asmPolitics-335 [Chinese Communist Newspaper Threatens U.S.]

BEIJING, China, March 16, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― A communist-controlled Chinese newspaper threatened that if China banned drug and medicine exports to the United States, America would be helpless to combat an epidemic. 

Stung by America closing its borders to travelers from the coronavirus-ravaged country, China’s state-controlled news service Xihua stated, “If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products and ban exports to the United States.” 

“Then the United States will be caught in the ocean of new coronaviruses,” it continued. 

“Also according to the US CDC officials, most of the drugs in the United States are imported…If China banned exports, the United States will fall into the hell of a new coronavirus pneumonia epidemic.”

Despite COVID-19 originating in China, Xinhua attempted to save face by telling its readers that the world ought to thank the country for its response to the Wuhan-based pandemic. 

“We should say righteously that the U.S. owes China an apology; the world owes China a thank you," the newspaper stated. 

In addition, Xihua hinted that Americans themselves had brought the disease to Wuhan. 

The possibility of China refusing to sell medicine and medical supplies to the USA had already occurred to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who in February blasted members of the American elite for selling out their country to Chinese economic interests. Fox News reported that Chinese pharmaceutical companies supply between 80% and 90% of the USA’s antibiotics, 70% of acetaminophen, and about 40% of heparin. 

Columnist Mark Steyn said today on the “Rush Limbaugh Show” that the Chinese communist party is in charge of America’s entire pharmaceutical chain. 

Chinese Communists are taking aim at citizens who criticize the government for how it is handling the crisis. A Chinese magnate who criticized dictator Xi Jinping has now disappeared. 

Property developer and Communist Party member Ren Zhiquiang called the dictator “a clown” after a speech Xi made about China’s response. Ren’s friends say that he has gone missing. In a statement to the Reuters news agency, Wang Ying said that his friends were looking for Ren and were “extremely anxious.”  

“Ren Zhiqiang is a public figure and his disappearance is widely known,” she said. 

“The institutions responsible for this need to give a reasonable and legal explanation for this as soon as possible,” she said.

Reuters attempted to contact Ren by phone but were unsuccessful. 

“These are still early days, but Ren’s disappearance is worrying,” David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China, told LifeSiteNews. 

He said that this would not be the first time the executive had gotten into trouble, but this time, by insulting Xi, Ren has “undercut the Party’s carefully contrived narrative.”

“They had sought to portray Xi, and themselves, as heroes of a successful campaign against coronavirus,” the former ambassador explained.  

“Ren’s caustic critique points to a far more uncomfortable and inconvenient reality. Truth tellers in China have a habit of disappearing.”

Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute told LifeSiteNews via email that Ren has probably been arrested. 

“Ren is a known critic of Xi's who has in all likelihood been "disappeared," Mosher said.  

“The playbook for such ‘disappearances’ is that the person arrested is subjected to severe psychological pressure until they ‘confess’ satisfactorily to their crime.  Then they are trotted out on national television, state-controlled, of course, to make that same confession in public.”    

Mosher, who took aim at Xi Jinping in his book Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is a Threat to World Order, predicts that China will force the outspoken executive to recant. 

“Unless Ren is made of sterner stuff than others who have been subjected to this treatment, we will see a broken man emerge from whatever ‘black jail’ ― as China's illegal detention centers are [called]  ― he is being held in by the end of the year,” the China expert said. 

“He will say that he was totally wrong to criticize ‘People's Leader’ Xi Jinping.” 

Hong Kong-based author Ma Jian, 66, a leading Chinese dissident, called Xi’s mishandling of the coronavirus among the Communist Party’s “shameful list of crimes”.  

“With serious outbreaks occurring in Japan, South Korea, Iran and Italy, it is clear that the virus of Xi’s totalitarian rule threatens the health and freedoms not only of the Chinese people, but of all of us everywhere,” Ma stated in late February. 

He alleged that Xi refused to acknowledge to the Chinese that there was a coronavirus epidemic in their country for almost a month.  

asmPolitics-334 [Facebook blocks a post linked to a Steven Mosher article]

February 24th, Facebook blocked a post linked to Steven Mosher’s article featured in the New York Post addressing China’s role in the coronavirus epidemic. The reason? “False Information.”

The fact is that every single data point used by Mosher to point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the China Coronavirus is true.

• Fact: China has a bioweapons program run out of two labs, the more advanced of which is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
• Fact: Chinese agents have stolen dangerous coronaviruses out of North American labs and taken them to WIV.
• Fact: Chinese virologists, working under the direction of the People’s Liberation Army, have genetically engineered at least one coronavirus to make it more infectious, reporting their “achievement” in the pages of the Journal of Virology.
• Fact: Chinese biotechnology labs, such as the WIV, have a history of accidentally releasing dangerous pathogens into the surrounding population.
• Fact: The Chinese coronavirus epidemic began in the city of Wuhan, the city where WIV is located.
• The “fact-checkers” used by Facebook are a Leftwing advocacy group which falsely accused Mosher of “writing a clickbait headline without any previous experience in the medical field.”  But Mosher actually has an advanced degree in the biological sciences and has published in medical journals. More importantly, he is one of America’s leading experts on China, is fluent in Chinese, and understands the crimes that the Communist Chinese Party has committed against its own people.
  In its criticism HealthFeedback.org relied upon the opinions of Singapore-based researcher who has ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Typical of the behavior of Leftwing hit-and-run “fact-checkers” in general, HealthFeedback.org has refused to correct the record. Facebook should discontinue using this discredited group to “fact-check” anything.

asmPolitics-331 [Communist China Not to be Trusted]

March 20, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The Chinese Coronavirus has now spread to a reported 150 countries.  But the rulers of the country where the pandemic started have good news: They have, they declared, won a complete and total victory over the dangerous pathogen.

On Thursday, Chinese propaganda outlets reported that there had been “no new infections of the novel coronavirus” in Wuhan, which is ground zero in the global pandemic.  As for China as a whole, they cited the National Health Commission is saying that “domestic transmissions are zero.”

The Chinese Communist Party is now touting its “success” in stopping the virus in its tracks is a model for other countries to follow.  “Learn from China,” is the latest Party line.

Were all of this true, it would be the fastest end to a pandemic in human history.  It would also be a stirring tribute to the sheer efficiency of Chinese-style socialism and a redemption of sorts for the country that caused the problem in the first place. 

But of course it isn’t true at all. It is sheer fabrication, no sturdier than the shoddy warehouses that were put up in a week to house the victims of the Wuhan virus.  It is just one more piece of Chinese propaganda to add to the ever-growing pile of lies that Beijing has been telling these past three months.

Ask yourselves what is the likelihood that China has actually reduced the number of new cases to zero, as it claims?  That in the entire 1.3 billion people of China there is not a single new case?  I would say that the likelihood of this happening is about the same as the CCP discovering a cure for cancer, establishing a base on Mars, and inventing faster-than-light interstellar travel—all on the same day. 

What the Communist leadership of that country did was much simpler. It simply directed doctors across China to stop diagnosing and reporting new cases of the disease.  Overnight, new cases dropped to zero.  

Who needs medicine, when you can just “cure” disease by fiat?

The Beijing regime has worked hard over the past few weeks to create the narrative that it was quickly getting the epidemic under control.  For example, there is evidence that some local jurisdictions have been deliberately underreporting the number of patients who test positive for the virus. Whether this is being done in response to a national directive, or simply to conform to the official narrative is not clear, but the result has been falling numbers of infected.

Remember the makeshift detention centers masquerading as “hospitals” that were built in a week?  They have all been emptied out in a hurry, with many of the occupants sent home while reportedly still testing positive for the disease.  

Their continued presence in the centers interfered with the narrative the Party was trying to promote, and so they had to be sent home.

Finally, at least one province is requiring all government offices to destroy all “documents and data” they may have received concerning the epidemic.  This, again, is being done so that the official narrative of unbridled success can stand unchallenged.

In Beijing, the hospitals have canceled all elective procedures.  This, too, suggests that they are still trying to cope with an influx of coronavirus patients. 

There is little doubt that the disease continues to percolate through the population.

The only thing the Party’s effort to redeem itself in the eyes of the world has actually accomplished—aside from making hundreds of millions of people roll their eyes—is to make it more difficult for those in China who have the disease to find treatment. 

In contrast to the Fake News out of China, there is real news from the United States and its allies. A common anti-malarial drug, chloroquine, shows promise as a possible treatment. 

A French study shows that chloroquine and azithromycin (your common “Z-Pac”) stops the Wuhan virus cold.  Congressman Mark Green, a former flight surgeon, told FOX News’ Shannan Bream last night that the drug “cocktail” “is very promising.  One hundred percent of the virus gone in six days.”

Chloroquine may not only be effective in treating the Chinese Coronavirus but may also prevent one from catching the disease in the first place.  In countries where malaria is common, many take chloroquine to protect themselves against it.  

As the map shows (view here), those African, South American, and South Asian countries that have malaria are reporting almost no cases of the virus.  

This suggests that chloroquine might be used to prevent, as well as treat, the disease.  We will see. 

I believe, under President Trump's leadership, we will relatively soon have the Chinese Coronavirus under control in the United States.  We are trying out new treatments daily, and mobilizing our vast resources in public-private partnerships to save lives in the U.S. and around the world.

I do not want to minimize the challenge that we now face as a people.  This Chinese Coronavirus can only be defeated if we all work together to protect one another from its spread. It is a time to put aside our differences and focus on the tiny enemy that is invisible to the human eye.

At the same time, we should never forget that real enemy here is not the virus, but the corrupt and tyrannical political system that, through its evil and incompetence, unleashed this plague upon the world.

If the Chinese Communist Party had simply allowed medical professionals in China and around the world to do their job at the outset of the outbreak, the Chinese Coronavirus could have been confined to Wuhan proper.  Instead, they put politics first, lied to their own people and the world, and they are still lying today.  

Everyone who falls ill or dies from the Chinese Coronavirus is a victim of the Chinese Communist Party.  They will “own” this virus for all time.  I hope it will come to be known as the Chinese Communist Party Conronavirus. 

One final point:  I always knew that the United States would have to save the world from Chinese tyranny at some point.  I just did not imagine that it would be in this way and at this time.  

But with God's help and much prayer, we will prevail.

Steven W. Mosher @StevenWMosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.

asmPolitics-330 [Chinese Virus Traced Back To Wuhan]

April 2, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – There are a growing number of people, such as Senator Tom Cotton and myself, who believe that the China coronavirus may have been under study at a Wuhan biolab, that it somehow escaped, and that this is how Wuhan became the epicenter of the pandemic that has changed all of our lives.

In fact, there is a paper, authored by two Chinese scientists, which traces exactly how they think this happened.  

Their paper, titled “The Possible Origins of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus,” begins by confirming that the China virus came from an animal known as the Intermediate Horseshoe Bat. Interestingly, the paper, published in February, has since disappeared from the international scholarly database Research Gate, but is still available through the Wayback Machine and is now available on LifeSiteNews here. 

On this point about the virus coming from bats, the scientific community is now virtually united.  Genetic analysis has revealed that the China coronavirus is from the same family of coronaviruses carried by the Horseshoe Bat.   

But how did the Horseshoe Bats and their load of coronaviruses get to Wuhan, and how did one of these viruses manage to cross the species barrier and infect humans?  On these questions, there is wide disagreement.

The Communist Chinese authorities initially put out the story that the bats were sold in the Wuhan wet market as food, and that a worker there accidentally became infected when butchering one of the little beasts for a customer.  This story has been endlessly repeated by compliant American media outlets.

Sorry, China, but your own scientists, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, who work for the state-run South China University of Technology, make quick work of this story.  First, they point out that there are no known colonies of this species of bat within 900 kilometers—that’s 560 miles—of Wuhan.  Second, they diligently interviewed 59 people with connections to Wuhan and each and every one confirmed that there were no Horseshoe Bats being sold there.    

So how did the bats, and the viruses carried by the bats, get to Wuhan?  They were carried there by humans, of course.  Bill Gertz has documented how China researchers were extracting and studying deadly bat coronaviruses in two Wuhan biolabs.

Gertz writes that “Several Chinese state media outlets in recent months touted the virus research and lionized in particular a key researcher in Wuhan, Tian Junhua, as a leader in bat virus work. … A video posted online in December and funded by the Chinese government shows Mr. Tian inside caves in Hubei province taking samples from captured bats and storing them in vials.”

The seven-minute video, reports Gertz, “boasts that China has ‘taken the lead’ in global virus research and uncovered over 2,000 viruses in the past 12 years, the time since the outbreak of the bat-origin virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).” China’s frenzied collection efforts, led by Mr. Tian among others,  have nearly doubled the number of known viruses.

Aside from collecting samples of bat urine and feces from caves, Mr. Tian also collects the Horseshoe Bats themselves.  According to a May 2017 report by the Wuhan Evening News cited by Gertz, Mr. Tian has gathered thousands of bats for research work on bat viruses since 2012.

Mr. Tian works at the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national center for China’s bat virus research, and one of two Wuhan biolabs identified by the authors of “The Possible Origins” paper as the source of the leak.  

“We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus,” the Chinese researchers explained.  “Within 280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purposes, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification.”

Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao note that one WHCDC study used 155 Horseshoe Bats captured from Hubei province and 450 bats captured from Zhejiang province. 

They also noted that about 7 miles away was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was also conducting research on the same bats.

They concluded that the first case of a human having contracted the virus was probably a biolab worker from the WHCDC or WIV who accidentally exposed himself to blood or urine from a bat and infected himself.  They also suggested that infected tissue samples from research animals, or the animals themselves, may have wound up in the wet market.

“The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan,” they write. 

They conclude that “safety” may need to be improved in “high risk, biohazardous laboratories.”

“Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places,” they state.

The paper was quickly censored by the Chinese authorities and disappeared online. But curiously—and just as the authors had recommended--new regulations governing the “handling of dangerous viruses like the novel coronavirus” were in fact quickly put in place.  Deepening the suspicion of a cover-up, Chinese officials not only refused to provide samples of the China coronavirus strains to U.S. researchers, it ordered private labs in China to destroy their samples and gene sequencing data.  Were they afraid that researchers might find out that the pandemic was in fact caused by a virus that had been isolated at one of China’s research labs?  It certainly looks that way.  

The Mainstream Media seems intent upon protecting China from the accusation that the China Coronavirus escaped from a lab via an accidentally infected worker or the selling of an infected lab animal.  Those of us who criticize the Chinese authorities for unleashing a pandemic upon the world are called “xenophobic” and “racist.” They seem so intent upon making Trump look bad that they are bending over backward to make China look good. 

But there is simply no question that China has for years been doing research on many dangerous coronaviruses at its Wuhan biolabs.  Not only have the institutions in question openly bragged about their virus collection efforts, but the researchers involved have left a clear paper trail. 

Consider a 2013 article co-authored by a WIV researcher that appeared in the scientific journal, Nature.  The article was titled, “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor.”  What the Chinese researcher and his colleagues concluded was that “Chinese horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV, and that intermediate hosts may not be necessary for direct human infection by some bat SARS-like coronaviruses.”

Here we find the Wuhan biolab involved in collecting a range of SARS-like coronaviruses from horseshoe bats and proving that, like the SARS virus itself, some of these other naturally occurring coronaviruses could directly infect human beings.  And in exactly the same way that the Wuhan Virus does. 

A coronavirus-carrying bat living in a remote cave poses little threat to humanity.  Even if it carries a coronavirus strain capable of directly infecting human beings it probably won’t, simply because it does not come in contact with them.

But bring that same infected bat into a biolab and start performing experiments on it, and you have dramatically increased the risk that the coronavirus it carries could infect a lab worker.  And, if that biolab is located in the heart of a city of some 12 million people, as the Wuhan labs are, urban crowding will ensure that it quickly spreads to thousands of people.

Then add to this already volatile mix Communist Party leaders determined to deny culpability.  For weeks on end, while five million people (5,000,000!) left the epicenter of the epidemic for all parts of China and the world, Beijing pretended the situation was under control.  Even today, they continue to cover up the mounting evidence that the China Coronavirus leaked from one of their biolabs.  

If Xi Jinping wants to prove that China is not responsible for the global pandemic now wreaking havoc all over the world, he should order the release of the research records of his Wuhan biolabs.

Of course, the likelihood of that actually happening is near zero, which in itself would be tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Steven W. Mosher @StevenWMosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.

asmPolitics-329 [Wuhan Virus Death Toll]

April 6, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In January, people in Wuhan began dying of the novel coronavirus. Not long thereafter, disturbing pictures began to leak out of China showing hospital hallways crowded with the bodies of the dead, and vans loaded with body bags heading toward crematoria. Yet the rapidly rising death toll these pictures suggested was not reflected in the official death toll, which remained puzzlingly low.  

Now, I have long been skeptical of numbers coming out of China, which are always crafted with one goal in mind -- to make the Party and its leaders look good. So I began to look for other metrics that might give me a clue as to what the real death toll was. I found one answer in the ovens of Wuhan’s seven crematoria.

Understand that everyone who dies in China is cremated. Not long after the Communists took power in 1949, the traditional practice of burying the dead in coffins was outlawed on the grounds that it took land away from farming. This means that we can assume that the number of cremations equals the number of deaths.

By January 30th, the Wuhan authorities reported that only 170 people had died in Wuhan and the surrounding area. Yet two days before, on January 28th, they announced that they were “dispatching extra vehicles, staff, and protective gear to all of the local mortuaries.”  

Why?  

“To improve the capacity of transporting and dealing with corpses.” They also suddenly offered “free cremation for the corpses of coronavirus victims who died on January 26 or later.”

These actions made it obvious that the real body count was going up a lot faster than the official count. In fact, by all indications, the mortuaries were being simply overrun with corpses.  Wuhan mortuaries had to add night and weekend shifts to cope with the numbers. We know this because they posted “help wanted” advertisements online to recruit workers for night, swing, and weekend shifts. Also, for two full months during the height of the epidemic, from January 23rd to March 23rd, no funerals were held at the mortuaries, and grieving relatives weren’t even allowed to pick up the ashes of their loved ones.

So how many bodies were cremated during this time? Let’s crunch the numbers. The seven mortuaries in Wuhan proper have a total of 84 ovens. Assuming that each cremation takes two hours, that number of ovens could have reduced 1,008 corpses to ashes each day. At this rate, some 60,000 bodies could have been cremated over two months, from which we have to subject the normal non-epidemic related mortality of roughly 10,000. This gives us an estimated number of deaths from the Wuhan Coronavirus of 50,000.

Another estimate comes from the huge numbers of funeral urns being handed out.  

It was announced on March 23rd that grieving relatives would finally be allowed to come to the mortuaries to pick up the ashes of their loved ones. Long lines quickly formed outside of Wuhan’s mortuaries as people waited for hours to receive the remains of their loved ones lost during the epidemic. They were told that they must pick up the urns by April 4, a traditional holiday called Tomb Sweeping Day where Chinese memorialize their ancestors.

Investigative journalists from Caixin reported that funeral urns were being distributed at a rate of 500 a day at Wuhan’s seven mortuaries, meaning that a total of 3,500 urns were being handed out each day. Given that the window for picking up the urns was 12 days long, this would mean that 42,000 urns would be given out during that time. 

One photo published by Caixin shows a truck loaded with 2,500 urns arriving at the Hankou Mortuary. When questioned, the driver said he had delivered the same number of urns to the same mortuary the day before. Another photo shows stacks of urns inside the mortuary totaling some 3,500 urns. Taken together with the new shipment, the number of urns on hand at this one mortuary alone looks to be more than double Wuhan’s official death toll.

To buy the silence of the people, the Communist authorities have been handing out hush money. Wuhan resident Chen Yaohui told RFA that “There have been a lot of funerals in the past few days, and the authorities are handing out 3,000 yuan in hush money to families who get their loved ones' remains laid to rest ahead of Qing Ming," he said, in a reference to the traditional Tomb Sweeping Day on April 4. “It's to stop them from wailing,” Chen said, referring to a traditional form of mourning. “Nobody will be allowed to wail after Qing Ming has passed.”

As reported by Bloomberg, U.S. intelligence agencies have also concluded that Beijing falsified its numbers, although their report remains classified. And when President Trump was asked at his April 1 press briefing about China’s numbers, he responded that they “seem to be a little bit on the light side. And I’m being nice when I say that, relative to what we witnessed and what was reported.”

I think the president was being not just nice, but extraordinarily diplomatic, given Beijing’s ongoing deceit where the epidemic is concerned. Remember, we are talking about the same Communist Party that asserts no one died in Tiananmen Square, when the actual death toll from the Tiananmen Massacre was 10,000. This is the same CCP that asserts that no one died in the famine after the Great Leap Forward, when in fact 42.5 million people starved to death.

Bear that in mind when you consider the official Chinese government data for Wuhan, which show that only 2,535 people died from the disease, and only 50,006 people were infected. 

I think the official figures are understated by a factor of 20. That is to say, the real number of fatalities is perhaps 50,000. As for how many people were infected, if you assume a case fatality rate of 2 percent, then 2.5 million people in the city came down with the coronavirus.

Down to the present day, China continues to conceal the truth about the epidemic within its own borders by publishing false data. These are not harmless little white lies. They are lies that kill.  

Tens of thousands of people will die unnecessarily because the Communist Chinese authorities did not warn us about the seriousness of the epidemic in Wuhan and share the data that it was collecting about the spread and treatment of the disease. Tens of millions of others will suffer because the Communist Chinese sent the global economy into a recession. This, too, will cost lives that otherwise could have been saved.

There is a hashtag trending on Twitter that sums up the situation: #ChinaLiedAndPeopleDied

Steven W. Mosher @StevenWMosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.