It’s Time for Conscious Uncoupling With China
Step back. Photo: Susan Walsh/AP/Shutterstock
Of all the lessons that plagues teach us, surely the most valuable one is humility.
Look around you. The most advanced, sophisticated, and wealthy civilization ever to exist on planet Earth — our glorious, multinational, globalized, technological miracle — has now been brought to a screeching halt by a pathogen so tiny no one was able to see their complex structures until the last century. For all our unparalleled wealth and knowledge, our streets are empty; our businesses for the most part are suspended; and our efficiency and technological mastery have been mocked by a speck of nature. This minuscule organism that isn’t even technically alive could, all by itself, generate a global depression unlike any since the 1930s.
All our carefully maintained, just-in-time supply lines have crashed in a matter of days. Our addictive elixir, economic growth, has evaporated. Global trade has been put on ice. We have no vaccine — and, barring a miracle, we won’t until next year. We have no effective treatments, although that may, with any luck, change. We have only very porous defenses — social distancing — which amount to a drastic, utterly unsustainable shift in how we live from day to day. And that’s it. We don’t know how contagious this virus is, how exactly it may mutate, how widespread it already is in the population at large, and even if it can reactivate in those who have recovered from infection.
We obsess about the responses of our governments, as is only proper, and we parse charts and debate tactics, to gain some sort of edge on tackling it. But when you look at the graphs of the viral curve in most of the major countries, most of them are unsettlingly similar. Yes, there are some more successful countries like Germany, and some outliers, like South Korea, but the rest seem to be following the same rough trajectory. And yes, we are flattening the curve … but it’s a temporary flattening due to unprecedented global shutdown of human activity. We may well be able, by suspending our entire way of life for a long while, to keep this virus from wreaking excessive and immediate damage, and overwhelming our hospitals. But we will not have beaten COVID-19. We will merely have stretched out the time it takes to spread.
The moment we relax, it will come back. Singapore, an early model for suppressing the virus, is now seeing a new wave after relaxing some controls. A leaked draft of a memo from the E.U. notes that “any level of [gradual] relaxation of the confinement will unavoidably lead to a corresponding increase in new cases.” The same risks of a rebound are being seen in China, in so far as we can believe a word that murderous dictatorship tells us. Meanwhile, I look around me and see a slow attenuation of social distancing — the park where I walk my dogs is increasingly crammed. Humans are social animals. There is a limit to our capacity to remain alone. In crises, in particular, our instinct is to seek one another, gather strength from our common experience. The virus exploits this mercilessly.
It’s a brutal reality check, this thing — relentlessly ripping the veil off our delusions of control. So much is being laid bare. The promise of a truly globalized world, where government is increasingly international, and trade free, and all would benefit, was already under acute strain. Now, it’s broken, perhaps irrevocably.
The nation-state was beginning to reassert itself before, but COVID-19 has revealed its indispensability. Europeans realized, if they hadn’t already, that a truly continental response was beyond the E.U. Borders were suddenly enforced, resources hoarded by individual nations, and the most important decisions were made by national governments, in national interests. Americans, for their part, saw their own dependence on foreign countries, especially dictatorships, for core needs — like medicine, or medical equipment — as something to be corrected in the future. Japan is now spending a fortune paying its own companies to relocate from China to the homeland.
And for both Europe and America, the delusions that sustained the 21st-century engagement with China have begun to crack. We still don’t know how this virus emerged — and China hasn’t given any serious explanation of its origins. What we do know is that the regime punished and silenced those who wanted to sound the alarm as early as last December, and hid the true extent of the crisis from the rest of the world. There had been 104 cases in Wuhan by December 31, including 15 deaths. Yet as late as mid-January, the Chinese were insisting, in the words of the World Health Organization, that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” On January 18, despite the obvious danger, the Chinese dictatorship allowed a huge festival in Wuhan that drew tens of thousands of people.
On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China — but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Well, we’re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us.” This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor. Trump’s ban on Chinese travel was better than nothing, but it did not prevent over 400,000 non-Chinese from arriving in the U.S. from China as COVID-19 was gaining momentum. It’s fair to say, I think, that after the immediate, unforgivable cover-up in China, a global pandemic was inevitable.
I’m not excusing Trump for his delusions, denial, and dithering — he is very much at fault — but the core source of the destruction was and is Beijing. Bringing a totalitarian country, which is herding its Muslim inhabitants into concentration camps, into the heart of the Western world was, in retrospect, a gamble that has not paid off. I remember the old debate from the 1990s about how to engage China, and the persuasiveness of those who believed that economic prosperity would lead to greater democracy. COVID-19 is the final reminder of how wrong they actually were.
The Chinese dictatorship is, in fact, through recklessness and cover-up, responsible for a global plague and tipping the entire world into a deep depression. It has also corrupted the World Health Organization, which was so desperate for China’s cooperation it swallowed Xi’s coronavirus lies and regurgutated them. At the most critical juncture — mid-January — the WHO actually tweeted out Communist Party propaganda: “Preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel Coronavirus.” On the same day, another WHO official was telling the world that there was “limited spread” of COVID-19 by human-to-human transmission, and alerted hospitals about the risk of super-spreading the virus. And so the virus has forced us to accept another discomforting reality: Integrating a communist dictatorship into a democratic world economy is a mug’s game. From now on, conscious decoupling is the order of the day.
In other cases, the cold triumph of reality represented by the virus has been salutary. It’s been remarkable to observe something Donald Trump cannot lie his way out of. He tried. And he’s still trying. He’s gaming out various ways to get himself reelected in a pandemic, but the pandemic keeps reminding us that this is in its control, not his. His daily performances are not informing anyone about anything — they are failing attempts to impose a narrative on an epidemic which has its own narrative, and doesn’t give two fucks about Trump.
And this is the truth about reality. It really does exist (whatever the postmodernists might argue). It’s complicated. And even if it can be ignored or forgotten in our very human discourses, it wins in the end. This virus is, in a way, a symbol of that reality. It can be stymied for a while; it can be suppressed and avoided. It can be controlled so it doesn’t overwhelm us in one fell swoop, metastasizing the damage. But it is unbeatable and is winning this war, as it was always going to, and only a vaccine can make a real difference. The coming months will be an unsatisfying series of starts and stops as we struggle to live with it. We are not, in other words, fighting and winning this war — we are merely negotiating the terms of our surrender to reality. And there is nothing more humbling for humans than that. And nothing more clarifying either.
Labour’s New Face
Beneath the overwhelming COVID-19 news, this past week was a critical moment for the left in Britain and America. In normal times, much chin-stroking would be in order. So allow me to remove my N95 for a second and note something. Labour and the Democrats are inching back toward the center. Bernie Sanders’s withdrawal from the race and Jeremy Corbyn’s retirement as Labour Party leader may prove the final prick in the far-left bubble that was burst in the last British general election and in the U.S. Democratic primaries. And the new Labour leader is Keir Starmer.
Keir who? A good question. And once again, bizarrely, I’m conflicted by personal ties. I went to college with Boris, and knew him a little from the Oxford Union. But I went to school with Keir for seven years, traveled each morning with him on the same public bus, back and forth, and sat directly behind his desk (alphabetically, Sullivan came just after Starmer) for much of my teenage years. More than that, actually, we fought almost daily, from the minute he got on the bus in the morning till he got off it in the afternoon. These were the ’70s, and I was a teenage Thatcherite and Keir was, well, a raging anti-Thatcherite, a defender of trade unions, a socialist true believer, and a proselytizing atheist who even crashed my Christian Union meetings to pick a fight. His name tells you a lot: His parents named him after the first leader and founder of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie. I’m still pinching myself that my old sparring partner is now leading the party his parents venerated so deeply.
Keir has obviously mellowed a bit and is physically very different. As a teen he was an unkempt bruiser, his collar always undone, his tie crafted into a super-fat knot, and his scraggly hair parted down the center. He wasn’t the coolest character in our cohort of 30 boys — Quentin Cook, now known as Fatboy Slim, held that honor — but he carried himself with a certain laddish swagger. Today, he is somewhat mocked for how controlled he seems to be, how well his suits fit, how boring and conventional he appears. And to be honest, when we reconnected a few years ago, he did strike me as a much more subdued version of his teenage self. But who isn’t? And I doubt his core convictions have changed much. He hasn’t indicated a major shift in policy from Labour’s 2019 manifesto, and he was an enthusiastic Remainer who wanted a second referendum on Brexit. As director of public prosecutions, a rough equivalent to the American position of attorney general, he emerged as a mainstream and gifted public figure, and even became a knight.
He is not a Blairite, and has radicalism in his bones. (One of his leadership campaign ads was full of images of Labour’s 1970s and ’80s struggles with Thatcher.) But he is infinitely more electable, more appealing, and more professional than Corbyn. And Labour, unlike the Democrats, chose a 50-something with only five years in Parliament, rather than a 70-something who’s been in politics forever. Starmer’s first statements, more to the point, were bang on. He pledged to be a strong leader of the opposition but insisted that in an epidemic, he would go out of his way to avoid partisan polemic, wouldn’t demand the impossible, and would criticize and scrutinize the government with only one objective: to get through the plague with as little damage as possible. He’s a grown-up, a pragmatist, and marinated in the legal, rather than the activist, left. And then he came out fast with a clear and heartfelt pledge to rid his party of anti-Semitism. On becoming leader, he said:
We have to face the future with honesty. On behalf of the Labour Party, I am sorry … I have seen the grief that [anti-Semitism] brought to so many Jewish communities. I will tear out this poison by its roots and judge success by the return of Jewish members and those who felt that they could no longer support us.
I’ll forgive him the mixed metaphor just this once. His wife, for good measure, is Jewish, and they have brought their own children up in the Jewish faith. All I can say from knowing him for many years is that he is a decent bloke, who stays in touch with his old schoolmates, all of whom love the guy. And maybe that word is the parallel with Biden: decent. That’s what he and Starmer have in common: They represent a decent left, in both America and the U.S. in an often shockingly indecent time.
Echoes of HIV
I was moved by the recent New York Times piece talking to veterans of the AIDS epidemic about our current COVID-19 travails. My old friend and ACT-UP pinup, Peter Staley, put it this way: “To the extent that all of us from those years have some version of PTSD, all of that is flooding back.”
And it is. There are, of course, huge differences. HIV was and is far, far harder to catch than COVID-19, had a far longer incubation period, and, until 1996, had a near 100 percent fatality rate. It was also restricted for the most part in America to gays and IV drug users, not the general, hetero public. But it’s been impossible for some of us not to feel transported back at times.
The most resonant feeling for me is simply the tension of not knowing when or if this virus is going to get you. An invisible thing haunted us all those years ago — and it remained confoundingly elusive. There were rules for staying safe — always wear a condom — and they were largely effective in the way social distancing is now. But they weren’t foolproof, accidents happened, as I found out to my dismay, and so you lived in a constant uneasy tension with life.
At times you almost wished you had it, just to break the suspense. “Sometimes it feels like some bogeyman in the forest,” my friend Patrick once said to me, “waiting to pounce on my back, and sometimes I wished it would, just because then I’d know where I was. And I’d know how to fight it. I really wish I had it, somehow. It would be less frightening than not knowing.” Within weeks of that conversation, Patrick found out. Within a couple of years, he was dead at the age of 31.
For my part, I’m still haunted by my failure to stay HIV-negative in those tense years. Each time I put on my mask today, or wash my hands, or avoid someone on the sidewalk, I remember how I could still get unlucky — at the supermarket, or entering my apartment building, or scratching my nose — and I suddenly reexperience that gut-churning dread that drained me repeatedly in the past. There would be a mordant irony to surviving one plague for decades only to die of another one in a couple of weeks. And in some ways, COVID-19 scares me more. It comes quickly and kills quickly. It aims directly for my weak spot — my asthmatic and bronchitic lungs — and shows no mercy. It isolates you from your family and friends, and you always drown and die alone.
So now, as then, I feel a certain cold fear but also a calming fatalism. There’s only so much you can do. There’s no safe space in this universe. And so you learn to lean into the inevitability of risk, to live with a sense of impermanence, and, after a while, to find a place in your mind and soul where the plague can’t get you.
This remained essential even after I knew I was HIV-positive, and the fear of infection abated. Then the suspense existed about the day your symptoms would start, when the first opportunistic infection would send you to the hospital ward. The political authorities, then as now, seemed clueless or panicked or simply helpless. And yet we carried on, scanning the horizon for a pharmaceutical breakthrough, which kept disappearing from view. The wait for that moment, like the wait for a COVID-19 vaccine now, became more poignant the longer it lasted and the more deaths and losses hit home.
There are also the direct echoes. Many Americans have come to know and respect Tony Fauci, but for us AIDS vets, his name and voice bring back acute memories of his sanity in a mad time. And I expect that when this epidemic ends, we will have no single moment of triumph, as we didn’t with AIDS, but a slow and fitful return to normalcy, laced with a deep desire to forget about it all. It doesn’t surprise me that we have no real collective memory of the 1918 influenza pandemic, because I’ve watched as gay men moved on so swiftly from thinking about AIDS. The younger generation barely knows anything about it and cares less. Their amnesia is a blessing for them; as no doubt it will be for us when this nightmare is over. The dead, however, remain.
See you next Friday.
Silicon Valley, and the Chinese Connection to Coronavirus Infection
By James Fulford
VDare.com Blog
. . .
https://vdare.com/posts/dr-norm-matloff-on-covid-19-silicon-valley-and-the-chinese-connection-to-coronavirus-infection
After Feinstein was elected to the
Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same
time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to
colleagues, even once claiming “that in my
last life maybe I was Chinese.” HARIS ALIC
FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF
CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS
AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION"
BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT OUT THERE!
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional
ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules
Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the
ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been
beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics
experts.
“All in all, it was an incredible
victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than
other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen
McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER.com
Senator
Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President
A high-profile U.S. senator with professional
and personal ties to China — including once employing one of its spies — is
backing former Vice President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s
business dealings with the communist regime.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a
former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her
endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have
witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures
in Congress.
I’ve worked closely with Vice
President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his statesmanship,
and most importantly his moral fortitude (NO, IT’S NOT A JOKE, BUT THEN
FEINSTEIN IS THE MOST SELF-SERVING CORRUPT POL IN U.S. HISTORY). During his
time in Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter
for hard working (ILLEGALS) MEXICAN families.
Jeff Sessions: We’ve Got to Stand Up to the ‘China Lobby’
1:56
Many are willing to acknowledge from this point forward that Mainland China should be held responsible for its inaction and lack of transparency in dealing with the initial stages of the spread of the COVID-19/coronavirus, but should we hold those accountable that allowed for China to practice risky behaviors up until this point? The answer is yes, according to former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
During an interview with Huntsville, AL radio’s WVNN, Sessions, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, argued it the “China lobby” wielding its influence in government and politics and that it was a must that it is confronted.
“This is basically what’s happened: Everybody has really known for years that there’s a China lobby,” Sessions explained. ” There are large numbers of big, big businesses that have huge investments in China. Whenever the United States stands up and complains about something in China, something that China has done wrong — these people start lobbying on behalf of China. China threatens to take strong action like it has threatened to quit buying farm products. But our strength as an economy is so much more than their strength. They have to sell in their markets. They have this huge trade surplus with the United States. They sell far more to us than they buy from us. And it’s this surplus that’s now allowing them to surge their military to a degree we’ve never seen before, as well as to advance their technology, which also supports their military in the years to come.”
“So yes, we’ve been weaken — we’ve got people in the United States that don’t realize the danger, who don’t speak on behalf of the American people’s interests but speak on behalf of their personal special interests. We’ve got to stand up to the special interest crowd. And I’ve done it. I know who they are. I’ve fought them.:
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
What China Has Done to Starve U.S. Hospitals of Key Medical
Equipment is Unforgivable
Trump admin weighs legal action over alleged
Chinese hoarding of PPE
Pandemic Problem: America's Supply Chains are
Dangerously Brittle
Josh
Hawley: Counter China’s Plans for Dominance by Ending ‘Forever Wars’
US Lawmakers Call for Full
Investigation Into China’s Pandemic Coverup
Josh
Hawley: Legislation ‘Necessary’ to Address Chinese Monopoly of U.S. Drug,
Medical Supplies
AFP/Getty Images
Josh
Hawley Introduces Legislation to Expose Chinese Monopoly of U.S. Drug, Medical
Supplies
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Coronavirus Live
Updates: Markets Reel as Virus Spreads Across the World
What China Has Done to Starve U.S. Hospitals of Key Medical
Equipment is Unforgivable
China lied and people
died. In December, China ordered its scientists to destroy samples that showed
they had a pneumonia-like virus on their hands. They strong-armed doctors from
trying to spread the word, kept medical staff in the dark, and prevented new
cases of what we know was the Wuhan Coronavirus, or COVID-19, from being
reported. And now doctors who tried to raise awareness have vanished. Vloggers
documenting the situation on the ground have also disappeared. China allowed
Chinese New Year to be celebrated which led to scores of people being exposed.
In all, some 5 million people had left Wuhan by the time the Chinese government
got its act together. It was too late. And now, their incompetence caused this
pandemic.
The world economy has
ground to a halt. And while we’re dealing with this nonsense, China has also
reportedly tried to corner the market on personal protection equipment which is
essential for health care workers around the world. The Trump administration is
fully aware of the situation and is mulling legal action. The New York Post quoted
one senior lawyer said China’s actions concerning this alleged hoarding is akin
to a first-degree murder charge (via NY
Post):
Leading US
manufacturers of medical safety gear told the White House that China prohibited
them from exporting their products from the country as the coronavirus pandemic
mounted — even as Beijing was trying to “corner the world market” in personal
protective equipment, The Post has learned.
Now, the Trump
administration is weighing legal action against China over its alleged actions,
a lawyer for President Trump said Sunday.
“In criminal law,
compare this to the levels that we have for murder,” said Jenna Ellis, a senior
legal adviser to Trump’s re-election campaign.
“People are dying. When
you have intentional, cold-blooded, premeditated action like you have with
China, this would be considered first-degree murder.”
Ellis said the options
under consideration include filing a complaint with the European Court of Human
Rights or working “through the United Nations.”
Executives from 3M and
Honeywell told US officials that the Chinese government in January began
blocking exports of N95 respirators, booties, gloves and other supplies
produced by their factories in China, according to a senior White House
official.
China paid the
manufacturers their standard wholesale rates, but prohibited the vital items
from being sold to anyone else, the official said.
Around the same time
that China cracked down on PPE exports, official data posted online shows that
it imported 2.46 billion pieces of “epidemic prevention and control materials”
between Jan. 24 and Feb. 29, the White House official said.
[…]
Michael
Wessell, a founding member of the federal US-China Economic and Security Review
Commission, confirmed the situation and said the Chinese maneuvering had left
American hospitals “starved of PPE to fight this crisis.”
U.S. companies are finding out they don't
own their own factories in China. When they tried to export THEIR medical
equipment, the Chinese government stopped them: https://nypost.com/2020/04/05/trump-admin-weighs-legal-action-over-alleged-chinese-hoarding-of-ppe/ … @nypost
Trump admin weighs legal action over alleged
Chinese hoarding of PPE
This is insane.
U.S. companies with factories in China have tried to export medical supplies to the United States,
Only for the goods to be stopped from being sent by the Chinese government.
We must end our dependency on China!
RT!
U.S. companies with factories in China have tried to export medical supplies to the United States,
Only for the goods to be stopped from being sent by the Chinese government.
We must end our dependency on China!
RT!
Far past time to disentangle and
restructure vital U.S. supply chains.https://nationalinterest.org/feature/pandemic-problem-americas-supply-chains-are-dangerously-brittle-134022 …
Pandemic Problem: America's Supply Chains are
Dangerously Brittle
As of today, U.S.
deaths from Wuhan coronavirus infection are rapidly approaching 10,000. There
are over 336,000 cases, most of which reside in New York City and the tri-state
area. President Trump and his Wuhan virus task force have worked hard to
increase testing and create better models that are currently being shipped out.
Ventilators are now being manufactured as quickly as possible. Distilleries are
now making hand sanitizer. My Pillow is now shifting their production to
medical masks, making anywhere from 10,000-50,000 masks a day. American
business has answered the call. Retired army doctors have also answered the
call. But it makes it all the more maddening when we hear stories about how the
Chinese are just bo jangling around because they’re either West-averse or
insufferably greedy.
Josh
Hawley: Counter China’s Plans for Dominance by Ending ‘Forever Wars’
7 Apr 202020
2:34
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote on
Tuesday that the only way America can counter Chinese domination is to end the
“forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hawley
said that the United States has focused more on the response to the coronavirus
outbreak than the country’s engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he
charged that America cannot respond to the Chinese Communist Party’s plans for
“domination” by remaining involved in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Our
involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is currently taking a backseat to the #COVID19 crisis,
but let’s remember, the only way we are going to be able to focus on #China and
counter Beijing’s plans for domination is to end the forever wars,” Hawley
wrote. “Can’t have it both ways.”
Our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is
currently taking a backseat to the #COVID19
crisis, but let’s remember, the only way we are going to be able to focus on #China
and counter Beijing’s plans for domination is to end the forever wars. Can’t
have it both ways https://twitter.com/hawleymo/status/1247188890445910018 …
The
Missouri populist’s commentary follows as he said that the country must remain
“laser-focused” on preventing Chinese “domination.” He said that this proposal
will involve revamping America’s military posture towards countering an
increasingly aggressive China.
China
understands that the global pandemic is an inflection point. They are trying to
turn this to their advantage. Make no mistake, they are still pursuing their
global strategic ambitions. The need for us to laser focus on China’s economic
and military ambitions is going to be more urgent once we beat this pandemic,
not less.
Hawley’s
commentary echoes his foreign policy vision, which he unveiled in
November 2019 at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The senator’s
foreign policy vision would replace the bipartisan foreign consensus that he
called “progressive universalism” with a foreign policy that would benefit the
interests of the American working class.
Hawley
said that the “burden of this nation’s long wars had fallen disproportionately”
on middle-class families.
He
said during his CNAS speech that instead of engaging in further conflict in the
Middle East, America should counter a rising and increasingly imperialist
China, which threatens the freedom of those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He added
that China has increasingly deployed soft power to pressure American
corporations such as Disney and the NBA to “throw overboard free speech at the
first sign of Beijing’s commercial pressure.”
Hawley
said that “the point of American foreign policy should not be to remake the
world, but to keep Americans safe and prosperous.”
Sean
Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter @SeanMoran3.
US Lawmakers Call for Full
Investigation Into China’s Pandemic Coverup
March 25, 2020 Updated: March 25, 2020
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik
(R-N.Y.) are calling for an international probe into how Beijing’s initial
handling of the ongoing virus outbreak may have endangered the United States
and the rest of the world.
In a
resolution introduced in both chambers on March 24, the lawmakers asked
Congress to condemn the Chinese regime for its coverup of the outbreak, which
“almost certainly” heightened the CCP virus’s rapid global spread, they
said.
Congress
should also quantify the damage of such acts on the health and economic being
of afflicted nations, the resolution stated.
CCP VIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE
The Epoch
Times uses “CCP virus” to
refer to the pathogen commonly known as novel coronavirus, because the Chinese
Communist Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread
throughout China and create a global pandemic.
One of three
legislative proposals introduced that day to take aim at the Beijing regime,
the resolution also calls on the international community to design a mechanism
for the CCP to deliver compensation accordingly.
“It is time
for an international investigation into the role their coverup played in the
spread of this devastating pandemic,” Hawley said in a joint press release with Stefanik. “The CCP must be held to account for what the world
is now suffering.”
Media reports
have detailed how Chinese authorities censored critical information when the
virus first emerged in the city of Wuhan, located in Hubei province.
On Jan. 1,
Hubei health authorities ordered a
genomics testing company to stop virus testing, destroy all virus samples, and
to keep their findings a secret, according to an expose by Chinese media
Caixin.
Police tracked
down multiple doctors who voiced concerns about the virus on social media,
accusing them of spreading rumors and inciting public fear. Critics of Chinese
authorities’ outbreak response were summoned and
punished, and several outspoken citizen journalists disappeared after they tried to share firsthand videos from Wuhan.
On Jan. 13,
Thailand confirmed the first infection outside of China, a day before the World
Health Organization, citing Chinese investigations, announced that
there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
A University
of Southampton study,
currently in preprint and not yet peer-reviewed, found that China could have
stopped up to 95 percent of the virus’s geographical spread had it enacted
containment measures earlier.
“There is no
doubt that China’s unconscionable decision to orchestrate an elaborate coverup
of the wide-ranging and deadly implications of coronavirus led to the death of
thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans and climbing,” Stefanik
said.
The resolution
also took note of how senior Chinese officials have tried to push the conspiracy theory that the virus originated in the United States.
“Since day
one, the Chinese Communist Party intentionally lied to the world about the
origin of this pandemic,” Hawley said.
On the same
day, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.)
and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) also introduced a bipartisan resolution to condemn the CCP for the outbreak coverup and disinformation.
Rep. Matt
Gaetz (R-Fla.), meanwhile, introduced a bill called “No Chinese Handouts in National Assistance Act” to prevent
any virus-related relief funds from flowing into China.
“Allowing
American taxpayers’ money to go to companies owned by the Communist Chinese
government is antithetical to our ‘America First’ agenda,” he said in a
statement.
Rep. Michael
McCaul (R-Texas) on Tuesday called the CCP’s handling of the outbreak “one of
the worst coverups in human history.”
“This is a
systematic whitewash of what the Communist Party has done in China,” he told
Fox News. He added that the virus “is now wreaking havoc all across the world,
costing not only the lives of people but economic chaos.”
For “the harm,
loss, and destruction their arrogance brought upon the rest of the world,”
Stefanik said, China will need to pay.
“Simply
put—China must, and will, be held accountable,” she said.
Josh
Hawley: Legislation ‘Necessary’ to Address Chinese Monopoly of U.S. Drug,
Medical Supplies
24 Feb 20201,067
2:59
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) Monday, contending that it is “inexcusable” that America
relies on China for its medical supply chain. Hawley called hearings and
legislation to determine how to address America’s reliance on Chinese for
producing vital medicine.
The Missouri conservative wrote a
letter to U.S. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn after reports revealed that the
coronavirus has jeopardized the “domestic supply of some 150 prescription drugs,
including antibiotics, generics, and branded drugs.”
Hawley said that the time is coming for Congress to have
oversight and consider legislation to address the insecurity of America’s
medical supply chain.
The degree to which some of our own manufacturers rely on China
to produce life-saving and life-sustaining medications is inexcusable. It is
becoming clear to me that both oversight hearings and additional legislation
are necessary to determine the extent of our reliance on Chinese production and
protect our medical product supply chain.
Reports have revealed the extent to
which China produces and exports the overwhelming majority of pharmaceuticals
to the United States. China exports 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80
percent of active ingredients used to make drugs in Americans.
Another report stated that America
is losing its ability to make pharmaceuticals because of Chinese dumping of
low-price products into the global market.
Rosemary Gibson, the author of China
Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine, told Breitbart
News Tonight host Rebecca Mansour that America should pursue a
federal industrial policy to renew domestic manufacturing of medicines and
medical products.
I would have our federal government invest in helping to rebuild
our industrial base using advanced manufacturing technology that can produce
our medicines much more cheaply, safely, with less environmental footprint, and
fully, from soup to nuts from those core raw materials to finished drug in one
location all here in the United States.
There will be opponents who say, ‘No, we should let the market
do it.’ The market will never do this. They’ll never make this investment. So
we have to decide as a country, do we want to have some degree of
self-sufficiency in our ability to make medicine? Do we want our military not
to be dependent on China for pharmaceuticals to treat chemical and biological
agents?
Gibson added, “We’ll be depending on China to help us out when
we run out of medicines. The absurdity of it is extraordinary. We have to
decide as a country, do we want to have some capacity to make our own
medicines, or not?”
Josh
Hawley Introduces Legislation to Expose Chinese Monopoly of U.S. Drug, Medical
Supplies
27 Feb 202084
4:34
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced
the Medical Supply Chain Security Act on Thursday to combat potential American
drug shortages created in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in China and to
reveal America’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and
medical devices.
Sen. Hawley said in a statement that
the legislation would provide the country with the information necessary to secure
the medical supply chain. He explained:
The coronavirus outbreak in China
has highlighted severe and longstanding weaknesses in our medical supply chain.
This is more than unfortunate; it’s a danger to public health. Our health
officials need to know the extent of our reliance on Chinese production so they
can take all necessary action to protect Americans. This legislation will give
us the information we need to better secure our supply chain and ensure that
Americans have uninterrupted access to life-saving drugs and medical devices.
The spread of the coronavirus
throughout China has exposed the deep vulnerabilities in the U.S. medical
supply chain as well as the country’s dependence upon China producing
pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
Axios reported that the
coronavirus outbreak has jeopardized the American supply of roughly 150
pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, generics, and brand-name drugs. Some of
these drugs do not have alternatives on the market.
China exports 97 percent of all
antibiotics and 80 percent of active ingredients used to make drugs in America.
America is losing its ability to make pharmaceuticals
because of Chinese dumping of low-price products into the global market.
Public health officials at the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) currently have limited resources for assessing
supply chain vulnerabilities. The FDA recently asked Congress for more
statutory authority to require that manufacturers notify the agency when they
discover circumstances that may lead to shortages in essential medical devices.
Giving the FDA more authority would allow the agency to ensure that they can take
the necessary steps to mitigate potential shortages of life-saving drugs and
medical devices.
Hawley’s legislation would:
- Require that manufacturers report
imminent or forecasted shortages of medical devices to the FDA as they
currently do for pharmaceutical drugs.
- Allow the FDA to expedite the review of
essential medical devices that require pre-market approval in the event of
expected shortages reported by a manufacturer.
- Grant the FDA additional authority to
request additional information from manufacturers of essential drugs or
devices regarding their manufacturing capacity, including sourcing of
component parts, sourcing of active pharmaceutical ingredients, use of raw
materials, and any other details the FDA might find relevant to assess the
security of the American medical supply chain.
Hawley’s legislation follows as the
Missouri populist wrote a letter this week to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn,
asking Hahn what actions he and the agency can take to ensure that American
citizens do not face shortages of life-saving drugs and medical drugs.
The Missouri senator said Tuesday
that the coronavirus outbreak has proved that America needs to “stop relying on
China for our critical medical supply chains.”
If
the #Coronavirus crisis makes anything clear, it’s that we
need to stop relying on #China for our critical medical supply chains. I
will introduce legislation this week to jump start that effort. Details to
follow https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/world/asia/coronavirus-news.html?referringSource=articleShare …
Coronavirus Live
Updates: Markets Reel as Virus Spreads Across the World
Rosemary Gibson, the author of China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China
for Medicine, recently told Breitbart News Tonight host
Rebecca Mansour that the United States should pursue an industrial policy to
renew domestic manufacturing of medicines and medical products in the homeland.
I would have our federal government
invest in helping to rebuild our industrial base using advanced manufacturing
technology that can produce our medicines much more cheaply, safely, with less
environmental footprint, and fully, from soup to nuts from those core raw
materials to finished drug in one location all here in the United States.
Hawley also said Tuesday that the
Donald Trump administration should consider additional travel restrictions to
combat the spread of the coronavirus throughout the United States.
“This is a no-brainer. It’s not just
China any longer. With the rise of cases in Europe & Asia, we need to take
additional steps to protect Americans,” Hawley tweeted.
This
is a no-brainer. It’s not just China any longer. With the rise of cases in
Europe & Asia, we need to take additional steps to protect Americans https://twitter.com/kylieatwood/status/1232654412440625152 …
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