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--:-- Georgia Howe: This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID, and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: One of the most influential studies on Alzheimer's now appears to be fraudulent, setting back research on the disease over a decade. We may have had for years and years so much money and many resources thrown into an area of research that was based on falsified data. That should be a concern to everybody within our field. We look at the allegations against the landmark study and the fallout in the medical community.
--:-- John Bickley: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Thursday, July 28th, and this is Morning Wire. A new Senate report details how China has attempted to infiltrate the Fed for at least the last decade and how it has at times succeeded. We discuss the report's alarming findings and what it could mean for U.S.-China relations.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And House Democrats have submitted a bill that would impose term limits on the Supreme Court, a move that comes as new polling shows public perception of the court shifting since the Dobbs leak. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: You've heard us talk about the potential for food shortages on this show. Are you prepared? Well, if not, go to preparewithwire.com to save $150 off a three-month emergency food kit from My Patriot Supply. Your three-month emergency food kit gives you breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, and snacks for three full months per person. So go to preparewithwire.com. You'll get free shipping and your order will arrive fast. That's preparewithwire.com.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: The medical community was rocked this week by allegations that a landmark 2006 Alzheimer's study included fabricated images and research. Here with the latest on this concerning story is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So, this was the authoritative study on Alzheimer's, the brain disease that's the fifth leading cause of death for Americans over the age of 65. The study claimed to have discovered important breakthroughs on proteins in the brain that could be targeted to help patients. One of the co-authors claimed they discovered, quote, the first substance ever identified in brain tissue in Alzheimer's research that has been shown to cause memory impairment.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Specifically, it said that targeting sticky plaques that build up on the brain of Alzheimer's patients is the key for curing the disease. So based on information from this study, over the past 16 years, researchers have been trying to develop medicine that would target this specific plaque they mentioned, and nothing has worked. Alzheimer's drugs have had a 99% failure rate in human trials to this point, which has really baffled doctors and researchers who just cannot figure out why nothing was working.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, now it seems like nothing has been working because the supposed breakthroughs in those 2006 studies were deliberately fabricated. Now, what aspect of the study was fabricated, and then how was it discovered? So, the original study was published in Nature magazine by Dr. Sylvain Lesney, a renowned neuroscientist. At the time of the study, there were a few theories about what caused Alzheimer's, but the study claimed to have confirmed the one main cause.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: According to Science Magazine, it was a researcher at Vanderbilt University who first noticed the discrepancies in the original study. And it appears that dozens of brain scans and other images associated with the study were photoshopped and manipulated intentionally. Basically, they're alleging that the author cherry-picked data and pieced together certain images and graphs to prove his initial hypothesis.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, how much of a blow to Alzheimer's research is this? Yeah, it's impossible to know just how severe the damage is, but it's not an exaggeration to say that this study, if fabricated, set back Alzheimer's research by at least a decade. 100 of the 130 Alzheimer's drugs currently working their way through clinical trials have been designed to target the brain plaque that was listed in this study as the culprit for the disease.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And for the last 16 years, literally billions of dollars have gone towards developing treatments that were based on this research. And even more concerning, the study also led doctors to stop researching the other theories about the disease that could have actually unlocked a cure by now. And because doctors have been using the findings of this study over the last 15 years to help them diagnose cases, experts now say that there are likely hundreds of thousands of cases in which people died of Alzheimer's but were never diagnosed, or that those with other types of dementia were falsely diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: It's awful. So how could this have happened in a peer-reviewed journal? Well, that is the big question that's got people understandably outraged. First, the main author was a well-respected scientist, and Nature magazine, where the study was published, is one of the most credible peer-reviewed journals in the world. The study was also based on a small kernel of truth. Alzheimer's patients do have certain levels of this plaque buildup, so people with good intentions wanted it to be true, and that could have played a role as well.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, I also want to ask you about the NIH. They got caught up in this story. What's going on there? Yeah, this is definitely an interesting wrinkle here. So the Vanderbilt researcher who first discovered all of the fabricated research initially tried to sound the alarm by sending a letter to the NIH this year with all of the evidence that he compiled. But the NIH reportedly never responded.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And four months later, they actually gave Dr. Lesney another five-year grant to study Alzheimer's. And it's worth noting, the grant was awarded by a man named Austin Yang. He's the program director for the NIH Institute on Aging. And Yang is also listed as one of the co-authors on the initial 2006 study itself. So now there are a whole new set of questions about why the NIH failed to address the concerns and continued funding the doctor after they were reportedly made aware of this fraudulent study.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, this is definitely something we'll continue to follow. Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Anytime.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Daily Wire senior editor, Cabot Phillips. Coming up, Senate Republicans release a report detailing China's attempts to infiltrate the Fed. If you like this podcast, subscribe to our Morning Wire newsletter available exclusively to Daily Wire members. Get the Morning Wire newsletter delivered straight to your inbox when you join at dailywire.com slash subscribe. Use code MORNINGWIRE to try a Reader's Pass membership and get your first month for only 99 cents.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: An alarming new report details how China has attempted and sometimes succeeded in infiltrating the U.S. Federal Reserve for at least a decade. The report, produced by Republicans on the Senate Committee for Homeland Security and Government Affairs, was released Tuesday. Here to go through its findings is Daily Wire reporter, Tim Pierce.
--:-- Tim Pierce: So, Tim, what did Republicans find here? Well, it turns out they found quite a bit, really. The Chinese have been attempting to extort, bribe, and hack their way into the Fed, one of the central U.S. economic institutions, since at least 2013, and they've had some success in doing it. In one rather unsettling incident, Chinese officials detained a Federal Reserve Bank employee multiple times in 2019 while he was in Shanghai on business.
--:-- Tim Pierce: As the report recounts, Chinese officials threatened the employee's family unless he supplied them with U.S. economic information and assistance. They also allegedly tapped the employee's phones, computers, and copied contact information of other Fed officials. They also threatened the employee with imprisonment if he spoke about the extortion. Those are some serious claims there.
--:-- Tim Pierce: What other tactics or methods did the Chinese government try? Yeah, one of their main inroads into the Fed appears to be through their Thousand Talents program. While many countries have talent programs to attract the best and brightest of the world to come work for them, China uses its talent program to bribe experts to give them proprietary research or data.
--:-- Tim Pierce: And in this case, Chinese agents paid reserve employees for U.S. economic and modeling data and to create a web of informants that could conceivably give China a heads up on Fed actions, such as changing interest rates. The Fed has access to what is probably the single largest store of economic data in the U.S. China getting access to that information would give Beijing significant insight into the Fed's inner workings and its oversight of the entire U.S. financial system.
--:-- Tim Pierce: What about the political fallout of this report? What kind of impact could it have on U.S.-China relations? Well, Washington's relationship with Beijing has been icy for quite some time already, and it only seems to be getting worse. China's track record on human rights abuses and their blatant efforts to steal proprietary technology and information from U.S. companies and the U.S. government has been a hurdle to normalizing relations for quite a while.
--:-- Tim Pierce: President Biden is expected to have a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday. White House National Security Council coordinator John Kirby said Wednesday that the two leaders are expected to discuss Taiwan, the war in Ukraine, and economic policy. Reports suggest that Biden is considering lifting some sanctions on China to try and tame inflation in the U.S. If Biden chooses to do that, it could be a boon for Xi ahead of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
--:-- Tim Pierce: The National Congress, assembled every five years, picks China's rulers and plays a big role in setting policy for years to come. So Xi and every other high-up Chinese official are feeling pressure to look good right now. Yeah, to that point, what are Xi's main goals in this call? His main focus seems to be on heading off House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's potential trip to Taiwan, which China has refused to recognize as an independent nation.
--:-- Tim Pierce: China has made some pretty threatening signals to try and deter anything that seems like the U.S. dropping its policy of strategic ambiguity and siding with the island nation. Yeah, we'll certainly be watching what comes out of this call and that planned Taiwan trip.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Tim, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Anytime. That was Daily Wire's Tim Pierce.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: Democrats in the House introduced a bill this week that would impose term limits on the Supreme Court. New polling does show that a majority of Americans favor term limits, and confidence in the court has fallen 16 points since May. Here to tell us how this polling squares with historical views of the court and what might be behind the uptick in negative opinions is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Megan, a lot of news coverage right now seems to suggest that more Americans than ever want term limits for justices. Is this idea gaining momentum? You know, despite the reporting, I think we actually have to start by saying that this is not a new thing. In fact, numbers haven't changed much since the last time we saw a landmark ruling on a contentious social issue like this.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the AP poll released this week found that 67% of Americans say they would prefer term limits for the court. But if you look back at 2015, shortly after the court ruled on gay marriage, you see almost identical results. So a poll from Reuters at that time shows that 66% of Americans then favored term limits on SCOTUS.
--:-- Megan Basham: The difference is, in 2015, when you broke these numbers down by party affiliation, you found that considerably more Republicans than Democrats then favored term limits, 74% to 66%. Today, that balance is reversed. 82% of Democrats now want to limit justices' tenure on the bench compared to 57% of Republicans.
--:-- Megan Basham: What the likelihood that we could see a serious effort to implement something like a term limit for justices? It really almost none. It would require an amendment to the Constitution and only a few of those members of Congress who are considered most progressive are making any noise at all in that direction.
--:-- Megan Basham: Okay, so the same AP poll, though, also found a dramatic increase in the number of Americans who now say they have hardly any confidence in the court. Right, that is true. And when you compare those AP findings to another polling outfit, Gallup, you find that their results are consistent and therefore pretty concerning.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Gallup conducted their poll last month before the Dobbs opinion was released, but after that unprecedented leak of Justice Alito's draft. And just like the AP, Gallup found that the public's confidence in the court has sunk to an historic low. So their data was a little more interesting, though, because they've been tracking this issue of confidence in the court for 50 years.
--:-- Megan Basham: And what you see over time is that confidence tends to take a pretty precipitous drop after these major rulings, thanks largely to partisan reactions. Republicans' confidence in the court has gone up by a couple of points this year, while the Democrats has dropped considerably from 30% to 13%. And independents have also dropped 15 points.
--:-- Megan Basham: That said, it's worth noting that in 2015, you saw the exact same percentage of people saying that the court was too liberal as now say it's too conservative, 37%. And 2015 was the last time Gallup recorded a record lack of confidence in the court.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, there are a couple of possible explanations for what may be behind these current negative feelings. Those on the left argue it's because the abortion ruling is out of step with public sentiment. And this was something that Justice Elena Kagan seemed to allude to at a conference last week.
--:-- Megan Basham: By design, the court does things sometimes that a majority of the country doesn't like. But if over time the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that's a dangerous thing for a democracy. So that's why the legitimacy of the court is so important and why public confidence in the court is so important.
--:-- Megan Basham: However, Justice Thomas pointed to the leaking of the Dobbs opinion itself as a major factor undermining confidence in the court. You can't have a civil society, a free society without a stable legal system. If someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone and you would say, oh, that's impossible, no one would ever do that.
--:-- Megan Basham: There's such a belief in the rule of law, a belief in the court, a belief in what we were doing, that that was verboten. And look where we are, where now that trust or that belief is gone forever.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Right, and that's understandable. Megan, thanks for breaking that down for us.
--:-- Megan Basham: That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: Other stories we're tracking this week. The Fed raised the interest rate another 75 basis points, or three-quarters of a point, on Wednesday, continuing their effort to fight rising inflation. The military is preparing to mobilize defense assets, such as fighter jets, ships, and surveillance equipment, should Nancy Pelosi decide to visit Taiwan.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and you stand with our mission, please consider subscribing, leaving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.
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