CNN reports on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in China. The Chinese didn’t realize they were dealing with a different virus at the beginning. They thought it was just a spike in flu cases. It took them 23 days to verify a diagnosis from a screening test. They weren’t forthcoming with information.
It sounds to me like they thought they had a particularly nasty flu on their hands initially and didn’t immediately make the connection to another disease like SARS, which is much more deadly than Covid. It was only when the tests for flu came back negative that they started considering other viruses.
This sounds so plausible I’m not sure why it’s news. I’m not letting China off the hook here. There may be cultural and sociopolitical reasons why the Chinese reacted the way they did. Maybe individuals try to avoid sticking their heads up because they’ve seen what happens to people who deliver bad news. Think of it as the Chinese version of Chernyobal. Yeah, go watch that on HBO. This behavior would be consistent with what I’ve observed working with Chinese colleagues. They tend to keep a low profile but there’s a Chinese Underground that passes information among itself, not for general consumption. Survival mechanism from years of communist rule, re-education camps, and trying to fit in the best way possible without drawing attention to yourself? Or using the new outbreak as a way to settle personal scores? Competition opportunities? A history of scientific or medical sabotage might have participants looking over their shoulders instead of sharing too much of what they knew. I could see those things happening.
But so what? Seriously.
By the middle of JANUARY 2020, while Trump was rage tweeting over his impeachment, the pandemic was already being tracked around the world. The Johns Hopkins tracker was reporting cases in Toronto shortly after Martin Luther King holiday weekend. I saw the two little dots on the map and wondered how close I got to exposure when I visited Canada that weekend.
I’m no freaking genius but if someone like me could be both fascinated and concerned, and if there was already a tracker available, then it’s incomprehensible to me that our governmental agencies that are supposed to be watching for this sort of thing weren’t aware of it also. It didn’t require Trump’s interest in it at that time to summarize that there was a very serious problem on our horizon.
When Biden takes office, we’re going to find out who knew what, when, and who went to the White House with their hair on fire to alert the Trump administration. We’ll learn when they decided to turn the response over to the private sector so they could make money on it. We’ll find out what the plans were with respect to the hoarded PPE and who decided to turn a global pandemic into a political hammer to pin the blame for the response on the Democrats in blue states.
There are some political observers who think that Covid hurt the president. When the dust settles, we may have found that the opposite was true. A change in political “leadership” may have been shown to be more necessary if Trump hadn’t used Covid as a naturally caused smoke screen to keep his other destructive actions hidden. We watched in horrified disbelief as he intentionally hobbled the response to the virus while he deliberately underplayed the seriousness, and confused and mislead his base.
Trump didn’t need the Chinese government in Beijing to tell him what to do or how to screw things up. He did that all on his own. He used Covid to enforce a sense of learned helplessness in his adversaries. Yep, the whole country could suffer illness and economic disaster and it would be impossible to get rid of Trump before the election and there wasn’t a damn thing any of us could do to dislodge him from sitting like a dragon on a hoard of federal response plans and money.
Tell me you weren’t angry and frustrated. That was the point.
So, I honestly don’t give a rat’s ass when, what and where the Chinese scientists knew about coronavirus or how they could have missed the clues. Even if there were no cultural or political barriers to China being more forthcoming, there was still plenty of warning before the virus hit our shores for Trump to mobilize a response. In fact, it would have been better for all of us if he had just delegated responsibility in an area he knew absolutely less than nothing about to the scientific professionals. Getting out of the way and just signing authorizations to trigger built in defense mechanisms would have saved us all a lot of grief.
He didn’t. He used it to his own ends.
Don’t look now but he’s using the outcome of the election in the same way. He’s spreading and reinforcing misinformation intentionally to mislead and anger his base and confuse everyone else. You think that all of the state certifications will put the matter to rest that Biden won? Did you miss the way he persuaded half of the US to ignore and downplay a deadly virus and jeer the rest oh us for wearing masks?
Never underestimate the ruthless and unscrupulous to take advantage of a crisis.
Don’t blame Beijing. To suggest that the Chinese made us behave this way makes us look stupid and powerless before our Chinese overlords.
No American should accept that our government cowered before Beijing while South Korea and New Zealand got its shit together. It’s time to face up to the fact that Trump did this to us deliberately.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
I’m still trying to figure out WHY he did it, it would have been so much simpler to institute wearing a mask, etc. and control the virus, but he went in the opposite direction. Why???
Because “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. He needed to herd his base on his side and activate them against Democrats. Here in PA, the Trumpers are furious with Gov. Wolf for closing down businesses during the lockdown. It’s unamerican, it violates their rights to assemble and make a living, yadayadayada.
The Trump campaign put blue state governors in a bind. They had to do what they did for public health reasons and to protect the healthcare system. Trump made it a battle between Republicans and Democrats in order to make Democrats out to be the bad guys who were impoverishing everyone.
It worked and it affected downballot Democrats in the House, Senate and state legislatures.
THAT’S why he did it.
He deliberately made things worse so Democrats would have to make a leadership choice that would divide the electorate.
I agree with most of what you say but the statement at the top “house cannot stand”, there’s a ring of truth about that. The toppling of USA from our pedestal has been aided by a lot of what he’s done . Putin would approve of that, and I still think Trump is being manipulated by Putin.
Also, our side was not so successful branding the republicans as the bad guys for letting the virus kill so many. We’re all thinking it but few actually said it. Surely that is worse than impoverishing someone. That’s the part of the election I really don’t understand and why our framing was so poor.
I can’t understand all of their strategy either but in general, power is addicting. People don’t give it up without a struggle. And there are examples from all over the world where radical governments have destroyed their populations in order to crush dissent or take advantage of a crisis (Shock Doctrine). Many millions died in Stalin’s Russia. Neglect, starvation, inaction, it doesn’t really matter. It decreases the surplus population and if you have the right media elements, you can lie about it indefinitely.
So true.
I hope RD is mistaken about this being a deliberate choice by Benedict Donald, rather than sheer stupidity, and that it actually helped the GOP, if not BD himself.
If that many of my fellow white Americans are that miserably stupid, then I fear for the future of the Republic.
At the end of the day, Benedict Donald is not the real problem. The GOP is not the real problem. Even Mommie Dearest Russia is not the real problem.
The realest of all real problems is that roughly 74 million of our fellow citizens are either authoritarian, or tolerant of authoritarianism.
How can they be deprogrammed?
Ah, the million dollar question. I was reading an article recently about how we dealt with Japan and Germany after the war as possibly helpful in dealing with the alternative reality trumpers who appreciate authoritarianism. It struck me that pounding Japan and Germany to ashes was a useful beginning, but how to translate that to our present situation escapes me.
I very much agree. China certainly deserves severe criticism, but that does not somehow exculpate trump and his people, who did the worst possible job in dealing with the virus. In fact, if someone deliberately tried to do a terrible job, they could not have done worse. It exemplifies and illuminates the corruption and depravity of Trump. To him, the virus was not something to deal with, not something that his position mandated him to try to solve. it was a nuisance, seen to threaten his political standing, and also to damage the economy that he wanted to run on. So he spent his time downplaying it, saying it was a hoax, not a concern; and then demanding that everyone go back to work to make money for him and the oligarchs. The mocking of wearing masks was abhorrent. Trump hates science, because he can’t manipulate and lie about it to his liking. I do think that it all hurt Trump to some degree, because otherwise he would have only run on an economy which he had little to do with, but which the media was all too eager to give him credit for.
Off topic:
1) Death
2) Taxes
3) IBW will post this in December, possibly more than once. 😛
Crimes against humanity, here in the US by the orange decrepit Nero.