By Donald A. Loucks, TEM
Submitted 19 April, 2020
There are two virus battles today. The first one we already know about: the travel restrictions, restaurant closings, quarantines, shelter-in-place orders, and or course toilet paper shortages.
Some of the restrictions are questionable, like disallowing church services. But some are examples of bizarre overreach.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer single-handedly outlawed solitary golfing, using a boat with a motor, the purchase of paint, floor covering and some construction material and vegetable seeds. (Yikes!) There have been massive protests in Lansing, Michigan’s capital, over the draconian and inexplicable edicts. If she had banned toilet paper there surely would have been a total rebellion.
That was hard to understand, but fighting the COVID-19 virus from a medical and epidemiological aspect can be more easily grasped. President Donald Trump’s daily briefings have kept the public knowledgeable of the progress the U.S. government has been making in treating infected patients and preventing and slowing the disease’s spread with the partnership of the states.
The second war is beginning in the background. The first war against COVID-19 must be waged and won before any of the other necessary action is taken.
China knew.
It knew on Jan. 3 that a virus had escaped from its “research lab” in Wuhan and issued a gag order to all parties concerned at the lab and medical personnel dealing with the immediate outbreak. One of the doctors involved with the initial outbreak, a 33-year-old healthy man, died of the disease, or so says the Communist Chinese government. Remember, a healthy 33- year-old should survive an infection; unless he was a whistle blower, which this man was.
All discussion was silenced. Almost all. Word did spread as well as reports from other countries of COVID-19 reaching their shores. Trump initiated the first travel ban on Jan. 19, much to the ridicule of the press and, tellingly, the World Health Organization, now led by an Ethiopian politician, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Ghebreyesus denounced travel bans, especially those preventing Chinese from entering the United States.
What doesn’t smell right is that Ethiopia is up to its ears in debt to the Communist Chinese, and Ghebreyesus helped get his country there.
The Chinese mode of operation is to control those countries, companies and organizations that owe it money or who need economic access to its markets. Ghebreyesus’ pronouncements were antithetical to the control of a pandemic, thereby discrediting the scandal-plagued organization.
So, on Jan. 14, WHO denounced the travel ban. Epidemiologists extrapolated that if the ban had been enacted one week earlier, combined with isolation protocol, there would have a 66% reduction of infection. If the ban had been enacted two weeks prior (right after the Chinese discovered the deadly virus had escaped) the reduction would have been 86%. Can you see why so many countries feel betrayed by the ChiComs?
Here is one more part of the devious puzzle: If COVID-19 now on the loose matched the samples in the Wuhan lab, the world would know that the disease originated from that lab. But now we know almost certainly that indeed happen. More important is that the ChiComs hid it and lied about it to make themselves look blameless. They even tried to blamed its introduction on U.S. Army soldiers in China participating in war gaming prior to the virus release.
What will be the cost to the world? Certainly tens of thousands of lives will be lost. The countries most severely affected at this point are Italy, Spain, Turkey, the Czech Republic and the Republic of Georgia. Those countries and others have been betrayed and endangered by their soulless, formerly-trusted trading partner.
This act of cowardice and treachery will not be forgotten by the millions of people worldwide who have suffered economically as we are now, and who have lost many friends and relatives over the course of the pandemic. Does anyone think that Communist China will maintain its station in the world economy?
Plague me once, shame on you ...