same thing as global warming? Definitions explained.

CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSES: Why scientists say humans are to blame

What does historical data say?

One historical data set from New York state in the 1800s compared with modern records revealed how plants are changing there statewide.

Researchers found a majority of the species in that historical data are flowering and leafing out earlier, according to a 2022 paper Crimmins helped co-author with Kerissa Fuccillo Battle of the Community Greenways Collaborative and others. Plants flowered an average of 10.5 days earlier and leafed out 19 days earlier than in the 1800s data.

GRAPHICS: Spring arrives weeks early, bringing sniffling and sneezing to allergy sufferers

Here's why scientists say the plants are changing:

The New York study found leafing and blooming associated with a warming trend in mean January-to-April average temperatures.

January was the warmest on record for seven states in the Northeast, and among the top 10 warmest for 20 others states, federal officials said.

In February, temperatures at 192 reporting stations in the nation averaged 3.5 degrees above normal, according to federal data provided by Climate Central.

Last year was one of the warmest years on record in the U.S. and around the globe.

A common blue violet, Viola sororia, blooms in Missouri. The plants produce showier blossoms than they used to, in part because climate change is bringing more rainfall.

Why are violets blooming earlier?

Records show warmer temperatures are bringing more rain in the eastern half of the United States.

Common blue violets are making the most of that, producing showier blooms, said Austin, an ecologist at Washington University in St. Louis and the botanical garden.

Common blue violets are a great research subject, Austin said, because they use two different kinds of reproduction: cross pollination — where they produce wide open, showy blooms that rely on pollinators to transfer their pollen between plants — and self pollination — with smaller flowers that remain in a bud-like stage tucked near the base of the plant.

CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS: What are the effects of climate change? How they disrupt our daily life, fuel disasters.

To learn more about how violets were changing, he looked at herbarium records of violets in Missouri that contained an entire dried plant, from the roots up, dating back to 1875.

He found violets today producing more of the open, showy flowers compared to smaller self-pollinating flowers. Comparing plant records and annual rainfall and temperature, he concluded the increase in showier blooms is linked to increased rainfall, with an interacting effect of temperature.

A Racemosum Mountain rhododendron is shown on Yulong Mountain in China, where Robbie Hart, an ethnobotanist with the Missouri Botanical Garden, did field work to examine the impacts of the changing climate on plants and the people who rely on them.

Plants moving higher

Robbie Hart, an ethnobotanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden works with a team that studies plants in parts of the Himalayas, where plants are creeping toward higher elevations.

"If climate change warms the entire mountain, it’s shifting elevational ranges upward for many plants, which means the highest elevation plants may not have anywhere to go because there’s no more mountain at the top," Hart said. Some plants bloom earlier, others bloom later.

Such changes affect the lives of Indigenous people in mountainous regions around the world, who rely on plants for their livelihoods, medicinal herbs, food and incense, he said. “When climate change affects (the plants), it's affecting people through the entire landscape."

He and other researchers want to learn more about the cues that trigger a plant to unfurl petals, open a leaf or germinate a seed.

As Hart studied rhododendrons, he learned they create a flower in a little closed bud the year before, then hold on to it, waiting to accumulate a certain period of cool temperatures before flowering the next spring.

Some mechanism keeps the buds closed until it’s really springtime, he said. When that cue is missed, rather than flowering early in a warmer year, it flowers later.

Rhododendron racemosum decorating a spring sacred to the Naxi Indigenous Himalayan people of Southwestern China during a springtime festival.

Dig deeper:

Fly fishing: Climate change puts a different spin on fly fishing for once-skeptical anglers


Uncertain future: Climate change affecting Northeast maple trees, maple syrup season


Flower and fruit festivals: As climate change disrupts historic weather patterns, festivals forced to adapt

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Early spring 2023: Flower blooms show climate change impact

Business backlash pushing GOP to weaken anti-ESG proposals

Eric Stafford, a veteran lobbyist for the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, watches a Kansas Senate committee hearing on a bill aimed at preventing state funds from being invested using environmental, social or governance principles, Tuesday, March 7, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. The chamber opposed the toughest version of the bill and became neutral when Republican lawmakers made it milder, but Stafford is still telling lawmakers that it violates free market principles. 

(AP Photo/John Hanna)

JOHN HANNA and TOM DAVIES
Thu, March 9, 2023

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Conservative Republicans who want to thwart socially and environmentally conscious investing are now being pushed to water down their proposals after backlash from powerful business groups and fears that state pension systems could see huge losses.

In both Kansas and Indiana, where the GOP has legislative supermajorities, bankers associations and state chambers of commerce criticized the strongest versions of anti-ESG legislation currently under consideration as anti-free market.

In Kansas, their opposition prompted a Senate committee's chair to drop the toughest version of its bill — applying anti-ESG rules to firms handling private investments — before hearings began this week. The Kansas committee was slated to vote Thursday but could postpone action on a milder version of an anti-ESG bill after the head of the state pension system for teachers and government workers warned that it could see $3.6 billion in losses over 10 years if the bill were passed.

And last month, legislative researchers in Indiana reported that its pension system expected the first version of a House bill to cost the system $6.7 billion over 10 years, prompting lawmakers to rewrite it before the chamber passed it.

ESG stands for environmental, social and governance and those factors' increased use in investing in recent years inspired GOP attempts to thwart it. Now, those efforts are riling groups long allied with Republicans in backing less government regulation.

"This is the underlying political nature of this,” said Bryan McGannon, acting CEO and managing director for US SIF: The Forum for Responsible and Sustainable Investment. “They really aren’t thinking about the consequences of the kind of the real world impacts of what this means in the financial system.”

About one-eighth of U.S. assets being professionally managed, or $8.4 trillion, are being managed in line with ESG principles, according a report in December from US SIF, which promotes sustainable investing.

At least seven states, including Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia, have enacted anti-ESG laws in the past two years. GOP Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Gianforte of Montana also have moved to ensure their states' funds aren't invested using ESG principles.

Critics of ESG contend that using investments to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels, address gun violence or protect abortion rights sacrifices earnings for investors and undercuts the finances of public pensions.

“The agent who is representing or investing on behalf of the principal has a fiduciary duty to put the principal’s interest over the agent’s interest,” Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a conservative Republican, told the state Senate committee this week. “That principle is such a such a core of American law.”

Anti-ESG efforts also draw support from companies and industries that feel under attack, such as oil and natural gas producers. During an Indiana House committee hearing last month, lawmakers heard a litany of complaints from businesses, including those in coal mining and firearms production, about difficulties they blame on corporate ESG policies.

“This is, again, a social agenda chasing something that they shouldn't be chasing,” Kansas Senate committee Chair Mike Thompson, a Kansas City-area Republican who labels ESG investments as “potentially dangerous.”

Public pension funds are caught in the debate as big institutional investors: The Kansas system has $25 billion in assets and Indiana's has $45 billion. NASRA, the association representing U.S. state pension fund administrators, opposes any move — including on either side of the ESG debate — away from making the security of pension fund assets "the paramount goal.”

In Kansas, Thompson scrambled Wednesday to set up behind-the-scenes talks to address the state pension system's concerns.

Its executive director, Alan Conroy, testified that Kansas lawmakers' current proposals are so broad that the state pension system couldn't hire or retain an investment manager who did “anything in that ESG world." The pension system would have to fire them all, hire new ones and likely settle for lower investment returns, he said.

Similar concerns played out in Indiana, but the pension system there backed off its figure for estimated losses after House members revised their bill.

Supporters say ESG isn't about boycotting certain industries or companies but of doing a better job assessing future risks, such as costs from major accidents or pollution, or a diminishing local water supply. They argue that considering such factors is part of an investment manager's obligation to get the best returns possible.

“The free market is trying to create a better risk-assessment framework, more comprehensive,” said Zack Pistora, a Sierra Club lobbyist in Kansas.

In Kansas, the bankers and credit union association and the state Chamber of Commerce went from opposing the tougher version of the anti-ESG legislation to being neutral on all or most of its milder cousin. In Indiana, the state chamber endorsed the more limited version.

Eric Stafford, a veteran Kansas Chamber of Commerce lobbyist, said free markets will make corrections if ESG investing provides lesser returns. And Alex Orel, a lobbyist for the Kansas Bankers Association, worried about a political "pendulum.”

He said: “You swing too far to the right, you swing back and it hits you right in the face.”

___

Davies reported from Indianapolis.

 

Kansas state Sen. Mike Thompson, R-Shawnee, confers with Jason Long, an attorney on the Kansas Legislature's bill drafting staff before a meeting of the Senate committee Thompson chairs, Tuesday, March 7, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. Thompson is leading an effort to prevent the state from investing its funds using environmental, social or governance principles. (AP Photo/John Hanna)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

Alan Conroy, executive director of the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System, testifies before a Kansas House committee about a bill that would prevent the pension system from doing socially conscious ESG investing, Wednesday, March 8, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. Conroy says proposals before the Legislature would force KPERS to fire all of its investment managers and hire new ones and create $3.6 billion in losses over 10 years. (AP Photo/John Hanna)

 

Kansas state Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, D-Wichita, asks a question during a Kansas Senate committee hearing on a bill aimed at preventing state funds from being invested using ESG principles, Wednesday, March 8, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/John Hanna)

   

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach follows a Kansas Senate committee hearing on a proposal to prevent the state from investing funds using ESG principles, Tuesday, March 7, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. ESG stands for environmental, social and governance, and conservative Republicans like Kobach are trying to block it across the U.S. (AP Photo/John Hanna)

No one believed the Covid Wuhan lab leak theory – then the world changed its tune

Sarah Knapton
Wed, March 8, 2023



When Covid-19 first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, many pointed out that the outbreak was close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Of all the cities in the world, a deadly coronavirus had popped up just eight miles from laboratories where scientists were importing and tinkering with deadly bat coronaviruses.

Even Wuhan scientists themselves were concerned. Dr Shi Zhengli, WIV virologist, told Scientific American that she remembered thinking if coronaviruses were behind the outbreak “could they have come from our lab?”

It should not have been so controversial. Laboratory leaks are fairly common, with smallpox, swine flu, anthrax, and foot and mouth disease all known to have escaped from facilities in recent decades.

In 2004, the Sars virus leaked from a high-containment research laboratory in Beijing at least three times, causing local outbreaks - so such a scenario was far from unprecedented.

Behind the scenes, international scientists were also worried. The virus had come out of nowhere, seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans, and no intermediary host could be found.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, in February 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security laboratory.

The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, of the US National Institutes of Health, said that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

Sir Jeremy warned that research in Wuhan was like the “Wild West”, with experiments carried out at worrying biosecurity levels.

But Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, argued that further debate on the subject could damage “international harmony”. The comment would come to typify why it has been so difficult to get to the bottom of the origins of Covid.

As Matt Hancock’s original biography drafts show, the world was terrified of upsetting China.

Over the next few months, scientists did what they could to steer investigations away from a laboratory leak, pushing journals to publish letters and papers that dismissed concerns as “conspiracy theories”.

Only in the US was the possibility being seriously considered, where Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, argued there was “enormous evidence” that the virus had leaked from Wuhan.

In May 2020, US intelligence discovered there had been an emergency shutdown at WIV in October 2019, coupled with a suspicious fall in mobile phone activity.

But the political gulf between the Trump administration and most scientists led to the allegations being disparaged as anti-Chinese racism.

When an investigation by the World Health Organisation concluded that the virus had most likely jumped from animals to humans in a zoonotic spillover event, the case seemed closed.

In fact, it was not until Mr Trump left office in January 2021 that the tide began to turn and slowly scientists put their heads above the parapet.

In a letter to the journal Science in May 2021, 18 of the world’s top epidemiologists and geneticists from institutions including Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford universities called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the pandemic.

By that time, a collective of virologists and hackers had also found evidence showing that Wuhan scientists had been tweaking bat coronaviruses to make them more deadly - and doing so with funding from the US government.

In 2010, WIV embarked on “gain of function experiments” to increase the infectiousness of Sars coronavirus in humans. By 2015, Wuhan scientists had created a highly infectious chimeric virus that targeted the human upper respiratory tract.

In 2018 and 2019, grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US showed that Dr Zhengli had applied to work on “virus infection experiments in humanised mice” using Sars coronaviruses - to find out what changes could lead to a spillover event into humans.

As Harvard scientist Alina Chan told MPs at the House of Commons science and technology select committee: “You find these scientists who said in early 2018: ‘I’m going to put horns on horses,’ and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city.”

Freedom of Information requests also revealed that under the US-China Predict project, Wuhan researchers collected bat coronaviruses from China and south-east Asia. These were sent to various laboratories hundreds of miles away for “sequencing”, “archiving”, “analysis” and “manipulation”.

WIV had collected more than 220 Sars-related coronaviruses, at least 100 of which were never made public. Members of staff were also photographed wearing inadequate levels of personal protective equipment while handing bats.

But to date, Beijing has failed to disclose much of the work that was happening and removed a database of viral sequences shortly before the pandemic erupted.
Bombshell admission

By the summer of 2021, US intelligence had also discovered that three researchers at WIV had sought treatment at a hospital after falling ill in November 2019 - weeks before China told the world about Covid.

Then in August 2021, the head of the WHO’s pandemic origins investigation made the bombshell admission that he had been pressured into ruling out a laboratory leak to avoid arguments with China.

Dr Peter Embarek said it was actually a “likely hypothesis” that a laboratory employee could have picked up the virus while working in the field and brought it back to Wuhan.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, was forced to admit that a laboratory leak had been ruled out prematurely and set up a new inquiry to examine the origins of the pandemic.

More than 18 months on, that inquiry has gone nowhere, with members complaining they have been stonewalled by China. In response, Beijing claims the inquiries are politically motivated and has even suggested the pandemic may have begun in the US.

Last October, a US Senate committee concluded that the Covid-19 pandemic was “more likely than not” the result of a laboratory accident and told China it would need to prove otherwise.

And last week Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, said that the bureau believes Covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese laboratory. A US energy department report released in February also came to the same conclusion.

A US House of Representatives sub-committee hearing on the pandemic origins opened on Wednesday in the latest attempt to get to the truth.

Yet China continues to dig in its heels and, without access to its laboratories and records, investigations are now at an impasse.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, believes that if any evidence existed, it has likely now been destroyed.

The political will to probe deeper also seems lacking outside of the GOP. If the Cabinet Office notes are to be believed, the British Government appears to view links to the Wuhan laboratory as entirely coincidental.

But with each passing day, a laboratory leak becomes more plausible. When scientists hunted for the source of the original Sars, a small team found it within six months.

It is now more than three years since the start of the pandemic and, despite an unprecedented search, no animal host for Covid-19 has ever been found. Perhaps because it never existed in the wild.

US aviation regulator boosting Boeing oversight

Family members attend as Boeing's Muilenburg testifies before Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing on grounded 737 MAX on Capitol Hill in Washington

Wed, March 8, 2023 
By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is ramping up oversight of Boeing and plans to add nearly 300 employees to its safety office following two fatal 737 MAX crashes in recent years, the agency's acting head said on Wednesday.

Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen told the Senate Commerce Committee that the aviation safety office, which currently has 7,489 employees, plans to have 7,775 by the end of September. The committee held a hearing on FAA safety reforms that Congress directed in 2020 after the 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.

The FAA currently has 107 full-time staff members providing regulatory oversight on Boeing, up from 82 just a couple of years ago, Nolen said.


Additionally, he said the FAA has augmented its Boeing oversight team with the equivalent of 35 full-time employees from across the agency to support oversight activities.

Boeing declined to comment.

A 2020 House of Representatives report said the two fatal 737 MAX crashes "were the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA."

Nolen told reporters the agency is continuing the review tow new versions of the MAX -- the MAX 7 and 737 10 -- for certification but declined to offer a timetable for when they might be approved. "Safety will dictate that timeline," Nolen said.

Nolen said he met with Boeing last month. "We've had a good level of responsiveness with Boeing," Nolen said. "They are committed to the process."

Boeing in 2021 agreed to pay $6.6 million in penalties after the FAA said it failed to comply with a 2015 safety agreement and cited other safety concerns.

The FAA has closely scrutinized Boeing's quality and other issues in recent years. The FAA continues to inspect each 737 MAX and 787 aircraft before an "airworthiness certificate is issued and cleared for delivery." Typically the FAA delegates airplane ticketing authority to the manufacturer.

During the hearing, Republican Senator J.D. Vance raised questions about two recent Boeing 737 MAX flights and asked whether the 737 MAX was actually safe after the FAA mandated safety and software updates before lifting a 20-month grounding in late 2020.

"I can say categorically that the 737 MAX airplane is safe," said Nolen.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Josie Kao)

Bank of Canada holds key rate steady, first major central bank to pause hikes

The Bank of Canada declined to hike its benchmark rate for the first time in a year

Alicja Siekierska
Wed, March 8, 2023 



Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said at a press conference in January that pausing rate hikes was “conditional on economic developments coming out in line with our forecasts.

The Bank of Canada hit pause on Wednesday for the first time in a year, opting to hold its benchmark interest rate at 4.5 per cent as it assesses the impact of its aggressive tightening cycle.

The highly anticipated move makes the Bank of Canada the first major central bank to pause interest rate hikes. It also follows through on the bank’s previous signal that it was ready to pause its current tightening cycle, one that included eight consecutive rate hikes in an effort to tame soaring inflation.

"Overall, the latest data remains in line with the Bank’s expectation that CPI inflation will come down to around 3 per cent in the middle of this year," the Bank of Canada said in a statement released alongside the rate decision.

"Governing Council will continue to assess economic developments and the impact of past interest rate increases, and is prepared to increase the policy rate further if needed to return inflation to the 2 per cent target."

Wednesday’s decision was expected by economists and markets, according to Bloomberg.

While the most recent Labour Force Survey showed the Canadian job market remains strong, GDP growth has stalled and inflation has decelerated from its June 2022 highs, falling to 5.9 per cent in January. The Bank noted that "the labour market remains very tight", but also said pressures in product and labour markets should ease amid weak economic growth for the next couple quarters.

"This should moderate wage growth and also increase competitive pressures, making it more difficult for businesses to pass on higher costs to consumers," the central bank said.

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said at a press conference in January that pausing rate hikes was “conditional on economic developments coming out in line with our forecasts.” The central bank reiterated that pledge to pause on Wednesday, saying it was conditional on economic developments evolving in line with its outlook.

"Clearly, the Bank wants to keep its options open if inflation doesn't go their way and/or if the job market continues to sizzle," BMO Capital Markets chief economist Douglas Porter wrote in a research note on Wednesday.

"The (Bank of Canada) will now be data dependent, and if the recent strong momentum persists, look for the tone to toughen in the coming weeks."

CIBC Economics managing director Avery Shenfeld said in a research note released on Wednesday that "the Bank of Canada needs a clearer picture on growth and inflation prospects to decide if it needs to hike again or more definitively set aside that prospect."

"With so little time since it initiated its conditional pause, it simply doesn't have enough data to provide that clarity," Shenfeld wrote.

On Tuesday, traders were pricing in 80 per cent change of another quarter percentage point hike at some point in 2023. That's due in part to a rebound in economic activity and a resurgence in inflationary pressures elsewhere, including the United States.

The pause by the Bank of Canada puts it on a diverging path from its U.S. counterpart. U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell told lawmakers this week that rates will likely have to go higher than previously anticipated.

"The Bank of Canada’s conditional commitment to keep rates on hold will place a magnifying glass on the divergence in monetary policy with the U.S. Federal Reserve," Desjardins managing director and head of macro strategy Royce Mendes wrote in a research note on Wednesday.

Still, he added that "given the sharp repricing in expectations over the past few weeks, the relatively neutral language in the statement is seeing markets marginally reduce bets for further rate increases."

With files from Bloomberg.

Alicja Siekierska is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow her on Twitter @alicjawithaj.


Bank of Canada and Fed head for historic divergence, in a blow to loonie


 Fed Chair Jerome Powell speaks at The Economic Club of Washington

Thu, March 9, 2023
By Fergal Smith

TORONTO (Reuters) - As the Bank of Canada pauses its interest rate hikes, investors are betting that the sensitivity of Canada's economy to higher borrowing costs will result in a historically large gap between the tightening campaigns of the BoC and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Analysts have long argued that Canada's economy is more sensitive to interest rate hikes than the U.S. economy, pointing to the higher debt loads of Canadians after they participated in a red-hot housing market in recent years and the shorter Canadian mortgage cycle.

But now some major economic data has given substance to that view and supports the market's recent move to price in a wider gap between the end points for interest rate hikes in Canada and the United States, say analysts.

Canadian inflation slowed more than expected to 5.9% in January and gross domestic product was flat in the fourth quarter, held back by weakness in the interest rate-sensitive parts of the economy, including housing investment as well as business spending on machinery and equipment.

A lower expected peak for Canadian rates has pressured the Canadian dollar against its U.S. counterpart. The currency hit a four-month low on Wednesday at 1.3815, or 72.39 U.S. cents, after the BoC left its benchmark interest rate on hold at 4.50%, becoming the first major central bank to suspend its tightening campaign.

A weaker currency could drive up the cost of imported goods for Canadians, adding to inflation pressures.

"The Canadian economy is just far more sensitive to interest rates because of factors like the crazy amount of debt-to-income that we've got, because of our overheated housing market," said Jay Zhao-Murray, a market analyst at Monex Canada Inc. "The transmission channels of monetary policy are more effective in Canada than in the U.S."

Contrasting with the BoC, Fed Chair Jerome Powell delivered a message this week of higher and potentially faster rate hikes.

Money markets expect the BoC's policy rate to peak at about 4.75% this year, or roughly 90 basis points below the expected end point of the Fed.

Canadian rates have peaked below U.S. rates in the three major tightening cycles since the start of the millennium, with the gap ranging between 50 and 75 basis points.

"Poring over the national accounts, it's increasingly clear that interest-sensitive demand has wilted in Canada," Warren Lovely and Taylor Schleich, strategists at National Bank of Canada, said in a note after the recent GDP data.

Their work shows that interest rate-sensitive demand in Canada's economy was 26% of final domestic demand at the start of the current rate hike cycle, one of the highest shares on record, compared with 21% for the United States.

Still, there could be a limit to how much interest-rate divergence the BoC will allow, say analysts. Last October, Governor Tiff Macklem warned that the bank might tighten more aggressively in response to a weaker currency after the loonie hit a two-year low of 1.3977.

"If the spread diverges any further there is going to be further depreciation of the Canadian dollar and that will feed in to eventually inflation in this country," said Royce Mendes, head of macro strategy at Desjardins.

(Reporting by Fergal Smith in Toronto; Editing by Matthew Lewis)