Former Director Of The Centers For Disease Control: Covid Was Spreading In Wuhan In September or October 2019

Re-using our introduction to December 2023's "Researcher Who Developed Chinese Covid Vaccine Probably Thrown Off Roof": 

For the last 3 1/2 years  I've been keeping an eye open for hints that the lab leak (notice no one is talking about pangolins or bat soup any more?) was known to the NIAID/gain-of-function/state security organs gang before September 2019. Not searching it out but trying to be aware of the dates being pushed back to the fall and summer of 2019....

From The Hill, March 28, 2021:

Redfield says he thinks COVID-19 began spreading in Wuhan in September or October  

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield said in an interview that aired Sunday that he thinks COVID-19 began spreading in Wuhan in September or October of 2019. 

“If I was to guess this virus started transmitting somewhere in September, October in Wuhan,” Redfield told Sanjay Gupta for a CNN special report. 

“That’s my own view,” he added. “It’s only an opinion. I’m allowed to have opinions now.”....

....MORE 

Our focus/purpose is not the 'proximal origin', raccoon dog or Biosafety Level 4 Laboratory, but rather the date the virus was circulating.

Possibly related, July 31's: Covid: China's Purchases Of PCR Test Kits Soared Months Before The First Cases Were Announced

""Canicule, fraîcheurs, vendanges (France, XVe–XIXe siècles)" Dog-days, cold periods, grape-harvests (France, 15-19th centuries)"

Ahead of the grape harvest, a repost from January 2022.

Original post:

We will be referring to some research papers later this year, and fearing they might be lost in the link-vault, post them here so they are easily searchable (which was the original purpose of the blog).

As with the English agricultural records*, the French extend far enough back that we can tease out patterns.

First link, the headliner: 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15810545/

Abstract

Dog-days, cold periods, grape-harvests (France, 15-19th centuries). The climate history can be based on several kinds of data. In the present paper, French records of grape-harvest dates in Burgundy from 1370 to 1890 were used for evaluate the climates at these various period of time. These results reveal that temperatures as high as those reached in the 1990s have occurred several times in Burgundy since 1370. Correlations between temperatures and historic data are presented.

And: 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222101676_The_climate_in_Burgundy_and_elsewhere_from_the_fourteenth_to_the_twentieth_century

The climate in Burgundy and elsewhere, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century

This paper reviews the climatic history of northern France from the grape harvest dates of the Burgundian vineyards. The grape harvest date is constrained by the mean surface air temperature during the growing season (April–August). At the start of the grape harvest dates series – during the 1380s and from 1415 to 1435 – the tendency is towards early harvest dates and warmer conditions, starvation due to crop scorching in 1420 included.

During the second half of the ‘ Quattrocento’, there are later harvest dates and cooler springs/summers, exemplified by the 1481 famine, due to rain and cold. The 1500s, 20s, 30s and 50s are characterised by blasts of warmer summers. The ‘midsummer night’s dream’ (1596/7) can turn into a nightmare . . . Then, a cold ‘long seventeenth century’?

This is quite pronounced from 1570 to 1630, with, however, a slight improvement around 1600–20. Major waves of hot summers were experienced during the 1630s, 60s and 80s. Is the Maunder minimum, between 1645 and 1715, responsible for a slight, synchronous, cooling? In this case, it would be mainly the Late Maunder Minimum (1675–1715), with the chill of 1675, the 1690s and 1709–1715. Then the great warming of the eighteenth century: the years 1704–07, 1718/9, the 1720s and 30s, 1757–65, the 1780s and above all 1778–81 all favour this interpretation, though we must not forget the cold, wet years 1725, 1740 and 1770. The years 1812–17 are not only snowy but also globally cold (due to the Tambora eruption in 1815 and the Dalton minimum?). And then there is the 1846 heatwave, so harmful to cereals. The Little Ice Age ends in 1860, with no return up to the present, the twentieth century warming from 1900, with an intensification of the phenomenon from 1976 and particularly the 1990s

And

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-011-0410-3

Extreme grape harvest data of Austria, Switzerland and France from A.D. 1523 to 2007 compared to corresponding instrumental/reconstructed temperature data and various documentary sources

And:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.568.7478&rep=rep1&type=pdf 

An open-access database of grape harvest dates for climate research: data description and quality assessment 

And

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2d5d/b4d9d757554d16f8f50fbc52b56618edb77e.pdf?_ga=2.176741797.1471188058.1641658658-1166791428.1641658658

The longest homogeneous series of grape harvest dates, Beaune 1354-2018, and its significance for the understanding of past and present climate

Abstract. 

Records of grape harvest dates (GHD) are the oldest and the longest continuous phenological data in Europe.

However, many available series including the well-known (Dijon) Burgundy series are error prone, because scholars so far uncritically drew the data from nineteenth century publications instead of going back to the archives. The GHD from the famous vine region of Beaune (Burgundy) were entirely drawn from the archives, critically cross checked with narrative evidence. In order to reconstruct temperature, the series was calibrated against the long Paris temperature series comprising the 360 years from 1659 to 2018. The 664-year-long Beaune series from 1354 to 2018 is also significantly correlated with tree-ring and documentary proxy evidence as well as with the Central European temperature series (from 1500). The series is clearly subdivided into two parts. From 1354 to 1987 grapes were on average picked from 28 September on, whereby during the last 31 year long period of rapid warming from 1988 to 2018 harvests began 13 days earlier. Early harvest dates are shown to be accompanied by high pressure over western-central Europe and atmospheric blocking over Denmark. The extremely early harvests comprising the 5% percentile bracket of GHD are unevenly distributed over time. 21 of them occurred between 1393 and 1719, whereby this is the case for just five years between 1720 and 2002. Since the hot summer 2003, 8 out of 16 spring-summer periods were outstanding according to the statistic of the last 664 years, no less than 530 among them within the last 8 years. In the Paris temperature measurements since 1659, April-to-July temperature reached the highest value ever in 2018. In sum, the 664-year-long Beaune GHD series demonstrates that outstanding hot and dry years in the past were outliers, whereby they became the norm since the transition to rapid warming in 1988.

And finally:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9810-0 

Grapevine harvest dates in Besançon (France) between 1525 and 1847: Social outcomes or climatic evidence?

*For more on other agricultural history, you may want to dip into the big daddy of price series:

"A History Of Agriculture And Prices In England, From The Year After The Oxford Parliament (1259) To The Commencement Of The Continental War (1793)"

by J. E. Thorold‐Rogers, 7 volumes, 1866-1887.

Here's another bit o'price series scholarship:

The Price History of English Agriculture, 1209-1914

The paper constructs an annual price series for English net agricultural output in the years 1200-1914 using 26 component series: wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, beans, potatoes, hops, straw, mustard seed, saffron, hay, beef, mutton, pork, bacon, tallow, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, wool, firewood, timber, cider, and honey. I also construct sub-series for arable, pasture and wood products. The main innovation is in using a consistent method to form series from existing published sources. But fresh archival data is also incorporated. The implications of the movements of these series for agrarian history are explored.

"L’Oréal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus Bets on A.I. to Extend a Nearly $100B Family Fortune"

From Observer, July 30:

As L'Oréal posts strong first-half earnings and strikes a sweeping partnership with OpenAI, the reclusive dynasty behind the world's largest beauty company—already worth $95.6 billion—cements its next generation of control. 

More than a century after chemist Eugène Schueller turned a hair-dye formula into the business that became L’Oréal, the beauty giant is still finding new ways to grow, with A.I. as its latest bet.

L’Oréal’s Revenue rose 6.3 percent on a like-for-like basis, a key retail metric, to €11.6 billion ($13.2 billion) in the April-June quarter. For the first half of 2026, revenue increased 5.8 percent to €23.78 billion ($27.1 billion), while net profit climbed 4.7 percent to €3.96 billion ($4.5 billion) and the operating margin reached 21.3 percent. Growth extended across every region and division, from Maybelline’s mass-market makeup to La Roche-Posay’s dermatological skincare and Kérastase’s salon-grade haircare.

CEO Nicolas Hieronimus credited that performance to e-commerce and L’Oréal’s innovation strategy, which now includes a partnership with OpenAI announced in June. “Our innovation engine is firing on all cylinders—and A.I. will help it maintain its pace,” he said in a statement accompanying the results.

Few investors have more riding on that momentum than Schueller’s descendants. His granddaughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, and her family own 34.79 percent of L’Oréal, making them the company’s largest shareholder. L’Oréal shares rose 3.6 percent to €397.15 in Thursday trading, adding roughly €2.5 billion ($2.9 billion) to the market value of the family’s stake. Forbes currently estimates the family’s collective fortune at $95.6 billion.

L’Oréal is turning ChatGPT into a beauty counter

L’Oréal’s e-commerce sales jumped 18 percent to €7.4 billion ($8.5 billion) during the first half of the year, almost twice the growth rate of the online beauty market, according to the company. L’Oréal now sees chatbots as a potential next storefront.

On the earnings call, Hieronimus said younger consumers are “shifting massively” toward large language models for product questions and described beauty as one of the most conversational categories. L’Oréal’s brand recognition, scientific data and professional endorsements could help its products surface in A.I.-generated recommendations, he argued, although the channel remains a “moving target.”

The shift could be lucrative well beyond L’Oréal. McKinsey estimated last year that generative A.I. could create $9 billion to $10 billion in annual value across the beauty industry, with marketing and sales among the largest opportunities.

At VivaTech in Paris in June, L’Oréal outlined a two-pronged collaboration with OpenAI: turning ChatGPT into an interactive beauty assistant while putting its models to work behind the scenes....

....MUCH MORE 

"Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney" (AMZN)

Amazon is one of the two hyperscalers we think know where they are going with AI. 
(GOOG being the other) 

That being said, if AMZN is playing fast and loose with how they present their reality, they should be called out.

From The Register, July 31:

"Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies" 

Amazon reported its earnings today, and because I am professionally depressed I read the thing in full [PDF].

"How long can I go before the red haze of rage sets in" is a fun game, and today I made it all the way to the bottom of the second page when I encountered a bullet point touting how AWS "made its spec-drive [sic] coding agent, Kiro, available on iOS."

Yes, I was in the room when they announced it at the New York summit, six weeks ago. As of this writing, their website, which I have screenshotted says I can "request early access" because "We'll invite a limited number of people to try the app via Apple's TestFlight, and we'll send everyone a link when it's ready." So Kiro is "available" in the same way as I am available to play in the NBA. You can twist yourself into a pretzel and assert that this claim is technically true, but for all practical readings it's what we'd colloquially term "a lie." You need to be explicitly invited to Apple's developer beta testing tool, where a limited number of users can try out an unpublished version. You cannot download it on your phone, and there is no page in the App Store that showcases the product. 

The delay is almost certainly due to Apple's byzantine App Store policies, which I have some sympathy for — but this is an earnings statement. If they're going to "shade the truth" like this, what else are they not being forthcoming about?

Once you notice it becomes hard to stop

There are a lot of other statements that one suspects might not stand up to scrutiny. Graviton boasts "up to 30 to 40% better price-performance," which I only accept because I have seen the numbers myself on customer workloads. The express statement that their AI business and chips business are each exceeding $25 billion run rates in consecutive bullets, with no word on whether those dollars overlap (we will come back to this point shortly). And their Bedrock statement: "customers spent more in Q2 than all prior quarters combined," which makes it sound like a rocket until you realize that they're saying the past 90 days exceeded the other 10 quarters for which Bedrock has been available. Without actual numbers tied to these, that makes it sound like for the first couple of years Bedrock was showing up wearing a party hat but no pants.

Then there's the AWS operating margin of 39.4%, which came in above every published analyst estimate and which everyone will invariably cite as cherry-picked proof the AI buildout is printing money. On the call, CFO Brian Olsavsky disclosed that it includes roughly $600 million of mark-to-market gains on energy derivative contracts. By his math, AWS margins were up 650 basis points year over year, or 520 "if you exclude the derivative accounting gain." Strip that gain out yourself (behold the power of arithmetic!) and the blowout margin goes right back inside the range analysts had modeled. Amazon now hedges electricity the way an airline hedges jet fuel, and this quarter the hedges paid off directly. Olsavsky noted these adjustments "have not been significant in prior quarters." The first quarter they are significant, they land in AWS margin, and their Q3 guidance already assumes no impact from these remeasurements going forward. Amazon knows it's noise, but clearly saw no reason to turn down claiming the win.

The chips business that sells no chips

Back to those dueling $25 billion run rates I touched on; describing their "AI chips business" that way struck me as an incredibly odd thing to say.

That business has revenue, growth, a triple-digit trajectory, sarcastic numbers of happy customers — but what it doesn't have is a product that you can buy. There is no Trainium price list, they will not ship you a socketed Graviton chip to put in your next desktop build, there isn't even an external part number. What Amazon books as "chips revenue" is EC2 instance rental (possibly filtered through higher level services like Bedrock, SageMaker, the half-baked agents that fail to properly explain your AWS bill to you, etc.), and an EC2 instance is not a chip. It's the chip, plus the nVME, plus the NICs (themselves built on Nitro, which uses Amazon's own silicon), plus some aspects of the data transfer that somehow aren't directly billed, plus the building the whole mess lives in—and then with AWS's margin layered on top. The silicon itself is a minority line item in the internal bill of materials that constitutes its business.

You don't have to take my word for it; Amazon CEO and AI Marketing Manager Jassy spent last quarter's call lamenting that the cost of components, "particularly memory, has skyrocketed," so by his own testimony a growing slice of the "chips business" is memory revenue.

Cynically, the category exists so that headline writers will talk about it in the same breath as Nvidia's data center numbers, which they of course will. But Nvidia's $25 billion is silicon sold in the form of physical packaged chips, shoveled out their loading dock. Amazon's is fully-loaded infrastructure rental. This is a hotel comparing its revenue to a mattress company's....

....MUCH MORE 

Regarding the chips, most people who follow the company know they aren't yet selling Trainium and handing over title to the silicon. That's still on the come and should happen in the next six to nine months. As for the margins, this is the first analysis we've seen that highlighted the hedges. Not doing so is just lazy, something we used to see with Mexico's state-owned oil company and their hedges.

Pemex runs a remarkably profitable hedge book and including those profits without highlighting the fact they are financial rather than operational income statement items gives a distorted view of how Pemex is actually performing. So kudos to the writer and to The Register for the highlight.

Recently:

July 30 - "Amazon beats Q2 earnings expectations, as AI, chip businesses see $25 billion run rate" (AMZN)

The negative we will see tomorrow, pointed out in the Yahoo story, is the company is spending all their cash flow rather than returning it to shareholders.

As our earlier GeekWire link, "Ahead Of Today's Amazon Report GeekWire Looks At The Behemoth (AMZN)", quoted:

“We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his April shareholder letter.

The GeekWire article had the Bezos story at Fortune as a sidebar: 

Jeff Bezos says this business is becoming Amazon’s next ‘pillar’

Amazon’s next pillar could be built on a foundation of silicon.

In a new interview with Fortune, Amazon founder and Executive Chair Jeff Bezos says the company’s custom chip business is on track to become one of Amazon’s most durable businesses, placing it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services as a core pillar of the company.

“A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and AWS,” Bezos told Fortune. “What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar.”....

....MUCH MORE, including links to the Fortune article.