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Time to put China on lockdown for its dishonesty amid coronavirus crisis
[USA Today] There are many lessons to be learned from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. But one is already clear: China needs to be isolated from the civilized world until its behavior improves. We are in the current situation, with deaths and economic devastation worldwide, because China handled this outbreak with its trademark mixture of dishonesty, incompetence and thuggery. Were China a more civilized nation, this outbreak would have been stopped early, and with far less harm, inside and outside of China.As Marion Smith wrote in these pages on Sunday, China’s first response was to clamp down on reports of the then-new disease that had appeared in Wuhan. The brave doctor, Li Wenliang, who first reported the disease to fellow physicians was silenced by police. Chinese media reports of the disease were censored by the government. So were ordinary citizens reporting on social media. Coronavirus coverup According to U.S. intelligence agencies, China systematically deceived the world about the extent of the outbreak, lulling other nations into a false sense of security that delayed a response by weeks or even months. As Smith writes: "Beijing denied until Jan. 20 that human to human transmission was occurring. Yet at the same time, Chinese officials and state-owned companies were urgently acquiring bulk medical supplies ‐ especially personal protective equipment like masks and gloves ‐ from Australia, Europe, and around the world. Put simply, Beijing hoarded the world’s life-saving resources while falsely claiming that people’s lives weren’t at risk." Marion Smith:Blame the Chinese Communist Party for the coronavirus crisis And this is the most charitable account, based on China failing to deal with what was, at root, a naturally occurring disease outbreak. And it may have been naturally occurring. But people are increasingly entertaining the possibility that the COVID-19 virus was accidentally released by a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan. That notion was once dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but it has since been discussed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by uber-establishment Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. The talk is of an accidental release, not the deliberate deployment of a biological weapon ‐ which makes sense, since few nations would release a bioweapon in their own heartland ‐ but if it’s true it only makes the Chinese government look worse, though it perhaps explains their unwillingness to be forthcoming. Posted by: Besoeker 2020-04-08 |
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