“But what exactly is a “flu-related death”? How does the flu kill? The short and morbid answer is that in most cases the body kills itself by trying to heal itself.”- Scientific American, 12/18/17
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Sherlock Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
– Aurther Conan Doyle
Every year the flu kills thousands of people all over the world as their bodies overreact in an attempt to eliminate the germ from its’ system. A few years ago , according to the CDC, the flu may have killed nearly 100,000 people in the US. Every year, whether we are thinking about it or not, worldwide, something on the order of 50 million people die (of all causes).
This unimaginable toll is not counted every day on the news as is the case with corona virus deaths. In fact, I’d venture to say that, on a daily average, we might hear of a single person who has died (usually someone very famous). Since the PANDEMIC!!, every night a breathless news anchor recites the ongoing carnage and gauzy ads fill the airwaves of what heroes we are for doing what we are told and “social distancing”. Where is this coverage for auto deaths (+/- 40,000 per year)? Where are the calls for banning cars or requiring only large, slow cars be sold? Crickets. ‘Crazy talk’, you’d say. ‘That would be an over reaction.’ And I would agree.
Who will bet me that the three year average of car deaths is not less than that from this corona virus three years hence?
I have looked and I can find no instance in modern history where the threat of pandemic, which comes every few years like clockwork, has caused the level of social and economic damage to be inflicted more or less voluntarily. The Wuhan flu has induced near worldwide economic suicide.
In the early part of this year, perhaps as early as late last year, news of an epidemic of some sort of flu-like disease came from central China. To the world, it appeared that it would be contained. By mid March, that changed, and nations around the world were faced with a serious health crisis, starting, outside of China, in Iran and Italy. Given the interconnectedness of the modern world, it did not take a world class epidemiologist to figure out that it was likely to spread.
A few short weeks ago, many of the governments of the world decided that the threat from this “novel coronavirus” was so serious that nothing short of a near-complete stand down of normal economic activity would suffice in preventing it from killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents. Many hospitals would be very, very busy perhaps to the point of having to decide not to treat some patients whose prognosis was poor; which is bad.
The most recent figures I have (4/20/20) show China claims to have had some 80,000 cases of COVID-19 along with over 4,000 deaths. Many in the west believe those numbers are intentionally not accurate. See here, and here. The theory seems to be that they are under reporting as a way of saving face and showing that they are able to deal with the problem better than other large nations.
Here’s a question: what if the numbers they are reporting are accurate? How could it possibly be that there are fewer cases and deaths in the country where the virus originated than in the US where it had to be seeded one sick airline passenger at a time?
On it’s face, it doesn’t seem reasonable that there could be fewer infections in China than elsewhere. You’d have to presume that travel between Chinese cities must be higher than travel to foreign countries and that the disease would have to spread there first, all things equal. I also assume that China would not want to be caught in a giant lie; and that hiding the deaths of tens of thousands of people in major urban centers would be fairly easy for western media, not to mention western intelligence, to discover and report.
Believe me, I am not discounting the willingness of the Chinese government to lie, but I am skeptical that they would be confident of getting away with such a whopper. Again, how could it be that there is not a huge coronavirus outbreak in Beijing, for example?
[Trigger warning-Conspiracy Theory]
IF they are not lying, the only explanation is that there is a vaccine that has already been deployed to most of China, with Wuhan being the sole exception.
I am not generally one for conspiracy theories (though I am a little skeptical of the moon landing), but this explanation might explain the set of facts we face.
Suppose an up and coming super power wanted to export a pandemic for the purpose of hurting a rival. They would want something new. They would want it to be something bad, but not that bad. They would need to convince the world that it’s release was unintentional. They would want to induce the world to over react to the virus, thus inflicting maximum self damage. They would want to have foreign political parties blaming each other. And they would not want to cripple themselves too badly in the process.
It could have happened like this: Beijing wants to unleash a virus on the world to disable and distract west, the US in particular. I am quite sure there would be lots to choose from. Pick a novel virus and develop a vaccine. Produce the vaccine and include it in the ‘formula’ for standardized, obviously mandatory, vaccinations throughout the country except in one region.
A simple Google search comes up with this: China’s vaccination law received a major update last year. In fact, this law was passed in June and went into effect in December, 2019. From the article on the Library of Congress web site, “According to the Law, China is to implement a state immunization program, and residents living within the territory of China are legally obligated to be vaccinated with immunization program vaccines, which are provided by the government free of charge.” In communist China, can there be a doubt that the number of people with full knowledge of what goes into vaccines can be kept to a very small and trusted circle?
In one, sacrificial, province this new vaccine might not be included. When the virus is released, a localized pandemic must surely follow. It would make sense, if the intention was to spread the virus worldwide, that the timing be such that it coincides with a time of traditionally high levels of travel. Coincedentally, the Chinese New Year is just such a time.
From Livescience.com: “No matter where they live, Chinese try to return home to be with their families for Chinese New Year, just as Americans do for Christmas,” said Dr. Ming Wang, an ophthalmologist and advocate for cultural diversity in Nashville, Tennessee. “This creates the world’s largest annual migration, known as the Spring Festival Travel Rush.”
From Bloomberg: “Also known as Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival, it marks the beginning of the lunar calendar and is China’s most important holiday, a period that’s seen as celebrating values like unity and family ties. People get a statutory seven days off beginning New Year’s Eve, which falls on Jan. 24 this year. (Many migrant workers seize what can often be their only chance in the year to return home.)”
Hmm. This year the Chinese New Year parade was held in New York on February 8th.
Once the proverbial cows had left the barn, and likely-infected people have come and gone, it would be time to convince the world that this is a massive public health threat that should be taken seriously. The Wuhan lockdown began on January 28, 2020, and was praised by the World Health Organization as a model of precaution. From Wikipedia: “The World Health Organization (WHO), although stating that it was beyond its own guidelines, commended the move, calling it “unprecedented in public health history”.
The timing of the lockdown seems a little early, but Chinese whistleblowers may have forced the issue. I would assume the usual suspects in the system would be allowed to attempt to squash the news, likely without knowing anything about any wider plans.
Stories of the desperation of the lockdown abounded. Social media was abuzz with stories of people forced into quarantine, with China rounding up curfew breakers and welding doors shut to keep people inside. It must be bad. Western news media were convinced the only cure for this type of outbreak would be a draconian shelter in place order, the likes of which would (unfortunately, from their perspective) never happen in a free country. USA Today said, “This is what China did to beat coronavirus. Experts say America couldn’t handle it.” The tone of nearly all the reporting was ominous.
What would be really helpful, at this point in the program, would be to have an academic institution to prognosticate the deadly seriousness of the budding pandemic. Wait … what about the Imperial College of London?
They brag on their website that they are “UK’s number one university collaborator with Chinese research institutions”. Infamously, it was the Imperial College of London’s Neil Ferguson that initially predicted over 500,000 deaths in the UK and over 2 million deaths in the US in February of 2020. We can all thank Dr Ferguson for introducing us to the faux academic sounding phrase “flattening the curve”. These deaths would be nigh unavoidable, he claimed, without a massive program of home quarantines and school closures; without this mitigation, our hospitals would be overwhelmed and people would die by the thousands alone in hospital corridors, unattended, gasping for air.
I am not claiming that Dr Ferguson was corruptly influenced by the Chinese to publish his now famous curves. This was surely not needed. The good Dr would have been drawn to the potential pandemic like a moth to a flame. His hysterical reaction would also have been easily predicted. Here he is in 2005: “Bird flu pandemic ‘could kill 150m’”
Questions I would love to have asked of Dr Ferguson: Did any Chinese colleague make any suggestions to you regarding the outbreak in Wuhan? Were you offered, without making the direct request, or granted with exceptional dispatch, any information regarding COVID-19 from China or someone, even potentially, with official Chinese backing?
Hysterically, but this time in the funny way, Dr Ferguson has walked back his original predictions. Oops, never mind. Instead of 500,000 dead in the UK, would you believe 20,000?.
There is one fact I will admit I cannot really explain. Why Wuhan, the home of the regime’s most advanced virus lab? Wouldn’t it have been less suspicious for the outbreak to be somewhere else? Perhaps the local politicians were asking for it? Perhaps it is just a next-level game of mind-fuckery to induce the western media to defend, as irresponsible, any accusation of an intentional, or even accidental, outbreak from the lab. Or fuel the Sean Hannitys of the world to conspiracy theories. I do not know.
The one defense the Chinese underestimated was, of course, the doggedly neutral and curious western press. Just in case you missed the sarcasm:
“The Racism at the Heart of Trump’s ‘Travel Ban’”- New York Times, 2/4/20
“He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus” – New York Times, 4/11/20
“All the President’s Lies About the Coronavirus” – The Atlantic, 4/9/20
If anything has been apparent to outside observers of the western press, they will WITHOUT FAIL take an opportunity to smear their own (only when right-leaning) governments, regardless of underlying facts. China is, if anything, a sentient observer of the west. They know they only need to offer the thinnest chum to start a frenzy.
I am not theorizing that the Chinese had a crystal ball and predicted the eventual wild over reaction that has taken place in many countries (though they would be quite impressed with themselves at this point if they had); that would be pure superstar, Michael Jorden-level evil genius stuff. And, if that were the case, we should just as well surrender now to save everyone the trouble. Yet I find myself unable to explain the facts on the ground with any of the the current narratives; these missing Chinese deaths are the ‘dog that didn’t bark’, the thing that no one is looking for or seeing. When we have reliable estimates of actual widespread coronavirus devastation in China I will gladly withdraw this speculation.
Without hyperbole, I fear this episode will ceremoniously mark the demise of the US empire. Already trending toward bankruptcy, the United States has been prompted to spend itself at ludicrous speed into financial oblivion to reimburse workers and businesses forced to shut down for what appears likely to be, in the end, nothing approaching a true epochal humanitarian crisis, but rather an outlier flu season.
The current economic pneumonia that threatens the life of the western world was triggered by the ‘virus’, Wuhan flu. Our own disfuntional political and social institutions created the true threat, the fevered overreaction to shut down a thriving economy on the hope of saving lives. What American politician has the courage to do only what is minimally necessary and stand accused of killing thousands of citizens (and voters)? It appears we now believe that if we can save a single life it will be worth any cost.
Rest assured, the Chinese do not.
Update: According the the South China Morning Post, China has been using a COVID vaccine since July.
And this: evidence of work on an “antidote“.
More on an antidote.
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