Many of the world’s recent pandemics have been traced to China: the Asian Flu in 1956, the Hong Kong Flu in 1968, SARS in 2002, and the Swine Flu in 2009. Now COVID-19 is another gift from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
COVID-19 is believed to have originated at a wet market in Wuhan, China. Wet markets are a cross between a zoo and a slaughterhouse. They put people in constant contact with both live and dead animals, including illegal wildlife. That makes it easy for diseases to be transmitted to humans.
According to a study published by the University of Southampton in England, if CCP authorities had disclosed the outbreak of the COVID 19 virus three weeks earlier, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by up to 95 percent, thereby mitigating the global public health crisis.
A timeline of the early weeks of the outbreak developed by the American news website Axios shows a cover up by CCP officials. This allowed the virus to spread unchecked in Wuhan for weeks, including among the five million city residents who left going to all points of the compass without being screened, leading to a national epidemic, and inevitably to its global spread.
That should come as no surprise. CCP officials prioritize stability – even if it means suppressing information the public needs to know and threatening public health.
CCP leadership covered up the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak for over a month after it emerged in 2002. Even as the virus spread CCP officials continued to undercount cases and delayed reporting information. They did not alert the World Health Organization until February 2003.
United States National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien said China’s cover up “probably cost the world community two months to respond,” exacerbating the pandemic. As the current outbreak has shown, an infectious disease that starts in one part of the world can spread to others in virtually no time.
So it came as no surprise that on March 17 the CCP said it would expel journalists from The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the three American outlets, plus Voice of America and Time Magazine, would be designated as “foreign missions” and must report information about their staff, finance, operations and real estate in China.
The CCP’s aggressive and highly centralized propaganda machine continues to sow doubt about COVID 19′s origin. Zhao Lijian a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “It might be the U.S. Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Chinese diplomats are pushing the narrative that China’s response bought precious time for and made important contributions to other countries’ epidemic prevention and control. They claim China is ready to share its experience and research with countries where the disease is spreading as well as to export face masks, pharmaceutical products, and other medical supplies for which it is the dominant global supplier.
If China decided to ban such exports to the United States, the state-run news agency Xinhua noted, the United States would be “plunged into a mighty sea of coronavirus.” Last year, prominent Chinese economist Li Daokui suggested curtailing active pharmaceutical ingredient exports to the United States as a countermeasure in the trade war. His comments validated those made by Gary Cohn, former chief economic advisor to President Trump: “If you’re the Chinese and you want to… destroy us, just stop sending us antibiotics.”
Having made much of the developed world dependent on China, and because of the country’s economic and military power, the CCP will likely avoid censure or sanctions for its role in the pandemic.
Perhaps it is time to get Greta Thunberg on the case to call out the CCP, hold them responsible for COVID-19 and raise the issue of decoupling the West from China.
