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By Jonathan Cook

If a disease can teach wisdom beyond our understanding of how precarious and precious life is, the coronavirus has offered two lessons.

The first is that in a globalised world our lives are so intertwined that the idea of viewing ourselves as islands – whether as individuals, communities, nations, or a uniquely privileged species – should be understood as evidence of false consciousness. In truth, we were always bound together, part of a miraculous web of life on our planet and, beyond it, stardust in an unfathomably large and complex universe.

It is only an arrogance cultivated in us by those narcissists who have risen to power through their own destructive egotism that blinded us to the necessary mix of humility and awe we ought to feel as we watch a drop of rain on a leaf, or a baby struggle to crawl, or the night sky revealed in all its myriad glories away from city lights.

And now, as we start to enter periods of quarantine and self-isolation – as nations, communities and individuals – all that should be so much clearer. It has taken a virus to show us that only together are we at our strongest, most alive and most human.

In being stripped of what we need most by the threat of contagion, we are reminded of how much we have taken community for granted, abused it, hollowed it out. We are afraid because the services we need in times of collective difficulty and trauma have been turned into commodities that require payment, or treated as privileges to which access is now means-tested, rationed or is simply gone. That insecurity is at the root of the current urge to hoard.

When death stalks us it is not bankers we turn to, or corporate executives, or hedge fund managers. Nonetheless, those are the people our societies have best rewarded. They are the people who, if salaries are a measure of value, are the most prized.

But they are not the people we need, as individuals, as societies, as nations. Rather, it will be doctors, nurses, public health workers, care-givers and social workers who will be battling to save lives by risking their own.

During this health crisis we may indeed notice who and what is most important. But will we remember the sacrifice, their value after the virus is no longer headline news? Or will we go back to business as usual – until the next crisis – rewarding the arms manufacturers, the billionaire owners of the media, the fossil fuel company bosses, and the financial-services parasites feeding off other people’s money?

‘Take it on the chin’

The second lesson follows from the first. Despite everything we have been told for four decades or more, western capitalist societies are far from the most efficient ways of organising ourselves. That will be laid bare as the coronavirus crisis deepens.

We are still very much immersed in the ideological universe of Thatcherism and Reaganism, when we were told quite literally: “There is no such thing as society.” How will that political mantra stand the test of the coming weeks and months? How much can we survive as individuals, even in quarantine, rather than as part of communities that care for all of us?

Western leaders who champion neoliberalism, as they are required to do nowadays, have two choices to cope with coronavirus – and both will require a great deal of misdirection if we are not to see through their hypocrisy and deceptions.

Our leaders can let us “take it on the chin”, as the British prime minister Boris Johnson has phrased it. In practice, that will mean allowing what is effectively a cull of many of the poor and elderly – one that will relieve governments of the financial burden of underfunded pension schemes and welfare payments.

Such leaders will claim they are powerless to intervene or to ameliorate the crisis. Confronted with the contradictions inherent in their worldview, they will suddenly become fatalists, abandoning their belief in the efficacy and righteousness of the free market. They will say the virus was too contagious to contain, too robust for health services to cope, too lethal to save lives. They will evade all blame for the decades of health cuts and privatisations that made those services inefficient, inadequate, cumbersome and inflexible.

Or, by contrast, politicians will use their spin doctors and allies in the corporate media to obscure the fact that they are quietly and temporarily becoming socialists to deal with the emergency. They will change the welfare rules so that all those in the gig economy they created – employed on zero-hours contracts – do not spread the virus because they cannot afford to self-quarantine or take days’ off sick.

Or most likely our leaders will pursue both options.

Permanent crisis

If acknowledged at all, the conclusion to be draw from the crisis – that we all matter equally, that we need to look after one another, that we sink or swim together – will be treated as no more than an isolated, fleeting lesson specific to this crisis. Our leaders will refuse to draw more general lessons – ones that might highlight their own culpability – about how sane, humane societies should function all the time.

In fact, there is nothing unique about the coronavirus crisis. It is simply a heightened version of the less visible crisis we are now permanently mired in. As Britain sinks under floods each winter, as Australia burns each summer, as the southern states of the US are wrecked by hurricanes and its great plains become dustbowls, as the climate emergency becomes ever more tangible, we will learn this truth slowly and painfully.

Those deeply invested in the current system – and those so brainwashed they cannot see its flaws – will defend it to the bitter end. They will learn nothing from the virus. They will point to authoritarian states and warn that things could be far worse.

They will point a finger at Iran’s high death toll as confirmation that our profit-driven societies are better, while ignoring the terrible damage we have inflicted on Iran’s health services after years of sabotaging its economy through ferocious sanctions. We left Iran all the more vulnerable to coronavirus  because we wanted to engineer “regime change” – to interfere under the pretence of “humanitarian” concern – as we have sought to do in other countries whose resources we wished to control, from Iraq to Syria and Libya.

Iran will be held responsible for a crisis we willed, that our politicians intended (even if the speed and means came as a surprise), to overthrow its leaders. Iran’s failures will be cited as proof of our superior way of life, as we wail self-righteously about the outrage of a “Russian interference” whose contours we can barely articulate.

Valuing the common good

Those who defend our system, even as its internal logic collapses in the face of coronavirus and a climate emergency, will tell us how lucky we are to live in free societies where some – Amazon executives, home delivery services, pharmacies, toilet-paper manufacturers – can still make a quick buck from our panic and fear. As long as someone is exploiting us, as long as someone is growing fat and rich, we will be told the system works – and works better than anything else imaginable.

But in fact, late-stage capitalist societies like the US and the UK will struggle to claim even the limited successes against coronavirus of authoritarian governments. Is Trump in the US or Johnson in the UK – exemplars of “the market knows best” capitalism – likely to do better than China at containing and dealing with the virus?

This lesson is not about authoritarian versus “free” societies. This is about societies that treasure the common wealth, that value the common good, above private greed and profit, above protecting the privileges of a wealth-elite.

In 2008, after decades of giving the banks what they wanted – free rein to make money by trading in hot air – the western economies all but imploded as an inflated bubble of empty liquidity burst. The banks and financial services were saved only by public bail-outs – tax payers’ money. We were given no choice: the banks, we were told, were “too big to fail”.

We bought the banks with our common wealth. But because private wealth is our era’s guiding star, the public were not allowed to own the banks they bought. And once the banks had been bailed out by us – a perverse socialism for the rich – the banks went right back to making private money, enriching a tiny elite until the next crash.

Nowhere to fly to

The naive may think this was a one-off. But the failings of capitalism are inherent and structural, as the virus is already demonstrating and the climate emergency will drive home with alarming ferocity in the coming years.

The shut-down of borders means the airlines are quickly going bust. They didn’t put money away for a rainy day, of course. They didn’t save, they weren’t prudent. They are in a cut-throat world where they need to compete with rivals, to drive them out of business and make as much money as they can for shareholders.

Now there is nowhere for the airlines to fly to – and they will have no visible means to make money for months on end. Like the banks, they are too big to fail – and like the banks they are demanding public money be spent to tide them over until they can once again rapaciously make profits for their shareholders. There will be many other corporations queuing up behind the airlines.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1239492023754862596

Sooner or later the public will be strong-armed once again to bail out these profit-driven corporations whose only efficiency is the central part they play in fuelling global warming and eradicating life on the planet. The airlines will be resuscitated until the inevitable next crisis arrives – one in which they are key players.

A boot stamping on a face

Capitalism is an efficient system for a tiny elite to make money at a terrible cost, and an increasingly untenable one, to wider society – and only until that system shows itself to be no longer efficient. Then wider society has to pick up the tab, and assist the wealth-elite so the cycle can be begun all over again. Like a boot stamping on a human face – forever, as George Orwell warned long ago.

But it is not just that capitalism is economically self-destructive; it is morally vacant too. Again, we should study the exemplars of neoliberal orthodoxy: the UK and the US.

In Britain, the National Health Service – once the envy of the world – is in terminal decline after decades of privatising and outsourcing its services. Now the same Conservative party that began the cannibalising of the NHS is pleading with businesses such as car makers to address a severe shortage of ventilators, which will soon be needed to assist coronavirus patients.

Once, in an emergency, western governments would have been able to direct resources, both public and private, to save lives. Factories could have been repurposed for the common good. Today, the government behaves as if all it can do is incentivise business, pinning hopes on the profit motive and selfishness driving these firms to enter the ventilator market, or to provide beds, in ways beneficial to public health.

The flaws in this approach should be glaring if we examine how a car manufacturer might respond to the request to adapt its factories to make ventilators.

If it is not persuaded that it can make easy money or if it thinks there are quicker or bigger profits to be made by continuing to make cars at a time when the public is frightened to use public transport, patients will die. If it holds back, waiting to see if there will be enough demand for ventilators to justify adapting its factories, patients will die. If it delays in the hope that ventilator shortages will drive up subsidies from a government fearful of the public backlash, patients will die. And if it makes ventilators on the cheap, to boost profits, without ensuring medical personnel oversee quality control, patients will die.

Survival rates will depend not on the common good, on our rallying to help those in need, on planning for the best outcome, but on the vagaries of the market. And not only on the market, but on faulty, human perceptions of what constitute market forces.

Survival of the fittest

If this were not bad enough, Trump – in all his inflated vanity – is showing how that profit-motive can be extended from the business world he knows so intimately to the cynical political one he has been gradually mastering. According to reports, behind the scenes he has been chasing after a silver bullet. He is speaking to international pharmaceutical companies to find one close to developing a vaccine so the United States can buy exclusive rights to it.

Reports suggest that he wants to offer the vaccine exclusively to the US public, in what would amount to the ultimate vote-winner in a re-election year. This would be the nadir of the dog-eat-dog philosophy – the survival of the fittest, the market decides worldview – we have been encouraged to worship over the past four decades. It is how people behave when they are denied a wider society to which they are responsible and which is responsible for them.

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But even should Trump eventually deign to let other countries enjoy the benefits of his privatised vaccine, this will not be about helping mankind, about the greater good. It will be about Trump the businessman-president turning a tidy profit for the US on the back of other’s desperation and suffering, as well as marketing himself a political hero on the global stage.

Or, more likely, it will be yet another chance for the US to demonstrate its “humanitarian” credentials, rewarding “good” countries by giving them access to the vaccine, while denying “bad” countries like Russia the right to protect their citizens.

Obscenely stunted worldview

It will be a perfect illustration on the global stage – and in bold technicolour – of how the American way of marketing health works. This is what happens when health is treated not as a public good but as a commodity to be bought, as a privilege to incentivise the workforce, as a measure of who is successful and who is unsuccessful.

The US, by far the richest country on the planet, has a dysfunctional health care system not because it cannot afford a good one, but because its political worldview is so obscenely stunted by the worship of wealth that it refuses to acknowledge the communal good, to respect the common wealth of a healthy society.

11 mind-blowing facts about American health care dysfunction

The US health system is by far the most expensive in the world, but also the most inefficient. The vast bulk of “health spending” does not contribute to healing the sick but enriches a health industry of pharmaceutical corporations and health insurance companies.

Analysts describe a third of all US health spending – $765 billion a year – as “wasted”. But “waste” is a euphemism. In fact, it is money stuffed into the pockets of corporations calling themselves the health industry as they defraud the common wealth of US citizens. And the fraudulence is all the greater because despite this enormous expenditure more than one in 10 US citizens has no meaningful health cover.

As never before, coronavirus will bring into focus the depraved inefficiency of this system – the model of profit-driven health care, of market forces that look out for the short-term interests of business, not the long-term interests of us all.

There are alternatives. Right now, Americans are being offered a choice between a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, who champions health care as a right because it is a common good, and a Democratic party boss, Joe Biden, who champions the business lobbies he depends on for funding and his political success. One is being marginalised and vilified as a threat to the American way of life by a handful of corporations that own the US media, while the other is being propelled towards the Democratic nomination by those same corporations.

Coronavirus has an important, urgent lesson to teach us. The question is: are we ready yet to listen?

This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

19 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

China and Cuba have stepped in with practical measures at international level amidst the near-collapse health care situation in a number of capitalist countries in the face of coronavirus pandemic.

China sending million masks & gloves to France

China is shipping one million surgical masks and gloves to France as the EU member struggles to contain the coronavirus, with Europe becoming the new focal point of the global pandemic.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed the shipments on Wednesday in an interview with France’s BFM TV.

The first of two planes has already arrived via Belgium and a second will arrive on Thursday, he said.

China’s gesture comes after France sent 17 tonnes of equipment to Beijing when the Covid-19 virus first broke out in Wuhan last December.

France reported 89 new deaths from Covid-19 on Wednesday, updating the total to 264. The number of confirmed cases has also risen to 9,134 – up from 7,730 on Tuesday – health agency director Jerome Salomon said.

China’s medical team and equipment in Italy

Last week, China shipped a planeload of medical supplies including respirators and masks to Italy, which has suffered more than any other European country so far, and has seen hospitals overloaded with the rapidly increasing numbers of cases.

Along with the 30 tons of equipment, China also sent nine of its medical staff to Italy to help in its battle against the disease.

Italian Red Cross head Francesco Rocca said the country was in “desperate need” of the masks and was grateful for the donation in a moment of “great difficulty.”

“Today, Italy is not alone,” said Italy’s Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio. “Many people in the world are supporting us.”

It is the third team of experts deployed by the Chinese authorities.

EU is not helping

Earlier reports said:

Italy requested the EU and EU member-countries to send medical equipments to fight coronavirus. But the EU and its member-countries declined to help citing the reason that they do not want to deplete their stocks.

Earlier this week, Italy’s permanent representative to the EU, Maurizio Massari, complained that Italy’s plea for medical help to combat the coronavirus outbreak crippling the country had gone unanswered.

Massari noted that while the EU had ignored Italian requests for aid, China had begun helping bilaterally.

“Italy, the European country struck hardest by the coronavirus, has done everything it can to contain and manage the epidemic,” he said.

The Italian minister said: “We must ensure, under EU co-ordination, the supply of the necessary medical equipment and its redistribution among those countries and regions most in need. Today, this means Italy; tomorrow, the need could be elsewhere.

“Italy has already asked to activate the European Union Mechanism of Civil Protection for the supply of medical equipment for individual protection.

“But, unfortunately, not a single EU country responded to the commission’s call. Only China responded bilaterally. Certainly, this is not a good sign of European solidarity.”

China sends masks to Serbia

Caught off guard by the EU’s ban on medical exports, Serbia found help in China as it struggled to prepare for the Covid-19 outbreak, the Serbian president said, adding that it has become clear that European solidarity is a myth.

Serbia is the latest country to impose severe restrictions on travel and public gatherings in response to the global epidemic.

As President Aleksandar Vucic declared a national emergency on Sunday, he had some scalding remarks for the EU.

The crisis has proven that European solidarity, only exists “on paper,” Vucic said, citing the ban on the export of medical equipment and supplies imposed by EU members to non-EU countries in response to the outbreak.

“Only China can help us in this situation”, the Serbian leader added, saying he recently wrote a letter to China’s President Xi Jinping “asking him for help and calling him a brother.”

Serbia received five million masks from China that it couldn’t get in Europe and an offer to send doctors to help tackle the disease, the president said.

“I say to foreigners: don’t come to Serbia, except for the Chinese who are called upon to come, their doctors, the people who help us,” Vucic said.

According to official sources, the country had to shop for respirators on a “semi gray market.”

Starting Monday, Serbia has shut down all teaching facilities, mobilized the military to guard sensitive sites such as hospitals, and closed the borders to everyone apart from citizens.

Serbs will have to remain in quarantine after coming back or face prison terms of up to three years.

As of Monday, there are 55 confirmed coronavirus cases in Serbia, which has a population of seven million. Two of the patients are in serious condition. The virus has also reached other Balkan nations with the exception of Montenegro.

The health crisis has put EU cohesion to the test.

Spain Iran Iraq

China has already sent medical missions and shipments of supplies to Spain, Iraq and Iran.

Beijing has been praised by the World Health Organisation for its efforts against the coronavirus. Authorities responded to the outbreak by building new hospitals in a matter of days and locking down Hubei province, which has a population of 58 million, to contain the spread of the disease.

To the U.S.

In addition to the government help, Chinese billionaire Jack Ma sent a shipment of surgical masks and Covid-19 test kits to the U.S., which has its own shortage of kits.

Africa

Ma said Monday he would also donate masks and test kits to all countries in Africa.

Despite its efforts to step up and aid other hard-hit countries, China has faced a barrage of negative media coverage in the West, with Trump administration officials repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus” given the fact that it originated there in December.

Cuba’s medical team to Italy

Socialist country Cuba has already sent medical team to Italy to help the EU-member fight coronavirus.

Cuba’s team to Venezuela

A specialized Cuban technical delegation traveled to Venezuela March 15 to support the country’s Covid-19 containment strategy.

Cuba’s medicine to China to fight coronavirus

Among the thirty medicines the Chinese National Health Commission selected to fight the coronavirus is a Cuban anti-viral drug, Interferon Alpha 2b. This drug has been produced in China since 2003, by the enterprise ChangHeber, a Cuban-Chinese joint venture.

Cuban Interferon Alpha 2b has proven effective for viruses with characteristics similar to those of coronavirus, officially named COVID-19.

Cuban biotech specialist Dr. Luis Herrera Martinez explained, “its use prevents aggravation and complications in patients, reaching that stage that ultimately can result in death.”

Cuba first developed and used interferons to arrest a deadly outbreak of the dengue virus in 1981, and the experience catalyzed the development of the island’s now world-leading biotech industry.

In 1981, the Biological Front, a professional interdisciplinary forum, was set up to develop the industry in Cuba. While most developing countries had little access to the new technologies (recombinant DNA, human gene therapy, biosafety), Cuban biotechnology expanded and took on an increasingly strategic role in both the public health sector and the national economic development plan. It did so despite the U.S. blockade obstructing access to technologies, equipment, materials, finance, and even knowledge exchange. Driven by public health demand, it has been characterized by the fast track from research and innovation to trials and application, as the story of Cuban interferon shows.

Interferons are “signaling” proteins produced and released by cells in response to infections that alert nearby cells to heighten their anti-viral defenses.

Countries ask Cuba to send medicine

The Cuban medication Interferon Alpha 2B has been requested by more than ten countries.

Coronavirus-hit cruise ship docks in Cuba for passengers to evacuate

A British cruise ship that has been stranded for more than a week in the Caribbean after several cases of the new coronavirus were confirmed onboard is set to dock in Cuba on Wednesday to allow weary passengers to disembark and fly home.

Britain’s Foreign Minister Dominic Raab expressed gratitude on Tuesday in parliament to Communist-run Cuba for offering a safe haven to the Braemar, which has more than 1,000 mainly British passengers and crew aboard after several Caribbean ports refused to let it dock.

“Prevention and contention of new coronavirus require the efforts of entire international community,” said Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez. “Let’s reinforce health care, solidarity and international cooperation.”

Passengers would return to Britain from the capital’s international airport in the evening on four charter flights including a separate one for passengers who had received a positive diagnosis for coronavirus or displayed any flu-like symptoms.

Any not considered well enough to fly would be offered support and medical treatment in Cuba.

The ship was refused docking in Barbados and the Bahamas, which are both part of the British Commonwealth – an irony not lost on some passengers.

“We should all remember what #Cuba has done for us, stepping in when none of the British Commonwealth countries and protectorates in the region offered any help,” tweeted one passenger aboard the Braemar, Steve Dale.

Cuban authorities are screening travelers at airports and have stepped up the production of facemasks while banning large cultural events. Family physicians are paying more home visits to monitor local communities.

Yet the government has not canceled flights from countries hardest hit by the pandemic, restricted internal movement or banned social gatherings, in contrast to other countries in the region, eliciting concern among some Cubans, as has the arrival of the Braemar.

A March 18, 2020 datelined Granma report, headlined “A safe port amidst adversity” said:

The humanitarian and altruistic dimensions of the events could make them stuff of a movie scene. The crew of the MS Braemar, owned by the British Fred Olsen cruise line, spent several days sailing the Caribbean with passengers aboard suffering coronavirus infections.

Despite diplomatic efforts by the UK government, the ship was refused entry to several ports in the region. But there was nothing fictional about the urgent situation of passengers, including the sick whose lives were endangered, with the rest facing possible infection, in the middle of the ocean.

Cuba said yes, and offered a safe port in the midst of adversity, with modesty, not seeking headlines in the media, for absolutely nothing in return. Such a decision perhaps generated incomprehension on the part of some, those who are unaware of the value of a helping hand during a catastrophe.

But, for most Cubans, the opportunity to help fills us with patriotic pride, with the emotion only understandable by women and men of good will in all latitudes. Because in “times of coronavirus,” the words “help, cooperate, work together” should be the norm, across the planet. Because human civilization should understand, once and for all, that only together can we overcome common challenges and tragedies.

Cuba, true to its principles, could not act otherwise, nor is this the first time we have done so. Solidarity is in the genes of the Cuban people. It is part of our unique identity and has written memorable chapters in our history.

Perhaps for these reasons, in the time of Covid-19, the eyes of the world look hopefully to Cuba, and our people, who despite hardships and a fierce blockade, did not hesitate to respond.

Requests for support have arrived from various parts of the world.

Meanwhile, others are sending thousands of military personnel to Europe to conduct the most extensive maneuvers since the Cold War, while leading an insulting campaign against Cuban medical collaboration around the world. Cuba’s response? An army of white coats at the service of the dispossessed: more than 400,000 health professionals who, over 56 years, have carried out missions in 164 nations.

Women and men from this Caribbean island have faced Ebola in Africa, blindness in Latin America and the Caribbean with Operation Miracle, and cholera in Haiti. Twenty-six Cuban brigades from the Henry Reeve International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Disasters and Major Epidemics – recognized with the Dr. Lee Jong-wook Public Health Award, granted by the Executive Council of the World Health Organization – helped during difficult times in Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Venezuela, among others.

In fact, this event is nothing like a film. It is an expression of solidarity from the Cuban people, who understand health as a human right, help any way we can and share what we have, with those who need it most in difficult times.

Martí said: “Cuba does not go around the world begging. She goes as a sister and works with authority as such. By saving herself, she saves.” Then and now, and into the future.

19 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Mainland China has had no new local coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours – the first time since the outbreak began in December.

However, China is still struggling to contain imported cases of the disease.

Notably, the purported epicenter of the epidemic – Wuhan, in Hubei province – recorded no new locally transmitted infections. The same was true across China, according to reports, citing the Chinese government.

Health authorities reported 34 new cases on Thursday, but said that all involved people who had come to China from abroad. Twenty-one of the imported infections were in Beijing, marking a daily record for the Chinese capital.

In total, confirmed cases in mainland China have reached 80,928, according to the latest data, with 3,245 deaths as of the end of Wednesday.

The number of deaths in Europe from the virus surpassed those in Asia on Wednesday, raising concerns that Covid-19 could lead to a long-term health crisis for the West.

19 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Pepe Escobar

Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the US as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus. 

Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.

Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.

When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaliing that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military.

He directly quoted US CDC director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the US, replied that  “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the US today.”

Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that Covid-19 was already in effect in the US before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of US to test and verify differences compared with the flu.

Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected Wuhan, Chinese media are now openly  asking questions and drawing a connection with the shutting down in August last year of the “unsafe” military bioweapon lab at Fort Detrick, the Military Games, and the Wuhan epidemic. Some of these questions had been asked – with no response – inside the US itself.

Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan.

Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN.  The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day.

Irrespective of its origin, which is still not conclusively established, as much as Trump tweets about the “Chinese virus,” Covid-19 already poses immensely serious questions about biopolitics (where’s Foucault when we need him?) and bio-terror.

The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control – on a global scale.

Cuba rises as a biotech power

Just as a fully masked Xi visiting the Wuhan frontline last week was a graphic demonstration to the whole planet that China, with immense sacrifice, is winning the “people‘s war” against Covid-19, Russia, in a Sun Tzu move on Riyadh whose end result was a much cheaper barrel of oil, helped for all practical purposes to kick-start the inevitable recovery of the Chinese economy. This is how a strategic partnership works.

The chessboard is changing at breakneck speed. Once Beijing identified coronavirus as a bio-weapon attack the “people’s war” was launched with the full force of the state. Methodically. On a “whatever it takes” basis. Now we are entering a new stage, which will be used by Beijing to substantially recalibrate the interaction with the West, and under very different frameworks when it comes to the US and the EU.

Soft power is paramount. Beijing sent an Air China flight to Italy carrying 2,300 big boxes full of masks bearing the script, “We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden.” China also sent a hefty humanitarian package to Iran, significantly aboard eight flights from Mahan Air – an airline under illegal, unilateral Trump administration sanctions.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic could not have been more explicit:

“The only country that can help us is China. By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.”

Under harsh sanctions and demonized since forever, Cuba is still able to perform breakthroughs – even on biotechnology. The anti-viral Heberon – or Interferon Alpha 2b – a therapeutic, not a vaccine, has been used with great success in the treatment of coronavirus. A joint venture in China is producing an inhalable version, and at least 15 nations are already interested in importing the therapeutic.

Now compare all of the above with the Trump administration offering $1 billion to poach German scientists working at biotech firm Curevac, based in Thuringia, on an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, to have it as a vaccine “only for the United States.”

Social engineering psy-op?

Sandro Mezzadra, co-author with Brett Neilson of the seminal The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, is already trying to conceptualize where we stand now in terms of fighting Covid-19.

We are facing a choice between a Malthusian strand – inspired by social Darwinism – “led by the Johnson-Trump-Bolsonaro axis” and, on the other side, a strand pointing to the “requalification of public health as a fundamental tool,” exemplified by China, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

The stark option, Mezzadra notes, is between a “natural population selection,” with thousands of dead, and “defending society” by employing “variable degrees of authoritarianism and social control.” It’s easy to imagine who stands to benefit from this social re-engineering, a 21^st century remix of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

Amid so much doom and gloom, count on Italy to offer us Tiepolo-style shades of light. Italy chose the Wuhan option, with immensely serious consequences for its already fragile economy. Quarantined Italians remarkably reacted by singing on their balconies: a true act of metaphysical revolt.

Not to mention the poetic justice of the actual St. Corona (“crown” in Latin) being buried in the city of Anzu since the 9^th century. St. Corona was a Christian killed under Marcus Aurelius in 165 AD, and has been for centuries one of the patron saints of pandemics.

Not even trillions of dollars raining from the sky by an act of divine Fed mercy were able to cure Covid-19. G-7 “leaders” had to resort to a videoconference to realize how clueless they are – even as China’s fight against coronavirus gave the West a head start of several weeks.

Shanghai-based Dr. Zhang Wenhong, one of China’s top infectious disease experts, whose analyses have been spot on so far, now says China has emerged from the darkest days in the “people’s war” against Covid-19. But he does not think this will be over by summer. Now extrapolate what he’s saying to the Western world.

It’s not even spring yet, and we already know it takes a virus to mercilessly shatter the Goddess of the Market. Last Friday, Goldman Sachs told no fewer than 1,500 corporations that there was no systemic risk. That was false.

New York banking sources told me the truth: systemic risk became way more severe in 2020 than in 1979, 1987 or 2008 because of the hugely heightened danger that the $1.5 quadrillion derivative market would collapse.

As the sources put it, history had never before seen anything like the Fed’s intervention via its little understood elimination of commercial bank reserve requirements, unleashing a potential unlimited expansion of credit to prevent a derivative implosion stemming from a total commodity and stock market collapse of all stocks around the world.

Those bankers thought it would work, but as we know by now all the sound and fury signified nothing. The ghost of a derivative implosion – in this case not caused by the previous possibility, the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz – remains.

We are still barely starting to understand the consequences of Covid-19 for the future of neoliberal turbo-capitalism. What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker. This may be just a “coincidence.” Or this may be, as some are boldly arguing, part of a possible, massive psy-op creating the perfect geopolitlcal and social engineering environment for full-spectrum dominance.

Additionally, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and economic sacrifice, with or without a reboot of the world-system, a more pressing question remains: will imperial elites still choose to keep waging full-spectrum-dominance hybrid war against China?

*

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This article was originally published on Asia Times. 

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

18 March 2020

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

I was only introduced to the term ‘Chilestinians’ last February at a conference in Istanbul, during a presentation by the Director of the Palestinian Federation of Chile, Anuar Majluf.

When Majluf referred to the well-rooted Palestinian community in Chile, who number between 450,000 and half a million, using that unfamiliar and peculiar phrase, I smiled. Others did, too.

It is quite rare that a conference on Palestine, anywhere, would include such an upbeat atmosphere as that introduced by the Chilean-Palestinian leader, as the current discourse on Palestine is one that is saturated with a deepening sense of political failure, disunity and betrayal.

I say ‘Chilean-Palestinian’ for the sake of convenience because, later on, I realized that the term ‘Chilestinians’ was not coined haphazardly, or jokingly.

Dr. Lina Meruane, a Chilean scholar of Palestinian descent, told Bahira Amin of the ‘Scene Arabia’ online magazine, that the term ‘Chilestinians’ is different from ‘Chilean-Palestinians’ in the sense that it is a demarcation of a unique identity.

“It’s not a hyphenated identity, but the fusion of two identities that belong together and have no issues belonging together,” Meruane said. Amin refers to this as a ‘third space’ which was created in diaspora, over the course of 150 years.

It might come as a surprise for those of us not familiar with the Palestinian experience in Chile to learn of the old adage, “for every village in Chile you will find three things: a policeman, a pastor, and a Palestinian.” But the saying, indeed, expresses a historical bond between Palestine and a country that is located on the extreme south-western coast of South America.

The immense distance – over 13,000 kilometers – between Jerusalem and Santiago, might in part, explain the reason why Chile and its large ‘Chilestinian’ population did not occupy its deserved status in the collective imagination of Palestinians everywhere.

But there are other reasons too, leading among them the fact that successive Palestinian leaderships have failed to fully appreciate the immense potential of Palestinian communities in diaspora, especially the Palestinians of Chile. The latter’s story is not only that of struggle and perseverance, but also of great success and vital contributions to their own society and to the Palestinian cause.

Starting in the late 1970s, the Palestinian leadership labored to politically engage with Washington and other Western capitals, culminating in the pervading sense that, without US political validation, Palestinians would always remain marginal and irrelevant.

Palestinian calculation proved disastrous. After decades of catering to Washington expectations and diktats, the Palestinian leadership returned empty-handed as the Donald Trump administration’s ‘Deal of the Century’ has finally proven.

Political decisions have their cultural repercussions as well. For at least three decades, Palestinians have re-oriented themselves politically and culturally, disowning their historical allies in the southern hemisphere, as a whole. Worse, the new thinking widened the chasms between Palestinians in Palestine and their own brethren, like Palestinian communities in South America who held even tighter to their identity, language, music and love for their ancestral homeland.

What is so unique about Palestinians in Chile and other Palestinian communities in South America, is that their roots go back decades before the destruction of Palestine and the establishment of Israel on its ruins in 1948.

Israel often claims that its Palestinian victims lacked a national identity in the modern sense. Some scholars, at times well-intentioned ones, concur, claiming that a modern Palestinian identity was largely articulated after the Nakba – the ‘Catastrophic’ destruction of historic Palestine.

Those who are still stuck at this historical distortion must introduce themselves to Palestinian historians like Nur Mashala and his must-read book ‘Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History’.

‘Chilestinians’ offer a real living example of the true strength of the collective Palestinian identity that existed before Israel itself was violently imposed on the Palestinian map.

‘Deportivo Palestino’, a prominent football club that plays in Chile’s Primera division, was unofficially established in 1916 and, officially, four years later. I learned from the ‘Chilestinian’ delegation to Istanbul that the founders of the Palestinian community in that country established ‘Palestino’ to ensure their children never forget the name, and that they continue to chant the name of Palestine for many years to come.

The football club – known as Palestine’s ‘second national football team’ – will soon celebrate its one hundred year anniversary, a celebration that is likely to take place amid the predominant chant of ‘Gaza resists; Palestine exists’.

Palestino’s La Cisterna stadium in Santiago, a towering edifice adorned with Palestinian flags, is not only a testament of the tenacity of Palestinian identity, but the generosity of Palestinian culture as well, as the stadium is one of the city’s largest communal hubs bringing people from all backgrounds together in an ongoing celebration of everything that we have in common.

To avoid any reductionist understanding of the Palestinian experience in Chile, and all of South America, we must accept that, like any other society, Palestinians there have their own divisions, which are often governed by wealth, class and politics.

This division reached its height during the US-backed coup of Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in 1973. But the rift did not last long, as the ‘Chilestinians’ united once more following the Israeli engineered massacre of Sabra and Shatila, in South Lebanon, in 1982.

Since then, the Palestinian community of Chile learned to accept their political differences, while agreeing that their rapport with Palestine must be their unifying common ground. For years now, the ‘Chilestinians’ are working hand in hand with other Palestinian communities in South America to accentuate the need for unity, distancing themselves from the political disharmony and factionalism that has wrought havoc on the Palestinian political identity in Palestine itself.

Slowly, Palestinians of South America are merging back to occupy a center stage in the larger Palestinian stream, not only as part and parcel of the collective Palestinian identity, but also as a role model that must be fully understood and even emulated.

Not a day goes by without me checking my sports app to follow the progress of ‘Deportivo Palestino’. I know that many Palestinians in other parts of the world do the same, because despite the distance, language, and time difference, ultimately, we will always remain one people.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

14 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

Co-Written by Ariel Gold and Medea Benjamin

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is far from the first proof of how intertwined we are as a global community. The climate crisis and the refugee crisis have long been glaring examples that the wars or CO2 emissions on one continent risk the lives and well-being of people on another continent. What coronavirus is providing, however, is a unique opportunity to look specifically at how the intentional damage caused to one country’s healthcare system can make it harder for the entire world to address a pandemic.

The coronavirus started in China in December 2019 and President Donald Trump immediately brushed it off as something limited to China. At the end of January 2020, he banned entry to the United States of people from China but still insisted that the Americans need not worry. It will have “a very good ending for us,” he said, insisting that his administration had the situation “very well under control.”

Despite Trump’s insistence that the medical pandemics can be contained via travel bans and closed borders, the coronavirus knows no borders. By January 20, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand had all reported cases. On January 21, the U.S. confirmed the infection of a 30-year-old Washington State man who had just returned from Wuhan, China.

On February 19, Iran announced two cases of the coronavirus, reporting within hours that both patients had died. By March 13, at the time of this writing, the total number of coronavirus infections in Iran is at least 11,362 and at least 514 people in the country have died. Per capita, it is currently the most heavily infected country in the Middle East and third in the world, after Italy and South Korea.

In the Middle East, coronavirus cases have now been identified in Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, Iraq, Lebanon, Omar, and Egypt. If Iran is not able to stem the crisis, the virus will continue to spread throughout the Middle East and beyond.

By the time the coronavirus hit Iran on February 19, the country’s economy, including its healthcare system, had already been devastated by U.S. sanctions. Under the Obama administration, the Iranian economy was given a boost when the Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015 and the nuclear-related sanctions were lifted. By February 2016, Iran was shipping oil to Europe for the first time in three years. In 2017, foreign direct investment increased by nearly 50% and Iran’s imports expanded by nearly 40% over 2015-2017.

The reimposition of sanctions after the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 has had a devastating impact on the economy and on the lives of ordinary Iranians. The Iranian currency, the rial, lost 80 percent of its value. Food prices doubled, rents soared, and so did unemployment. The decimation of Iran’s economy, reducing the sale of oil from a high of 2.5 million barrels a day in early 2018 to about 250,000 barrels today, has left the government with scant resources to cover the enormous costs of dealing with direct medical treatment for patients suffering from the coronavirus, as well as supporting workers who are losing their jobs and helping businesses going bankrupt.

Humanitarian aid—food and medicine—was supposed to be exempt from sanctions. But that hasn’t been the case. Shipping and insurance companies have been unwilling to risk doing business with Iran, and banks have not been able or willing to process payments. This is especially true after September 20, 2019, when the Trump administration sanctioned Iran’s Central Bank, severely restricting the last remaining Iranian financial institution that could engage in foreign exchange transactions involving humanitarian imports.

Even before Iran was unable to procure enough testing kits, respiratory machines, antiviral medicines and other supplies to slow the spread of the coronavirus and save lives, Iranians were having a hard time getting access to life-saving medications. In October 2019, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report citing that “the overbroad and burdensome nature of the US sanctions [on Iran] has led banks and companies around the world to pull back from humanitarian trade with Iran, leaving Iranians who have rare or complicated diseases unable to get the medicine and treatment they require.”

Among those in Iran who have been unable to get critical medications have been patients with leukemia, epidermolysis bullosa, epilepsy, and chronic eye injuries from exposure to chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. Now coronavirus is added to that list.

On February 27, 2020, with over 100 people in Iran having been infected and with a reported 16% mortality rate, the Treasury Department announced that it would waive sanctions for certain humanitarian supplies to go through Iran’s central bank. But it was far too little far too late, as the spread of coronavirus is yet to slow in Iran.

The Iranian government is not without blame. It grossly mishandled the beginning of the outbreak, downplaying the danger, putting out false information, and even arresting individuals who raised alarms. China had acted similarly at the start of the virus there. The same can be said for President Trump, as he initially blamed the virus on Democrats, told people not to practice social distancing, and refused to accept tests offered by the World Health Organization. Today, there are still nowhere near enough tests in the U.S., Trump is refusing to have himself tested despite having been in contact with infected individuals, and he continues to label this a “foreign virus.” Neither China nor the U.S., however, have the compounding problems of sanctions that prevent them from obtaining the necessary medicines, equipment, and other resources to address the crisis.

It isn’t just Iran that is sanctioned. The U.S. imposes some form of sanctions against 39 countries, affecting over one-third of the world’s population. In addition to Iran, Venezuela is one of the countries most hard hit by U.S. sanctions, including new measures just imposed on March 12.

According to President Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela does not yet have any coronavirus cases. However, sanctions have contributed to making Venezuela one of the most vulnerable countries in the world. Its healthcare system is in such shambles that many public hospitals often do not have water, electricity, or basic medical supplies and many households have only limited access to basic cleaning supplies such as water and soap. “As of today, it has not reached Venezuela,” President Maduro said on March 12. “But we have to get ready. This is a time for President Donald Trump to lift the sanctions so Venezuela can buy what it needs to face the virus.”

Likewise, the Iranian government, which is now asking the International Monetary Fund for $5 billion in emergency funding to fight the pandemic, has penned a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calling for U.S. sanctions to be lifted.

There are sweeping changes President Trump needs to make to seriously address the coronavirus pandemic at home and abroad. He must stop minimizing the crisis and insisting that people do not need to exercise social distancing. He must stop falsely claiming that testing is available. He must stop catering to the greedy, profit-based healthcare industry. In addition, and no less important, the Trump administration must lift the sanctions on Iran, Venezuela and other countries where ordinary people are suffering. This is not a time to squeeze countries economically because we don’t like their governments. It’s a time to come together, as a global community, to share resources and best practices. If coronavirus is teaching us anything, it’s that we will only defeat this terrible pandemic by working together.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Ariel Gold is national co-director of CODEPINK for Peace

13 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By GreatGameIndia

In an explosive interview Dr. Francis Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Act has given a detailed statement admitting that the 2019 Wuhan Coronavirus is an offensive Biological Warfare Weapon and that the World Health Organization (WHO) already knows about it.

Francis Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

In an exclusive interview given to Geopolitics and Empire, Dr. Boyle discusses the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China and the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4) from which he believes the infectious disease escaped. He believes the virus is potentially lethal and an offensive biological warfare weapon or dual-use biowarfare weapons agent genetically modified with gain of function properties, which is why the Chinese government originally tried to cover it up and is now taking drastic measures to contain it. The Wuhan BSL-4 lab is also a specially designated World Health Organization (WHO) research lab and Dr. Boyle contends that the WHO knows full well what is occurring.

Dr. Boyle also touches upon GreatGameIndia‘s exclusive report Coronavirus Bioweapon – where we reported in detail how Chinese Biowarfare agents working at the Canadian lab in Winnipeg were involved in the smuggling of Coronavirus to Wuhan’s lab from where it is believed to have been leaked.

Watch Dr. Francis Boyle’s interview with Geopolitics and Empire below:

Francis Boyle: Wuhan Coronavirus is an Offensive Biological Warfare Weapon

Dr. Boyle’s position is in stark contrast to the mainstream media’s narrative of the virus being originated from the seafood market, which i increasingly being questioned by many experts.

Recently, American Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas also dismantled the mainstream media’s claim on Thursday that pinned the coronavirus outbreak on a market selling dead and live animals.

In a video accompanying his post, Cotton explained that the Wuhan wet market (which Cotton incorrectly referred to as a seafood market) has been shown by experts to not be the source of the deadly contagion.

Cotton referenced a Lancet study which showed that many of the first cases of the novel coronavirus, including patient zero, had no connection to the wet market — devastatingly undermining mainstream media’s claim.

“As one epidemiologist said: ‘That virus went into the seafood market before it came out of the seafood market.’ We still don’t know where it originated,” Cotton said.

“I would note that Wuhan also has China’s only bio-safety level four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

Such concerns have also been raised by J.R. Nyquist, the well known author of the books “Origins of the Fourth World War” and “The Fool and His Enemy,” as well as co-author of “The New Tactics of Global War”. In his insightful article he published secret speechs given to high-level Communist Party cadres by Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian explaining a long-range plan for ensuring a Chinese national renaissance – the catalyst for which would be China’s secret plan to weaponiz viruses.

Nyquist gave three different data points for making his case in analyzing Coronavirus. He writes:

The third data point worth considering: the journal GreatGameIndia has published a piece titled “Coronavirus Bioweapon – How China Stole Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponized It.”

The authors were clever enough to put Khan’s Virology Journal article together with news of a security breach by Chinese nationals at the Canadian (P4) National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, where the novel coronavirus was allegedly stored with other lethal organisms. Last May, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were called in to investigate; by late July the Chinese were kicked out of the facility.The chief Chinese scientist (Dr. Xiangguo Qiu) was allegedly making trips between Winnipeg and Wuhan.

Here we have a plausible theory of the NCoV organism’s travels: first discovered in Saudi Arabia, then studied in Canada from whence it was stolen by a Chinese scientist and brought to Wuhan. Like the statement of Taiwan’s intelligence chief in 2008, the GreatGameIndia story has come under intensive attack. Whatever the truth, the fact of proximity and the unlikelihood of mutation must figure into our calculations.

It’s highly probable that the 2019-nCoV organism is a weaponized version of the NCoV discovered by Saudi doctors in 2012.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media’s narrative still maintains that the origin of the 2019 Coronavirus is the Wuhan Seafood Market. After GreatGameIndia published the story on Coronavirus Bioweapon – not only were our databse tinkered with and our reports blocked by Facebook on the flimsy reason that they could not find GreatGameIndia Facebook page, but the report itself was viciously attacked by Foreign Policy magazine, PolitiFact (known widely as Facebook’s propaganda arm) and BuzzFeedNews.

It is not GreatGameIndia alone which is being viciously attacked. Zero Hedge, a popular alternate media blog was suspended by Twitter for publishing a story related to a study by Indian scientists finding 2019 Wuhan Coronavirus to be not naturally evolved, raising the possibility of it being created in a lab. Shockingly, the study itself came under intense online criticism by Social Media experts resulting in the scientists withdrawing the paper.

In retaliation India has launched a full-scale investigation against China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Indian government has ordered an inquiry into a study conducted in the Northeastern state of Nagaland (close to China) by researchers from the U.S., China and India on bats and humans carrying antibodies to deadly viruses like Ebola.

The study came under the scanner as two of the 12 researchers belonged to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Department of Emerging Infectious Diseases, and it was funded by the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

The study, conducted by scientists of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in the U.S. and the Duke-National University in Singapore, is now being investigated for how the scientists were allowed to access live samples of bats and bat hunters (humans) without due permissions.

The results of the study were published in October last year in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, originally established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As the author J.R. Nyquist puts it:

We must have an investigation of the outbreak in Wuhan. The Chinese must grant the world total transparency. The truth must come out. If Chinese officials are innocent, they have nothing to hide. If they are guilty, they will refuse to cooperate.

The real concern here is whether the rest of the world has the courage to demand a real and thorough investigation. We need to be fearless in this demand and not allow “economic interests” to play a coy and dishonest game of denial. We need an honest inquiry. We need it now.

3 February 2020

By Larry Romanoff

The Western media quickly took the stage and laid out the official narrative for the outbreak of the new coronavirus which appeared to have begun in China, claiming it to have originated with animals at a wet market in Wuhan.

In fact the origin was for a long time unknown but it appears likely now, according to Chinese and Japanese reports, that the virus originated elsewhere, from multiple locations, but began to spread widely only after being introduced to the market.

More to the point, it appears that the virus did not originate in China and, according to reports in Japanese and other media, may have originated in the US.

Chinese Researchers Conclude the Virus Originated Outside of China

After collecting samples of the genome in China, medical researchers first conclusively demonstrated that the virus did not originate at the seafood market but had multiple unidentified sources, after which it was exposed to the seafood market from where it spread everywhere. (1) (2) (3)

According to the Global Times:

A new study by Chinese researchers indicates the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.

The study published on ChinaXiv, a Chinese open repository for scientific researchers, reveals the new coronavirus was introduced to the seafood market from another location(s), and then spread rapidly from the market due to the large number of close contacts. The findings were the result of analyses of the genome data, sources of infection, and the route of spread of variations of the novel coronavirus collected throughout China.

The study believes that patient(s) zero transmitted the virus to workers or sellers at the Huanan seafood market, the crowded market easily facilitating further transmission of the virus to buyers, which caused a wider spread in early December 2019. (Global Times, February 22, 2020, emphasis added (2)

Chinese medical authorities – and “intelligence agencies” – then conducted a rapid and wide-ranging search for the origin of the virus, collecting nearly 100 samples of the genome from 12 different countries on 4 continents, identifying all the varieties and mutations. During this research, they determined the virus outbreak had begun much earlier, probably in November, shortly after the Wuhan Military Games.

They then came to the same independent conclusions as the Japanese researchers – that the virus did not begin in China but was introduced there from the outside.

China’s top respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan  said on January 27

“Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China”

“But that is Chinese for “it originated someplace else, in another country”. (4)

This of course raises questions as to the actual location of origin. If the authorities pursued their analysis through 100 genome samples from 12 countries, they must have had a compelling reason to be searching for the original source outside China. This would explain why there was such difficulty in locating and identifying a ‘patient zero’.

Japan’s Media: The Coronavirus May Have Originated in the US

In February of 2020, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China, and that some (or many) of the 14,000 American deaths attributed to influenza may have in fact have resulted from the coronavirus. (5)

A report from a Japanese TV station disclosing a suspicion that some of those Americans may have unknowningly contracted the coronavirus has gone viral on Chinese social media, stoking fears and speculations in China that the novel coronavirus may have originated in the US.

The report, by TV Asahi Corporation of Japan, suggested that the US government may have failed to grasp how rampant the virus has gone on US soil.

However, it is unknown whether Americans who have already died of the influenza had contracted the coronavirus, as reported by TV Asahi. (People’s Daily, English, February 23, 2020, emphasis added)

On February 14, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said they will begin to test individuals with influenza-like-illness for the novel coronavirus at public health labs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City.

The TV Asahi network presented scientific documentation for their claims, raising the issue that no one would know the cause of death because the US either neglected to test or failed to release the results. Japan avoided the questions of natural vs. man-made and accidental vs. deliberate, simply stating that the virus outbreak may first have occurred in the US. The Western Internet appears to have been scrubbed of this information, but the Chinese media still reference it.

These claims stirred up a hornet’s nest not only in Japan but in China, immediately going viral on Chinese social media, especially since the Military World Games were held in Wuhan in October, and it had already been widely discussed that the virus could have been transmitted at that time – from a foreign source.

“Perhaps the US delegates brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, and some mutation occurred to the virus, making it more deadly and contagious, and causing a widespread outbreak this year.” (People’s Daily, February 23, 2020) (1)

Shen Yi, an international relations professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, stated that global virologists “including the intelligence agencies” were tracking the origin of the virus. Also of interest, the Chinese government did not shut the door on this. The news report stated:

“Netizens are encouraged to actively partake in discussions, but preferably in a rational fashion.”

In China, that is meaningful. If the reports were rubbish, the government would clearly state that, and tell people to not spread false rumors.

Taiwan Virologist Suggests the Coronavirus Originated in the US

Then, Taiwan ran a TV news program on February,27,(click here to access video (Chinese), that presented diagrams and flow charts suggesting the coronavirus originated in the US. (6)

Below is a rough translation, summary and analysis of selected content of that newscast. (see map below)

The man in the video is a top virologist and pharmacologist who performed a long and detailed search for the source of the virus. He spends the first part of the video explaining the various haplotypes (varieties, if you will), and explains how they are related to each other, how one must have come before another, and how one type derived from another. He explains this is merely elementary science and nothing to do with geopolitical issues, describing how, just as with numbers in order, 3 must always follow 2.

One of his main points is that the type infecting Taiwan exists only in Australia and the US and, since Taiwan was not infected by Australians, the infection in Taiwan could have come only from the US.

The basic logic is that the geographical location with the greatest diversity of virus strains must be the original source because a single strain cannot emerge from nothing. He demonstrated that only the US has all the five known strains of the virus (while Wuhan and most of China have only one, as do Taiwan and South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, Singapore, and England, Belgium and Germany), constituting a thesis that the haplotypes in other nations may have originated in the US.

Korea and Taiwan have a different haplotype of the virus than China, perhaps more infective but much less deadly, which would account for a death rate only 1/3 that of China.

Neither Iran nor Italy were included in the above tests, but both countries have now deciphered the locally prevalent genome and have declared them of different varieties from those in China, which means they did not originate in China but were of necessity introduced from another source. It is worth noting that the variety in Italy has approximately the same fatality rate as that of China, three times as great as other nations, while the haplotype in Iran appears to be the deadliest with a fatality rate of between 10% and 25%. (7) (8) (9)

Due to the enormous amount of Western media coverage focused on China, much of the world believes the coronavirus spread to all other nations from China, but this now appears to have been proven wrong. With about 50 nations scattered throughout the world having identified at least one case at the time of writing, it would be very interesting to examine virus samples from each of those nations to determine their location of origin and the worldwide sources and patterns of spread.

The Virologist further stated that the US has recently had more than 200 “pulmonary fibrosis” cases that resulted in death due to patients’ inability to breathe, but whose conditions and symptoms could not be explained by pulmonary fibrosis. He said he wrote articles informing the US health authorities to consider seriously those deaths as resulting from the coronavirus, but they responded by blaming the deaths on e-cigarettes, then silenced further discussion. …

The Taiwanese doctor then stated the virus outbreak began earlier than assumed, saying, “We must look to September of 2019”.

He stated the case in September of 2019 where some Japanese traveled to Hawaii and returned home infected, people who had never been to China. This was two months prior to the infections in China and just after the CDC suddenly and totally shut down the Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab claiming the facilities were insufficient to prevent loss of pathogens. (10) (11)

He said he personally investigated those cases very carefully (as did the Japanese virologists who came to the same conclusion).. This might indicate the coronavirus had already spread in the US but where the symptoms were being officially attributed to other diseases, and thus possibly masked.

The prominent Chinese news website Huanqiu related one case in the US where a woman’s relative was told by physicians he died of the flu, but where the death certificate listed the coronavirus as the cause of death. On February 26, ABC News affiliate KJCT8 News Network reported that a woman recently told the media that her sister died on from coronavirus infection. Montrose, Colorado resident Almeta Stone said, “They (the medical staff) kept us informed that it was the flu, and when I got the death certificate, there was a coronavirus in the cause of death.” (12)

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

The media hype and disinformation campaign regarding the spread of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus have created a Worldwide atmosphere of fear and uncertainty following the launching of  a global public health emergency by the WHO on January 30th. 

The fear campaign is ongoing.  Panic and uncertainty. National governments and the WHO are misleading  the public.

“About 84,000 people in at least 56 countries have been infected, and about 2,900 have died” says the New York Times. What they fail to mention is that 98% of those cases of infection are in Mainland China. There are less than 5000 confirmed cases outside China. (WHO, February 28, 2020)

While COVID-19 is a matter of Public Health concern, at the moment, there is no real pandemic outside Mainland China. Look at the figures.

At the time of writing, the number of  “confirmed cases” in the US was 64.

A low number and the media is spreading panic.

Meanwhile, there are  15 Million Cases of Influenza in the USA.

The latest FluView surveillance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that as of January 18, 2020, there have been 15 million cases of flu, 140,000 hospitalizations, and 8200 deaths in the US this influenza season. (emphasis added)

Data on the COVID-19 pandemic: 

The WHO has also reported 2,791 deaths of which only 67 have occurred outside Mainland China.

These figures confirm that the pandemic is largely limited to Mainland China.

Moreover, recent data suggests that the epidemic in China is firmly under control. On February 21, 2020, China’s National Health Commission reported that 36.157 patients were designated as cured and discharged from hospital. (see graph below).

Chinese reports confirm that people have received treatment and are recovering from the virus infection. Concurrently, the number of infected patients is declining.

According to the National Medical Products Administration of China, hospitals are  using Favilavir, an anti-viral drug, “as a treatment for coronavirus with minimal side effects”.

Lets Crunch the Numbers  

The World Population is of the order of  7.8 billion.

The population of China is of the order of 1.4 billion.

The World population minus China is of the order of 6.4 billion.

4691 confirmed cases and 67 reported deaths (outside China) out of a population of 6.4 billion does not constitute a pandemic. 4691/6,4oo,ooo,ooo =0.00000073 = 0.000073 %

64 cases in the US which has a population of approximately 330 million is not a pandemic. (Feb 28 data): 64/330,000,000 = 0.00000019 = 0.000019 %

Why the Propaganda? Racism directed against Ethnic Chinese

A  campaign against China was launched, a wave of racist sentiment against ethnic Chinese is ongoing largely led by the Western media.

The Economist reports that “The coronavirus spreads racism against—and among—ethnic Chinese”

Fear of covid-19 makes people behave badly, including some Chinese

By Press Release

Over last few months we have witnessed a reawakening of the democratic ethos led by Muslim women all across the country.  These near-uninterrupted protests against the passage of the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and it’s bigoted twins, the NPR and NRC, have clearly not gone down well with the BJP government, and many attempts have been made at demonising and discrediting the protesters.

The culmination of this barrage of vile and hateful propaganda was when BJP leader Kapil Mishra issued an ultimatum to the protesters in Delhi on 23 February, 2020 warning of the dire consequences that were to follow if the protest sites were not cleared.  He did so in the presence of a senior police officer. This was followed the same afternoon by an eruption of violence instigated by fanatical right-wing mobs in the areas of Jafrabad and Maujpur. The violence quickly spread to other parts of north east Delhi [1], and the death toll has risen to over 40 [2].

Courageous reportage and heart-breaking eyewitness accounts of the affected areas paint a very clear picture of the nature of this violence: it is anti-Muslim, and are not, as the mainstream media has continued to paint it, composed of “clashes” between “pro-CAA” and anti-CAA camps. Extremist Hindutva rioters mobilised by upper-caste leaders have run amok in the national capital, setting fire to and vandalising cars and shops and homes belonging to Muslim families, and also schools and mosques [3], all the while mercilessly brutalising Muslim residents of these areas [4].

It is clear to us that this comprehensive breakdown of law and order, which comes on the heels of the sickening attacks on students in Jamia, AMU, and JNU, is happening with the complicity of the Delhi police, who are acting in near-perfect coordination with the right-wing mobs, either by actively assisting them or by turning a blind eye to their actions [5]. We also regard it as no coincidence that the Delhi High Court judge who called the Delhi police to account for its willful inaction was transferred on the same day he held the emergency hearings [6]. We are, in short, witnessing the unfolding of an anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi, with eerily familiar echoes of the modus operandi deployed by the RSS and it’s affiliates eighteen years ago in Gujarat, and more recently in Uttar Pradesh [7].

The violence has claimed the lives of many innocents, most of them from marginalised sections of society, including daily wage labourers, auto-rickshaw drivers, a police head constable, and an intelligence official. There have been deaths across religious divides. We place the blame for all these deaths squarely on the fascist upper-caste Hindutva forces who have orchestrated this pogrom. We also emphatically appeal to fellow progressive-minded individuals to recognise that there is a world of a difference between the violence of these fanatical mobs and attempts made to defend one’s life, family, home, and livelihood against this violence. We stand firmly in solidarity with the affected families in this regard—there are no two sides to this story, there is no nuance, only senseless violence fuelled by the communal agenda of the upper-caste Hindu right-wing.

We, the undersigned academics, condemn in the strongest possible terms those aiding or abetting the various indignities visited on Muslim men and women in Delhi by these right-wing terrorists affiliated to the RSS and sister organisations.

We also protest the reprehensible manner in which this government has conducted itself, by dropping all pretense of functioning in a democratic manner and acting blatantly as a ministry run by the RSS.

We demand that a judicial inquiry be set up to investigate the actions of the Delhi police, as reportage, video footage, and eyewitness accounts clearly point to their complicity in the violence.

We appeal to the judiciary to ban terrorist organisations like the Bajrang Dal which, as always, were at the forefront of this pogrom and which have been emboldened under the Modi regime.

We finally demand that the state immediately and adequately compensate those whose houses, shops, and livelihoods have been destroyed.

[1]: Hindu supremacist mobs orchestrate violence against Muslims where BJP won in Delhi elections | The Caravan

[2]: Delhi riots: Death toll rises to 42, 148 FIRs registered | The Economic Times

[3]: Delhi violence: Three mosques targeted, school burnt, shops & homes looted | The Indian Express

[4]: Hindu mobs terrorise Vijay Park’s residents | The Caravan

[5]: Delhi violence: Cops shouted “Jai Shri Ram” with armed Hindu mob, charged at Muslims | The Caravan

[6]: HC Judge Who Pulled Up Delhi Police Over Riots Shunted Out by Modi Govt | The Wire

[7]: Why Delhi violence has echoes of the Gujarat riots | BBC News

(The institutional affiliations of the signatories are provided for identification purposes only and do not indicate the official positions of these institutions. The form is still open. We will continue to update this form over the next few days.)

Signatories

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2 March 2020

Source: countercurrents.org