Mike Huckabee
It’s frustrating to listen to the “official” scientists when it comes to treating COVID-19 with promising drugs. Researchers want data –- YES, WE KNOW –- and they typically answer any question on the need for new treatments with the same spiel about controlled, double-blind, long-term studies.
Those studies take time. (Aside: in the meantime, we simply must go ahead and treat with medications that are safe and show promise.) And much of the data we need will have to come from far-flung places around the world. A few controlled studies are already going on, but we must wait for the results. Of course, in an ideal world, we would be getting solid data from China, everything they have, which would be especially useful because Wuhan Province is Ground Zero for this infection. But this is not an ideal world, and that is NOT happening and will never happen.
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Over the past couple of days, I’ve written about the lack of truthful information from Chinese leaders. It’s worse than that: they’ve created a bogus narrative about their effective handling of the spread of the disease that many in the American media love to perpetuate because it makes President Trump look bad by comparison. They hate him so much that I’m not sure it matters to them that the story out of China is a big lie.
One big eye-opener is a recent report from the Australian version of 60 MINUTES. Australia, being much closer geographically to China and the Asian Pacific, takes a warier approach than the American media do to anything China does or says, and this report is no exception. When the Chinese government claimed that only about 2500 people died, Australians weren’t buying it, in part because of the huge increase in the number of cremations. That’s right; it seems that if you want to “earn” money in China right now, you should definitely go into the urn business. There was also a corresponding decrease in the number of cell phones
According to “emerging diseases” expert Laurie Garrett, who has witnessed outbreaks of Ebola and SARS, the virus “festered” in the live animal market in Wuhan for at least a month and a half before the world was told. At least at the time of this interview, she believed the virus “jumped” from some animal species, such as a bat, to human as has happened with other viruses (Note: as we’ve discussed, at least one study has suggested the market was not the original source of infection, and a Level 4 biolab is suspiciously close by; so is the Wuhan Institute of Virology.)
Garrett takes us through the timeline that started in mid-November, when cases of “a strange new flu” began to surface. In early December, they determined that it wasn’t SARS or anything like it, and that it had been spread from that market. Anyone who suggested otherwise was “suppressed,” she says. An official announcement didn’t come until New Year’s Eve; they said they had closed the market and stopped the spread, and also that there was no human-to-human transmission. She says this was a deliberate lie, that by then they were seeing cases they knew had no connection with the market.
Garrett goes on to talk about the physician who tried to warn the world and has since died of the virus. He was among a group of eight doctors who were called in and forced to sign statements declaring themselves liars. Isn’t totalitarianism great?
The report also features an interview with Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, ranking Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee. He has been outspoken in accusing China of a criminal act, “the worst cover-up in human history.” From reports out of Beijing, we know that a lab had sequenced the new coronavirus by December 27 but was ordered to hand over or destroy its samples.
McCaul says that if the Chinese had done the right thing and notified the World Health Organization, an estimated 95 percent of the worldwide contagion could have been stopped. I would add that it’s ironic, in light of this, how much the World Health Organization is going along with China’s narrative now. Tucker Carlson had a good segment on WHO Tuesday night; he also references the Australian 60 MINUTES report.
The report goes on with the shocking timeline, contrasting China’s official statements with what they really knew about the virus. The culmination was the Chinese president’s decision to allow 5 million people, with no health screening, to leave Wuhan for points unknown around the world. Since then, another doctor, the head of emergency at Wuhan Central Hospital, who tried to expose the deception has “disappeared.”
I’m linking to this piece with one caveat: the interviewee (a New Yorker) interjects politics and engages in some extremely undeserved Trump-bashing towards the end. Unbelievably, she blames both President Xi AND President Trump, “the two most powerful men on earth,” for the pandemic. She wrongly accuses Trump of “downplaying the significance” of COVID-19, never mentioning his early efforts to contain it by stopping travel from China. She notes instead his tweets praising China, not understanding the “big picture” and the diplomatic and practical reasons why he might do so. Anyway, if that part sickens you as it did me, you can skip over to the rest of the interview with McCaul, whose defense of the President –- believe it or not –- actually made it in.
Whistleblowers silenced by China could have stopped global coronavirus spread | 60 Minutes Australia
According to Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party in the UK, Radio Free Asia says the number of deaths in China from COVID-19 is more like 40,000. “But the one thing I do know,” he told Martha MacCallum on Monday evening, “absolutely for certain, is we cannot believe a word that Communist China says.”
He said that from the beginning, they hid the truth. “The doctor that exposed what was really happening was written off as a mad conspiracy theorist...and now we see China using its influence, using its money; we particularly see Huawei, the telecoms company, donating face masks, hand gel, donations in some cases, and even the state offering to sell ventilators to countries like Italy that are having serious problems. The country that caused this problem is now trying to present itself to much of the Western world as being its savior, and is trying to make a massive, massive power grab.”
Reminds me of the arsonist who plays “hero” and rushes in to save the family.
Farage says it’s time the Chinese government “owned up” and took some responsibility. Fat chance. I’d say it’s time our own media got a reality check and realized this is a totalitarian state, one that keeps people in line with prison camps and executions and will use the pandemic they caused to hurt us in any way possible, short-term and long-term, so they can eventually replace us as the leading world power. THAT is what President Trump has to deal with. Is there anything to convince our partisan media that the Chinese state is America’s enemy, and the one person they spend all their energy hating and abusing, President Trump, is really America’s dearest friend?
Farage, for one, understands Trump having to pay lip service to the Chinese president right now. “The truth of it is, we’ve become much too dependent on China for much of our supply chains in manufacturing...this needs a radical rethink. It is globalization that has caused this crisis.”