Category Archives: Globalism

NEW COLUMN: From Wuhan to Washington State With ‘Love’

China, Globalism, Healthcare, Music

NEW COLUMN AT The American Greatness is “From Wuhan to Washington State With ‘Love’” In it, I focus on, to quote,

“the intellectually nimble sleuth work done by scientists not of the CDC, in the course of viral RNA sequencing.” Of course, “epidemiology obligates even this creaky bureaucracy to trace the origins of the virus.

And so it has. Admits the CDC:

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people such as with … with this new virus (named SARS-CoV-2).
The SARS-CoV-2 virus [has its] origins in bats. The sequences from U.S. patients are similar to the one that China initially posted, suggesting a likely single, recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir.
Early on, many of the patients at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, had some link to a large seafood and live animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread. Later, a growing number of patients reportedly did not have exposure to animal markets, indicating person-to-person spread. Person-to-person spread was subsequently reported outside Hubei and in countries outside China, including in the United States.

In other words, coronavirus jumped first from animal to person and thereafter from person-to-person.

The deadly disease originated in one of China’s disease-breeding, barbaric, “wet markets,” as they are called. These “wet markets” are hell on earth for wild animals, which are tied up, stacked in cages and slaughtered on the spot, because the fiendish customers demand “freshness.”

As the Associated Press reports, “You’ve got live animals, so there’s feces everywhere. There’s blood because of people chopping them up, … The messy mix raises the … odds that a new virus will jump to people handling the animals and start to spread.”

To its report, the AP has appended an image of a “wet market,” adjacent to an up-market Chinese mall.

Suffer the innocent, helpless critters. Suffer the old and the infirm. God help us all. …

… READ THE COMPLETE COLUMN. “From Wuhan to Washington State With ‘Love’” is AT The American Greatness.

Music for the times is “V: The New Mythology Suite” by progressive metal band Symphony X. It features evocative melodies, harmonic complexity, gorgeous arrangements, furious licks, sublime singing, impossible time-signature fluctuations. No contrapuntal incompetence here.  Yes, it is no contradiction at all to love Schubert’s trios and this … no contradiction at all.

Stay safe.

ilana

UPDATED (3/17) NEW COLUMN: The Open-Border Fetish Is Turning Into A Symbol Of Death

China, Globalism, Homeland Security, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Israel, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Russia

“For open-border offenders to talk-up open borders during a killer pandemic is scandalous—as scandalous as it would have been for Harvey Weinstein to be talking-up rough sex during his sentencing for sexual assault.”—–ilana mercer, American Greatness.

NEW COLUMN, “The Open-Border Fetish Is Turning Into A Symbol Of Death,” is  at the American Greatness.

An excerpt:

Taking its cues from the American Left, the Israeli left is all for national and individual self-immolation. But nobody who matters in that country has been listening to the Left babble on about “racism” and “Sinophobia.”

Against the advice of its liberal think tanks—and to protect its nationals from the Wuhan virus pandemic—the Jewish State had, early on, closed its doors to “more and more of eastern Asia, starting with China, continuing to Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Thailand, South Korea and Japan.”

China is Israel’s second-largest trading partner.

To follow were tough travel restrictions and a quarantine regimen on territories in Europe, in line with unfolding coronavirus contingencies. Israel has since extended the quarantine to all arrivals. Consequently, of the 9 million Israelis, 100 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded so far, but no deaths.

What is proving more difficult for the Jewish State is adding “New York and the states of Washington and California to its restricted list.” Israeli public health officials recommend it, but Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is being muscled by Vice President Mike Pence to keep his country open to those COVID-19 hot zones.

Following transmission of the coronavirus from Wuhan to Washington State, I wondered, in a mild tweet, posted with links to the Israeli policy, why Americans didn’t deserve this kind of diligence from their government.

Came the strident reply, also on Twitter: “Because, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a postage-stamp-sized garrison state. The U.S. needs to tailor its response to the disease to its role as global economic power.”

Stalin apologist Walter Duranty summed up this Jacobin perspective perfectly. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Breaking a few old eggs, in an old-age home, in King County, Washington State, is what it apparently takes to make that great global omelet.

To the extent that it safeguards the well-being of its own people, the defensive measures taken by Israel comport with the role of government. “Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others—intentionally or unintentionally—falls perfectly within the purview of the night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory.”

Look to other nationalistic countries for the connection between borders closed and the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As reported by CNBC, Russia had sealed its borders with China as hermetically as possible, late in January. Matters are fluid, but at this writing, Russia has only 34 cases of coronavirus and no deaths. The infected are said to be Russians returning from Italy.

Likewise, Mongolia closed its borders with China in late January. Only a single case has been reported there. Singapore has reacted patriotically with all its scientific and cerebral might to what was termed there the “Wuhan flu.” It is now over the worst. The great Lee Kuan Yew would be proud. “The response in the U.S. has essentially been the opposite,” laments an envious geneticist writing at the Technology Review.

For open-border offenders to talk-up open borders during a killer pandemic is scandalous—as scandalous as it would have been for Harvey Weinstein to be talking-up rough sex during his sentencing for sexual assault.

The open-border fetish is turning into a symbol of death, not freedom. For the correlation between borderless countries and infection rates seems unmistakable—certainly when one looks at Italy and the EU nexus of nuts to which it belongs. For Brussels, the undisturbed free flow of people across European borders is sacrosanct. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “The Open-Border Fetish Is Turning Into A Symbol Of Death,” is  at the American Greatness, epistolary home of Victor Davis Hanson and Michelle Malkin.

* Image here. Thanks for fair-use permission.

UPDATED (3/17):

NEW COLUMN: From Wuhan to Washington State With ‘Love’

China, Globalism, Healthcare, IMMIGRATION, Science

A NEW COLUMN, “From Wuhan to Washington State With ‘Love,’” is on Townhall.com. No wonder the CDC prefers no to discuss what the genetic sequencing of viral RNA reveals.

An excerpt:

U.S. travel restrictions came too late for the poor residents of the Life Care home in King County, Washington State.

Patient Zero, who very likely infected Washington State and beyond, arrived in my state, from Wuhan, China, on Jan. 15.

Thanks to the patient’s own diligence, he was tested on Jan. 20 and diagnosed with COVID-19. However, CDC contact tracing fell woefully short. As is done in South Korea and Israel, the man’s whereabouts—not his identity—ought to have been made public. In this way, anyone who had come in contact with the Man from Wuhan could have been quarantined and taken the necessary precautions to prevent further transmission.

Genetic sequencing of virus extracted from infected patients allows scientists to pinpoint the virus’ origins and the timing of the “seeding event.” That the virus that continues to kill poor old people in homes for the aged and the infirm in King County, WA, came from Wuhan is indisputable.

Writes Trevor Bedford, a sequencing scientist at the Fred Hutch Research Center: “The first case in the USA was … from a traveler directly returning from Wuhan to Snohomish County on Jan. 15.” But there was another traveler whose virus was related to that of Patient Zero, and who had,

exposed someone else to the virus in the period between Jan. 15 and Jan. 19, before they were isolated. If this second case was mild or asymptomatic, contact tracing efforts by public health would have had difficulty detecting it. After this point, community spread occurred and was undetected due to the CDC’s narrow case definition that required direct travel to China or direct contact with a known case to even be considered for testing. This lack of testing was a critical error and allowed an outbreak in Snohomish County and the surroundings to grow to a sizable problem before it was even detected.” [Emphasis mine.]

Colleagues confirm that the “genetic diversity of the Washington State outbreak … suggests a scenario in which an individual infected [from] Washington State travelled to California, and in particular to the Grand Princess cruiser, and instigated a chain of transmission there. The viral strain from a patient infected on the cruise ship off the coast of California is similar to the cluster circulating in Washington state.”

If only travel from China had been stopped earlier, the poor old people from the Life Care home might be alive, and the coronavirus would not be multiplying exponentially among us. …

… A NEW COLUMN, “From Wuhan to Washington State With ‘Love,’” is on Townhall.com.

* To its report, the AP appends an image of a “wet market,” adjacent to an up-market Chinese mall.

The Response To Date To Coronavirus In America: Just The Facts, Ma’am

America, Asia, China, Communism, Critique, Globalism, Government, Healthcare

“By March 1st, when South Korea had run 100,000 tests for the virus, America—which saw its first case on January 23rd—had run fewer than 500.
… a single undiagnosed case can, in principle, give rise to more than 3,000 cases six weeks later.”

Like it or not, The Economist is the gold standard of news gathering; of data analysis. But I guess, my own mind disdains a partisan approach to truth, which is patent in the approach to all things in the USA, coronavirus too.

Writes the Economist:

… in America the response to date has been a shambolic missed opportunity. Shockingly, the worst American bungling has more in common with the catastrophic early stages of the Chinese epidemic—when officials minimised risks and punished truth-tellers, thus letting the disease spread much further and faster than it might have—than with the country’s later co-ordinated control efforts. …

Take America. On February 25th Larry Kudlow, chief economic adviser to President Donald Trump, told reporters that “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.” As he spoke a cluster of cases at a care facility in Washington state was showing that America’s public-health agencies had been caught flat footed. Test kits made available by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were faulty; restrictions were limiting tests in other settings. By March 1st, when South Korea had run 100,000 tests for the virus, America—which saw its first case on January 23rd—had run fewer than 500. …

… “Test and you shall find,” says Gabriel Leung of the University of Hong Kong, who was also on the WHO team. “You either test and find it early, and do something about it, or the body bags are going to pile up,” he adds. …

… In South Korea, by contrast, the government is being forthright and formidably transparent, allowing Koreans to trace their possible brushes with the disease. As well as briefing the press thoroughly twice a day, and texting reporters details of every death, the government puts online a detailed record of each new patient’s movements over previous days and weeks …

…China is now making 116m face masks a day, 12 times the production a month ago, with 1.7m of them the high-performance sort that health-care workers need when faced with patients coughing and sneezing. A General Motors joint venture in south-western China is making both its own disposable face masks and face-mask-making machinery for the many other companies doing the same. There are no precise figures for the production of tests, but the number carried out suggests that it, too, has soared.

***

I wonder when production will be brought home, for future posterity and prosperity—ILANA MERCER

 

* Image courtesy of The Mirror.