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COVID-19: The Preventable Pandemic
[The Daily Signal] When The Heritage Foundation released its comprehensive report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, headlines tended to focus on the cost to the U.S. That’s not surprising: At an eye-popping $18 trillion, it’s almost 10 times the projected 2024 budget deficit.
At least in Hillsboro, Ohio - similar article published August 25.
 Arguably, however, the commission’s most infuriating conclusion was this: The global pandemic was "totally preventable," in the words of Commissioner Dr. Robert Redfield, an experienced virologist who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the outbreak.
| Not the first time well-intentioned governments made things worse. I’ve seen it argued that the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 would have been merely unusually deadly had also sorts of innovative but unscientific treatments not been deployed. |
Had the Chinese government been more transparent and cooperative at the outset of the pandemic, millions of lives and trillions of dollars could have been spared. The pandemic’s "proximal origin," the commission found, was the Chinese government’s "aggressive opposition to honesty transparency, and accountability" along with its "systemic cover up."
| C’mon, man! China is a long-established totalitarian system that’s taken shortcuts and ignored basic hygiene and scientific practices with regard to its people for generations. Remember when entire villages would get together to donate blood plasma to their version of the Red Cross — or maybe it was red blood cells, I don’t remember the details — and then the remainder would be split among the donors and pumped back into all their arms. They shared all sorts of interesting diseases that way, well beyond just AIDS, as I recall. |
Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic is considered one of the seven deadliest plagues in human history, with excess deaths topping 28 million, according to some estimates. The World Bank has characterized the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic as "the largest global economic crisis in more than a century," with low-income countries hit the hardest.
The commission’s assessment that the pandemic cost the U.S. alone $18 trillion includes $8.6 trillion in "excess deaths," $1.8 trillion in income lost, $6 trillion in chronic conditions like "long COVID," $1.1 trillion in mental health costs, and $400 million in education losses.
To avoid a future pandemic and hold the Chinese government accountable, the commission report concluded with several practical recommendations for the U.S. government:
1. Establish a bipartisan national COVID-19 commission ...
2. Create a bipartisan reparations or compensation task force ...
3. Facilitate the filing of civil claims against China by amending the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
4. Decouple U.S. government and commercial supply chains from Chinese state-backed companies.
5. Audit all U.S. government funding for biomedical research and related research activities in China.
6. Impose economic sanctions on Chinese officials and entities who were complicit...
The COVID-19 pandemic was almost certainly the deadliest and costliest event of the 21st century. Beijing’s ability to escape virtually any accountability—and the global media’s relative disinterest in the pandemic’s origins, cost, and China’s culpability—are equal parts confounding and infuriating.
Heritage Foundation Report, July, 2024. Over an hour read.
Posted by: Bobby 2024-08-27 |
