On the menu today: A new book offers more details about the contradiction between the Chinese government’s public words and its private actions in the first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic; the Associated Press looks at claims of voter fraud in the 2020 elections; and a succinct summary of our former president.
Why Doesn’t the Biden Administration Want to Focus on China’s First Pandemic Actions?
In this excerpt from CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s recent book, World War C, he discusses his conversations with Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC director:
Redfield told me they’d put in several requests to be allowed into China, including President Trump appealing directly to President Xi Jinping. All were denied. One of Redfield’s biggest regrets was not successfully gaining entry to China in those early days. He couldn’t get his CDC people deployed from Beijing to Wuhan to start a formal investigation. Instead, all he could do was have regular discussions with his friend George Gao [the Chinese virologist and immunologist who led China’s version of the CDC]. Their private conversations, likely recorded by the Chinese military, revolved around the truth about this new pneumonia and how it spread. For example, when Redfield noticed that the first twenty-seven individuals in China diagnosed with COVID were compromised of three distinct clusters, he knew that meant these people were infecting each other as opposed to all contracting it independently from another location or walking through the same market. This was a clear sign of human-to-human transmission.
On a call in the first week of January, Redfield remembers pointing out the obvious;: “George, you don’t really believe that mother and father and daughter all got it from an animal at the same time, do ya?”
Inexplicably, George’s reply was along the lines of, “Bob there’s just no evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
Redfield challenged his friend of twenty-odd years, describing cases that had nothing to do with the wet market. The Chinese government and military had long been controlling the narrative and keeping the focus on the wet market, unbeknownst to him. Gao did not even know that there had been an outbreak of respiratory illness in the Wuhan Institute of Virology back in the fall of 2019. (The antibody testing of those lab workers did not reveal coronavirus exposure, but those lab results were not independently confirmed.) Three researchers from the lab got sick enough to seek hospital care. This was weeks before Beijing later said its first confirmed case was a man who fell ill on December 8. Had Redfield been able to better assist his friend with twenty or thirty people on the ground in those first few weeks in January, he thinks the pandemic’s plotline would have changed.
Gao finally realized the enormity of the situation one night on another private call with Redfield. Gao broke down, audibly and tearfully distraught after finding “a lot of cases” in the community who had never visited the wet market. He knew the situation was not only out of is control, but people were dying, and the crisis was being directed by higher-ups in the government and the military, and that it likely had been going on awhile. The initial mortality rates in China were somewhere between “5 and 10 percent,” Redfield told me. “I’d probably be crying, too,” he added. (To this day, we don’t know how many Chinese citizens were infected or died; the numbers could be grossly undercounted.)
During my postmortem conversation with Redfield, it became apparent that he was very concerned about Gao’s safety and was protective of him. At times, Redfield leaned forward and told me he was worried about George Gao’s security, and he wanted to say nothing that could incriminate him in the eyes of the Chinese government, which he doesn’t trust. It was arresting to hear a chief scientist so distressed that his friend and Chinese counterpart might be physically harmed just for revealing the scientific evidence he was uncovering. When Gao and Redfield spoke in early January, it was clear that while China’s CDC was far out of the loop, the country’s central government knew what was going on and was secretly preparing for the spreading disaster: It was at least a month ahead of the rest of the world in terms of securing N95 masks and other PPE, reagents for testing, and the development of vaccines – the essentials they would need to manage the pandemic. They were buying up these supplies before alerting the rest of the world.
There was other evidence the Chinese knew and were not telling. Toward the end of January, as we wall watched the Chinese hastily build two massive coronavirus hospitals in just over a week, people like Redfield and Fauci thought, Wait a minute. Why are building hospitals overnight if you’re not that worried?
Scott Gottlieb’s book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic, dates the phone call in which Gao denied the virus’s contagiousness as January 4, 2020, and the day Gao broke down and cried as January 6.
Keep in mind that by December 27, 2019, “A Guangzhou-based genomics company had sequenced most of the virus from fluid samples from the lung of a 65-year old deliveryman who worked at the seafood market where many of the first cases emerged. The results showed an alarming similarity to the deadly SARS coronavirus that killed nearly 800 people between 2002 and 2003.” In other words, before 2019 ended, some well-connected people in China knew that they were dealing with something akin to SARS.
Put aside the lab-leak theory for a moment. At minimum, we know that some segments of the Chinese government had a much better sense of the severity of the virus and the outbreak in Wuhan — and yet, instead of warning the rest of the world or their own country’s CDC, they bought up personal protective equipment. In a six-week span at the start of 2020, the Chinese government “imported 2.5 billion pieces of epidemic safety equipment, including over two billion safety masks, Chinese government data shows.”
We also know that the Chinese government as a whole kept putting out false information — otherwise known as lies — about the contagiousness of the virus for at least three weeks, and perhaps as long as six weeks.
The Chinese government did not admit that the virus was contagious until January 21. By then, it was far too late; cases had been reported in Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, and the virus was spreading, undetected, all around the world. Wuhan’s hospital wards had filled up a week earlier.
The last international flights out of Wuhan departed around midday on January 23, 2020.
By January 27, the mayor of Wuhan admitted that his office had not released information about the virus in a timely manner, but said that his office needed authorization from its superiors before it could inform the public — and that his superiors had not given him authorization.
The Biden administration says it wants to “pivot to Asia” and focus on China. But on front after front, the administration keeps making decisions and taking actions that are functionally pro-China — well beyond the embarrassing spectacle of cutting the video feed of a map showing Taiwan as an independent country at a self-proclaimed “Democracy Summit.”
The Biden administration wants to build a far-reaching global alliance to serve as a counterweight to China, and yet the administration seems terrified of bringing up the Chinese government’s decision-making in the first days of the pandemic.
The U.S. is sitting on a giant mountain of evidence that we are in year three of a pandemic that has killed more than 5.3 million people around the world, with more than 271 million known diagnosed cases, because of the actions of the Chinese government. All of us have had our lives disrupted in a million ways, large and small, primarily because of the shameless dishonesty of the Chinese government when it mattered most. This is the case even if there wasn’t a lab leak, and even if this novel coronavirus — most similar to those found in bats — just happened to first infect a human being right outside a Chinese-government-run biological-research facility that was doing gain-of-function research with novel coronaviruses found in bats. The only shot that humanity had to contain this pathogenic wildfire was in those earliest days, before the virus jumped from person to person and started leaving Wuhan in automobiles and trains and planes.
I still think that SARS-CoV-2 jumping to a human being from some animal independent of the Wuhan Institute of Virology requires a series of coincidences too implausible to believe. But the one nagging doubt I have is that the Chinese government might not want the infection to be definitively traced back to a wet market, because that would spur intense international demands to shut down the wet markets, once and for all. So when the Chinese government says it hasn’t found any evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in any animals that could have been at the Wuhan wet market . . . there’s at least a small possibility that it’s lying, that someone did find the virus in a potential animal species, and it’s being covered up.
But even the natural-spillover theory doesn’t get the Chinese government off the hook for its actions once it realized how dangerous and contagious the virus was. We’re in this mess because of the Chinese government’s decisions and actions. And for some odd reason, the Biden administration doesn’t want to dwell on that — even though that would seem to be a powerful and galvanizing argument for those seeking to isolate the Chinese regime.
Also, We Should Prosecute Those 475 Cases
This will persuade no one who actually needs to be persuaded, but it is worth noting anyway:
An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.
A Succinct One-Sentence Summary of Our Former President
Michael Brendan Dougherty, in reviewing the texts from Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity to Trump during the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot, writes that, “Just as Tucker Carlson had once traveled to Mar-a-Lago to ask the president to take the Covid-19 pandemic more seriously, these Fox hosts were intervening with a man who they knew took television seriously, more seriously than his constitutional duties.”
ADDENDUM: Applications to the Spring 2022 Burke to Buckley programs in Miami, New York City, and Philadelphia are due today, December 15th:
Burke to Buckley is a discussion program that explores the foundations of conservative thought and builds a network of talented individuals who assist one another professionally and personally. This spring’s program will run from approximately March to May. Accepted participants will gather over dinner to discuss foundational conservative texts. Each week, an expert (often an NR writer or fellow) will guide the discussion providing a unique opportunity for participants to engage with, and to learn from, one another. Program topics include:
William F. Buckley Jr. and American Conservatism
The Founders’ Constitution
Economic Freedom and Political Freedom
Burke, Prudence, and the Spirit of Conservatism
Conservatism, Libertarianism, and Fusionism
Mediating Structures between the State and the Individual
Conservatism, Democracy, and Foreign Policy
The Conservative Spirit and Civic Gratitude
Check out the Burke to Buckley webpage for more information and applications, and be sure to apply by the end of the day!