1:36
Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) dismissed complaints from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about President Donald Trump’s focus on China for its part in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hawley scoffed at Pelosi’s characterization of Trump’s rhetoric on the communist Chinese as a “diversion.”
“I would say if you think China is a diversion from the challenges that the United States faces, then you’re not living in reality,” Hawley said. “You need to come back to planet Earth. China is the single-greatest national security threat to this country. More than that, Martha — they’re the single-greatest economic threat. We’ve been losing jobs to China for years. We’ve been losing manufacturing to China for years. Now they’re building up their military, even as they unleash this pandemic on the world. We’ve got to change our relationship with China and the time to do it is right now.”
The Missouri Republican signaled things would be different regarding the United States’ relationship with China from this point forward.
“We’re just getting started in terms of standing up to them as a nation,” he added. “I can tell you — Beijing needs to understand that the free ride is over. The United States is back. We are going to protect ourselves and rebuild a better world for the 21st century.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
Pinkerton
– Josh Hawley Is Right: The World Must Know the Truth About the Origins of the
Coronavirus
STR/AFP via
Getty Images
Pinkerton
– Josh Hawley Is Right: The World Must Know the Truth About the Origins of the
Coronavirus
26 Apr 20207
19:56
The Need for a Deep Investigation
On April 14, the Washington
Post headlined a scoop, “State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses.” As
the article explained, two State Department officials had visited the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV) in early 2018 and cabled back on January 19 of that
year:
During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, [the
State Department officials] noted the new lab has a serious shortage of
appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate
this high-containment laboratory.
In other words, here was clear
evidence that the Chinese lab could have been the vector of the virus—perhaps
accidentally, perhaps purposefully, we don’t yet have any way of knowing—that
has killed more than 150,000 people worldwide. (The
true number might never be known, since not every country provides an accurate
or honest accounting of fatalities.)
A few hours after the Post story
appeared, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) retweeted it,
declaring, “This is why we need an international commission to get all the
facts, publish them to the world, and hold #China Communist Party accountable
for its lies & suppression that have cost so many lives.”
We might note that many other
senators, including Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Cruz
(R-TX), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Marco Rubio (R-FL), have also called for
investigations of one kind or another. Similarly,
two senatorial candidates this year, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Jeff
Sessions of Alabama, have also been notably outspoken in their determination to
chase down the facts about the virus.
Indeed, it’s likely that when all is
said and done, there will be many official investigations going on in the U.S.,
covering every aspect of this crisis, foreign and domestic. Some will be fair-minded, while others
will be witch hunts; the American people will have to judge which is
which.
And yet perhaps the most important
of these investigations will be the one that digs into the origins of
the virus. Because while we can
study the response to the virus—what was done badly, what was done well, what
could have been done better—all we want, surely the most important goal
is to keep it from happening again.
The Value of a Timeline
In the course of any thorough
investigation, it’s necessary to build a timeline. That way, all the investigators, as
well as outside observers, can proceed on the basis of a shared body of
sequential data points—this happened, then that happened, and so on.
Already, many journalistic outlets
have published timelines, but here’s the thing: Most of them are focused on
the response to the virus, not the origins of
the virus.
For instance, the New York
Times starts its coronavirus timeline on December 31, 2019. Fox News starts
its on January 4, 2020. And NPR starts
its on January 5.
These timelines can be useful in
terms of assessing the national and international response to the virus. But if we want to learn more about
the origins of the virus, we need to push our timeline further
back—much further back.
The Virus Timeline
Here’s a timeline for the virus itself:
— October 2007: A peer-reviewed
medical publication, Emerging Infectious Diseases, released an
article titled, “Evolutionary
Relationships between Bat Coronaviruses and Their Hosts.” The piece, coauthored
by 15 scientists, argued that bats are a “natural reservoir of a range of
coronaviruses” and included this ominous sentence: “This finding has
implications for the emergence of SARS and for the potential future emergence
of SARS-CoVs or related viruses.”
SARS, of course, stands for Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged from Yunnan province in southern
China in 2002—not far from Wuhan, China.
— December 1, 2017: A news story
appeared in the magazine Nature headlined, “Bat cave solves mystery of deadly
SARS virus—and suggests new outbreak could occur: Chinese scientists find all
the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.”
Author David Cyranoski begins the
piece, “After a detective hunt across China, researchers chasing the origin of
the deadly SARS virus have finally found their smoking gun.” We should note that at the time,
Cyranoski was not imputing any malign intent; he was simply noting that many
nasty viruses seemed to be emerging from this part of China.
The Nature article
detailed the efforts of two Chinese scientists, Cui Jie and Shi Zheng-Li, as
they studied the nexus between the horseshoe bat and the coronavirus. The piece include this ominous
paragraph:
Cui and Shi are searching for other bat populations that could
have produced strains capable of infecting humans. The researchers have now
isolated some 300 bat coronavirus sequences, most not yet published, with which
they will continue to monitor the virus’s evolution.
We might pause over some of the
words above: The researchers have now isolated some 300 bat coronavirus
sequences. We can quickly
see: With that many kinds of coronavirus on hand, a simple application of
Murphy’s Law—that which can go wrong, will go wrong—could have devastating
consequences.
So with that fearful prospect in
mind, we might take note of the Nature article’s closing
lines; speaking of researchers Cui and Shi, the author wrote, “They warn that a
deadly outbreak could emerge again. … The risk of spillover into people and
emergence of a disease similar to SARS is possible.”
— January 19, 2018: As we have seen, on that
date, a State Department cable went from China to Washington, DC, stating that
the WIV suffered from a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians
and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
— January 2019: Four Chinese
scientists—including Shi Zhengli, who has come to be known as “Bat Lady”—published an article in Viruses, concluding, “It is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like
coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased
probability that this will occur in China.”
— February 2020: Two Chinese
scientists, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, published a paper suggesting that another facility, the Wuhan Center
for Disease Control, could have been the source of the epidemic. As they wrote,“The killer
coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Interestingly, this laboratory,
which held some 605 bats, as well as other risky animals and materials, is just
300 yards from a Wuhan “wet market.”
— February 26: Just days after its
publication, the Botao/Lei paper, pinning responsibility on the Wuhan Center
for Disease Control, was withdrawn. Why? The reason has yet to be fully
explained.
— April 7: Joshua Philipp, an
investigative journalist associated with the Epoch Times, a
publication hostile to the People’s Republic of China, released a video on
YouTube, “Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus.” In less than two weeks, the video,
which puts the blame on these Chinese government labs, has garnered more than
1.5 million views.
— April 13: International relations
scholar Walter Russell Mead published an op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal headlined, “China Still Misleads the World on the Coronavirus: A truthful
account of the virus’s progress there would help us know what to expect.”
Signaling his doubt about China,
Mead pointed to a study by the
American Enterprise Institute that suggested that the People’s Republic has
been covering up its population’s exposure to Covid-19. That is, instead of the 82,000 cases
that it has reported, the real number was likely 2.9 million. (As Breitbart News has since reported, China has since
revised its Covid numbers upward, although not to 2.9 million.)
— April 14: Asked about the possibility
that the coronavirus could have been weaponized by China, Gen. Mark Milley,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters:
It should be no surprise that we’ve
taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of intelligence [agencies]
take a hard look at that. And I
would just say at this point it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence
seems to indicate natural. But we
don’t know for certain.
We can observe that Milley is a
military man, and yet he speaks with the ambiguity—perhaps the precise ambiguity—of
a diplomat.
We know that this virus originated
in Wuhan, China. We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a
handful of miles away from where the wet market was. There’s still lots to
learn. … We really need the Chinese government to open up. The Chinese government needs to come
clean. … They say they want to cooperate. One
of the best ways they could find to cooperate would be to let the world in, to
let the world’s scientists know exactly how this came to be, exactly how this
virus began to spread.
— April 16: Fox News headlined an ominous new scoop: “Sources believe coronavirus
outbreak originated in Wuhan lab as part of China’s efforts to compete with
US.” The article continued:
There is increasing confidence that
the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though
not as a bioweapon but as part of China’s attempt to demonstrate that
its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the
capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed
on the details of early actions by China’s government and seen relevant
materials tell Fox News.
In other words, the Fox piece was
saying, the People’s Republic of China was not seeking to use the coronavirus
as an actual weapon; instead, it simply wanted to show off what it could do
with viruses. To some, that’s a
distinction without a difference.
— April 16: Asked at a White House
press conference about the possibility that the virus somehow emerged from a
Chinese lab, President Trump answered, “More and more we’re hearing the story … we are doing a very
thorough examination of this horrible situation.”
— April 17: Zhao Lijian, a spokesman
for the Chinese foreign ministry, pushed back on Trump and other inquisitive Americans, saying that
suggestions of Chinese responsibility were intended “simply to confuse the
public, divert attention and shirk responsibility.” Zhao added: “We have said many
times that tracing of the virus’s origin is a serious scientific issue and
requires scientific and professional assessment.” (We might note that back on March 12,
Zhao tweeted, outrageously, that the U.S. Army might be the
source of the coronavirus.)
— April 17: At the White House,
Trump was asked again about the horseshoe bat-coronavirus connection, and answered, “It seems to make
sense, they talk about a certain kind of bat, but that bat wasn’t in that
area.” Trump’s implication was
clear: The bat, or its virus, was brought to Wuhan. By whom? And why? To do what? Inquiring minds should want to know.
— April 19: At the White House, Trump was asked again about
China’s possible responsibility, and answered, “Well, if they were knowingly responsible, certainly. If they
did—if it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if it were knowingly
responsible, yeah, then there should be consequences.”
— April 20: Sen. Tom Cotton tells Fox News, “The most plausible explanation for the origins
of these viruses is one of those two labs in Wuhan.”
— April 21: White House trade and production adviser Peter
Navarro tells Fox News’s Sean Hannity that China “spawned the
virus, probably in that P4 lab right there in China, and then they hid the
virus behind the shield of the World Health Organization. And Sean, what that
did over a six-week period is allow hundreds of thousands of Wuhanians,
basically, to get on aircraft and seed the world.”
— April 22: Headline in Breitbart News: “China Lashes Out at Australia for Proposing International Probe
into Coronavirus Origins.” One is reminded of the old saying from World War
Two: The flak is always
heaviest when you’re getting near the target.
— April 23: Pompeo said at a press conference that China
had “destroyed” samples of the coronavirus and “covered up” the bad news about
the virus, thereby hindering the chance for the U.S., and the rest of the
world, to prepare for its onslaught.
— April 24: Per the BBC, China rejects the call of
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison (among others), for an international
investigation, claiming such an effort would be “politically motivated.”
— April 25: Navarro tells Fox News’s Neil Cavuto, “This is a war. It’s a war that China started by spawning the
virus, by hiding the virus.”
International Investigation? National Investigation? The Katyn Precedent
We might return to Sen. Hawley’s
suggestion of an international investigation of China. We certainly should hope that that all
the countries of the world should wish to get to the bottom of the question of
the coronavirus’s origins. After
all, the vast majority of coronavirus-caused
illnesses and deaths have occurred outside the U.S. This is, for sure, a planetary crisis.
Some might be concerned, of course,
that an international investigation would be inevitably tangled up in the
United Nations, which has so often shown an anti-American bias. Indeed, some
U.N. agencies, such as the World Health Organization, have proven themselves,
as Breitbart News has documented, to be in the
pocket of China.
Still, history tells us that there’s value to an international
inquiry—at least as a starting point.
For instance, way back in April
1943, the Nazi Germans discovered that the Soviet Union had massacred some
22,000 Polish military officers and intellectuals three years earlier, at a place
in Russia called Katyn. (It’s not
well remembered that in 1939, Joseph Stalin’s Reds had joined with Hitler’s
Nazis in attacking Poland; both aggressors seized hundreds of thousands of
Polish captives—many of whom met a bad end.)
The Germans had overrun Katyn back in 1941, but it was only two
years later that they discovered the Polish corpses mouldering in mass graves.
The Nazis were plenty guilty, of course, of their own heinous crimes against
humanity, and yet they hadn’t committed this crime. So Hitler’s
propagandists jumped on the opportunity to highlight this mass murder and cast
the blame on their enemy, the Soviet Union.
Germany managed to bring in
independent observers from 12 countries, including the International Red Cross,
to inspect the Katyn site; the bodies were easily identifiable through their
uniforms and other personal effects. So
the outside observers concluded that yes, this was a Soviet crime.
For their part, the Soviets denied
any involvement, blaming the Germans, and yet the proof was obvious to anyone
but a communist. Later in 1943,
the Red Army recaptured Katyn from the Wehrmacht, and the
Russians quickly destroyed the remaining evidence. Indeed, the Russians set up their own
big-lie propaganda commission, which dutifully pinned culpability for Katyn on
the Germans.
Yet Nazi crimes notwithstanding, the
reality that the Soviets had committed this particular crime
echoed around the world. In particular, Poles, and Polish-Americans, as well as
friends of Poland everywhere, shuddered at the thought that the Soviets were
coming to Poland not as liberators, but as conquerors—even mass-murderers.
Interestingly, the very next year,
1944, the Red Cross, having participated in the Katyn fact-finding, among many
other activities during those terrible war years, was honored to receive
the Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, all through the 1940s,
various international groups pursued the Katyn issue, interviewing witnesses
and gathering data where they could. The
result of all these international efforts was the building of convincing, and
enduring, proof that it was, for sure, the Soviets who were guilty of the Katyn
Massacre.
In the meantime, back in the U.S., outrage was growing over
Soviet domination of Poland; if the Soviets could lie so brazenly about Katyn,
then they could lie about everything else. Indeed, particularly among ethnic
communities that could trace their ancestry back to Central and Eastern Europe,
the realization that the old countries–now dubbed captive nations—were being held in bondage by the
Red Army and their Communist Party overlords contributed greatly to anti-Soviet
pro-Cold War sentiment.
So we can see: Those early investigations of Katyn paid big
dividends in terms of making the truth known. Yes, the truth was grim, but
better to know it than not know it.
Then, in 1951, the U.S. House of
Representatives formed a fact-finding body of its own, the Select Committee to
Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn
Forest Massacre—better known as the Madden Committee, after its chairman, Ray Madden (D-IN). The following year, 1952, the committee concluded, “No one could entertain any doubt of Russian guilt for the
Katyn massacre.”
Needless to say, the Soviets
continued to deny everything. Still, the diligent work of international and
national fact-finders proved that the Polish blood was on Russian hands.
Finally, in 2010, long after the
U.S.S.R. had collapsed, the Russian government belatedly conceded that the
Soviets were guilty. (In 2011, Poland made a dramatic and
compelling movie about Katyn.)
So we can see: There is great value
in building an international consensus on the basic facts of a case. There’s never a guarantee that an
international inquiry will succeed, but if it does, it’s a success worth
having.
So now, back to China and the coronavirus. We don’t know what happened with the
virus. We can have our
suspicions—even our strong suspicions—but until we fully investigate, we won’t
know for sure.
So Sen. Hawley is right to call for
an international investigation. If an honest
international commission—perhaps including the Red Cross—could be formed and
allowed to do its work, the findings would be enormously valuable, not only for
the sake of finding out the truth, but also for the sake of making sure that
this sort of debacle is never repeated.
Of course, it’s always possible that
the Chinese might find a way to block an international commission from finding
the truth about the coronavirus, using the same big-lie tactics that the
Russians used about the Katyn Massacre.
If so, then America will have to
rely on itself to find the truth about the origins of the virus. We can do that, of course, if we
choose to—whether or not the rest of the world wants to be a part of it.
Because the truth about the
coronavirus, whatever it proves to be, is too important not to be known.
We can’t let this happen again.
Senate Dems Push WHO Chinese Propaganda Resolution Condemning "Wuhan Virus" as Racist
Senate Dems Push WHO Chinese Propaganda Resolution Condemning "Wuhan Virus" as Racist
First the Dems insisted that "Chinese Virus" was racist. That argument was wrong, but at least comprehensible. Now they're going on to insist that the term, "Wuhan Virus" is racist. And leading the charge is Senator Kamala Harris.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) introduced a bill last week that would malign people as racists for using the term "Chinese Virus," connecting it to hate crimes.
Senate Resolution 580 condemns "all forms of Anti-Asian sentiment as related to COVID-19," citing "Chinese Virus," "Wuhan Virus," and "Kung Flu" as inaccurate rhetoric perpetuating anti-Asian stigma. The bill calls on public officials to denounce such rhetoric in any form.
The resolution specifically claims that, "the use of anti-Asian terminology and rhetoric related to COVID–19, such as the ‘‘Chinese Virus’’,‘‘Wuhan Virus’’, and ‘‘Kung-flu’’, have perpetuated anti-Asian stigma;"
Then it notes that, "in 2015, the WHO issued guidance calling on media outlets, scientists, and national authorities to avoid naming infectious diseases for locations to avoid stigmatizing groups of people;"
I wonder why an organization that is essentially China's hand puppet would have issued such guidance.
Harris, Warren, and the rest of the Dem gang are essentially pushing a resolution that is a set of Communist Chinese talking points meant to censor discussion about the origins of the pandemic.
Senate Committee Authorizes Subpoena in Hunter Biden-Burisma Investigation
3:41
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to authorize a subpoena related to the GOP investigation into Hunter Biden and Burisma Holdings on Wednesday.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson opened a vote to subpoena Blue Star Strategies, which is accused of trying to influence State Department policies. The consulting firm worked with Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings while Hunter Biden was still on the board.
The vote, originally intended to take place last week, was postponed for one week “out of an abundance of caution, and to allow time for [committee members] to receive additional briefings.” Despite initial resistance to the idea, Utah Senator Mitt Romney joined fellow committee members in a unanimous vote in favor of the subpoena.
Blue Star Strategies CEO Karen Tramontano sent a letter to Johnson ahead of the vote, asserting their history of cooperation and questioning the need for a subpoena after the firm has already volunteered for an interview. Tramontano also reminded Johnson that the firm has already provided documents related to “meetings with the U.S. government regarding Burisma.”
“At every opportunity we have indicated to the committee that it is our intention to cooperate. At no time have we ever stated or indicated in any way that we would not cooperate,” Tramontano wrote. “Therefore, we are puzzled, despite our willingness to cooperate, why the committee is proceeding to vote on a subpoena.”
Democrats have pushed back against the investigation, suggesting that its motives are purely political. Johnson, however, disagrees. “This subpoena furthers the committee’s work to address the many unanswered questions about this effort and potential conflicts of interest,” Johnson spokesman Austin Altenburg said. “It is unclear why anyone would want to help Blue Star Strategies continue to hide what happened here.”
On Tuesday, California Senator Kamala Harris called out Republican lawmakers for neglecting pandemic business in favor of pursuing the investigation:
Rather than prioritize providing important oversight that will protect Americans from the unprecedented threat posed by this pandemic, you have continued to pursue partisan political matters – such as the markup scheduled for this Wednesday on the issuance of a subpoena – that do nothing to help the millions of constituents that we serve. This is a clear abdication of responsibility.
Hunter Biden and his father, former vice president and de facto Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, stand accused of shady dealings with Burisma Holdings and deliberate manipulation of foreign policy for profit. As previously reported:
In 2014, Burisma appointed Hunter Biden, the youngest son of former Vice President Joe Biden, to its board of directors. The board appointment coincided with the elder Biden serving as the Obama administration’s point person for Ukraine, and as Burisma’s chief executive officer stood accused of money laundering. Hunter was paid $83,000 per month to serve on the board, despite his lack of expertise in the oil and gas industry.
President Donald Trump has vowed not to let the issue go. “That will be a major issue in the campaign. I will bring that up all the time because I don’t see any way out. I don’t see any way for them — I don’t see how they can answer those questions. And maybe they can. I hope they can,” the president told host Sean Hannity. “I’d actually prefer it that they can. But I don’t believe they’ll be able to answer those questions. That was purely corrupt.”
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