Speak the Truth, Shame the Chinese

[Anti Federalist]

Speak the Truth, Shame the Chinese

https://www.takimag.com/article/speak-the-truth-shame-the-chinese/

David Cole

March 31, 2020

Well, I’ll be damned; the Chinese are now encouraging “cultural appropriation”! After telling whites that they can’t cook “Asian” food or open “Asian” restaurants or wear “Asian” clothes, because everything that comes from Asia belongs to Asians only, the Chinese are now willingly surrendering credit for the COVID-19 virus, even though it came from China as the by-product of specifically Chinese customs.

Sorry, pallies. You want ownership of the pot sticker, you get ownership of COVID.

There are times to avoid pointing fingers, and there are times to point them so vigorously that you put someone’s eye out. So let’s do some pointin’.

COVID-19 is zoonotic, meaning it jumped from animals (in this case, bats) to humans. You’re going to hear a lot of media propagandists claim that “we don’t know the origin of the virus.” That’s pure obfuscation. True, we don’t know how bats originally acquired the virus in the wild. But that’s not the issue; the issue is how the virus jumped to humans (a “zoonotic spillover”). And regarding that “jump,” we know exactly where it happened: at a Wuhan “wet market” where exotic animals are sold for food in the most appallingly unclean conditions. That’s where the “jump” occurred.

Officially, COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2. As the name implies, COVID-19 is a relative of another coronavirus, SARS. Remember SARS? It was all the rage in 2003. SARS also did the zoonotic jump to people through the Chinese wet markets. And back in the early 2000s, the media was willing to say so. “SARS was not an isolated outbreak,” reported CNN in 2005. “South China has long been the epicenter of pandemic flus, giving birth to three or four global outbreaks a century.”

And why?

South China offers the most exotic fare from all over the globe—by some accounts at least 60 species can be found in any one market—thrusting together microorganisms, animals and humans who normally would never meet. This thriving trade gives the manufacturing hub that straddles the Pearl River Delta the unenviable title of being the “petri dish” of the world.

In an attempt to control the SARS outbreak, the Chinese government tried to stem the trade and consumption of exotic animals. But again and again, the people of China said no. This bears repeating: The Chinese government acknowledged that the SARS “jump” happened because of the wet markets, and those markets were closed…until the Chinese people brought them back.
“COVID-19 is the most predictable calamity in modern history.”

As Jacques deLisle, director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at UPenn, wrote in 2004:

As the SARS crisis came under control, measures to stem the consumption of civets and other wild animals showed signs of eroding once the intense international scrutiny that proponents credited for their adoption began to abate. A hotly debated Guangdong provincial draft law omitted a ban on consumption of wild animals (beyond mere exhortations not to eat them), and a proposed provision prescribing a ban included no penalties. Reports of the reopening of exotic animal markets, the return of wild animals to menus, and amendments to relax regulatory restrictions became commonplace.

At a 2003 Brookings Institution conference on SARS, Newsday’s science correspondent Laurie Garrett observed:

There was a survey done—50% of responders China-wide said that they do occasionally eat exotic animals. So if you have something that is that entrenched in the diet and the cuisine and the tradition and the culture, I don’t think that any regulation is going to make the actual trade in these animals disappear. If anything, it could drive them further underground and make it harder for public health authorities to have any idea what’s going on. So I don’t think that China has come up with an answer on how to stop zoonosis.

Garrett was incorrect. China knew exactly how to “stop zoonosis.” The government simply lacked the will to fight its citizenry on the issue.

In 2003, the CDC’s Daniel DeNoon made the following prediction: “Will SARS come back? Experts agree only on this: It won’t be the last worldwide killer epidemic.” DeNoon quoted the WHO as saying that this future “killer epidemic” is “especially” inevitable because “in China there has been no attempt to segregate exotic animals in the marketplace. These animals have been allowed back into the markets and are still a threat.”

The timeline is important. SARS became a global menace in 2003. The Chinese government attempted to end the wildlife markets that year…and that same year, the markets came back. Literally, the Chinese couldn’t go four months without their filthy, disease-spreading fare. In fact, the return of the wet markets in 2003, while the world was still struggling with SARS, surprised even the China-friendly WHO. As Science magazine reported in August ’03:

The lifting of a 4-month ban on civets and 53 other species of wild animals delighted gourmets in Guangdong Province, where the local cuisine relies on a variety of wild animals. But it came as a surprise to the World Health Organization, which has a team of experts working with its Chinese counterparts investigating a possible animal reservoir of SARS.

As world health officials were trying to curb SARS, the locals were inviting it. “Chinese Diners Shrug Off SARS: Bring On the Civet Cat.” That’s a New York Times headline from December 2003:

It was lunch hour at The First Village of Wild Food, and if anyone in the restaurant was worried that SARS might again be spreading in this city, they were not showing it. Huang Sheng was more worried about which of the small animals in black metal cages would become his midday meal. Asked if he worried about eating wild game in light of SARS, Mr. Huang said he saw no risk. “It’s no big deal. It’s not a problem.” He said Guangdong Province residents had a reputation for eating exotic foods, a taste not even SARS could deter.

Not even SARS could deter. Nor the threat of the next “killer epidemic.” Nor the words of experts like the University of Hong Kong’s Moira Chan‐Yeung, who in November 2003 addressed this message to the people of China: “Abandoning the widespread use of exotic animals as food or traditional medicine and the practice of central slaughtering of livestock and fowl will decrease the chance of viruses jumping from animals to humans.” Around the same time, Nature magazine’s Asia-Pacific correspondent David Cyranoski rhetorically asked, “Why does this region keep throwing up viruses that have the potential to threaten the lives of people around the world?” The answer? “The southern Chinese widespread use of wild species for food and traditional medicine.”

As the Chinese people fought for their right to spread zoonotic diseases, Chinese activists fought to keep the West from noticing. Victor Wong of the Vancouver Association of Chinese Canadians gave a talk in May 2003 in which he downplayed the need to take SARS seriously: “I contrast SARS with the fact that thousands die from influenza every year in Canada. Around the world, millions die from tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS.” He urged an end to “wall-to-wall coverage of Asians wearing masks, patients being wheeled away on stretchers, health officials in moon-suits” because such stories “only serve to fuel more public panic.” He demanded that the media stop running stories with a “negative message” about how “the Chinese eat exotic wild animals.” Finally, he stressed the need to study not the disease but the “trauma” the coverage inflicts upon the Chinese.

In January 2004, SARS reappeared in China. The wildlife market ban was repealed in August 2003, and five months later, the Chinese had ushered in a new round of the disease. As NBC reported in January ’04, even as the ban was reimposed, wild animals were nevertheless “back on the menu” in Chinese eateries. Many in the Western press treated the return of the wildlife markets as a joke. A January 2004 Slate piece by Wired’s Brendan Koerner stated, “Considered a culinary treat in southern China, the animals are believed to carry the virus that causes SARS. What’s a civet cat, what’s the best way to cook one, and what do they taste like?” Yes, Koerner provided recipes for the disease-carrying animal. I’m sure that seemed hilarious at the time.

In a July 2004 piece about the revocation of the January wet-market ban, the L.A. Times wondered “whether the virus for another potential outbreak might be lurking somewhere else in the Chinese diet.” However, the WHO, which had been against the ban’s August 2003 repeal, by July 2004 had “mysteriously” come around to the Chinese way of thinking, supporting the new repeal. The organization’s SARS “team leader” Julie Hall told the Times, “We have to keep an open mind. We may not eat dogs or cats, but we do eat raw oysters. We just shouldn’t pass judgment.”

The World Health Organization’s SARS leader literally said “we shouldn’t pass judgment” on the behavior that causes SARS. That’s like an oncologist refusing to pass judgment on smoking. It’s malpractice soaked in racial whataboutism (“Whites eat crazy things too!”).

By 2007, with the WHO no longer “passing judgment” and with the wet-market ban long gone, Reuters reported that “exotic wildlife and squalor have returned to the Qingping market, making health officials worried that another killer virus could emerge. Traditional wet markets still account for the bulk of fresh food sales in China, where diners hope exotic meats will bring good fortune.” Taiwanese health official Li Jib-heng direly predicted that “a new disease could emerge from close contact with sick wild animals.”

Even some Chinese officials were willing to publicly voice their concerns:

“It seems that some people are determined to start eating civet cats again since no new SARS cases have been reported over the past two years in Guangdong Province. It’s a very dangerous sign,” said Huang Fei, deputy director of the Guangdong Health Department. (‘China Daily,’ 2/14/07)

That same year, Guo-ping Zhao of the Chinese National Human Genome Center in Shanghai unequivocally stated in a paper for the Royal Society that a “ban on wild-game animal markets” would practically guarantee “no further naturally acquired human cases.”

The Chinese knew a ban would work, but they allowed the markets to thrive.

In 2013, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post disclosed that a new Chinese zoonotic pandemic was likely: “Scientists warn of more serious disease threats than SARS.”

A survey that year by Beijing’s Horizon Research Consultancy Group showed that in Guangzhou, 83.3% of residents ate exotic animals.

The Chinese people were living in stubborn, arrogant denial, and the WHO had fallen silent because only racists “pass judgment” on Chinese zoonotic practices.

And now we have COVID-19, which has disrupted the entire world. One-third of the earth’s population is under some sort of lockdown. Livelihoods are ruined, economies destroyed, hundreds of thousands are ill and tens of thousands are dead. And the Chinese government, the Chinese diaspora, the political left, and the media want you to forget how COVID grew from the willful failure of China to learn the lessons of SARS.

So let’s not forget.

Remember that COVID-19, like SARS, began because of specifically Chinese customs, practices, and fetishes.

Remember that during and after the SARS outbreak, the Chinese knew that the wet markets were a danger, yet they were allowed to prosper.

Remember that experts predicted that a bigger, badder SARS would eventually be born from the wet markets. COVID-19 is the most predictable calamity in modern history.

And remember that a ban on Chinese wet markets would have prevented COVID-19. This was the most preventable calamity in modern history.

If we allow anything—fear of “racism,” hatred of Trump, lucrative Chinese business dealings—to get in the way of halting those wet markets for good this time, it’s a certainty that eventually we’ll see an even worse pandemic. There can be no soft feelings here, no sensitivity, no diplomacy. The Chinese must be cajoled, shamed, ridiculed, banned, and threatened until they stop risking the lives of every human on earth because they love eating things that shouldn’t be eaten.

The Chinese don’t deserve hugs; they’re lucky that most of us are civilized enough to not take violent revenge for what they’ve wrought. They should count their blessings that they can still walk among us unmolested. But they shouldn’t mistake our civility for forgiveness.

They have the power to shut the sky…and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they wish. I’m not a religious man, but that line from Revelation seems appropriate. The Chinese have shut the world with their latest plague.

We need to make sure it’s their last.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Wuhan Derangement Syndrome

https://www.takimag.com/article/wuhan-derangement-syndrome/

David Cole

April 07, 2020


“How can we not be united against death?” So wailed emotive carbuncle Keith Olbermann back in 2009. He was off on some typically nutty rant about single-payer health care, but still, it was a nicely turned phrase.

“How can we not be united against death?”

Or more to the point, how can we not be united against the thing that created COVID-19?

In last week’s column, I detailed how in 2003, a coronavirus called SARS became a global health menace. SARS began as a virus in bats, and it would have stayed that way but for the fact that Chinese people love eating exotic animals, which are sold in grotesque “wet markets” where species that wouldn’t normally mix in the wild mix with each other and with humans. I quoted numerous scientists on how the “wet markets” are where SARS made the “spillover” from bat to human (through an intermediary carrier—the civet—which is a delicacy in China), and how the next wet-market zoonotic disease would be even worse.

The science on SARS is uncontested, but that’s only because it didn’t become a huge international plague. SARS conspiracy theories didn’t drive web traffic, so the fantasists let it be. But with COVID, we want a mad scientist in a lab as the villain, not a billion arrogant, selfish, but ordinary assholes who refuse to alter their gutter tastes in the name of saving lives.

Last week, Tucker Carlson shocked the ’net with a “Chinese report” about how the wet markets were framed, framed I tells ya! COVID actually came from a lab! And since my last column squarely blamed the wet markets, my regular readers were like, “Tuck sez different. What say you?”

Okay, here goes.

Carlson’s “striking” report supposedly contains the “findings” of “Chinese scientists” detailing the “origins of coronavirus.” Carlson praised the Feb. 6 paper’s “rational conclusions” that the virus “escaped from a Chinese lab.” Carlson quoted the paper as claiming that although the virus originated in horseshoe bats, “there are no known colonies of this bat within 900 kilometers of Wuhan, nor is there any evidence that they were sold in the Wuhan wet market.” The two authors of the report interviewed “sixty people” who confirmed that there were “no horseshoe bats for sale there, period.” Therefore, the virus must have come from an accident in a Wuhan “government lab.”

Carlson’s vaunted “report” is all straw and no man. Bat-eating jokes aside, it’s not claimed that humans got the virus from ingesting bats. Just as with SARS, there was an intermediary animal. SARS had the civet. With COVID, researchers have zeroed in on the pangolin, which is common in the wet markets and used for meat and bullshit (I mean “traditional”) Chinese medicine. Although scientists are not 100% certain that the pangolin is the intermediary, what is certain is that there was an intermediary. The fact that bats weren’t sold at the Wuhan wet market is therefore irrelevant; the intermediary animal would have been infected elsewhere.
“As logical as it seems that we should unite to prevent this nightmare, in the end the only thing we’ll be united in is inaction.”

Tuck made a huge deal out of the fact that there are no horseshoe bats within 900km of Wuhan. But guess what? There are no SARS-carrying bats within one thousand kilometers of the wet markets where the SARS outbreak started (the SARS-carrying bat colonies are in Yunnan province; the spillover to humans happened in Guangdong). As I said, bat proximity is irrelevant, because the intermediary animals were brought to the wet markets from elsewhere. The wet markets deal in exotic animals. Don’t breeze by that sentence. Slow down and repeat the word exotic. Sound it out and think. What does that word mean? It means not from there.

The intermediary-to-human point of contact was the wet market. The bat-to-intermediary point of contact was somewhere else.

The “bombshell” report concludes, “The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market.” That’s it; no science, no “findings,” just a nonsensical statement that infected bats probably couldn’t have “flown” to the market, which is meaningless because the animals at the market were brought there by sellers and suppliers, and it wasn’t the bats but the intermediary species that infected humans. No one claims bats “flew to the market.”

The report states that a researcher at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention was splashed with bat blood and urine while collecting samples, and had to self-quarantine. Carlson oddly neglected to inform his viewers that this incident occurred in 2017 in a faraway cave in the wild (not a lab), and the researcher was fine.

By presenting this report as something it isn’t (“scientific findings”), Tuck finds himself in league with Chinese officials. The “lab accident” theory works to their advantage. The Chinese excel at racial “whataboutism.” Point to something they’re doing wrong, and they scream, “Well, whites do it too!” That’s how the Chinese deal with Western criticism regarding human rights abuses. The Chinese are experts at deflecting censure by saying, “Whites do bad things too.” And now that Tuck has given the “lab accident” story a veneer of respectability, the Chinese need only invoke the 1967 lab accident in Germany that caused the Marburg virus outbreak (monkeys that had been infected by bats in Africa were shipped to a Marburg lab for study, where workers were accidentally infected). With Tuck spreading the claim that COVID was an accident just like Marburg, any attempts to sanction the Chinese will be met with “You didn’t sanction the Germans after Marburg, you racists!”

BTW, the 1967 Marburg outbreak resulted in a grand total of—ready for this?—seven deaths. Proof, though many of you don’t want to hear it, that a high death toll does not automatically mean an outbreak “came from a lab.” Wet-market-birthed SARS killed more people than lab-birthed Marburg. COVID’s high death toll does not mean “this must’ve come from a lab.”

But what are facts compared to the “doctor” (Ph.D. in finance) presented as a “scientist” by Stefan Molyneux on a recent podcast? Ol’ Doc Businessdegree also claims that COVID is a lab creation. His proof? “Bilderberg types” warned of a killer coronavirus pandemic years ago. Therefore, they created it! Richard Jewell 2.0: The people who noticed the danger and tried to warn of it are accused of causing it. This is pure leftism; attacking people for noticing.

The Daily Caller hyped an exclusive interview with an MSNBC coronavirus expert (yes, MSNBC!) who declared that the “proof” COVID escaped from a Wuhan lab is that China’s top expert on bat-borne viruses, Shi Zhengli, criticized the “uncivilized living habits” in the wet markets. The MSNBC guy literally claimed that because Zhengli blamed the wet markets, that alone is reason to suspect that her lab loosed the virus! It never occurred to him that she blamed the wet markets because the wet markets are to blame.

Zhengli is the scientist who traced SARS to bats; she knows this terrain like the back of her hand. But the DC took the word of an MSNBC contributor over that of the scientist who solved the SARS riddle, because for certain conservatives, it’s all about mindlessly repeating their COVID mantra: “Blame the CCP, not the Chinese people.” Blame evil government labs, not the innocent foodies who deserve green cards stapled to their university diplomas!

Here we see far-right (with its fondness for “invisible hand” conspiracy theories) and mainstream right (with its “we all bleed red” hokum) united to absolve the wet markets.

Matthew Tye, the popular American travel blogger in China, wants so badly to “blame the party not the people” that he took the report Carlson trumpeted and made it a million times worse by adding outright fabrications. Tye took the incident of the single bat researcher who was splashed with bat blood and urine in a faraway cave in 2017 and altered it to become multiple “researchers who were splashed with urine and blood samples from all of the bats that were collected at the Wuhan Disease Control and Prevention lab in 2019.” Tye switched the location of the “splashing” from a cave to a lab, shifted the date from 2017 to 2019, and increased the number of splashed researchers from one (who never became ill) to many (who vanished and might be dead).

Tye’s video, with over 1.5 million views, was heralded by National Review, which highlighted the falsified “splashing” claim as the video’s “key part.”

National Review is, of course, front and center in the fight to “blame the party not the people.”

If the CCP vanished tomorrow, the wet markets would still be there in China, along with the seeds of the next, worse SARS and COVID. And yes, U.S. officials on all sides bungled the COVID response; no one is without error in this catastrophe. But if Trump, Pence, Pelosi, Schumer, and Cuomo vanished tomorrow, the wet markets would still be there in China, along with the seeds of the next, worse SARS and COVID.

From this point on, there can be nothing that takes priority over shutting down the Chinese exotic-animal trade and wet markets. Nothing.

The Chinese should be subjected to the same sanctions and restrictions meted out to white South Africans during apartheid, until the wet markets are closed and exotic animal traders gulag’d like Uighurs. The death toll from COVID has already—in one month—matched and doubled the entire 55-year death toll from apartheid. Economic sanctions; cultural boycotts; prohibitions on immigration, employment, and trade—all were part of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 aimed at punishing white South Africans until apartheid was dismantled. Sure, many SA whites were decent folks who disapproved of apartheid, but all South African whites were punished equally, to end a threat that was no actual threat outside of South Africa.

The Chinese zoonotic pandemics are a threat to us all.

Of course, China will not be penalized. Donald “much respect for President Xi” Trump will likely apply only superficial pressure, to the cheers of the globalist business elites. Leftists will continue to scream “racist” at anyone who criticizes the wet markets, the far right will continue to lobotomize itself with Bilderbergers and mad scientists, and the mainstream right will continue to vomit up drivel about how a people can never be harmful or destructive and that’s why everyone should have a legal path to citizenship.

The wet markets will thrive, and your children will die during the next decade’s inevitable and worse Chinese zoonotic pandemic.

As logical as it seems that we should unite to prevent this nightmare, in the end the only thing we’ll be united in is inaction.

Last year, Ann Coulter half-jokingly stated that the title of her next book should be F-ck It, We’re Doomed. Ann was, as always, ahead of the curve. If we can’t, if we won’t, aggressively confront a threat that is the very definition of existential, then we can’t, and we won’t, confront anything.

And we’ll most certainly be doomed.

United not against death but in it.

 

[PAF]

What's your solution?

Obliterate China from the face of the earth? And then Mexico, Africa, and other countries too?

Mandate Biometric Vaccines to every man, woman and child by 2030 2022, distribute by Bill Gates/ID2020/WHO/United Nations?

Let the U.N. have the 10% of the worlds income, perhaps much, much more due to rapid rabid inflation?

Close every border, restrict travel, provide papers please and only for "essential" business/conduct? And then move on to state borders? Then county?

.
.

Or, perhaps let the flu run its course like it has for hundreds of thousands of years, get some sunshine, vitamins/minerals, and hope you don't kick due to diabetes, drive-by shooting, smoking or smacked by a bus?

 

[Anti Federalist]

What's your solution?

Hold the CCP financially responsible for this mess.

Renounce our debt held by the Chinese, slap a 50% import duty on every single Chinese item, reduce and eliminate government taxes, regulations and torts that make it so difficult to manufacture goods in this country, especially vital defense and medical and electronic goods and revoke MFN status, for starters.

Or, perhaps let the flu run its course like it has for hundreds of thousands of years, get some sunshine, vitamins/minerals, and hope you don't kick due to diabetes, drive-by shooting, smoking or smacked by a bus?

For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind did not have the ability to travel from one side of the globe to the other in 15 hours, thus being able to spread what may have been an isolated outbreak into a global pandemic.

 

[PAF]

Hold the CCP financially responsible for this mess.

Renounce our debt held by the Chinese, slap a 50% import duty on every single Chinese item, reduce and eliminate government taxes, regulations and torts that make it so difficult to manufacture goods in this country, especially vital defense and medical and electronic goods and revoke MFN status, for starters.



For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind did not have the ability to travel from one side of the globe to the other in 15 hours, thus being able to spread what may have been an isolated outbreak into a global pandemic.

There, I FIFY. Probably a typo on your part ;-)