Is Biden’s China Covid Crisis A Political Opportunity?
Biden has a a China Covid Crisis
Two weeks after Mr. Trump lost the election, thirty-four CDC scientists published evidence that Covid-19 was endemic in the USA by December 2019.
Six weeks later, the WHO found no evidence of Covid in China before December 2019.
Now the WHO wants access to CDC records and Biden has a China Covid crisis.
***
The CDC’s paper[1] concludes with a spreadsheet, excerpted below, with italicized rows inserted showing the number of affected Americans:
While the political implications of the paper are stunning, to epidemiologists, its findings are ho-hum. We have always ignored outbreaks of ‘flu and coronavirus and, through the magic of herd immunity, they have surviving populations more resilient.
Only once–when Swine Flu struck during the 1976 presidential campaign–did we abandon herd immunity. Over WHO objections–No other countries have plans for mass inoculations–President Ford funded mass immunization.
The vaccines, which proved both unsafe and ineffectual, catalyzed Ford’s loss to Carter. Four years later, President Reagan deliberately ignored the AIDS epidemic and won reelection in a landslide.
Health officials have long been skeptical of vaccines and shutdowns. In 2014, at the height of Africa’s fast-spreading Ebola outbreak, when State governors demanded quarantines for workers returning to the US from afflicted regions, Dr. Anthony Fauci objected. Quarantines, he said, were “unscientific” and “draconian.” In March, 2020, months after the WHO raised the Covid alarm, Dr. Fauci announced, “I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles. But the judgement of the Chinese health authorities is that this is going to help contain it. Whether it does or not is open to question because, historically, when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”
In April 2020, says former UK Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn, “I remember distinctly going to a meeting at the Cabinet Office, where we got a lecture about herd immunity. The last time I discussed herd immunity was when I worked on a pig farm 40 years ago. It was absurd that actually [you] would build up herd immunity by allowing people to die. And so, while the government was going into eugenic formulas and discussing all this stuff, they were not making adequate preparations.”
It is doubtful that we could have made ‘adequate preparations’ in any case, since we distrust our government, our health industry, and our media. Nor could the CDC help much. Born in 1946 as the US Army’s Communicable Disease Center, it is still headed by a non-scientist Army officer. Beyond its surveillance, research, and advisory staff, the CDC fields fewer public health workers than Singapore.
What Did the White House Know and When?
Covid’s doubling time is 56 days, so the CDC probably informed the President of the Covid outbreak in the Summer of 2019, sixteen months before the election. Presumably acting on his instructions, they misleadingly attributed early Covid deaths to vaping.
The White House immediately moved Covid discussions to secure facilities, classified them on a need to know basis, banned Covid testing, issued cease and desist orders to enforce the ban, issued ‘Blame China’ memos to embassies worldwide, banned testing until April (when Wuhan ended its lockdown) and refused[2] to share with researchers tissue samples of ‘vaping’ victims. To forestall a WHO investigation, Trump did not sign the UN/WHO Covid-19 agreement, withdrew from membership, and refused to disclose CDC medical data prior to December, 2019.
Unable to resist screaming headlines, the media equated China’s Covid outbreak with the Black Death, forcing the CDC to abandon herd immunity and, with no Plan B, create the chaos that has caused 500,000 excess deaths.
The media also ignored abundant evidence that the virus was endemic in 2019 in the United States, Sweden, Japan, Italy, France, Spain and Brazil (unlike China, all have high viral loads and experienced second and third waves, suggesting longer histories with the virus).
The media and the White House also ignored China’s public health competence: according to the National Institutes of Health, in the 1950s, the PRC eliminated diseases in two years that had been endemic for centuries: “The rise in life expectancy [under Mao] ranks among the most rapid, sustained increases in documented global history”.
After the 2003 SARS outbreak, China prepared for the next epidemic by appointing three teams:
- Prevention and Detection. George Gao, head of the CCDC, established a 70,000-node detection network that gave physicians one-click access to Beijing.
- Response. Ninety-four million Party[3] members took responsibility for logistics and cordons sanitaire[4].
- Geopolitics. Liu He, below, observed that pandemics often shift the balance of global power. Given a supercomputer and a thousand PhDs, he modeled the scenario that China is currently executing, growing GDP faster than ever in its history[5].
Spooked?
The Chinese were well aware of the CDC’s limitations and, probably, also aware of the US outbreak[6]. Did they deliberately panic the White House into abandoning herd immunity after Trump announced that Covid is no worse than seasonal ‘flu?
A European epidemiologist, resident in Beijing at the time, alerted me to this possibility (emphasis added):
I actually find the response by the Chinese government extremely interesting. It seems like it’s overblowing the matter on purpose. Considering the low number of cases (compared to China’s population) and low death rates, it feels like the Chinese government is overblowing fears on purpose, with maps filled with dark areas and shutting down everything everywhere (and this is during China’s most important holiday season).
I suspect it’s practicing for when a really serious disease breaks out, the sort with people dying like flies. So I find all this fuss quite interesting. We’ve been warned about a potential superbug outbreak for years, and now we can see how the response will look like. No doubt the Chinese government is busy taking notes on what it could have done better.
Not to mention, I don’t think most Westerners realize just how big Wuhan is, just how significant Chinese New Year is in terms of people moving around and just how many people go in and out of those wet markets every day. That’s like, tens of thousands of people leaving the wet markets, taking public transport then going home to expose all their visiting relatives, and all those people in turn going to all sorts of crowded areas too. With a high enough contagion rate, we’d easily be at 1 million infected. The fact that we haven’t reached such numbers means that this virus isn’t that bad.
Biden’s China Covid Crisis
We will never know, but Sweden’s stats, below, adjusted for age and population, suggest that the virus was less deadly than our media made out. 
Exit the Chinese
The Chinese are leaving the epidemic better off than when they entered it: the combination of state competence and social cohesion impressed the world. For scope, speed, agility, sophistication, and geopolitical impact, no peacetime event compares. Even their economy is booming.
Enter the WHO
Last month the WHO inspection team found no Covid-19 in China before December, 2019 and requested the same access to American health records as they received there.
Biden’s Covid crisis: if he gives the WHO information showing Covid was here before it reached China, he will destroy Trump’s 2024 hopes but, in the process, hand China a PR victory from which the US will never recover.
- Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020. Sridhar V Basavaraju, MD, et al. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1785/6012472 ↑
- Chief investigator, private communication. ↑
- Imagine the Party as Rotary International headed by your grandmother, who is Professor of Engineering at MIT and middleweight Olympic Judo champion. She loves you, but has no time for your nonsense. ↑
- China did not lock down. It established concentric rings, cordons sanitaires, around infected areas. Wuhan’s Yangtze Memories, the PRC’s biggest chip factory, continued operating normally. ↑
- Media confuse the economy’s acceleration rate with growth. Growth = acceleration rate x previous year’s GDP. So China’s GDP will grow by $2.1 trillion this year, the most ever, anywhere. ↑
- The FBI apprehended several Chinese researchers returning to China with biological samples–presumably from Covid postmortems–but several reached China. ↑
