The Chinese Virus, also known as Covid19 or the novel corona virus (highly bigoted against the producers of Corona beer, which is made in Mexico), is treated like no other illness in the history of the planet.
It has caused enormous damage to the nation as much from government reaction to it as the medical consequences of the disease itself. It was also completely preventable.
The virus emerged from Wuhan, China under uncertain circumstances. Some have speculated that it was part of the Communist Chinese biowarfare laboratory in Wuhan where it escaped and mistakenly entered the population at large. Or it may have been a zoonotic virus arising from a live, “wet” market. A Chinese ophthalmologist in Wuhan who has since died from the disease was one of the first to break the news. The Communist Chinese regime silenced him and others to avoid losing face or creating uncertainty about China. This coverup went on for six weeks until the world came to know of the problem. If China had been forthcoming, even by as little as three weeks, it is estimated it would have reduced the number of cases by 95 percent and limited global spread.
Part of the China coverup included silencing its experts, taking away credentials from five U.S. media outlets, and expelling journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. China launched a disinformation campaign blaming the U.S. Military for spreading the virus. Playing the victim card, China even descended into identity politics claiming at the time that President Donald Trump’s banning of Chinese from entering the United States on Jan. 31, 2020, was racist, a charge eagerly embraced by the Red Chinese American media. The American press went further into overdrive in defending the totalitarian regime when it accused President Trump of racism for referring to the virus as the Wuhan or Chinese virus despite having used the same terms repeatedly themselves. Puppets for the World Health Organization, like the American media, have parroted Red Chinese propaganda.
Trump has engaged in a number of unprecedented steps to impede the spread of the Chinese Virus, including banning travel from China, Europe, the UK and Ireland, sealing our borders and declaring a public health emergency. He has formed a task force headed by Vice President Mike Pence, held daily press conferences, worked with state governors and invoked the Defense Production Act. Trump has also signed the historic $2.2 trillion Corona Virus Stimulus bill, with a dizzying array of spending and funding options. More than half the states have imposed lockdown measures, quarantines, “sheltering in place” and “social distancing,” disrupting the activities of more than 100 million people and halting the operations of thousands of businesses. The impact of placing much of the country under house arrest, the abridgment of civil liberties, and shutting down vast segments of the economy has been crushing.
In the last two weeks of March, there were 10 million jobless claims, already exceeding the 8.7 million claims filed during the Great Recession 2007-2009 from peak to trough. The stock market entered a bear market with the Dow plunging 23 percent for the quarter, its worst since 1987. Oxford Economics estimated there will be 24 million lost jobs and a 14 percent unemployment rate in April, well above the 10 percent peak reached during the Great Recession. GDP is expected to fall by 9 percent in the first quarter and 34 percent in the second quarter, the worst since World War II.
The pandemic shatters several sacred myths held by governing elites. These include religious devotion to open borders and globalism, the rejection of nationalism and the nation-state and absolute allegiance to free trade, particularly with China. Many American companies outsourced their manufacturing to China, creating enormous profits for themselves on the backs of Chinese slave labor while eviscerating the American heartland. For the privilege of investing in China and having access to its vast market, the Communist government forced companies to give the regime majority ownership and its proprietary intellectual property. In time, the regime created its own version of the company, stealing its technology and eliminating the American competition.
Yet we foolishly went along with this scam for two decades. In so doing, we knowingly jeopardized our national security, devastated our labor force, and placed our supply chains for critical products at risk. We suffered through massive trade deficits, the loss of manufacturing, the lowering of life expectancy, increases in suicide and drug dependency and the wiping out of communities, littered like so many carcasses through the midsection of the country.
Even more delusional was the notion that through trade Red China would liberalize and become a more open, democratic, law-abiding member of the international community. The Chinese government, however, is a Leninist regime, a totalitarian police-and-surveillance state that has no intention of relinquishing power. Nor will it abide rights or freedoms for its subject population. Instead, it persecutes and imprisons them, crushes dissent and commits human rights abuses and atrocities against marginalized communities such as the Uighurs, Tibetans and the Falun Gong.
Through tax, regulatory, legal and other incentives and remedies, the U.S. must return manufacturing, recreate supply chains within the country or with allies, wean the nation from China, delink our economies, stop flooding our universities with Chinese students and treat China as an “evil empire” and strategic threat far greater than the Soviet Union. We must have free trade, but an America First free trade that benefits the nation and our workers. The cost of globalism has proven too high.
Richard Moss, M.D., a surgeon practicing in Jasper, was a candidate for Congress in 2016 and 2018. Contact him at richardmossmd.com or Richard Moss, M.D. on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send comments to awoods@aimmedia indiana.com.