The Tale of Two National Fuckups
This thing came from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We don’t need evidence gift wrapped by the Chinese to make this case. We just need simple mathematics, and the case is rock solid.
The “official channels” have maintained for four months that this virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the world’s Mecca of studying emergent SARS coronaviruses that originate in bats. A lot of speculation by the media has gone into supporting this case, as well as the solid support of the Chinese government, but the case is obviously garbage. I grant that wet markets for exotic harvested wild meats are a great vector for something like this, but set that aside for a moment.
There are between a hundred and a thousand wet markets in China. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Vietnam. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Thailand. There are hundreds or thousands of wet markets in Laos, hundreds or thousands more in Cambodia, hundreds or thousands more in Burma and Myanmar and Malaysia. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s completely reasonable to estimate the total number of wet markets in East Asia being at least ten thousand.
But only one of these ten thousand or more wet markets is two blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The chance that a brand new never before seen SARS coronavirus variant would emerge at the only wet market two blocks from a laboratory whose primary function is to study never before seen SARS coronavirus variants, specifically from bats, is simply too astronomical to believe. If a brand-new world epidemic virus were to emerge
every day from a wet market in east Asia, it would be three years or more on average before one emerged from Wuhan. No honest scientist would believe that coincidence given what we know.
I’ve followed a lot of traffic from geneticists and epidemiologists saying this virus doesn’t seem to have the earmarks of being created artificially. They may be right. But that doesn’t mean that a diseased bat wasn’t transported to Wuhan and the virus escaped via an infected technician, or via an improperly disposed of specimen. Nor does it rule out the disease being a product of “
gain of function” research on bats with lesser uncatalogued diseases.
The Chinese reaction was archetypically communist and cannot be trusted. In order, they imprisoned whistle blowers, denied the virus, admitted the virus but said it wasn’t transmissible, admitted it was transmissible and invited foreign journalists in to watch them build a giant hospital, turned everyone in Wuhan into
The Bubble Boy, snuffed it out (officially), then kicked all the journalists out and reopened the city. Then after the journalists were gone, they beat up people trying to go to the hospitals with COVID-19 to keep their new cases number down, cremated a lot more people than the official death count, denied any reinfection after lockdown was ended, and then blamed the origins of the infection on the US Army. Which is obviously not true, because if the USA had developed the virus we’d have tests for it way sooner than we did.
Now granted, that could just be communists acting like communists, but the entire timeline tells of a cover up.
The USA’s fuckup was a fuckup of mid level bureaucracy that has been widely reported, but doesn’t seem to be widely understood despite the reporting.
This article is a fabulous primer, but I’ll summarize.
There have been three major regulatory barriers so far.
thedispatch.com
The first case in the US was identified
the same day as the first case in South Korea, January 21st. South Korea gave out regulatory approval to every company in the country that wanted to make a test within one week, by the end of January, and as a result created the best testing apparatus in the world. The FDA and CDC collaborated to
prevent US companies and universities from developing tests until the middle of March, and only eventually stopped obstructing test development by administrative (Trump/Pence) fiat. One of the most egregious examples of this behavior, which was promulgated by bureaucrats at the FDA and CDC, is the example of
Washington University’s Helen Y. Chu, who after testing someone in her ongoing flu study for COVID-19 and discovering she had a sample pool that may have many infections, was told, basically:
1) You just violated that test subject’s HIPAA privacy rights, and
2) You don’t have a permit to do COVID-19 tests, therefore
3) Stop testing.
If they had said the exact opposite, Seattle would have been controlled. Chu had everything in her hands to isolate the Seattle cases and possibly the lions share of the cases on the West Coast.
When universities and companies tried to develop their own tests, they were told to apply for a permit, and then only one permit was issued — to the CDC. The CDC then screwed up the test, and had to release a new one several weeks later. The backlash from the screw-ups came to a head the last day of
February, where the FDA begrudgingly allowed some 5,000 labs (of the 260,000 labs in the country) to start working on tests.
The doors were finally thrown open to academic and private entities in full on March 15th, when HIPAA was waived for anyone working on COVID-19, and March 16th, when Vice President Mike Pence announced that all the rest of the labs could work on this without FDA interference.
Wojtek Kopczuk, a professor of economics at Columbia University,
quipped that the “FDA sped up the process by removing itself from the process.”
The USA lost 45 days as compared to South Korea, at the same starting gun, entirely due to pencil pushers at the FDA and CDC. The important thing to take away from the
Tale of The Second National Fuckup, is that no politician could have prevented this, unless they were willing to unilaterally step in, deplatform the FDA, burn HIPAA sooner, and bust the CDC down into an “advisory only” role. Not Trump, not Hillary, not Biden, not Bernie. The one politician who might have been able to do it, is the
hypothetical caricature of Trump for which many Trump voters voted. And knowing how government works in the USA, it is unthinkable that this will get fixed, or that this won’t happen again the next time, because our universal bipartisan answer to government failure is
more government.
And the government’s final response to needlessly wasting 45 days reacting to this, is to issue a 2 trillion-dollar bailout to pause the national economy for 56 days, so we can catch up, while everyone loses their jobs.
All decisions here, in either direction, could kill you.
medium.com
asiatimes.com
