Silicon Valley, and the Chinese Connection to
Coronavirus Infection
By James Fulford
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.
BLOG: FEINSTEIN LOVES BIDEN BECAUSE SHE WALLOWS IN CORRUPTION.
BIDEN HAD SPENT HIS ENTIRE POLITICAL LIFE SUCKING OFF BRIBES.
“He’s a
totally corrupt swamp thing, and here’s the worst part of his manifest
corruption – he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s corrupt, if not personally
than in terms of allowing his bum kid to leverage his position. He thinks it’s A-OK for his boy Hoover to cash in
all over the globe. After all, that’s what you do, right? That’s part of the
benefits package for being in the liberal elite. And all these people fussing
and fighting about the paternity test-failing dirtbag getting rich are totally
out of line. How dare they? HOW DARE THEY!”
He
wants to raise taxes, open the borders, let you pay for illegal aliens’ sex
changes, and spark a civil war by taking guns from the people who don’t commit
crimes.
Joe Biden? Seriously?
The
establishment narrative on Joe Biden is, to put it mildly, malarkey. Gropey J
actually is everything the liberals accuse Donald Trump of being – bizarre,
vulgar, dumb, corrupt, incompetent, and utterly unfit to be president. But yet
the Creepy Veepy is so much more. In the last month, this totally not-senile,
not-at-all-weird guy has assembled a track record of freaky behavior that would
put mid-eighties Crispin
Glover to
shame.
Let’s
review…
Corn Pop
is old news. Biden’s latest rambling onion-on-the-belt monologue was something about
little kids at a pool rubbing his leg hair or something – it’s so random I’m
not even linking to it. There’s no best-case scenario here – he’s just creepy.
Then, for
no other reason than I guess he felt like a snack, he started gnawing on his
wife’s fingers in public and on camera. You know, like people do. You wonder
what the thought process there was…
“Hey,
sure are lots of cameras…gosh, I’m kind of hungry…oh look, an index finger.
Yum.”
I’m a
little surprised he didn’t pull out a packet of ketchup.
But the
best part was when some guy pointed out that, you know, Biden’s loser son Lil’
Crackpipe is the poster child for corruption and Sane Joe started spazzing out
and calling him “fat” and challenging him to a push-up contest for some reason.
This is
just odd. And this is the candidate who, amazingly, is still in the lead for
the Democrat nomination.
And then
there’s the groping females thing. He still does it occasionally, though the
media does its best to curtail coverage of his lecherous creeping. Do you
believe there’s any chance at all that he is not going to, at some point, have
some horrifying incident with some female at the White House, you know, like
grabbing the Queen for a hug n’ rub, or walking absent-mindedly into the press
room in a flapping robe with Little Joe and the gang in effect?
And let’s
be charitable. No one has ever called Joe Biden “smart.” Well, maybe as a joke.
The fact is that he’s a 40-watt guy in a 100-watt world. Haters say Trump is
dumb, but he is demonstrably not dumb. The thing about Trump is that because
our garbage elite hates him it tends to ascribe all possible negative
characteristics to him regardless of whether they apply. Trump is cunning,
crafty and has a keen sense of strategy. You may dislike him, but that does not
change the fact that alone, against the full force of the elite and its media
serfs, he prevailed and continues to prevail. If Trump, who managed to figure
out that it would be a good idea to campaign in Wisconsin, is dumb, what does
that make Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and the sobbing losers who supported
her?
No one
can seriously argue that Joe Biden is smart, and no one does. They’ll either
call you “racist” or start complaining about Trump. But you won’t get anyone
comparing the former veep to Stephen Hawking. They just sort of elide past his
staggering stupidity, perhaps hoping that whoever he picks for his veep will
give him a rubber ball to play with and lock him in an Oval Office closet when
it's time to do some presidenting.
He’s a
totally corrupt swamp thing, and here’s the worst part of his manifest
corruption – he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s corrupt, if not personally
than in terms of allowing his bum kid to leverage his position. He thinks it’s A-OK for his boy Hoover to cash in
all over the globe. After all, that’s what you do, right? That’s part of the
benefits package for being in the liberal elite. And all these people fussing
and fighting about the paternity test-failing dirtbag getting rich are totally
out of line. How dare they? HOW DARE THEY!
Understand
that Biden sees nothing wrong with this. Nothing. And that means there will be
exponentially more of it. Hell, the useless DoJ under Trump won’t prosecute
obvious graft. Do you think a DoJ that’s thrilled to have a fellow traveler
back in the White House is going to root out Biden's business badness? You do?
Well, then meet my unicorn Chet.
And
SloJoe is utterly incompetent. This is the guy who thought they should let bin
Laden skate. As Robert Gates, no Trumpie, said, "I think he has been
wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the
past four decades.”
This is
the guy who wants to take your doctor, again, and impose another brilliant
healthcare reform idea, again – all designed to unscrew the last big healthcare
reform the Democrats passed, which he praised as “a big [vulgarity] deal.”
He wants
to obey that tiresome Swedish teenager’s commands to sacrifice at the altar of
the weird weather cult. He wants to appoint all Hawaiian and Scat Franciscan
judges.
He
wants to raise taxes, open the borders, let you pay for illegal aliens’ sex
changes, and spark a civil war by taking guns from the people who don’t commit
crimes.
When you
think of a calm, steady, wise presence guiding the nation, you do not think of
Joe Biden, though that’s what is allegedly needed to end the nightmare of the
Trump presidency – you know, the record job numbers and the lack of stupid new
wars. You think of Obama and Stumbles McMyturn, only dumber and touchier.
Just
recently, Biden’s campaign ran an ad alleging that foreigners were “laughing”
at Donald Trump. Is there any Democrat anywhere who takes America’s side in a
dispute with malicious aliens? In any case, those tin pot euroweenies had
plenty to cry about – Donald Trump has forced them to pay up for NATO. Of
course, that will end too if Joe takes office. We’ll return to business as
usual – the business as usual of being shafted for the benefit of the global
bigshots.
Basically,
we’ll get rid of all the peace and prosperity that Trump has brought and get
back to normal – that is, people like us being plundered by the garbage elite.
Trump has
a track record of success, and Democrats hate him. Joe has a track record of failure,
corruption, and creepiness. Well, I guess we know why the Democrats seem to love him.
It’s out
now, my new novel Collapse, the action-packed yet hilarious
sequel to People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. Friendless loser Never Trumpers
hate it, so you’ll love it.
***One last thing. On
Wednesdays, there's BONUS KURT if you're a Townhall VIP member. Sign up today. Three
Kurts is better than two.
And here's the biggest laugh of all: the Democrat party's
only hope is a confused old man whose corruption is oozing into
the
open only because the Democrats wagered everything on
impeaching President Trump.
What to do About China
Much
the same way that the Nazis invasion of Poland in the 20th century,
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assaulted the world with a biological agent.
Instead of Panzer divisions rolling down the streets of Warsaw, Communist
China’s invisible biological warfare has stricken the world with economic and
human misery, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and forcing
millions into unemployment lines globally.
Expansionist
China is clearly a military, economic, and health threat to the world. But it’s
reckoning time for the Chinese communist dictatorship. Washington should exert
diplomatic, economic, and military pressure on Beijing that will put China’s
dictator Xi Jingping, and the evil and corrupt CCP under enormous strain.
Here
are four suggestions to counter China’s biological, military and economic
threats:
Economic Distancing: Seize China’s U.S. Treasury Notes
For
America, the China virus attack was a 21st century medical
Pearl Harbor, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties and placing our
healthcare system under enormous strain. To counterattack China’s criminal
negligence and mishandling of the coronavirus epidemic, the U.S. needs to hit
our communist comrades where it hurts the most -- their pocketbooks.
China
owns approximately $1.07 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, according to
the Treasury Department. The United States
government should seize the Chinese treasury obligations that Beijing holds in
their name, and inform the CCP that this is a down payment for the death of
tens of thousands of American citizens and the economic devastation Beijing has
unleased on the U.S. economy. And the U.S. should encourage Canada, the U.K.,
Japan, Switzerland, and other allies to do the same.
Academic Distancing: Shutter China’s Confucius
Institutes in the U.S.
The
nefarious CCP pumps over $10 billion into its Confucius Institute propaganda
machine, funding over 500 Confucius Institutes on high schools, colleges, and
university campuses around the world. In the U.S., there are over 100 Confucius
Institutes on high school, college, and university campuses, receiving over
$150 million from the Chinese communist dictatorship, according to National Association of Scholars.
The
Chinese Ministry of Education, which is run by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, infiltrates high
schools, colleges, and universities, brainwashing American students into
accepting communist China propaganda, textbooks and operating funds to enhance
its own image abroad. Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes lack transparency,
threaten academic freedom and give the Chinese communist despots access to the
U.S. education system that China does not extend to American programs,
according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations.
All
Confucius Institutes in the United States should be shut down, and all Chinese
“teachers” deported. America must end China’s unfettered access to our research
centers and universities. Also, the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, based in Washington, D.C., should be shuttered.
Seize and Sell all CCP Property in the U.S.
The
Chinese Communist Party is our enemy, so why don’t we treat them that way?
Let’s start by seizing all CCP property in the United States and selling it as
reparations for the damage they have caused to our economy. The U.S. federal
government should impound and sell all CCP property in the U.S., including
companies, real estate, bank accounts, aircraft, ocean-going vessels, and all
other CCP assets in the USA.
Bring Back “Made in the USA”
The
U.S. federal government should pay U.S. manufactures to leave China and return
to the USA. It’s time to bring U.S. manufacturing back home. Americans want to
buy high-quality “Made in the USA” products; not cheap Chinese junk that breaks
right away. To encourage U.S. manufactures to make products in the United
States, the U.S. federal government should offer companies a 100 percent
federal tax relief for 10-years if they open and produce products here in the
USA.
It
won’t be easy or painless, but America ought to fundamentally reconsider its
relationship with China. It is imperative that we have a “hard decoupling” of
the U.S.-China relationship, according to political scientist Andrew A. Michta,
writing in the American Interest. It’s time to reduce our
reliance on China as a manufacturing base.
Only
one adversary poses a truly mortal challenge to the United States; that
adversary is China.
Now
that the Chinese Communist Party has murdered tens of thousands of people
globally, the U.S. and its allies are being held hostage by the
criminals that run the CCP. China is repeatedly singled out for its unfair
trade practices, currency manipulation, support for rogue regimes like North
Korea and Iran, proliferation of nuclear arms, cyberattacks on free societies,
widespread human rights abuse at home, and undermining international
institutions. And now, you can add bioterrorism to the list.
It’s
time to cut our ties with Communist China. This is a very dangerous time for
the world. We should expect that the CCP will become more repressive
domestically, aggressive internationally, and confrontational in the wake of
the China virus.
And
one final thought: Let’s make the China plague the last Chinese import into the
U.S.A.
Octavio Nuiry is a former New Orleans Times Picayune columnist. He can be reached at onuiry@gmail.com or (562) 537-2901.
The Democratic
Party Is Wounded and Dangerous
Beware the wounded animal. In
pain and desperation, it will do violent things. It seems to me no
coincidence that Joe Biden's big win on Super Tuesday was followed by
Democratic senator Chuck Schumer threatening conservative members of the Supreme
Court on Wednesday.
Joe Biden is hardly Lancelot to President
Trump's dragon. The Democrats and the Deep State needed a
first-class warrior; instead, their best option is a walking advertisement for
Alzheimer's awareness. In
his best days, Joe Biden was the political equivalent of Jack McCall, shooting
his adversaries in the back. When he wasn't using his position of
power for financial gain or stealing other people's words, he was helping his
family line their own pockets. Today, he's a disoriented and
stumbling shell of an unimportant political hack who looks on in confusion
while his wife does his fighting for him. If you've ever wondered what
happens to the shriveled soul of a lifetime liar and Democratic swindler, just
cast your eyes upon Old Joe. He's a walking, talking effigy of
Democratic corruption and amorality. He's what the Democratic
Party usually keeps far off the main stage for the back-alley entertainment;
now he's the main event, but no amount of stick-prodding by Donna Brazile or
Tom Perez is going to turn Joe Biden into Fred Astaire. He's a
freak-show carnival attraction at best, amazing onlookers by his ability to
occasionally jumble audible words together into a sentence. The
Democrats needed a man who could command a movement; all they got was a man who
can barely control his own.
I'm not saying President Trump's
re-election is in the bag. Far from it. We've never seen
such an array of villains acting in concert to take down an American
president. The Democratic Party has most of the permanent
bureaucratic Deep State (as well as stealthy anti-Trump Republicans), Wall
Street, Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, cosmopolitan Europe, global warming
doomsayers, the Middle East's worst terrorists, and domestic Antifa terrorists
here at home all actively working to dislodge President Trump from the White
House. In the past, the chiefs of our intelligence agencies and
clandestine services retired into relative obscurity, cognizant that duty
commanded their silent withdrawal into the pages of history. After
orchestrating a coup against the American president, however, it is not unusual
to see the former heads of Obama's CIA, FBI, and NSC all tirelessly justifying
their criminal acts on cable news each night. The corporate news
media and institutional government have spent years trying to gin up enough
hysteria in the nation that mock beheadings of the president and ritual
re-enactments of his assassination during summer theater might lead the
American people to clamor for the real thing.
So, no, the 2020 election will not be
over until all the votes have been counted on November 3, and it becomes clear
that we have successfully preserved Western civilization for at least a little
while longer from this most recent manifestation of Vienna's bloody 1683
siege. All I am saying is that Joe Biden was never meant to be the
establishment's champion for resurrecting their oligarchic power. They wanted a formidable presidential nominee,
someone who could check all the right identity politics boxes while stringing
words together that were substantively meaningless while singularly
inspiring. Instead, they're settling for a politician past his
expiration date who sounds less crème
de la crème and more soused in crème de menthe. The
Democratic Party may depend on dead voters to win elections, but running dead
candidates is another thing altogether.
So just because the cable news anchors
and Carville clones are all high-fiving each other and cheering for managing to
narrowly prevent a communist disciple of Stalin and Castro from sewing up the
Democratic nomination for president by the beginning of March, don't forget how
disappointed they are at heart. If Biden goes on to clinch the
nomination, the Democratic Party will have managed to take all the aloof,
plain, manila-folder blandness of John Kerry and combine it with the alertness
and energy of a nursing home after pill rounds. This is the one whom
the commentariat is celebrating right now, the guy Obama and the gang blocked
from running in 2016 because they felt him not quite up for the challenge when
he was four years younger. The vice president during the slowest economic recovery since the
Great Depression, the wordsmith who marveled at Obama for being strangely
"articulate" for a black guy, and the obtrusive shoulder-rubber whose
chief political instinct was to sniff the hair of the wives and daughters of
White House officials and visiting dignitaries. Imagine being in such dire straits
because the previous Democratic president so hollowed out the party's future by
losing over a thousand elected officials across the country during his time in
office that the last, great hope to beat President Trump this year is just
hoping to make it to bed each afternoon before saying something so
inappropriate or illogical or ridiculous that Red Bernie becomes the Democrat's
Dear Leader by default. For every minute of his few wakeful hours,
his handlers have to be on constant guard against the possibility that a voice
in Biden's head will scream, "Oh, look, a young child with
wonderful-smelling hair." "Comeback
Joe"? More like "Come back, Joe!"
The Democrats and the Deep State have
spent the last four years constructing the greatest wag-the-dog spectacle
America's ever seen in an attempt to cover up the malfeasance and criminality
of the last administration, while preventing the current one from achieving too
many victories. Considering that
Brennan and Comey are still free and Obama and Hillary are still smiling,
they've been remarkably successful. But the Mueller obfuscation and Schiff circus are behind us,
the dance music of delay is dying down, and the Democrats' and Deep State's
ability to keep pushing back their day of reckoning is coming to an
end. If they don't win in 2020, they cannot keep justice at bay,
regardless of how stacked in their favor it has always been in the
past. And standing in the gap as their last-ditch prospect to save
them from President Trump's re-election and spare them from long delayed judgment
is none other than Corn Pop's archenemy. The one
"reasonable" Democrat in the race who has already burnished his
"moderate" credentials by fully embracing Bernie's Green New Deal,
Warren's Medicare for All, and Beto's door-to-door gun
confiscation. Nothing says "electable centrist Democrat"
like "D'oh!" Biden's full tilt toward Marxist
socialism. No wonder Chuck Schumer sounds like some injured animal
in the forest, lashing out at tree branches all around him. That's what
small, weak, dying creatures do when they know the end is near.
Pinkerton – Josh Hawley Is Right: The World Must Know the Truth About the Origins of the Coronavirus
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.
— April 16: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News:
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.
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