Originally Germany #76 >>13170824

(translated with Yandex)

Corona: After the death of a nurse in Austria, thousands of AstraZeneca cans end up in the garbage

Covid-19 vaccine: AstraZeneca batch withdrawn in Austria

According to ORF, 6,000 doses of vaccine had to be withdrawn. Around 37,000 doses of the batch have already been inoculated. The precautionary stop for the batch ABV 5300 of the AstraZeneca vaccine has been in place since Friday evening. On Sunday, the state of Carinthia announced that vaccine doses of this batch had been delivered. "The Red Cross, the hospitals and the Medical Association - the sponsoring organizations that had been supplied with this batch - were immediately informed.“

How oe24.at according to reports, the said batch included one million doses. It had been distributed throughout Europe. Austria had received around 43,000 doses of the vaccine. Where exactly the remaining 6,000 doses are is still unclear. On Sunday, according to media reports in Carinthia, the exhibition center in Klagenfurt was locked up. Only vaccine doses from the affected batch were available to the state capital. A hotline for those affected has been set up.

https://www.merkur.de/welt/corona-oesterreich-astrazeneca-impfstoff-impfung-krankenschwester-tot-rueckruf-charge-muell-news-aktuell-90232384.amp.html

Originally South Africa #4 >>13171071

“Family offices: More than just keeping it among kin and paying it forward.”dated 26 November 2019 at https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3a%2f%2fwww.dailymaverick.co.za%2farticle%2f2019-11-26-family-offices-more-than-just-keeping-it-among-kin-and-paying-it-forward%2f&d=4702899173995044&mkt=en-WW&setlang=en-US&w=XcculH3wC8ZaofHgrhM_mtCGRKbh9K-f. Below are a few statements however it is worth reading in full.

The world’s first family office set up shop in the US in the 19th century. Its sole purpose at the time was to manage the fortunes of corporate moguls such as JP Morgan and John D Rockefeller. Fast forward a century or so, the offering has evolved into something more elaborate and further reaching. But it is in the past 10 years that family offices have gained real traction and become a significant contender in the money management game.

It’s a booming business. An EY report states that there are currently more than 10,000 single-family offices around the world, and research by Campden Wealth suggests family offices hold assets in excess of $4-trillion.

South African billionaires that crack the list include Nicky Oppenheimer, Johann Rupert, Patrice Motsepe, Koos Bekker and Michiel le Roux, according to Forbes.

But there is much more money to go around in South Africa than that among a handful of billionaires. A report by academics Ihsaan Bassier and Ingrid Woolard suggests that based on tax data, the country has an estimated 182,000 dollar millionaires.

It is for such reasons that Maitland opened up one of the largest full-service independent multi-family offices in South Africa in 2018. It said in a media statement at the time, that “the time is ripe” to tap into the growing wealth in South Africa.

Cheryl Howard, MD of the Maitland Family Office, says that the wealthy are quickly becoming “global citizens” and need a service that is truly international and delivered seamlessly across borders.

“This was compounded by increasingly complex regulations, a more litigious society and the risks of an unstable global economy.”

Maitland was founded in Luxembourg 42 years ago and according to the company, it counts some of the world’s wealthiest families as its clients. The group has 17 offices worldwide with private clients serviced mainly from Guernsey, Isle of Man, London, Luxembourg, Malta, Mauritius and Monaco.

The first business in SA to brand itself as a family office, however, was Stonehage Fleming. It was formed by the merger of Stonehage, which focused primarily on helping South Africans manage their overseas assets, and the family office interests of the UK’s Fleming family. The best-known member was Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.

Stonewood, Vantage and Alpha Wealth are some of the other local operators. Citadel is planning to launch a family office operation in the second half of 2020.

Before them, the closest thing to a family office were the large trust companies such as Syfrets and BOE.

A move to a family office would see Tepper join several of his prominent peers, including George Soros, who moved in 2011 to close his hedge fund to outside investors. Billionaire John Paulson also indicated earlier in 2019 that he was weighing a transition. Leon Cooperman returned all capital to investors in his hedge-fund firm, Omega Advisors, at the end of 2018.

“Brooke Harrington of Copenhagen Business School worries that the growth is undermining meritocracy in capitalism.

“The bigger the apparatus they have behind them, the harder it is for the market to discipline them,” she says.

Chuck Collins of the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, frets over opacity — “they ensure ever more wealth goes off the ledger” — and their growing lobbying clout.

He argues that billionaires’ family offices have worked tirelessly to exploit loopholes and rig rules to further their interests, most notably by helping to gut America’s estate tax.

“They are in the dynasty-protection business, trying to arrest the normal, natural process of wealth dispersal,” he says.

Anon at General Research put this together

Originally General Research #16716 >>13172857

BGI Genomics—the Chinese Communist Party-linked genomics firm flagged by U.S. officials as “mining” the DNA of Americans—has collaborated extensively with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The National Pulse can reveal.

The company has recently come under fire following a 60 Minutes exposé on the company’s use of COVID-19 tests to “collect, store and exploit biometric information” on American citizens, according to former U.S. intelligence officials. What’s more, a recent Reuters article linked the firm to the Chinese Communist Party’s military.

In addition to the Obama administration enabling the firm to gain a foothold in the U.S., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation played a critical role in BGI’s American expansion.

In September of 2012, the Microsoft founder’s foundation signed a “Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form a collaboration on global health and agricultural development with the goal of achieving common objectives in health and agricultural development.”

The co-founder of BGI praised the agreement, celebrating the forthcoming “scientific breakthroughs in the areas of human, plant and animal genomics.” He also revealed that the collaborative efforts focused on sequencing genomes—the precise activity flagged for national security threats in the 60 Minutes segment:

“Having contributed to the Human Genome Project as well as sequencing the genomes of many critical plant and animal species and human diseases, including the initial sequencing of the rice genome as well as our involvement in the Rice 10,000 Genome Project, the 1,000 Plants and Animals Genome Project, the International 1,000 genomes project, the 1,000 Rare Diseases Project, the International Cancer Genome Project, Autism Genome 10K, among others, BGI looks forward to partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in this significant collaboration to apply genomics research to benefit global human health.”

The memorandum predates Gates’s 2010 visit to BGI’s China-based headquarters, where he witnessed the company’s genetic sequencing operation as described by the Financial Times:

In 2010, Bill Gates visited an unremarkable building in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Shenzhen, China. With row after row of high-tech machinery humming inside, the place could easily be mistaken for an anonymous data warehouse. But Mr Gates and Ray Yip, head of the Gates Foundation’s China operation, saw something else that day. As they toured the BGI headquarters, the two men were stunned by the ambition of the scientists working at the biotech company. Inside, more than 150 state of the art genetic sequencing machines were analysing the equivalent of thousands of human genomes a day. The company is working towards a goal of building a huge library based on the DNA of many millions of people. BGI executives see this not as the end-game, but as the springboard for new drug discoveries, advanced genetic research and a transformation of public health policy.

Yip praised the endeavor as “out-of-the-box,” “open,” and “liberal”:

“We were taken aback. We never thought we would find such an out-of-the-box approach. They are in their own league — open and liberal. Most people only see them as a service provider for DNA analysis. It is the database they are building that will make them formidable.”

The Gates Foundation has also funded BGI projects relating to genome sequencing alongside Chinese Communist Party bodies such as the Ministry of Science and Technology and Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Similarly, Dr. Tadataka Yamada, the former president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global health program, serves as the Chairman of BGI’s Scientific Advisory Board.

And in 2016, BGI launched a U.S.-based office in Washington—the home state of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

BGI’s ties to Washington also appear to have influenced the firm’s decision to target the state with its COVID-19 test kits, part of the company’s plot to “mine” the data of Americans.

“Early last March, the state of Washington was the site of the first major coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. As COVID rates and the need for tests were spiking, BGI Group, the world’s largest biotech firm—a global giant based in China—approached the state of Washington with an enticing offer. In a strikingly personal letter to the governor, BGI proposed to build and help run state-of-the-art COVID testing labs,” 60 Minutes summarized.

But officials ultimately turned down the offer at the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence over BGI’s ties to the Chinese government.

https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/bgi-genomics-gates-foundation-collab/