COVID-19 in China: Who Benefited

COVID-19: CUI BONO?

Afterthoughts on the Aftermath

Since COVID-19 in China: Who Benefited outbreaks under Presidents Ford and Bush produced only hugely expensive, failed vaccines and political headaches. The policy has been to ignore moderately lethal outbreaks and conflate. Their results with seasonal flu stats–an eminently sensible policy many contributors have blessed right here in the Unz Review.

So Washington ignored a novel coronavirus when it began circulating here in 2019. Sure, it killed some people in aged care homes and a few youngsters, but the CDC attributed them vaping (and did not recant when the Mayo Clinic disproved that) and allied Western countries followed suit for the same reasons. Practically speaking, what else could they do?

Well, we could save those old lives if we followed WHO guidelines and implemented cordons sanitaires. Mass testing and tracing, etc., and disrupted the economy.

But the lethality of the virus did not warrant that and the idea was discarded because even if our governments were competent to manage such a campaign–and Katrina suggested that they are not–the economic cost was literally incalculable.

But there was a fly in that ointment: overlooking the outbreak would only work if every national CDC agreed to follow suit and we knew that China’s would not.

The CDC’s Linda Quick was in Beijing, embedded at their CCDC, training Chinese field epidemiologists to track and investigate diseases and she told us that, in case of a coronavirus outbreak, Beijing had pre-authorized implementation of the entire WHO playbook nationwide.

So we recalled Dr Quick in July 2019 and came up with a cunning plan: “Nobody does coronavirus testing and, when the virus reaches China…we’ll blame them for the outbreak!” Win-win! High fives!

https://youtu.be/ACnqI1l4I9s

Everything went according to plan, pretty much. Our allies didn’t test for Coronavirus; outbreaks ignored or blamed on vaping; concerned officials were hit with cease and desist orders; NIH Coronavirus meetings were moved to secure facilities and information was released on a need to know basis; a ‘BLAME CHINA!’ memo went out to embassies worldwide; and, when the virus reached China and their detection system worked and they followed WHO guidelines we chortled gleefully and publicly predicted that it would tank their economy and anyway they deserved it because human rights, freedom, Jesus, and slitty eyes.

We made an enormous, front-page, top-of-the-news cycle fuss about Coronavirus, China, Coronavirus, wet markets, Coronavirus, bats, Coronavirus, people dying in the streets, Coronavirus, brutal crackdowns (always), and a dying, doomed economy caused by Coronavirus. Soon every living being on the planet knew every detail about Coronavirus and every aspect examined, dissected, discussed, and analyzed.

Everyone got a crash course in Coronaviruses. We primed.

But, like the geniuses who planned the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and everything else, Washington hadn’t considered that, after all that attention, we could no longer ignore the Coronavirus in our midst and, finally, in mid-March, the CDC gave up trying and lifted the testing ban. But it was too late. The virus that so deadly, so terrifying that China had shut down to deal with it, was in our midst.

After watching China’s riveting demonstration of State competence and social cohesion–and seeing that. They were willing to sacrifice their entire economy for it. We became convinced that COVID-19 in China: Who Benefited worse than the Black Death and demanded that our government DO SOMETHING.

But the government had never planned to do anything and its response was much worse than Katrina and we’re living with its consequences now and will be for years, as we are living with the consequences of the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and everything else. That’s the price we pay for letting unqualified amateurs run our country.

China, of course, is run by professionals and, after the SARS outbreak, they commissioned three professional studies.

1. One on prevention, which led to their establishing an expensive, 70,000. Node coronavirus detection system that gave every ER physician one-click access to CCDC headquarters. That report was the work of George Gao, the current head of the CCDC (and publicly furious that Wuhan politicians meddled with his system).
2. One on treatment: how to deal with tens of thousands of very sick people and feed millions in quarantine. The Communist Party has superb logistic skills so they took that job.
3. And a report on the broad implications of pandemics, which was the work of the old guy to the right of Xi Jinping in the photograph below (who is also in charge of trade negotiations with the US and, simultaneously, the EU, in addition to being buddies with Ray Dalio).

Liu He’s report analyzed pandemics from the Plague of Constantine to the Black Death and the Spanish Flu. And concluded that they often result in regime changes and even shifts in the balance of global power.

So, since the COVID-19 in China: Who Benefite plan would get them into the shutdown. In an orderly fashion, and the CCP’s ninety-three million members would handle logistics. He recommended focusing on how China would come out of the lockdown. Anyone can shut down an economy, he said, but nobody had ever restarted one from scratch. Beijing set 5,000 PhDs to work with several supercomputers, with this result^[1]:

Now it’s over.

We did what we did.

China did what China did.

Maybe dirty tricks involved.

I think it was bad luck or bad judgement.

Maybe we’ll find out and maybe we won’t.

But we can ban TikTok and call China names, but it makes no difference.

We lost world leadership and China won just as they planned: without firing a shot.

Time to move on.

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Godfree Roberts publishes a newsletter, Here Comes China.

1. China dominates the Fortune Global 500, with 133 Chinese companies vs. 121 in the USA. ↑