Category: China

Stop Pretending We Don’t Know Exactly How and Where This Pandemic Started

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Two words you should add to your vocabulary — zoonosis and zoonotic:

A zoonosis (plural zoonoses, or zoonotic diseases) is an infectious disease caused by bacteria, viruses, or parasites that spread from non-human animals (usually vertebrates) to humans.
Major modern diseases such as Ebola virus disease and salmonellosis are zoonoses.

The Wuhan coronavirus is a zoonotic disease. In January — before the liberal media decided Trump was to blame for this pandemic — it was widely reported that the outbreak originated in China’s Wuhan province, specifically in so-called “wet markets,” where live animals are kept and slaughtered on the spot for sale. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was linked to 41 of the first cases of COVID-19 identified in China by early January. In addition to seafood, this market in Wuhan was known for selling meat of “exotic animals”:

The South China Morning Post reported on 29 January 2020 that the market had a section selling around “120 wildlife animals across 75 species.”

From a Jan. 20 report by CNN:

A new Chinese coronavirus, a cousin of the SARS virus, has infected hundreds since the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December. Scientist Leo Poon, who first decoded the virus, thinks it likely started in an animal and spread to humans.
“What we know is it causes pneumonia and then doesn’t respond to antibiotic treatment, which is not surprising, but then in terms of mortality, SARS kills 10% of the individuals,” Poon, a virologist at the School of Public Health at The University of Hong Kong, said.
It’s not clear how deadly the Wuhan coronavirus will be, but fatality rates are currently lower than both MERS and SARS. . . .
Coronaviruses are a large group of viruses that are common among animals. In rare cases, they are what scientists call zoonotic, meaning they can be transmitted from animals to humans, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From a Jan. 26 report by ABC News:

Chinese authorities temporarily banned the trade of wild animals Sunday following a viral outbreak in Wuhan, saying they will “severely investigate and punish” violators. . . .
The ban will continue until “the epidemic situation is lifted nationwide” in order to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus and block potential sources of infection and transmission.
The three agencies also opened a hotline where people can report violations, and called on the public to refrain from eating wild animal meat. . . .
The wildlife ban comes as the new virus accelerated its spread in China with 56 deaths, and 1,975 infections. China cut off trains, planes and other links to Wuhan on Wednesday, as well as public transportation within the city, and has steadily expanded a lockdown to 16 surrounding cities with a combined population of more than 50 million — greater than that of New York, London, Paris and Moscow combined.
Demand for wild animals in Asia, especially China, is hastening the extinction of many species, on top of posing a perennial health threat that authorities have failed to fully address despite growing risks of a global pandemic. . . .
A group of 19 prominent researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nation’s top universities had called for the government in China to crack down on wildlife markets such as the one at the center of the Wuhan outbreak. . . .
Zoonotic diseases, or those contracted by humans that originated in other species, account for a large share of human infectious illnesses. Not all of them come from the wildlife trade: Rabies is endemic across many species and one of the biggest causes of death in the developing world. But mixing species of wild animals increases the risk of diseases mutating and growing more virulent as they spread in unregulated markets, experts say.
The emergence of such diseases is a “numbers game,” said Christian Walzer, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s health program.
“If these markets persist, and human consumption of illegal and unregulated wildlife persists, then the public will continue to face heightened risks from emerging new viruses, potentially more lethal and the source of future pandemic spread,” he said. “These are perfect laboratories for creating opportunities for these viruses to emerge.”
Researchers have not yet identified a definitive source for this latest outbreak, which like many other viruses can infect multiple species.
One of the first measures taken by Wuhan authorities was to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where 41 of the first cases originated.

Back in January, while impeachment was dominating headlines in the United States, the liberal media had no problem reporting that (a) this viral outbreak began in Wuhan, China, and (b) it was a “zoonotic” disease clearly linked to the “wildlife trade” in China. At that time, CNN did not hesitate to use the phrase “Chinese coronavirus” or “Wuhan coronavirus” in its reporting, but in a White House press conference Wednesday, a reporter for ABC News scolded the president for “bias”:

 

President Trump on Wednesday defended himself from the allegations of racism and xenophobia that were leveled in response to his calling the Wuhan coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” telling reporters that “it comes from China” and that “it’s not racist at all” to use the label.
Trump used the term “Chinese virus” in a tweet Wednesday morning, and was asked about why he used the phrase by ABC reporter Cecilia Vega, who referenced “dozens of incidents of bias against Chinese Americans” since the outbreak.
“Because it comes from China,” Trump stated, adding that “it’s not racist at all, no, not at all.”
“It comes from China, that’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate,” Trump said. “I have great love for all of the people from our country, but as you know, China tried to say at one point — maybe they stopped now — that it was caused by American soldiers. That can’t happen, it’s not going to happen, not as long as I’m president.”

The Communist regime in Beijing is at fault, not only for its false propaganda trying to blame America for this disease, but also for its mishandling of the initial outbreak of the virus:

A recently published study from the University of Southampton estimated that the global outbreak of the coronavirus could have been dramatically reduced had China’s communist government acted sooner. . . .
The research found “that if interventions in [China] could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively — significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.”
The first case of the virus was reportedly detected as early as mid-November of last year. . . .
Other reports place the initial detection of the outbreak in early December, with Wei Guixian, a seafood merchant in Wuhan’s Hua’nan market, being one of the first reported cases. . . .
China waited until January 23, 2020, before quarantining the entire city of Wuhan, which has a population of over 11 million people.
Axios highlighted how China censored people who tried to sound the alarm . . .

How irresponsible is it for (allegedly objective) journalists to demonize President Trump, blaming him for “incidents of bias,” simply because he has told the truth about where this virus came from?

The media contend it is “controversial,” and almost certainly “racist,” for a Republican to tell the truth about the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic:

As President Donald Trump receives backlash for comments Wednesday about the coronavirus outbreak that were widely perceived as xenophobic, his allies in Congress have risen to his defense — with one senator in particular embracing his rhetoric.
“China is to blame,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Wednesday of the virus, which was first identified in Wuhan, China. “Because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that.”
He proceeded to identify the consumption of such animals as the source of the virus, echoing a since debunked myth that the outbreak began with a woman eating bat soup. The origins of the virus remain a mystery to health officials, even as it continues to spread globally.

It is certainly not a “debunked myth” to explain the zoonotic origins of this disease, nor is the source of the virus a “mystery”:

The consensus among researchers studying the spread of the virus pinpoints COVID-19’s likely origin to a “wet market,” or live animal market, in Wuhan, China
The origin theory for the virus is supplemented by preliminary research into the disease’s genome, as well as the origins of similar diseases. Researchers at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre published the genome of COVID-19 two weeks after cases were reported in late December 2019. Gene sequencing analysis strongly suggests the virus originated in bats and was transferred to humans through a yet-unidentified intermediary species. In early February, Chinese researchers published work suggesting the intermediary species may have been the pangolin (also called a scaly anteater), though this work has not yet undergone a peer-reviewed study.
The conditions for such interspecies pathogen transfer are ripe in wet markets, which are common in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, resulted from a virus transferring from bats to civet cats and then humans. SARS, discovered in 2003, originated at a wet market similar to the one now suspected to be the origin of COVID-19.

Are we clear now? Senator Cornyn was absolutely correct in explaining that the dietary habits of (some) Chinese, which involve markets where multiple live exotic species are kept together and slaughtered on site, are to blame for this zoonotic pandemic. If it is now “racist” to tell the scientific truth — which, I should point out, was first reported by Chinese researchers — then political correctness has become fatal.



 

America Is Not Italy: Wuhan Coronavirus and the ‘Grisly Calculus’ of Pandemic Risk

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Let’s start with the good news: My American Spectator colleague Jeffrey Lord just ended two weeks of self-quarantine, a precaution after being potentially exposed to Wuhan coronavirus at CPAC. My brother and I both attended CPAC, of course, and while we are not aware of any direct contact with the person from New Jersey who later was diagnosed as a COVID-19 patient, it was nevertheless possible we were exposed. Having passed the 14-day incubation period, then, we have some sense of relief, although I was not worried because I have a robust immune system.

Sunday, Italy reported 368 COVID-19 deaths in a single day. That was two days after Newt Gingrich (whose wife is U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican) published an alarming report on conditions in Italy, where the pandemic has hit most severely. While I still believe Americans are panicking too much over this virus, Gingrich notes that we are fortunate President Trump took one crucial step very early:

President Donald Trump was right to cut off travel from China as soon as it was clear how big the pandemic was going to be. He saved American lives and bought time for America to be more prepared as the pandemic developed.
When you realize that the current 1,016 deaths in Italy with a population of 60 million would be the equivalent of 5,400 deaths in the United States instead of the 41 deaths we have had so far, you can see what milder, slower and less aggressive responses might have cost in lives. Then we would have needed to move to truly draconian measures of isolation and shutdowns.
By the same standard, Trump was exactly right to ban travel from Europe. In fact, he was following the advice of his best medical experts.

Almost no one in the media is reporting the demographic factors involved in Italy’s pandemic disaster, and I can’t vouch for this “alternative” source’s account about the way manufacturers in Northern Italy brought in thousands of Chinese laborers to work in the leather and textile industries. Nonetheless, seems plausible, because it resembles the way Mexican and Central American laborers have been brought into the United States to work in, for example, meat processing plants.

Precaution is not a synonym for panic. To respond rationally to a genuine risk requires facts and arithmetic, because risk is always a matter of statistical probability. China deliberately suppressed the facts in the immediate aftermath of the Wuhan outbreak, and Italy’s government made the mistake of trusting China. By the time they realized how serious the COVID-19 danger was, it was too late to halt the contagion. Last night, I did some quick math and discovered that, a week earlier, there had been more than 500 reported cases of coronavirus in the United States with 21 reported deaths. As of Sunday night, there were about 3,500 reported U.S. cases with 65 reported deaths. This provides us a benchmark estimate of the rate of increase. By next Monday, I would expect around 20,000 reported U.S. cases with about 200 deaths.

WHY THIS MATTERS:
If the number of reported U.S. coronavirus deaths next Monday is significantly less than 200, it will mean our health system is functioning effectively to identify and treat infected people. If the number of reported cases is significantly less than 20,000 next Monday, it will mean that the precautions taken so far are effective in preventing the spread of the virus. Having extrapolated what the expected numbers would be in a week, these provide a benchmark by which we can tell whether we are winning or losing the fight against this disease.

My hope is that we will be winning, but what’s important is to establish a metric by which we can measure success. Meanwhile . . .

My 19-year-old son’s university canceled on-campus classes for the rest of the semester, so he booked a $49 flight to Florida, where he’s doing his coursework online and babysitting his nephews. My 17-year-old daughter is out of school for at least the next two weeks, and she informs me that her friends on social media are calling this holiday their “coronavacation.” Whether or not school cancellations will do much to halt the spread of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is a matter of speculation, but officials everywhere seem to have decided to err on the side of caution. Thus all Americans are affected by this disease, directly or indirectly, without regard to whether or not we ever actually were at any risk.
Blame the media, but also blame the tort lawyers. Imagine you were a university president, and suddenly cable TV news networks are warning of a deadly pandemic, with some experts offering estimates of millions of infections. The president announces a White House Task Force, and it seems as if we are on the verge of a virus-induced apocalypse. Other universities begin announcing that they will suspend classes, and what are you going to do, Mr. University President? Even if you are skeptical about the worst-case scenarios being discussed 24/7 on CNN, there is the problem of liability. See, if you don’t close your campus and even one of your students comes down with this disease, you might face a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, charging you with negligence for failing to take precautions.
Speaking of precautions, how much toilet paper do you have? . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.



 

Confirmed: You’ve Got the Racism Virus

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Years ago, when discussing amnesty for illegal aliens, I announced one exception to my universal opposition: “Don’t deport the hotties!”

Send us your supermodels, your Maxim cover girls, your Miss Universe contestants, we lift our lamp beside the golden door. There is no such thing as too much beauty, and America’s immigration policy should make a special exception for good-looking young women. Stephen Green calls our attention to the case of University of Chicago student Evita Duffy:

The university’s Institute of Politics ran an Instagram campaign last week, giving students a chance to fill in the blank after “I vote because…” Duffy can be seen in the video holding a sign that says, “I vote because the coronavirus won’t destroy America, but socialism will.”
You can probably guess what happened next, but it was serious enough that Duffy — who describes herself as a conservative Hispanic woman — had to take it public with an op-ed in the student paper. She wrote that she hoped her “vote” message might “encourage a lively and robust debate on economics,” but instead she received an “onslaught of online hate and threats of violence” from her tolerant, progressive friends. . . .

Fellow students attacked my character, my intellect, my family, my appearance, and even threatened me with physical violence, using foul and offensive language. I was called a racist and a xenophobe. Some compared me to animals. Others declared that they would personally stop me from voting, and many defended the personal attacks, saying I deserved to be bullied and that I don’t belong at the University of Chicago on account of my beliefs. I was told by many that I was the most hated person on campus. It was frightening. It was also hurtful, since some of the attacks came from people I considered friends.

You might wonder, “How can someone named ‘Duffy’ be Hispanic?” Her father is former Republican Rep. Sean Duffy, and her mother is Fox News contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy, a Latina from Arizona. Evita Duffy’s mother is not only Hispanic, but also a pro-life Catholic, and Evita is one of nine children in the Campos-Duffy family. #Winning!

Being called “racist” is just part of being a conservative nowadays, and I’ve long since become immune to such accusations. To be hate-listed by the SPLC is a sort of inoculation, and while I suppose my performance as an alleged “white supremacist” must be disappointing to anyone who takes the SPLC seriously, it’s fun to mock these perceptions by occasionally writing something that an earnest hate-watcher will have to read carefully in search of evidence — proof! — that I really am an awful hater: “Don’t deport the hotties!” Yes, there must be something racist about saying such a thing. I dare Heidi Beirich to explain why.

David Gura of MSNBC declared on Twitter that it is “racist” to refer to the current epidemic as the “Wuhan virus.”

It’s 2020: Everything is racism and everybody is racist.



 

Commie Homophobia in China

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LGBT activists recently got into an uproar about Chinese homophobes:

Basketball team members in China carried a banner saying “defend core socialist values” and “keep homosexuality far from campus” at a university [April 16], sparking outrage.
Ling Bing, the women’s basketball team coach at Huazhong University of Science and Technology of Central China, posted a photo of team members carrying the banner online, The New York Times reported [April 20].
“Protect traditional Chinese morals,” read the banner. “Defend core socialist values. Resist corrosion from decadent Western thoughts. Keep homosexuality far from campus.”
Upon receiving backlash for posting the picture, Ling noted what he perceived to be a “double standard” — gay students flaunt rainbow flags at graduation, but the banner held by his basketball team was deemed wrong, as reported by The New York Times.

What kind of crazy world are we living in, when the only people speaking in defense of “traditional morals” are Chinese Communists?

 

Recusing Myself On Recent Events, Let Me Bring Up A Point About Tiananmen Square

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by Smitty

Actual courage in the face of evil.
Actual courage in the face of evil.

In the first place, the United States government is not a line of Type 59 tanks. In the second place, recent headline twerps are not Tank Man, staring down the barrel of tyranny.

The question to ask is: what constitutes heroism? It strikes me that, if in a situation where the government is doing something way out of line, e.g. interning citizens of Japanese extraction, one should have the courage both to

  • Raise the issue, and
  • Stand and deliver on the raising

That is, if you are certain enough that whistle blower mode is called for, you underscore your point by triumphantly treading titanium testicle territory, like Tank Man.

When you go all Brave Sir Robin, you seriously undercut your argument, and raise questions about motives.

Keep this in mind, patriots: irrespective of your contempt for the results of any election, try to hold true to the ideals the country was founded upon, and faith in the system to Do The Proper Thing.

That is, look past the IRS, DOJ, Pigford, and the rest of the laundry list of scandals. If there is any good to come of this wretched 100 year anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural, it will be

  • a gut check,
  • a rejection of statism, and
  • a return to the individual and not the regime as the main point of emphasis.

Keep your powder dry, and let’s stick it to the incumbents at the election next year, Americans.

Feminists Celebrate Chi-Com Swimmer, Exaggerate Olympic Record

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Feminists can ruin anything, even a 16-year-old’s gold medal. When China’s Ye Shiwen set a record time in the 400-meter individual medley, headline writers created the false impression that she swam faster than the men’s champion, Ryan Lochte. Selwyn Duke at The American Thinker explains the misperception:

The  confusion stems from the fact that Ye did swim the final 50m of her 400m race  marginally faster than Lochte swam his last 50, which rightfully raised  eyebrows.  Yet there were men in Lochte’s race who swam that short stretch  faster than Lochte (and Ye, of course), yet no one implies that they “beat” the  men’s gold medalist.

In fact, Ye’s record time for the full 400 meters was 23 seconds slower than Lochte, and also 14 seconds slower than the last-place finisher in the men’s 400-meter IM event. But why let facts get in the way of celebrating feminist-inspired androgynous egalitarianism, eh?

Communist China is the kind of country feminists admire: A totalitarian dictatorship with compulsory population control policies that include forced abortions. And let’s face it, Ye is a natural as a feminist: “Many times she has been turned away from the female changing rooms because she is mistaken for a boy.”

The Rachel Maddow of China!

International Intrigue Surrounds Harvard University Graduate Student Bo Guagua

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Livin’ La Vida Guagua: Son of ChiCom official partied down in England

In February, 41-year-old British businessman Neil Heywood died in China. Gu Kailai, wife of provincial Communist Party official Bo Xilai, reportedly confessed to Heywood’s murder:

According to Mr Wang, Mr Heywood, a fixer with decades of experience in China and a family friend of Mr Bo and his wife, was held down in a hotel room in Chongqing and forced to drink cyanide. Subsequently, Mrs Gu allegedly confessed to the crime. “Gu said ‘I did it’ three times to Wang,” a diplomatic source with knowledge of Wang’s account said. “It was a gruesome scene, Heywood spat the cyanide out and they had to give him more.”
In recent weeks, a series of allegations about the alleged crime have begun circulating freely, an odd phenomenon in a country as closed and censored as China, prompting speculation that the Communist Party was trying to smear Mr Bo and his wife ahead of the announcement of the findings of an investigation.
Mr Heywood, Mrs Gu and her son, Bo Guagua, are said to have had a close relationship until a quarrel over an “economic” matter, according to the Chinese government. At the time of his death, Mr Heywood was thought to be raising money for an £80 million shopping centre dedicated to British luxury goods.

Following this so far? OK, so the son of the Gu Kailai and Bo Xilai is a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Bo Guagua has been the subject of much gossip. The New York Times reported last week:

After a pampered childhood in the walled compounds of the Chinese capital, he was sent off for schooling in England, where he developed a reputation as an academically indifferent bon vivant with a weakness for European sports cars, first-class air travel, equestrian sports and the tango. . . .
“If you’re discreet, they look the other way,” the former government employee said. “But Guagua’s behavior was striking by the standards; urinating against a fence at Oxford, kissing foreign girls — it all goes down bad in China.” . . .
American officials say he arrived in a red Ferrari last year to pick up the American ambassador to China’s daughter for a date. Classmates at Harvard say they have seen him driving around in a Porsche.

Hmmm. OK, so now the alleged ChiCom party boy has seen fit to issue a statement to the Harvard Crimson:

Recently, there has been increasing attention from the press on my private life. As a result of these speculations, I feel responsible to the public to provide an account of the facts. I am deeply concerned about the events surrounding my family, but I have no comments to make regarding the ongoing investigation. . . .
My tuition and living expenses at Harrow School, University of Oxford and Harvard University were funded exclusively by two sources — scholarships earned independently, and my mother’s generosity from the savings she earned from her years as a successful lawyer and writer. . . .
During my time at Oxford, it is true that I participated in ‘Bops,’ a type of common Oxford social event, many of which are themed. These events are a regular feature of social life at Oxford and most students take part in these college-wide activities. . . .
I have never driven a Ferrari. I have also not been to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing since 1998 (when I obtained a previous U.S. Visa), nor have I ever been to the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in China.

What’s the truth here? Dunno.

Just saw the story via Memeorandum and found it intriguing. Wish I could find the “higher education bubble” angle, or maybe land a screenplay deal for what would certainly make a blockbuster movie.