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--:-- John Bickley: In a radical departure from their previous policy, the WHO is now calling for an investigation into the lab leak theory. Why did the agency delay the investigation for more than two years? And will Chinese officials cooperate? They don't want to be seen as the villain in the public eye that unleashed this virus onto the world. You know, now over six million people worldwide have died of this.
--:-- John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, June 17th, and this is Morning Wire. Several big banks say a recession is imminent as the Fed aggressively raises interest rates. Now, Americans are making drastic cuts to their budgets. 77% said they've cut back on spending on entertainment or aiding out. Six in 10, each saying that they've minimized use of electricity, have driven less, and have cut back the amount of money they've put in savings. And members of Congress are making new claims about politically motivated censorship by the most powerful tech company in the world. We talked to an expert about the convergence of politics and big tech.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. This show is sponsored by Birch Gold. Have you considered what could happen in the stock market if our economy stalls out? Don't wait until it's too late to solidify some of your investment with gold from Birch Gold. Throughout history, gold has maintained its value better than any other investment in the world. Text WIRE to 989898 today for a free zero-obligation info kit on holding gold in a tax-sheltered retirement account. Again, text WIRE to 989898 and secure the gains you've made while you can.
--:-- John Bickley: Earlier this month, the WHO quietly announced that they would be investigating the lab leak hypothesis. Now, questions are mounting about why the agency delayed more than two years to acknowledge the possibility that COVID-19 may have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab studying coronaviruses located just 500 yards from the location where the first case of the virus was identified. Joining us to discuss is Johns Hopkins' Dr. Marty McCary.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: Thanks so much for coming on.
--:-- John Bickley: Great to be with you. So this new recommendation from the WHO to investigate a possible lab leak is a radical departure from their stance over the past two years. So what changed?
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: Really just a lot of pressure. It's so obvious. I mean, for a lot of scientists, it's 99.9% likely, and it's the default hypothesis until proven otherwise.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: China, of course, is not happy. They're pointing out that the United States does gain-of-function research, and they're correct. They actually are suggesting that gain-of-function research was being done at UNC Chapel Hill and in Maryland at Fort Detrick. And that is true, likely with much better protocols than at the Wuhan lab where the leak likely occurred.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: Now, what will the WHO be looking for in this investigation in terms of evidence? Well, we're going to have to have lab documents. We going to have to have experts who are involved come out with witness protection and give an honest testimony as to what happened Nobody thinks that going to happen As you know the Chinese government has a trend of punishing family members of those who go against the political party. So the few lab workers involved have likely already had significant threats placed on them by the Chinese government and their family members.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: On the flip side, the rest of the world wants closure, and many people in the United States still want to understand the role of the NIH in funding this lab and not just funding it, supporting the general concept of gain-of-function research in science. From very early on, this hypothesis was treated as pretty taboo. Why was there so much resistance from people at the top, like Dr. Fauci, about taking this seriously?
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: He was asked about it directly. He sort of mocked the reporter who was asking him. And Dr. Fauci discovered that some of the funding from the NIH was going to EcoHealth, which was then in turn subcontracting out the research to the Wuhan lab. So NIH government dollars were going to fund the lab. It's arguable as to whether or not it was directly going to gain-of-function research. But when Dr. Fauci learned of this, he called an emergency meeting early in the pandemic of scientists from around the country.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: We now have records, Fox News has obtained, that show that scientists in that initial emergency meeting from top labs in the United States said, basically, this is likely from the lab. And one of them even said it's likely engineered. And after that, there was sort of a pact made to not speak publicly because it would so-called feed the conspiracists. And both those scientists who said it was a lab leak came out publicly and said they don't think it's a lab leak soon after. Both were awarded a total of $9 million in NIH funding after that time. So it does look bad for sure.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: Now, what was the major incentive to keep this information suppressed? Is it just that it's an embarrassment for the United States that they may have been involved in gain-of-function research? Or is there more to it than that? This is perhaps the biggest liability case in the history of the world. So there's a lot of national interest in it, and it's also exposing many of the problems at the NIH that are intrinsic to the bureaucracy.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: For example, scientists in 2015 had petitioned President Barack Obama at the time to ban all gain-of-function research. They just made the case that messing with Mother Nature is dangerous and, you know, you don't want to ever do it. There's no reason to ever do it. And to President Obama's credit, that moratorium was established. But then Dr. Fauci and Collins created bureaucratic workarounds. They weakened the power of this oversight committee that was created in 2015. They had certain grants not go through the committee. And so they were able to continue to fund gain-of-function research as Dr. Fauci had gone around universities in the United States talking about the benefits of juicing up these viruses and creating a Frankenstein sort of nightmare virus for the purpose of studying it in the lab.
--:-- Dr. Marty McCary: At this point, everybody should have a consensus that we should not ever be doing gain of function research. And if I were advising President Biden or the head of the NIH right now, I would advise them to call for an international ban of gain of function research once and for all.
--:-- John Bickley: Right. Well, thanks for coming on and hopefully we'll get to the bottom of this. Great to be with you. That was Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty McCary. You can get this show and all of the content you love wherever you are, all on the Daily Wire app. Even if you're not a Daily Wire member, you be the first to know what trending with mobile notifications for the latest news and you get content from all of your favorite Daily Wire shows Download the Daily Wire app and keep up with the facts no matter where your day takes you
--:-- John Bickley: With consumer confidence in the economy at all-time lows and interest rates on the rise, seven in 10 economists now say a recession will hit within the next year. Here are the latest on how Americans are shifting their behavior to cope with inflation and how it's impacting the midterms is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, first, the Fed announced on Wednesday that they'd raised interest rates by 0.75%. That is the largest single increase in a quarter century. And they're actually expected to continue raising rates at least another point and a half by the end of the year. Because as they now admit, record inflation has lasted much longer than they expected. and they're hoping that by making it more expensive to borrow money, the economy will slow down and inflation will slow down.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: The other big development was a stock market sell-off that saw the Dow Jones drop below 30,000 for the first time since January of 2020. The Dow is now down 20% since January. So to everyone at home, don't look at your 401k right now. It's going to be painful.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So how will rate hikes impact the average family? Yeah, more bad news there. This impacts pretty much every kind of borrowing. Remember, banks typically base their credit card and loan rates on the Fed's benchmark rate. So the cost of borrowing for things like credit cards, auto loans, and mortgages will all be going up. On the mortgage front, rates have now surged to 5.78%. That is the highest level since 2008. And it's also the biggest one-week jump since 1987. For context, this time last year, rates were just 2.93%. That means that more and more people are being priced out of homeownership.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And how are Americans reacting to these changes in the economy? We're seeing more and more evidence that inflation is really having deep behavioral impacts on Americans. For example, according to a recent Washington Post-Shar poll, nearly 9 in 10 Americans say they're now bargain hunting for cheaper products, and 75% say they've cut back on restaurants and entertainment.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: On that note, we talked to Emily Gaskin. She's the polling analyst at the Washington Post and has details on other behavioral changes that we're seeing. A 64% majority of drivers said they've made fewer trips for groceries with the higher gas prices. 44% say that they've only partially filled their car's gas tank. We found 21% of drivers saying that they work from home because of the rising gas prices.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Gaskin says summer vacations are the other big area where behavior is really shifting. We asked how much of a factor gas prices were into making their summer vacation plans, And a 61% majority said it was a major factor. So the prices and the increase in prices are impacting decisions that families are making. And again, you just cannot overstate the impact that this is going to have on midterms. Since 1980, there's never been a midterm election cycle where inflation was higher than 4.2%. Right now, it is at 8.6%. So double anything we've seen in a midterm cycle. For context, at the height of inflation during Jimmy Carter's presidency, he received a 66 percent disapproval rating in the economy. Right now, Joe Biden is at 71 percent.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That's Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- John Bickley: A series of recent reports detail alleged politically motivated censorship by the most powerful of all the big tech companies, Google. Meanwhile, two Republican senators are demanding answers about the Biden administration's disinformation board. Here to discuss is Kara Frederick, director of the Tech Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation.
--:-- Kara Frederick: So Kara first is Google operating as a political actor here I think it pretty clear that they are in the political game You look at what happened when they stifled conservative outlets like The Daily Caller Breitbart The Federalist during the 2020 election season compared to the 2016 election season Breitbart alleges that their Google search visibility shrank by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the 2016 election cycle. And then you look at this new study out of NC State, which basically says that Gmail retains the majority of left wing candidate emails in people's inboxes, yet sends the majority of right wing candidate emails to the spam folders.
--:-- Kara Frederick: The Heritage Foundation is no stranger to this type of political censorship. Either YouTube, which Google owns, has basically censored us, especially the last time we hosted Donald Trump. And a few weeks later, on May 19th, they took down a video of his speech. There's a litany of other examples that we can point to as well that basically indicate Google is throwing its weight on one side.
--:-- Kara Frederick: You mentioned YouTube. The New York Post recently published a report by Ben Weingarten providing some examples of YouTube, as he put it, censoring journalism for the Biden administration. Is this a fair assessment?
--:-- Kara Frederick: Oh, absolutely. In October of 2021, YouTube said that they won't allow ads or monetized content that pushes climate change denial. You know, this is a key tenet of the Biden administration. But it gets, I think, even more granular from there when it comes to the efficacy of masks, COVID-19 misinformation or election integrity. These are all things that Google has singled out for suppression, for censorship. And those are things that, frankly, the Biden administration doesn't really want proliferating out there.
--:-- Kara Frederick: Now, a lot of these claims have been dismissed in the past as sort of conservative, conspiratorial thinking. but we've had the White House actually admit openly that they're working with some of the platforms on so-called misinformation. What have they said and what do we know about the actions they've taken to work with these platforms?
--:-- Kara Frederick: So Jen Psaki led the way here when she strode out to the White House podium in July and she said that the government is working with Facebook to police accounts. She said flagging problematic posts in direct quotes for suppression and for censorship. And we know that within a month, Facebook took down 12 accounts that she and the Surgeon General singled out as purveyors of disinformation. And then she did it again this February with regard to Spotify. She deliberately singled out the private company and said that there was more to be done when it came to Joe Rogan and his controversial platforming of Dr. Robert Malone. Then when you look at the disinformation board and the whistleblower documents that were released by Senator Grassley and Hawley and the concerns that they have regarding the ability to operationalize relationship with private social media companies to implement public policy goals, I think you have a preponderance of evidence that shows this is no longer just a right-wing conspiracy theory, but something that is actively happening at the highest levels of government with the highest levels of these big tech companies as well.
--:-- John Bickley: 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.
