“The virus was spawned in Wuhan province, patient zero was in November,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed that.”
“They could have kept it in Wuhan,” Navarro said. “Instead, it became a pandemic. That’s why I say the Chinese did that to Americans and they are responsible.”
When pressed Navarro would not use the word “deliberately”, just the word seed.
Mish
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Navarro Accuses China of Using Travelers to Spread Virus
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So the Chinese need to be even more authoritarian so that Americans can be more free?
As usual, Trump hears something on Fox News. Does he check it with the vast resources of the NSA, CIA, etc.? Of course not, they are the deep state, and he is shallow. All flights are tracked, and he tracking is available over the internet by Flightradar24, a global flight tracking service. You don’t even need the CIA or NSA. It’s all nonsense. And now, since trade wars are so easy to win, and the economy is doing so great, our trade representative is spreading nonsense. Pure Trump administration nonsense. Pure Fox nonsense.
“We spoke to Ian Petchenik, the director of communications for Flightradar24, a global flight tracking service, and Petchenik confirmed that “there were no more normal, commercial flights” from Wuhan after Jan. 23. “They did stop people from going to the U.S. and to the rest of the world,” he said.”
Maybe if Trump did what he claims (shut down travel from China), it wouldn’t have come here from there.
While traffic from Wuhan into China was forbidden traffic from Wuhan to the rest of the world was promoted. True? I know both happened, not sure about the relative timing.
Do you have any legitimate source for this claim? Particularly, “promoted.” It’s all nonsense: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel-conspiracy/
Seeded sounds like deliberate action. Most farmers’ fields are not accidentally “seeded”. There is virtually no evidence of any intent or guided action. What exactly does China stand to gain from having an epidemic? If they wanted to seed it, they would not have started off seeding it in their own country. Makes no sense.
Much more likely (though evidence is scarce) is that they tried to make it go away by denial. Why? Well that is how politicians tend to react. Probably because they were afraid it somehow came from a lab for which they apparently feel responsible, lax, and ashamed.
Many other possibilities exist, but none are likely in the absence of concrete evidence.
There are interesting questions to be considered here between misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance. These are types of failure to discharge public obligations existing by common law, custom or statute…not that China would necessarily recognise anything other than their own laws.
well, they did stop domestic air travel from Wuhan, but allowed international. Sounds intentional to me.
As usual with Trump, it’s irresponsible nonsense that the head of the US government just accepted off Fox news. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel-conspiracy/
There are many possibilities, and you cannot assume national authority is more aware than any subset. It is possible to come up with many theories, many of which will fit. An example:
All that is nescessary to unleash this whole chain of events would be one vial of a more transmissible virus. This is not hard at all, it is easy, labs own virus like this and their derivatives. It is easier still for those who control any lab, but for sure many researchers had access to this kind of material. That includes Chinese in US and US in China, I imagine various europeans also.
You could have a national military wing release the virus, a western corporation , an international background political / power movement, etc.
The reaction afterwards though is what ? China might be thinking it was US, China might also be complicit, China might be just following damage limitation to own political system. Same for US, one department could be trying to cover own failures, another trying to avoid direct accusation to avoid conflict, another department might be related to the release of the virus and be a source of disinformation covered by excuse of own national political bias, etc. etc. etc.
What it looks like to us though ? All of the above, plus possibly accidental release, plus possibly from wild. We don’t know, we are in the dark, being fed manure and fear.
So, anyone is as wrong as anyone else for now, that means we are confused and bias is emphasised, and this is conflictive for society, especially for more open societies.
The reply by governments is basically to increase the control of society at the same time as selling reassurance. If you look at all the different replies though between countries, they more or less add up to the same result, Sweden or Brasil or Switzerland or US etc. Sure in the near term much is emphasised in terms of dramatic effect, and sure mitigation is sensible, but in the bigger picture over longer timeframe I think that the basic results are the same , but just not in terms of how. The rest often looks like a show, sometimes pre-planned – those that are spared vs those not, all costs and benefits that in real terms are not calculable because we don’t have a parallel reality to compare results with, just some gimmicky poorly coded programs being fed poor and incomplete data and probably written to present whatever bias needed as “factual”.
That is definitely not to say that the virus is not real, but common sense existed before all the above.
Into this mix you can add opportunism, there are few in power who are there by missed opportunity. They would not hesitate to use any event to prove their worth, to further their own influence. This can make them look complicit to any event, even if they were not. The same goes for “philanthropists”, whether politicians pushing socialist ends or central bankers “supporting the system everyone depends on, for their own good” etc.
Anyone who is not confused by all this knows more than I do.
But what remains very questionable about the reaction is the amount of credence given to the Imperial College model (not peer-reviewed, code not made public, written in Fortran!) and the IHME, who were often wrong on the first day with the initialisation data. All big recipients of Bill Gates and consorts money, but somehow given more air time than all the hundreds of other epidemiology modelers and departments around the world.
The same applies for the media orchestrated monolithic support for vaccine vaccine vaccine and remdesavir (the Chinese had already tried out all the antiviral and HIV drugs, in cocktails and separately). The success that Korea had with hydroxychloroquine and the asinine attempt to depict it as something unsafe. There seem to be a lot of agenda’s here informing policy other than the concern for lives. Just look at how much they protected the nursing homes after knowing months ago from China that virtually all the mortality is in 80 year olds, and where they also had nursing home disasters.
Not to mention that the CDC and WHO therapy guidelines have proved very ineffective, and are at odds with what a lot of doctors (who actually want to keep people alive) are doing and recommending. The WHO and the FDA are just government fronts for bigPharma vaccine interests.
Actually, considering what Trump did “deny deny and deny” that this was a problem, why would we think the Chinese would react differently. After all, this has been the exact playbook your leaders employed.
It would disappear by magic, it would not come to America — the words of your leader!
If I were the Chinese, I would play dumb and act surprised. Let other countries report the issue first. The first to report the issue is it right?
Whoever smelt it, dealt it.
The virus this is the 4th outbreak from China in the last 20 years. Basically since international travel became easy to China.
The US funded the Wuhan lab for the last 5 years, so I guess we are the co-conspirators.
I’m confused on the funding time line. Obama precipitously ended the funding in 2014, I believe….but somehow US funding of this lab4 in Wuhan might have continued. What went on here?????
Which lab? Try some decent science reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk
So it’s to be war with the batmunchers, is it?
Stupid people (Trump team) sometimes say smart things… Navarro is right, for the same reason 100 nations recently signed a petition at WHO asking for an independent investigation into how the Covid-19 virus was introduced into the world. One hundred countries, including sometime China ally Russia, can’t all be wrong?
Keep in mind a lab created virus, a natural virus found in a lab animal, and a natural virus found in the wild all look the same, or rather, it’s a matter of opinion as to whether the virus is natural or artificial. DNA, unless it’s from a known cataloged organism, does not clearly show just by looking at the sequence whether it’s artificial or natural.
The path of least resistance is to say China was negligent in warning the world about the virus (whether it’s natural or artificial), and that’s the path most countries and Trump’s team are taking.
What would it take to change my mind? Find the Covid-19 virus in the wild, in a so-called “intermediate host”. So far, unlike SARS, MERS, Ebola, etc, they’ve not done that. With most other viruses the intermediate host was immediately found, but not with C-19 (Ebola took a while too, but I would argue that outside of people living in Africa, nobody cared much about Ebola and was not spending money to research it that much; notice that once Ebola started spreading and got world attention, they luckily found a vaccine within a couple of years, since it had the potential to infect the world).
What does it matter? China, like many countries was surely trying to cover up the tracks of the virus, whether it was lab made or natural. It wasn’t just from the world but from their own people. The Chinese government is made up of elitists and they govern via social pressure and intimidation. Any event might be enough to topple them, which is not something the ruling powers ever wants.
And don’t forget that ALL major countries have biological labs working on scary viruses as weapons. It’s a wonder than none have really gotten loose yet.
Actually, no, they don’t all “look the same.” Try some decent science reporting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk
A better reference is this paper:
Our overall findings point to the conclusion that a recombination event between ancestors of human SARS-CoV-2, or a closely related to bat-SARS-CoV-2, and ancestors of pangolin-SARS-CoV-2 lineage b strains, is the likely origin of the currently circulating pandemic strains.
A “recombination event” can be done in vitro in a lab says modern science.
Now, that…., is par for the course, as far as the intellectual aptitude of all of American leadership, Federal as well as state and local, public as well as private, in the Fed era goes.
This is all that is left of America. Nothing more than this abject garbage. This really is it.
Planes falling out of the sky, people homeless by the millions a century and a half after building 10 homes per capita, and doing so cheaply, was already a solved problem for anyone with the aptitude to learn to count beyond one,two,many…. World record numbers of deaths from some virus, etc., etc. And: Absolutely nothing else. Nothing good. No redeeming qualities. A country almost infinitely worse than a communist dump like China, and anywhere else, in every possible way whatsoever. Not one single positive quality left at all. Just this monkey. And monkeys like him. Empowered solely, 100%, by Fed and “legal” theft, without having a single talent of any kind of their own. Standing around babbling mindlessly and uselessly about holding those who are their infinite superiors in every way “responsible”, while the worthless, indoctrinated dimbulb brigade stands around cheering for the trash.
Pretty good a little tough on us. You forgot that it was really done with thought and on purpose. Why? Why would we dumb down America?
The worst post in the history of internet posts by an angry American (I suppose) named Stuki. Did you ever white water raft on the New River in WV? Have you ever sailed on the Great Lakes and been baffled by the Northern winds? Ever been to Nashville? Have you ever seen the majestic Mount Rushmore in person or the Lincoln Memorial? Ever ski Heavenly Mountain Resort and looked out over Lake Tahoe? Ever watch the sunrise over the Outer Banks in North Carolina with the wild Mustangs?
Infinitely worse than China? Politicians don’t make this country. Dude, if you live in America, you must leave, and take your keyboard with you.
America has beautiful nature. So does China. Rockies vs The Himalayas… Mississippi vs Yangtze… No difference there. (they don’t have Socal weather. But then again we don’t have Pandas…)
Both have full stop, totalitarian governments. And purely extractive institutions. One’s no better, nor even meaningfully different, in that regard.
Only difference left, is the totalitarian Chinese at least not being completely and utterly, 100% illiterate and incompetent at absolutely everything, period. They’re like a mean dog. He may growl and flash his teeth, but at least dogs are intelligent enough to know when to fold them. While our brand of totalitarian junta and Fed enabled FIRE trash, exemplified perfectly by this abject waste-of-space halfwit, have no more insight than a bloody Corona virus. So dumb they cause nothing but harm, ever, even if they against all odds should try not to. That’s a much more intractable problem. A dog is trainable. A virusbrained automaton incapable of doing anything right, is not. The latter you simply have to exterminate and eradicate.
I do apologize if I came across as being against “America”, the landmass, the history, or the romanticized idea. Or the people, most of whom I’m sure have no particular desire to run around robbing their neighbor nor destroying everything around them by sheer incompetence. They’re just stuck in a place where robbing neighbors and destroying everything in sight, is, by now, the only remaining official policy.
But natural beauty aside: The American government, anno now, is NO better, in any way, than the North Korean one. Our courts no better, less corrupt and more impartial than the Venezuelan ones. Our companies ran by noone more accomplished at anything than the AK wielding 7 year olds Pol Pot reckoned it was a good idea to put in charge of everything. And none of that is exaggerated one bit.
The Chinese government, for all their evils, really is less, even if perhaps not by much, horrible than that. Which is why they create jobs, while we destroy them. Why they can contain a virus, while “we” can’t. Why they can produce facemasks, while we can not. Why their aerospace industry is building better and better planes every year. While ours just fall out of the sky more and more often. Why they build multimillion population cities in a few years, while we build nothing but homelessness. And it goes on and on and on and on….
Our current “system of government”, like our “economic system”, our “financial system” and our “legal system” has sunk so low by now, that it is, absolutely, 100% ,worse than those of a communist country. Just let that sink in…. The idiots running this place may not (so far at least) have managed to destroy the wind over the Lakes, nor sunsets over valleys, with the all encompassing incompetence which is all any of them posses. But those things are also increasingly the only things they have not yet been able to destroy. Everything else, from jobs to hope to a future for America and Americans, they have.
I agree with some of your sentiment but it is true that the Chinese allowed international air travel long after they said there were restrictions. China is a totalitarian regime where there is a lot of monitoring and controls and even forced organ harvesting so be careful in thinking they are better than the US unless you approve of those things.
My American brother, you missed the point, although maybe I wasn’t making it well enough. You’re stuck thinking in a bureaucratic morass. The internet steals thinking capital, does not enhance it. Most of the things you reference are not true, and I am not sure where you are reading these exaggerated claims of the US demise under the low legal bar that Venezuela has set. American is not worse than a Communist country….no chance in that. Lose the ego that your prose suggests and go enjoy the benefits of starting a Company and transacting in an non-coerced manner and take those profits and travel and think for yourself instead of this anti American drivel. It ain’t perfect, but it ain’t Communist…Kissinger made sure of that. And don’t reply with some nonsense about kissinger being a war mongering Machiavellian realist. That ain’t true either. Hope you can find some peace.
Well I guess we know what the game plan is.
Having a someone common hate brings people together. China is the best path to reelection.
It’s a sloppy slope though.
I don’t think America would start a war with China, BUT if China started losing its grip on power from an economic downturn(broken social contract) they might need someone to demonize. A war is always the best way. History doesn’t repeat but it sure as shit rhymes.
Nah. China wouldn’t come after the USA. What they would do is take Taiwan, then challenge the USA to do something about it.
All I know is if we stop all trade now, the Dow will reach 400K.
The historical precedent for that is called the Dark Ages. The Dow was zero.
It sounds like the clowns in the WH circus are trying to show they are tough
Blame everyone but Trump. That’s the game. Way to go, “trade representative.” That should help the trade negotiations. Trade wars are easy to win, so why not.