Communist China’s state media propaganda organ Xinhua just boasted that Beijing could choose to “impose pharmaceutical export controls which would plunge America into the mighty sea of coronavirus.” This, because almost all the chemicals used to make generic drugs in the U.S. are manufactured in mainland China.

Before you laugh off the threat, consider that the Food and Drug Administration just announced there is already one coronavirus-related drug shortage within the country, without identifying which drug.

This is the language of an enemy. There can be no more pretending that China is anything less than exactly that. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered the country’s armed forces to be modernized by 2035 and reach top-ranked status in the world by 2050. U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper in December warned Congress that we were now in “a new era of great-power competition” and that “China first and Russia second are now the department’s top priorities.”

What sort of enemy is it exactly that we face? One that would allow 3,000 of its own people to die in three months as it covered up the initial onset and spread of this new Wuhan virus, rather than accept help from the superpower, which thanks to economic and political freedoms is home to the world’s top infectious disease experts, it seeks to unseat.

Thanks to the lack of a free and open political environment, in which a government is directly accountable to voters and a domestic press is free to report independently, some 5 million people exited Wuhan, the city of coronavirus’ origin, to visit relatives prior to the Lunar New Year, the country’s largest, most important holiday, entirely oblivious to the presence of a quick-spreading, deadly disease.

In December, a Wuhan doctor reportedly posted that there were seven cases of what appeared to be the SARS virus in connection to the city’s food market, now known to have been the source of the initial spread. But the Communist regime castigated the whistleblower doctor and forced him to sign a document at a police station retracting his assertion as an error. He himself ultimately died of COVID-19.

Disinformation And Disease

The Chinese government’s reluctance to tell its citizenry about the possible dangers in December is an instructive illustration of the difference between a society where information is restricted from the top and one in which it flows freely. Beijing was looking after its own power instead if its own people. As the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last month, “COVID-19 rapidly spread from a single city to the entire country in just 30 days. The sheer speed of both the geographical expansion and the sudden increase in numbers of cases surprised and quickly overwhelmed health and public health services in China, particularly in Wuhan City and Hubei Province.”

In this case, early action was imperative. But when a tyrannical government uses the keeping of information as a main tool of control over the populace, early action is impossible. And obviously the harm has extended beyond those under Chinese Communist control to the entire world, which has swiftly found itself in economic shutdown.

“Knowing” that the New Year “meant each infected person could have numerous close contacts over a protracted time and across long distances, the government needed to quickly act,” JAMA noted. Whether out of lack of concern or wishful thinking that the disease would subside, the Communists didn’t act when it counted.

It would be madness to allow a regime so insensitive to the value of human life – even when the lives are those of its own people – to gain dominance over the planet.

Beijing did not concoct the novel coronavirus in a Chinese military lab, then unleash it on its enemies abroad. But Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian is spreading the disinformation that “It might be U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” And we’re told that calling it the Wuhan virus is racist. The government is at least mulling the idea of withholding medicine from the U.S. as the coronavirus of Chinese origin unfolds. Meanwhile it seeks through its puppet business entity Huawei to make as much of the world as possible dependent on China for 5G telecommunications, which Beijing could ultimately use for surveillance, covert intelligence long being a key weapon of war, or a tool in the prelude to war.

No, China is not conducting germ warfare against the United States. But coronavirus is a germ. And it does come from China. And were it not for the Red Dragon having a system that oppresses its own people as much as it threatens ours, as well as the rest of the world, this new disease might not ever even have reached our shores.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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