UPDATED: HOW COVID-19 WAS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN (Or, ‘Pass The Biscuits,’ My Lips Are Sealed’)

China, Critique, Ethics, Healthcare, History, WMD

This is a remarkable account, by LA Times’ James Rainey and Kiera Feldman, of how killer COVID19 was loosed on the world. Terrific writing. (What a change from Washington-Examiner type syntactical tics and grammatical infelicities, not to mention “Dear Leader” adulation):

“Impeachment. Primaries. Kobe. Coronavirus rushed in while our focus was elsewhere“:

It began for Peter Daszak, a British American scientist, a couple of days after Christmas. While the rest of the world trundled along, the president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance was in his office in lower Manhattan, picking up the first clues of something amiss.

Weibo, China’s Twitter, carried the warning signals: An odd illness in the city of Wuhan. Patients in respiratory distress. Some developing pneumonia. A few dying, or so said the reports, unconfirmed. Most of the sick had worked in, or visited, a “wet” market in the central Chinese city, where live fish, crabs and livestock are sold, gill-by-jowl, alongside more exotic fare, such as snakes, hedgehogs and bamboo rats.

An ebullient zoologist and parasitologist, Daszak had associates around the globe in the One Health movement — the professional community trying to prevent the spread of disease between the animal and human worlds. But, as New Year’s approached, his colleagues in China suddenly went mum.

“They were all saying ‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk. We’re very busy. We’ll talk to you soon.’ They wouldn’t respond, even to a ‘Happy New Year’s’ message. That wasn’t normal,” Daszak recalled. “That’s when you know, you just know, something serious is going down.”

Those fleeting days of 2019 and the first three months of 2020 have passed in a blur for America and the world, turned upside down by a virus previously not identified by humankind and now responsible for a death toll that has climbed past 100,000.

For the 54-year-old Daszak and his fellow germ trackers, it’s been a period of long hours and roiling emotions — anxiety about the trajectory of the killer they spotted in its first days, a queasy satisfaction that their years of warnings had not been misplaced and a stolid determination to do more to prepare the world for the pandemics yet to come.

There’s also frustration, and some anger, as they watch world leaders move too slowly to marshal healthcare workers, set aside medical supplies and, especially, to isolate millions of people with no immunity to the new invader. …

MORE.

UPDATE:  “China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days.”

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UPDATED (4/18): Con Inc. And Their Vintage Neocon, COVID Culpability Theories

China, Communism, Conservatism, Critique, Culture, Democracy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Iraq

Without fail, American pundits and pols, especially Con Inc., apply to COVID the same theories of culpability that have undergirded U.S. invasions of backward people in the Middle East: It’s the Chinese government, not the people. Free the Chinese and they’ll show their Jeffersonian propensities and their capacity for enlightened self-interest (not to mention a cuisine less craven and cruel).

What I wrote in 2006 about Iraqis applies in spades to the Chinese and their culpability for COVID (I’ve substituted Iraq with China):

“The government of [China] doesn’t stand apart from the governed; it reflects them.”—ILANA (November 6, 2006)

We’re accustomed to the Dysnified depiction of neocons or neoliberals intent on interventions that damage America. Accordingly, a noble Chinese people, a freedom-loving civilized nation, was set up by their scheming government.

Look, the Chinese government is no good, but the people get the government they deserve. My guess is that, if anything, the Chinese government here is likely covering for the people’s despicable habits. These caused previous epidemics and have brought us the coronavirus.

Here are the excellent points published in my friend Christopher DeGroot’s journal, The Agonist:

Rightists were happy making bat eating jokes and mocking the “filthy” Chinese back when Covid was an Asian problem. But now that it’s become an epochal event, only the grandest of explanations will suffice. Surely Covid was cooked up in a commie mad scientist’s lab, or perhaps in the lair of a genocidal James Bond villain like Ernst Blofeld or Hugo Drax. But a bunch of common Chinese selling wild animals in a stinking, filthy market slum? A bunch of scummy gluttons who take pride in the fact that they’ll eat anything that moves, and they’ll eat it raw? These people ravaged the world, just by eating animal testicles and anuses? No way, man. Next you’ll tell me that the entire course of history was nearly altered by a college dropout failed songwriter who wanted to impress a dyke actress.

 

* Image: Asia’s Busiest Wet Markets Courtesy Jo-Anne McArthur

UPDATE (4/18):  RNA doesn’t lie. Dr Fauci rejects claim that disease escaped lab.

Dr Fauci also rejected a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab.

The precise origins of the novel coronavirus are still unknown, leading some to question whether it was developed by scientists in a lab.

However, Dr Fauci said studies of the virus’ genome have strongly indicated that it was transmitted from an animal to a human.

While speaking at the daily White House press briefing Dr Fauci was asked if COVID-19 was “man-made” and may have originated in a laboratory.

He said a study by a group of evolutionary virologists examined the genome sequences of the coronavirus and other bat viruses that evolved.

Dr Fauci said: “The mutations that took to get where it is now is totally consistent with a jump from a species to an animal to a human,” he said.

However there are some in the Trump administration, including the president, who are investigating the claims.

MORE.

Told You So About Testing: Now, Italian Experts Are Getting Testy, Too

Argument, Critique, Europe, Healthcare, Intelligence, Reason

Today, April 17, Dr. Anthony Fauci finally explained what I EXPLAINED on April 9, a week ago, in the column, “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats“:

“… COVID testing [is not] an amulet against the dreaded disease. It isn’t. All testing does is give an individual a snapshot in time of his COVID status. As soon as he drives out of the testing facility, a COVID-free person could become infected. Unless they engage in prevention, a single testing in time doesn’t in any way give individuals a clean bill of health.
Prevention protects people.”

Testing is, however—at this stage of spread—helpful in giving medical researchers a grip on the symptomless-sick phenomenon, as well as an idea of how the disease is disseminated and distributed in the population.

Test and keep testing large enough representative samples, and you’ll get good prevalence data.

Maybe Anthony Fauci got a whiff of what his Italian colleagues in Lombardy were saying, for they preceded his belated, simple, overdue insight about the limits of testing:

“… some doctors at the Italian epicentre of the health crisis doubt that testing is their way out of confinement.”

“It is a nonsense,” Milan’s Polytechnic Institute professor Davide Manca said. “Conceptually, I am sceptical.”

The reason for Manca’s scepticism is plain to see in the math.

Milan’s Lombardy region has 10 million people and 11,142 officially registered COVID-19 deaths.
The economically strong area, the size of Belgium, has been under one of the world’s strictest lockdowns since early March.

Yet Lombardy has been conducting just 6,500 tests daily over the past 10 days.

Manca estimates it would take more than five years for everyone in Lombardy to get tested just once.
“And you need people tested every 15 days for it to have any meaning,” Manca said in a phone interview. [My point here exactly.]”

“Even if you raise that number 10 times, that would still take 200 days for one test. That’s six or seven months.”

“Manca said he still did not understand how the end of confinement would work.”

“Herd immunity is very difficult to achieve with COVID,” the professor said.

“You need 90-95 percent (of the population) to have COVID for immunity. That number is too high to reach.”

More candidly, in Italy, they are not talking dishonestly about “opening up the country.” They are talking about “coexisting with the coronavirus.”

Well, yours truly beat the good doctors to it on April 9, with “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats.“

However, these medical heroes were busy saving lives. Bless them.

* Photo by Miguel MEDINA / AFP

UPDATED II (4/17): NEW COLUMN: Coronavirus And Conspiracy: Don’t Be A ‘Covidiot’

Conspiracy, Government, Healthcare, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, The State

NEW COLUMN (with YOUTUBE video) is “Coronavirus And Conspiracy: Don’t Be A ‘Covidiot.’” The column is on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Reality is bad enough; there is no need to explain the world using conjecture and fantasy. The facts suffice.

Government is bad enough. There is no need to explain it using conjecture and fantasy. The facts about it suffice.

In particular, imputing garden variety government evils to conspiracies is based on the following faulty premise: Government generally does what is good for us (NOT). So, whenever we think it is failing in a mission it fulfills so well (NOT), we should look beyond the facts for something more sinister (NOT).

As if The State’s natural quest for expanded power were not enough to explain the events! Why, for example, would you need to search for the “real reason” behind an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless you honestly believed government would never prosecute such a war? History belies this delusion. Even when government prosecutes a just war, it finds ways to turn it into an unjust war by prolonging it. After all, a protracted crisis demands more taxpayer funds. Cui bono? For whose benefit?

There’s no conspiracy here. The constituent elements of the bureaucratic behemoth that is government continuously work to increase their sphere of influence. Thus, grunts don’t benefit from war; the generals everybody reveres do. It is therefore but natural for the soldier’s superiors to pursue war for war’s sake. By virtue of its size, reach, and many usurpations, the U.S. government is a destructive and warring entity—no matter which of one the big government parties is at the helm.

Clearly, conspiracy thinking is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the welfare of the individual and civil society, a position held by a good number of libertarians and conservatives.

Some conspiracy claims are more consequential than others. Those pertaining to coronavirus are an example. Let us, then, briefly discuss coronavirus and conspiracy. Watch the YouTube corresponding to this section of the column here. …

READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Coronavirus And Conspiracy: Don’t Be A ‘Covidiot.’” It’s on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

UPDATE I (4/17):

The great Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ph.D, writes:

I always read my friend Ilana Mercer’s essays with great interest, and whether one agrees or disagrees with her on this or that issue, she never ceases to be thought-provoking, including in this current piece, “Coronavirus and Conspiracy: Don’t Be a ‘Covidiot‘”—which is timely for those among us who are always concerned about the growth of government power in times of crises. Check it out.

UPDATE II (4/18):