Pandemic Reflection

The Destructive CCP Model

(Commentaries & Viewpoints)

Table of Content

We Need to Learn from Sweden’s Approach

On Controlling the Pandemic

Vaccine Passports Are a ‘Terrible Idea’

The World’s Pandemic Response（I）Why Did China Get to Dictate the World’s Pandemic Response?

The World’s Pandemic Response（II）The World Continues to Follow China’s Lead in Containing the Pandemic

Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun

How China Exported ‘Pandemic Tyranny’ to the World; Side-Effects of Stripping Away People’s Rights

Is the Chinese Communist Party Orchestrating the New Global Wave of COVID-19 Lockdowns?

How Beijing’s Pandemic Narratives Influenced Western Actions in Curbing the Spread of COVID-19

The Great Social Experiment: China’s Draconian Lockdowns and the Loss of Human Agency

Pandemic Lessons Learned: Scientific Debate Silenced, With Deadly Consequences

We Need to Learn from Sweden’s Approach

Brian Giesbrecht

May 8, 2020

As this wave of the pandemic winds down we should ask honest questions about our response to it. Although an accurate assessment of the lockdowns — closing schools and businesses — is months away, we need a plan to respond to a likely second fall wave.

The Economist magazine published an essay detailing how closing primary schools has probably caused lifelong harm to much of the student population while widening the inequality gap. Growing amounts of research suggest that closing schools was a very bad idea. An Australian study shows that COVID-19 does not sicken many children, and children are not effective spreaders of it. Sweden did not close their primary schools, yet experienced no significant infection problem in either their student or teacher populations.

It was a major mistake to close down primary schools, should we not reopen them now?

Also, was it necessary to shut down all “non-essential“ businesses? Sweden left business owners and customers to make their own decisions. While our “lockdown and stay home approach” damaged, if not bankrupted, many small businesses, Sweden left businesses intact and did not need the huge government spending that will leave lockdown countries with severely damaged economies. As for their numbers of deaths, Sweden did no better or no worse than did lockdown countries.

Isn’t Sweden’s policy of leaving most decisions to the individual, rather than using state control, proving to be a better approach?

One area where Sweden and Canada both failed is with respect to the elderly and vulnerable. Thankfully, this virus has mainly spared the young, but much more has to be done to those now known to be vulnerable. And, wasn’t the experiment of quarantining the healthy population (putting the working population on welfare) a massive mistake? Best to protect those either vulnerable or wishing to self-isolate, but allow healthy people to decide how much personal risk they want to take.

Likely there will be a second wave of COVID-19 — the current lockdown approach merely delays the virus. And, we are nowhere near to achieving the desired “herd” immunity (where the virus dies off because so many people have recovered from the disease and are immune from catching it again). Sweden, close to achieving herd immunity, will likely not suffer as much as we will.

The good news is that this virus does not appear to be nearly as deadly as first thought. In fact, healthy people might have about as much to fear from getting this virus as they do in getting regular flu. It seems we were badly scared by wildly inaccurate models — particularly by one that predicted 2,000,000 deaths in America alone.

Experts like Dr. John Ioannidis and Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University saw the mistakes of that forecast from the beginning. But, our senior medical science and political leaders, who largely represent the last of the Boomer class, didn’t listen. Did we not panic and follow the wrong “experts?” Going forward, we should keep our heads and follow the pragmatic Swedish approach.

We have and are paying a heavy price. And, our children and their children will be paying for it for decades. We Boomers will not be here to watch its end. Was our panic response the Boomer’s last gasp?

— Brian Giesbrecht, a retired judge, is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

https://winnipegsun.com/opinion/columnists/giesbrecht-we-need-to-learn-from-swedens-approach

On Controlling the Pandemic

Feb. 16, 2021 |   By Su Peng

(Minghui.org)  Since the beginning of this winter, coronavirus variants have been spreading around the world, affecting over 80 countries. The situation in China, however, appears relatively mild. Chinese authorities have claimed there have been only over 1,000 cases, including two deaths, in the past few months.

Because of the massive cover-up, censorship, and disinformation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the coronavirus outbreak, many people referred to the disease as the CCP Virus. The recent situation, however, is somewhat perplexing: how come this disease is treating the CCP well while hitting other countries so hard?

In the meantime, the CCP has been actively advocating its three-pronged approach to control the pandemic, namely, lockdown and isolation, widespread testing, and vaccination. This approach has left an impression on many Chinese people that it is safer in China than in other countries and that the CCP has been effective in controlling the disease.

Is it really true that the virus is going easy on China and that only by copying the CCP can other countries get the pandemic under control?

We know plagues have existed for thousands of years. Almost every time, they came with little warning and then mysteriously disappeared with no explanation. Similarly, there are many unknowns with the current pandemic. As we explain below, without addressing the underlying issues of why the pandemic arose and where it went, the “success” claimed by the CCP could be limited and short-lived. Instead of blindly following the CCP, a better approach on the part of Western countries might be to identify the root cause of the catastrophe and resolve it fundamentally.

The Cost of the Wuhan Experience

The CCP is notorious for its human rights violations. Similarly, the way it bluntly deals with the pandemic also has serious consequences. Zhang Wenhong, Director of Infectious Disease at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, recently said the CCP’s approach to combatting the coronavirus is like chasing rats in a china shop, referring to the high price of such a chase.

In a recent video, Zhang further pointed out the Chinese epidemic control policies have caused excessive tension. “If life does not return to normal any time soon, there will perhaps be mental breakdowns,” he explained.

It can be difficult for outsiders to fully understand the pain caused by the CCP’s military-style lockdown. After the Ronghui community in Beijing was listed as a high-risk area, many neighboring communities were dealt with the same way. Here's how some of them reacted: “We have been forced to stay at home for almost a month now,” wrote one person on social media. “When will this nightmare end?” “If this is so-called safety, it rests on the loss of freedom for tens of thousands of people,” another person added.

It was similar in other regions. Even after Nangong City in Hebei Province was downgraded to a low-risk area on February 8, the authorities said residents would not receive a health pass until February 15 when the entire community is cleared of new cases. “We have been restricted to our homes since January 3 and our trash has piled up high like a hill now,” wrote resident Chen. “I tried to go out once to get medicine for my 11-day-old newborn. But I was driven back home by the Special Weapons and Tactics Unit (SWAT) team.”

The mental stress and anxiety have soared. In some areas, there have been suicides and homicides, with isolated residents going to the extreme and killing volunteer gatekeepers to get out of their gated residential compounds. Because the anti-pandemic campaign has become a political task, it is being carried out as a military effort, similar to the Cultural Revolution, with one of the consequences being that nearly everyone has been turned into a victim. Sometimes, the relationship between quarantined residents and those monitoring them is like class struggle enemies. Some ordinary citizens applauded the draconian lockdown without realizing the underlying communist ideology and its brutality. Some of them even praised the extreme measures undertaken in North Korea, where those infected with the disease would be executed.

But is such a pandemic control model a success or a tragedy? In the past few decades, the CCP has killed about 80 million lives to advance its agenda. One particle of dust from the gigantic political machinery could become a mountain when it lands on an ordinary citizen. The truth is, although we may praise the seeming “efficiency” of the CCP's pandemic control measures, who knows if we will one day become its victims and ruthlessly crushed? In other words, the one being targeted and quarantined probably would be in no mood to sing the praises of the lockdown policy.

The Limitations of Isolation

Besides the cost, the CCP’s pandemic control campaign may not be as effective as is claimed. Zhong Nanshan, a top CCP health official, has also admitted this. In a speech on January 13, he said that, when the government escalates the coronavirus risk level by one notch, it could reduce the infection rate by 20 or 30%, which shows the prevention measures' limited effect given the cost of the lockdowns.

The real situation goes beyond the number of confirmed cases. In China, sometimes the virus is not detected until the 11th testing. This shows the actual number of cases could be much higher than reported. Furthermore, many people who are infected with the disease did not show symptoms. When combined, these two factors could point to a dire possibility.

In fact, based on patterns and potential infection routes, it seems that the virus has never stopped spreading since its outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. If that is the case—as it had been the case during numerous plagues in history—and the virus suddenly breaks out across regions all at once, what could be done to battle the disease then? If what Zhang Wenhong said about chasing rats in a china shop is true, when countless rats swarm into a china shop at the same time, wouldn’t that chasing around lead to complete disaster?

Such worries are legitimate concerns, especially because the Chinese authorities have yet to provide a convincing explanation for the sporadic cases that have emerged in various places in the country. Very often, CCP officials attribute new cases to importation from travelers or frozen food. Zhang said the chance of spreading disease through frozen food is smaller than a plane crash—meaning it is essentially negligible. As for the theory of importation, judging from either the number of travelers or frequency of flights, those hubs of air travel, institutions associated with foreign affairs, or education would be the hardest hit. But the reality is that these new cases were often found in the countryside or small cities in Sichuan Province, Hebei Province, or northeast China, where there are very few (if any) out-of-country visitors.

The CCP's theories aimed at explaining the emerging cases, as well as its numerous versions of narratives on patient zero and the virus' route of transmission, have deceived many people who've gotten lost in the maze and not gone after the root cause of the virus.

Lessons from History

A lot can be learned from the Black Death. In 1347, the disease traveled to Paris and then Britain, before striking other countries. Within several years, it killed 25 million people, about one-third of the population of Europe. Physicians were in despair since they were unable to offer help.

Scientists believe the disease started in Asia and spread to Europe. But it remains a mystery as to how it could spread so quickly and break out in multiple areas at the same time since there was no air travel at the time.

Similar plagues have come and gone mysteriously in China. In October 1910, a plague broke out in Manchuria (northeastern China). Lian Wude, an epidemiologist from the University of Cambridge, introduced the quarantine system in the infected area of Fujiadian. Beginning on January 13, 1911, the Qing dynasty stopped railroad operations in the region and dispatched military forces to stop incoming travelers. Prevention and control measures were also implemented in nearby provinces. Since the disease was associated with rats, a massive campaign was launched to eradicate rats, with about 81,000 rats killed in Fengtian (today’s Shenyang City, Liaoning Province) alone.

But the disease continued. About 40 to 60 people died in Fujiadian every day, sometimes as many as 183 per day. The pandemic then mysteriously stopped in late March after taking 60,000 lives in six months.

Scientists believe the Black Death was caused by bacterial variants. “Only a few genetic changes were enough to turn an ordinary stomach bug into the bacteria responsible for the plague,” according to a November 2015 Scientific American article titled “The Mutant Genes behind the Black Death.”

But viruses, on the other hand, have a much higher tendency to mutate, which makes them more likely to produce new variants that cause illnesses. To make things worse,   scientists found   one liter of seawater usually contains about 100 billion viruses. This adds up to 10 31  viruses on earth, 15 times the total number of all other creatures in all the oceans in the world.

Facing these challenges, modern science and technology seem to offer limited help to combat plagues. This has convinced some scholars that mankind cannot outwit nature, including the virus.

Plagues: Scourge of God

In ancient times and traditional Chinese culture, it is generally believed plagues arise when mankind has deviated from proper moral standards.

Caecilian (or Caecilianus) in the ancient Roman Empire, for example, described plagues at the time as a result of the persecution of the Christians.

Scholars at the University of Paris considered the Black Death that started in March 1345 a result of “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, occurring on the 24th of March 1345.” Other atypical phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, comets, and solar eclipses were also observed.

Historian Gregory of Tours, documented a series of phenomena during the plague years, including bright lights appearing around the sun as if the heavens were on fire. Other reports from France mentioned a brightly illuminated night sky, making it like a day, and immense, dragon-like creatures floating through the city and down to the sea, which preceded an immediate outbreak of the plague in the area. Many historical reports on plagues mention a smelly mist that would precede the outbreak. At the same time, strange bright lights in the sky would be reported from multiple locations.

Similar to the Black Death’s triple-planet conjunction, there was a six-planet alignment (the sun and moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury) between February 10 and the Chinese New Year on February 12, 2021. Such a phenomenon has only occurred 7 times in the past 4,000 years.

A similar six-planet alignment also happened on May 3, 2000, several months after the CCP started to suppress Falun Gong, a meditation system based on the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. With tens of millions of innocent practitioners being persecuted for their faith, that campaign has probably been the largest suppression of human rights in modern times.

Another event that happened around May 2000 was the unprecedented support from the United States to foster the growth of communist China. In his last year in office, former U.S. president Bill Clinton called on Congress to help him change the trade policy with China to permanent normal trade relations (PNTR). Legislation was introduced in May 2000, which was later approved, clearing the path for China to join the WTO in 2001.

Twenty years later, communist China has become a leading world power, giving it unparalleled momentum to advance its communist ideology globally. Its strong economy and propaganda have dominated the international stage, including world organizations such as the WTO. By the time the coronavirus pandemic arrived, virtually no country or government has had the ability to fend off the tragedy. So far, over one hundred million people have caught the disease, with a death toll of more than 2.4 million. About one-fifth of those deaths have occurred in the U.S. alone.

Back on Track

People often talk about learning from history, but that is easier to say than to do.

In ancient China, there was a well-known story called Nan Yuan Bei Zhe (Facing South While Traveling North). A person was planning to travel south to the kingdom of Chu, when others told him he was headed in the wrong direction. He simply dismissed it. “My horse runs very fast... I have more than enough resources... my coachman is very skilled,” he boasted. The truth is, when one heads in the wrong direction, advanced technology and skills offer little help.

In the past decades, the CCP has suppressed people economically, destroyed traditional culture, deprived people of their freedom, and undermined their faith. Were such a situation to spread across the world—such as adopting a socialist agenda in the U.S.—the CCP would be even more reckless in turning people around the globe into victims of communism.

In ancient China and Western societies alike, people repented their wrongdoings after plagues or other catastrophes occurred, hoping to learn from their mistakes and get back on track. If we dismiss this possibility and continue on the wrong path, what’s next could be even more dire.

Here is one example that explains this. In ancient China, people believed in the harmony of   heaven, earth, and mankind . That is, when a person or a community is morally corrupt, misfortune, disease, or plagues would arise. If we just want to tackle misfortune by focusing on superficial factors without tending to the root cause, it simply won't work.

It is just like a community in which many parents gamble, drink, deal and use drugs, or engage in deviant sexual behaviors. Children who grow up in such a community would pick up their parents' bad habits and do the same. Parents may, in turn, simply ground their children to prevent them from doing bad things. But will such kids naturally become better parents? Probably not.

The CCP is like those corrupt parents in that hypothetical community, and the virus is like the troubled kids who grow up in that community. Simply quarantining the trouble kids wouldn't turn things around for the better. One has to target the root cause to treat the problem.

The CCP's suppression of people, especially its persecution of Falun Gong over the past two decades, has resulted in millions of deaths. According to traditional Chinese culture, when the ruler commits unpardonable sins, plagues or other misfortunes might strike. Many people have quit the CCP and now support the innocent, including Falun Gong practitioners. That will help them avoid being held responsible when the time comes for the CCP to be brought to justice for its crimes.

In summary, the cause and the spread of the virus are beyond mankind's control. What we can control, though, are our moral standards and behavior. From Chinese tradition to Western culture, there is a belief that, despite all this chaos and tragedy, we are watched and being saved by the divine. But that is based on the premise that we are true to our conscience and virtuous. After all, the divine can only help those who are willing to help themselves. We hope more people can see through the CCP's true colors and sever ties with it so as to stay safe in the pandemic.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2021/2/16/190973p.html

Vaccine Passports Are a ‘Terrible Idea,’ Says Florida Gov. DeSantis

By Jack Phillips  March 19, 2021 Updated: March 19, 2021

Florida  Gov. Ron DeSantis said that vaccine passports that require a person who is vaccinated for COVID-19 to participate in certain activities is a “terrible idea” and won’t get support in Florida.

“The vaccine passport is a terrible idea. We are definitely not going to require anything from the state’s perspective. That is totally off the table,” DeSantis, a Republican, told reporters on Thursday. “If I have businesses that want to do that in Florida, I think that that’s more than just a private decision.”

The idea of a CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus  vaccine passport has been floated by some countries and businesses in recent months. However, critics say the proposal would be a violation of Americans’ civil liberties.

“Look, if you want to go to a movie theater or concert, all this stuff, go. If you don’t, don’t. But to require somebody to show some type of proof of vaccination, I think, is completely unacceptable, and it’s not something that we’re going to support here in any way in Florida,” DeSantis said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has urged countries not to use a CCP virus vaccine passport system due to how vaccines are being rolled out and distributed worldwide. Meanwhile, CCP mouthpiece The Global Times suggested earlier in March that the Chinese regime should build an international “vaccine passport” system.

“Chinese experts noted on Tuesday that China can help by sharing its experience with and provide technical support to the WHO to organize the issue,” the Global Times wrote. “As China is the most experienced country in using a health code system in the world while the WHO is the most proper organizer for the matter to ensure independence, fairness, and data security.”

China this month also launched  its own “vaccine passport” system for Chinese nationals traveling internationally.

The digital certificate shows a user’s vaccination status and CCP virus test results. It is accessible via a program on WeChat, a Chinese social media platform, as reported by Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, a significant number of Americans have expressed skepticism about the CCP virus vaccines. A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll  earlier this month found that 41 percent of respondents said they are not willing to receive the shot.

“The single most concerning number in this moths poll is that 4 in 10 of those who have not been vaccinated do not want to take the vaccine. This includes 60 percent of Black voters,” Harvard CAPS-Harris polling director Mark Penn said in an interview with The Hill.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/vaccine-passports-are-a-terrible-idea-says-florida-gov-desantis_3741436.html?utm_source=ai&utm_medium=search

The World’s Pandemic Response（I） Why Did China Get to Dictate the World’s Pandemic Response?

Centralized quarantine facilities under construction, where people at risk of contracting COVID-19 are to be taken into quarantine, in Shijiazhuang, China’s northern Hebei Province, on Jan. 16, 2021. (STR/CNS/AFP via Getty Images)

Why Did China Get to Dictate the World’s Pandemic Response?

Part 1 of the 2-part series: The World’s Pandemic Response

Antonio Graceffo

November 12, 2021;  Updated November 13, 2021

Commentary

First the Chinese regime lied about the origins of COVID-19, then the world followed its pandemic  containment policies, in spite of their inefficacy and the hardship they caused.

In October, roughly 20 months into the pandemic, China  locked down a city of 4 million people . China has not “defeated” COVID-19, and yet Chinese leader Xi Jinping somehow convinced the world to adopt the China model of containment, despite the severe hardship and societal and economic damage caused by lockdowns, school closures, masks, and now forced vaccinations.

The United States and the world have never taken China’s advice on any other global problem in the past. So why was the pandemic response an exception?

Beijing’s original strategy was to cover up the virus . When that failed, it seemed the CCP believed that its legitimacy hinged on its ability to control the virus. Consequently, the CCP took a hard line. Authorities imposed draconian measures when they locked down Wuhan and other cities, which most of the world condemned as a violation of human rights. However, some Western media and politicians were less critical and said that the measures were effective, but they could never be applied to the West. And yet, within months, many countries followed suit .

China’s state media and internet trolls began publicly pushing CCP policies of mass testing, lockdowns, quarantines, masks, and school closures. ProPublica investigated Twitter accounts, supporting China’s pandemic response  and its role as the “world’s savior,” and found 10,000 of them to be fake and linked to the Chinese regime. Twitter ended up deleting over 170,000 accounts  that were linked to the CCP’s influence campaign.

In the West, mainstream media and some lawmakers began praising China for “ flattening the curve ” so quickly. In March 2020, scientific journal Nature ran an article about how the rest of the world could learn from China’s handling of COVID-19, suggesting that other countries should emulate China’s lockdowns .

Although Nature supported the Chinese model, it explained that travel bans would only delay the spread, not end the pandemic. It went on to say that the World Health Organization ( WHO ) recommended against travel bans at the time. The article also mentioned that Singapore had quickly adopted the China model of contact tracing  and isolation, and thus brought the virus under control by March 2020. The reality is, however, Singapore was still under lockdown  in the summer and has recently began to ease restrictions.

As for school closures, the Nature article made the claim that children were equally as likely to be infected as adults, something which has since been disproved. But the article also said that it was unclear if children could transmit the virus, so it was unknown if school closures would be beneficial. And yet, schools were closed around the world.

Perhaps the most important statement in the Nature article was “China is suppressing the virus, not eradicating ” it. The article also goes on to say, “Lockdowns have to end at some point.” And yet, nearly two years later, COVID-19 restrictions are still being implemented.

Chinese commuters wear protective masks as they wait to cross an intersection at the end of the workday during rush hour in Beijing, China, on May 18, 2020. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Xi began touting China’s “success with the virus” as a form of nationalism, which the Chinese public appeared to buy into. The rest of the world also believed it, as they followed China’s lead, locking down their own populations, closing schools, and requiring citizens to wear masks.

The CCP believed that its handling of the virus would catapult China  to a position of world leadership. Beijing bragged, through state media and online posters, about the “low death count” in China and mounting deaths in the United States. To appear as the “world’s savior,” Beijing offered concessionary loans  to Sri Lanka and other developing countries, whose economies were wiped out by the same virus response that China had recommended. The CCP sent Chinese-made masks, personal protective equipment (PPE), and medical supplies to Spain, Italy, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

In Italy, Chinese health “experts” taught the Italian government how to implement the China-model of pandemic containment .

Thus, China exported contact tracing, masks, lockdowns, and school closures. China sent aid along the “ Health Silk Road ” to legitimize the debt ridden Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Beijing criticized the United States’ refusal to support the WHO, while widely publicizing China’s engagement  with it and other world organizations.

Xi called on world leaders to talk about pandemic response . He held talks with the G-20, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the African Union. Chinese diplomats released media articles and op-eds in the various countries they were stationed in, to highlight the aid that China was dolling out and the expertise that China was imparting to the world regarding containment measures.

State-sponsored media articles stressed how grateful countries  around the world were for China’s help in fighting the pandemic. Much of the aid that countries received was not actually aid. They had to pay for it. And a great deal of the equipment was defective. Slovakia received $16 million worth  of defective test kits. And Finland purchased Chinese-made masks that turned out to be unsuitable for use in hospitals.

Capitalizing on its alleged successful handling of COVID-19, the CCP sought to take a leading role in global health  organizations. Western media apparently bought into the notion that China knew the right way to address the pandemic and began supporting the CCP’s initiatives. China provided funding to the WHO, which then parroted Beijing’s recommendations about the importance of suspending civil liberties and locking down the global economy as a means of preventing the spread of the disease.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the WHO rejected reports provided by doctors in Taiwan, because Beijing opposes Taiwanese representation  in international bodies. Instead, the WHO transmitted the CCP’s narrative, praising China’s alleged early response.

The WHO issued a China mission report, which stated: “In the face of a previously unknown virus , China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history” gaining valuable response time, utilizing an “all-of-government and all-of society approach.”

The WHO report did not include anything about the negative impact of China’s draconian measures. Instead, it endorsed the China strategy, recommending it to the world.

And one-by-one, countries adopted the China model, disregarding the negative impact and ignoring data, which suggested that these methods were not effective at ending the pandemic.

Antonio Graceffo, Ph.D., has spent over 20 years in Asia. He is a graduate of Shanghai University of Sport and holds a China-MBA from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Antonio works as an economics professor and China economic analyst, writing for various international media. Some of his China books include “Beyond the Belt and Road: China’s Global Economic Expansion” and “A Short Course on the Chinese Economy.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-did-china-get-to-dictate-the-worlds-pandemic-response-part-1_4091086.html

The World’s Pandemic Response（II） The World Continues to Follow China’s Lead in Containing the Pandemic

Marion Koopmans, right, and Peter Ben Embarek, center, of the World Health Organization team say farewell to their Chinese counterpart Liang Wannian, left, after a WHO-China Joint Study Press Conference held at the end of the WHO mission in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 9, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

The World Continues to Follow China’s Lead in Containing the Pandemic

Part 2 of the 2-part series: The World’s Pandemic Response

Antonio Graceffo

November 13, 2021

Commentary

It appears the Chinese regime is under pressure, as the international community criticizes its “zero- covid ” policy that’s wrecking the economy. However, the world continues to follow China ’s pandemic measures to varying degrees.

By March 2020, the world began to follow the Chinese model of pandemic control, including masks, lockdowns , and school closures, despite significant evidence of the negative impacts of these decisions and almost no evidence that they were effective at ending the pandemic.

The director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, Lawrence O. Gostin, identified “major human rights” concerns that arise from the strict lockdowns enforced in China, and later adopted, to varying degrees, by countries around the world, including the United States. Rather than these extreme strategies, Gostin said, standard public health measures were “ scientifically justified .”

In April 2020, Dr. Bruce Aylward, the leader of the World Health Organization team that visited China, told The New York Times that Beijing’s strategy of extreme measures  could be replicated anywhere. He said that there were no indications from China that COVID-19 posed a threat to people under the age of 20; and yet, in the same interview, he recommended closing schools, as China did . He also acknowledged that by closing schools, central authorities were forcing roughly half the workforce to stay home and take care of the children.

Workers place barriers outside the closed Huanan Seafood wholesale market during a visit by members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team, investigating the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China’s central Hubei Province on Jan. 31, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

When asked about the role social media played in China’s pandemic response, Aylward said, “They had Weibo and Tencent and WeChat giving out accurate information .”

He failed to mention the censorship of dissenting opinions or that phones were taken away from people in quarantine, or that citizens were prohibited from talking about deaths or posting first-hand accounts and photos that challenged the Chinese Communist Party’s ( CCP ) narrative. Like the lockdowns themselves, this type of censorship of only allowing “accurate information,” and the state deciding what was “accurate,” was adopted across U.S. social media.

In the United States, the Trump administration opposed lockdowns , but mainstream media criticized  former President Donald Trump for downplaying or mocking the wearing of masks. He was against school closures , but governors and local school boards still moved to close schools. In November 2020, The New York Times actually published an opinion piece that supported Trump’s position that schools should not  have been closed. And yet, many schools remained closed.

Western media continued to support Beijing’s narrative, in spite of mounting evidence that its pandemic measures were destructive, ineffective, and self-serving.

In November 2020, The Conversation ran a report, headlined “ China beat  the coronavirus with science and strong public health measures, not just with authoritarianism.”

Then in February 2021, The New York Times published an article, headlined “Power, Patriotism and 1.4 Billion People : How China Beat the Virus and Roared Back.” Even when it had already become clear that masks, lockdowns, and school closures only brought misery, and did not end the pandemic, the Times was still supporting the CCP’s policies. Even the claim that China came roaring back is a myth. The Chinese economy stands on the brink of the worst stagflation in decades.

American lawyer Michael Senger, author of “Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World,” told Sky News in September 2020 that COVID-19 lockdowns are based on Xi’s policies , rather than science.

The WHO’s stance on lockdowns was that, while they could slow transmission, “these measures can have a profound negative impact on individuals, communities, and societies by bringing social and economic life  to a near stop.”

Furthermore, the WHO recognized that “Such measures disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups , including people in poverty, migrants, internally displaced people and refugees, who most often live in overcrowded and under resourced settings, and depend on daily labour for subsistence.”

A pedestrian moves along an almost empty George Street in the Sydney CBD, Australia on June 28, 2021. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

Experts, both inside and outside of China, pointed out that the extreme measures were unsustainable. Eventually, most countries adjusted their expectations about the containment of COVID-19 and began opening up. As of November, even the holdouts are beginning to ease their restrictions. But this gradual trend toward adjusting policies—based on logic, reason, and data—took nearly a year and a half. For some reason, English speaking countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, had the strictest and longest lockdowns.

China seems to be the last country that still maintains a zero-covid policy. Recently, more than 30,000 people were locked inside of Shanghai Disney  because of one person being informed that she had tested positive for COVID-19, after she had left the theme park. All these visitors were tested, and not one was positive.

Global public opinion has turned against China for isolating itself from the rest of the world. However, while politicians and Western media are criticizing China for maintaining zero-covid policies, they have not admitted that the polices were misguided and should never have been adopted in the West.

Since the world knows all of this information about why the China model is bad, why are we still following it? Yes, most countries have dropped the zero-covid policy, but to varying degrees, masks, lockdowns, school closures, restrictions, travel bans, and even vaccines are still being forced on the populations of both democracies and totalitarian states.

Since these measures came from the Chinese regime, and China has not conquered COVID-19, and since we know that Beijing took advantage of the lockdowns, which it encouraged, to enrich itself and to raise its global standing, would it not make sense to do the exact opposite of what the regime recommended?

Other questions remain. Why did the international community allow Beijing to take the lead in containing the pandemic, which wrecked their economy and robbed citizens of their basic rights? Why does the West continue to go along with a scaled-down version of the China-model?

While there has been a gradual moving away from the CCP’s COVID-19 policies, parts and remnants remain, and it looks like there will never be a return to full human and civil rights as we had before the pandemic.

Antonio Graceffo, Ph.D., has spent over 20 years in Asia. He is a graduate of Shanghai University of Sport and holds a China-MBA from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Antonio works as an economics professor and China economic analyst, writing for various international media. Some of his China books include “Beyond the Belt and Road: China’s Global Economic Expansion” and “A Short Course on the Chinese Economy.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-world-continues-to-follow-chinas-lead-in-containing-the-pandemic_4091143.html

Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci testifies before a Senate panel in Washington on Nov. 4, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun

Jeffrey A. Tucker

December 20, 2021

Epoch Times Commentary

Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration  did feel odd.

On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document.

Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was coming. The fakes were deleted in days and new methods of confirming signatures were deployed.

The document, on the one hand, said nothing controversial. The right way to deal with this pandemic , it said, was to focus on those who could face severe outcomes from disease–a very plain point and nothing new. There was nothing to be gained by locking down the whole of society because of a pathogen with such a huge differential in its demographic impact.

The virus would have to become endemic in any case (including the realization of “herd immunity,” which is not a “strategy” but a descriptive term widely accepted in epidemiology) and certainly would not be stopped by destroying peoples’ lives and liberties.

The hope of the Declaration was simply that journalists would pay attention to a different point of view and a debate would begin on the unprecedented experiment in lockdowns. Perhaps science could prevail, even in this climate.

On the bad side, and at the very same time, following the release, the attacks began pouring in, and they were brutal, structured to destroy. The three main signers – Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) – made the statement as a matter of principle. It was also born of frustration with the prevailing narrative.

Mostly this declaration was intended as an educational effort. But the authors were being called vicious names and treated like heretics that should be burned. There certainly was no civil debate; quite the contrary.

It was all quite shocking given that the Declaration was a statement concerning what almost everyone in these professional circles believed earlier in the year. They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House  warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. It was sponsored by Yale University. Today it reads nearly like a first draft of the Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed on that same day, Fauci wrote  to a Washington Post reporter: “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”

But following the March 13-16, 2020 lockdowns, the orthodoxy had evidently changed. And suddenly. The signers of the GBD had declined to change with it. Thus did they endure astonishingly brutal smears. What felt odd at the time was the sheer intensity of the attacks, as well as their dogmatism and ferocity. These attacks also had a strong political flavor that had little regard for science.

Already by the summer, it was very clear that the lockdowns had not achieved what they were supposed to achieve. Two weeks had stretched into many months, and the data on cases and deaths were uncorrelated with the “mitigation measures” that had been imposed on the country and the world. Meanwhile, millions had missed cancer screenings, schools and churches had been shut, public health was in a state of crisis, and small businesses and communities were fighting to stay alive.

It was obvious on October 4, 2020, when the Declaration was released, that it was a correct statement and that the lockdowns had failed by every measure. Following Trump’s fatal March 2020 decision to acquiesce to Anthony Fauci  and Deborah Birx, the president had pushed for reopening the country and treating this pathogen as a disease with normal medical methods. He was not making much headway, however. The handful of people around Trump who had been responsible for pushing them were digging in, prepared to wage a full war on dissent.

What historian Phil Magness has discovered , with newly unearthed emails, comes not as a shock to any of us but it is satisfying to see the confirmation of what we suspected. It seemed at the time that the effort to attack and destroy both the GBD and its authors was coordinated from the top. Here at last is the proof that our intuition was not crazy.

The author of the initial email is Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. The recipients were Anthony Fauci and H. Clifford Lane, NIAID Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects.The email calls for a “published take down” of the GBD that is both “quick and devastating.”

That evening, Fauci wrote back, not with a reference to any scientific papers supporting lockdowns and so on but with a piece from the gadget publication called Wired, which said the GBD is wrong because “quite literally arguing with the past” because the lockdowns are no longer being used. Collins responded: “excellent.”

The next day, Fauci struck again with an article from the pro-lockdown leftist newspaper The Nation. It’s a demoralizing reference simply because the public was led to believe that between his endless TV interviews, Fauci was scouring “the science” to find out more about SARS-CoV-2, not googling and landing on highly politicized and ideological webzines. What we find in these emails are highly political people who are obsessed not with science but with messaging and popular influences on the public mind.

Days later, Collins himself gave quotes to the Washington Post that ridiculed the position that society should reopen. He was clearly attacking Trump and the White House generally. Fauci said not to worry about it because they were too busy with other things, e.g. the election.

Over the following weeks, many new pieces appeared in the popular press. These gentlemen eagerly shared them.

What do we learn from these emails? The attacks on tens of thousands of medical professionals and scientists were indeed encouraged from the top. The basis for the attacks were not scientific articles. They were heavily political popular pieces. This adds serious weight to the impression we all had at the time, which was that this was not really about science but about something far more insidious.

You can discover more about this in Scott Atlas’s  book on the topic . These new emails confirm his account. It was an outright war on top scientists, people whose views on matters of public health were not different from the professional consensus only earlier in the year. For that matter, Anthony Fauci himself warned against lockdowns in January and February, favoring instead normal methods of mitigation.

My own estimate is that the convinced advocates of lockdowns when they took place were probably fewer  than 50 in the US. How and why they managed to grab hold of the reins of power will be investigated by historians for many decades. The incredibly positive response to the Great Barrington Declaration, which has garnered 900,000 signatures in the meantime, demonstrates that there was and is still life remaining in traditional public health measures deployed throughout the 20th century and still respect for human dignity and science remaining among medical professionals and the general public.

Please remember that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are not just two scientists among hundreds of thousands. As the NIH site says, it “invests about $41.7 billion annually in medical research for the American people.” With that kind of spending power, you can wield a great deal of influence, even to the point of crushing dissent, however rooted in serious science the target might be. It might be enough power and influence to achieve the seemingly impossible, such as conducting a despotic experiment without precedent, under the cover of virus control, in overturning law, tradition, rights, and liberties hard won from hundreds of years of human experience.

This war on dissent against lockdowns is not only a scandal of our times. The lockdowns and now the mandates have fundamentally transformed society and its relationship to government, technology, media, and much more. The emergency continues. Protests have arisen  the world over but they are hardly even covered by the media. We seem ever more to be on the precipice of total disaster, one that will be difficult to reverse. It is urgent that we know who did this, as well as how and why, and take steps to stop it before more damage is done and then becomes permanent.

Jeffrey Tucker is founder and president of the Brownstone Institute. He is the author of five books, including “Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/faucis-war-on-science-the-smoking-gun_4168360.html

How China Exported ‘Pandemic Tyranny’ to the World; Side-Effects of Stripping Away People’s Rights

The Wide Angle

Brendon Fallon

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

In certain aspects, China’s early “handling” of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak—in particular, its draconian lockdowns—set the tone for the erosion of civil liberties continuing across the world in the name of “pandemic response.”

In this episode, I’m joined by veteran journalist and Epoch Times contributor   Lee Smith . We look at the mechanisms by which Western democracies have been steered toward negating the rights of citizens, and the Chinese Communist Party’s hand in this.

“If you treat your populations like an occupied people, they will come to treat you like an occupying power.”

What consequences await those governments and leaders who continue to override the rights of the people they’re intended to serve?

B: Who would have imagined how much of our freedom, our works, our day-to-day lives were about to be changed?  Many have seen the rapid fading of the rights, the freedoms that were long taken for granted. If the basic freedoms of Western democracy are eroded, then how are we any different from the alternative. And again, dissolving that difference may have been the plan all along.

B: Hello, and welcome to the wide-angle. I'm Brendan Fallon today we have something a little less formal than I normally interview style I'm turning by my friend and mentor of sorts Lee Smith and this is the first of what I hope to be ongoing conversations with Lee focus on the pivotal issues about our times. Please subscribe to my channel and my newsletter click on the link pinned to the live chat or the comments. This way you won't miss anything.

Lee is a veteran journalist who specializes in US foreign policy and domestic affairs. He's the author of the Permanent Coup - How the Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.

Lee, it's always an honor to have you on the program.

L: Well, Brandon, thank you very much for inviting me on again today. It's always a lot of fun speaking with you and I don't know if I told you before, but our last conversation like this got a lot of positive responses. People told me how much they enjoyed the topics we were discussing and the vivid nature of our conversation. So thank you very much again for bringing me on.

Yeah, when you and I were speaking before, I was talking about a new book I'm reading from a gentleman named Michael P. Singer. What he's talking about, he's talking about the lockdowns, the way that he sees the lockdowns is that this is an extraordinary successful information operation that Xi and the Chinese Communist Party are responsible for. And the main point is that Western officials, Western leaders, heads of states, have turned toward autocracy in a sense that, this is the case of the book makes and I find it extremely compelling, that the Western democracies have been rotted in the sense that the argument for world influence, for global influence and power has been that, well, look at our democracy, this is a much better way to live than under on an autocratic regime. Even though you have certain economic liberty if you don't have political liberty, you don't have political freedoms. Well. one of the things is that we have to look at what's happened here over nearly two years now. The lack of political liberties I mean these things are written, these things are written into the Constitution of the United States but as it appears, Western leaders, American leaders, from the current President of the United States down to State and municipal authorities have revoked these rights guaranteed in our constitution.

B :  What do you think is the most compelling example of democracy subverted or undermined?

L: Vaccine mandates. I think that's an enormous issue. The idea that you know, if you don’t have bodily autonomy. If it doesn't start with the individual unit. I'm not even talking here about freedom of assembly,   to gather with our neighbors, to gather with our fellow citizens, whatever Western democracy was part of. But bodily autonomy, if you don't have a choice over what we put into our own bodies. That's an enormous issue.

B: Yes, if you cannot control what goes into your body then what freedom do you have? The idea that the Chinese Communist Party has used this, use the situation of the global pandemic to show the weaknesses in the ideas of democracy around the world’ I’m kind of question, are we may be giving it too much credit. Is the CCP really at that level of competence? And if you look at the way it conducted itself, you know, the recent years diplomatically it's been a bit of a disaster; its own management of the pandemic has been disastrous.

L: Absolutely yes,  and I don't mean to credit Xi, Chairman Xi as a genius statesman. Far from it, but I do believe that competent statesmanship is opportunistic. You see different things that are happening around the world, and you take advantage of them. You go in there, you have some general sense of strategy, and you see some situations to implement your strategy. And I  definitely think what happened here, I think, the CCP has encouraged the lockdowns. There is very interesting research in this book. It showed exactly how via social media campaigns the CCP actually did encourage lockdowns. So again, I don’t think there was a master plan here, where Master puppet Xi has designed all of these things to happen just the way it has. Again, competent statesmen are opportunistic, they look to advance their own national interests and that’s certainly what's happened here.

B: With what other mechanisms it has, kind of, fueled these lockdowns around the world?

L: Yeah, I mean, certainly a few different institutions like the WHO that’s certainly important. Also, I mean, you know there are our own institutions here in the United States like the CDC and the NIH, certainly Dr. Anthony Fauci. They have long-standing relationships with Chinese Communist Party’s institutions as well as Chinese Communist Party’s researchers. So these are some of the forms of influence. You know, throughout Washington you have a number of different think tanks and researchers who are influencing on behalf of the CCP. If you remember when the coronavirus, covid-19,  first struck, they were messaging how well Beijing handled covid-19.  And the way they handled it so well was locking everyone down. As you know, you and I have discussed the lockdowns. This has never been used as a public health measure before for very good reasons because it's a political measure, it's an oppressive measure throughout history. When you lock down a population you do it as collective punishment. To lock down an entire population is what occupying powers do to their adversaries, right? They lockdown occupied populations.

L:  And there is a certain kind of bitter irony in this. It's not the Chinese Communist Party imposing this directly on these countries. It’s them doing it to themselves. It’s the governments of these countries doing it to the people of their own accord.

L: Yeah you're absolutely right. It's not as though Beijing has sent hovercrafts to hover over the capital of Australia and over over the Beltway in Washington DC, to demand that these lockdowns be imposed. Western officials have done it to themself and, surprisingly, while there are many Americans who opposed lockdowns and mandates, there is also an astonishing amount of people who applaud them, who demand them, who require them, who demand that their fellow citizens be forced to take an experimental medical treatment or be forced to wear a piece of cloth over their face. We have no evidence that masking works. And who demand economic activity stop and the school shut down. It's absurd that this is not something that the CCP imposed on the United States, on Canada, on the United Kingdom, on Australia and New Zealand, and throughout Western Europe. We've done it to ourselves.

B: At the same time, I think, if we take America for example, there are states, that are still upholding democracy, you know, Florida is a good example. So, certainly, there are warning signs about the state of liberty in this country if not around the world. But it's also been some examples where there are leaders who are really upholding that tradition.

L: There are leaders, there also, thank goodness,  there are fellow Americans and there are people all over the world where would you look at the protest in Rome we are seeing protest in Florence, you are seeing protests in the different states of Australia,  you are seeing protests throughout all of Europe. So yes, there are people who understand what has been done to them. People who understand exactly what is happening. Our leaders, however, I don't think they are dealing with the full consequences of all of these. What it means to impose an occupation on their own people and how the people will finally turn and respond to this.  If you treat your population like occupied people, they will come to treat you like an occupied power. So that is one danger, the domestic front. The other danger, the other consequence, we’ll see this in the foreign policy. Again, there is this idealogical contest between the United States leading the Western democracies, and totalitarian China, the CCP. American, Western officials go around the world whether to Africa and other parts of Asia or Latin America: You certainly would rather be on our side, wouldn't you? Look at what we have to offer, we offer democracy, we offer freedom and we offer all these different rights, we guarantee all the rights granted to you by our Almighty Maker. And now, they can't very well go around and say that, can they? I mean again if you're sitting in circles of power in Beijing, you would have to look at this as, regardless, of how heavy your hand was on the lever. You would have to regard this as a very formidable victory. It’s like the Americans have been routed, for now anyway. Their ideological? Their soft power? We've routed them. They have nothing to sell. Democracy? What do they mean by democracy? Look at what they've done to their own people.

B: What you were saying before, the idea if a government treats people like an occupied people, then there'll be a backlash to that. What comes to mind, I think about the Chinese situation, where CCP has actually, kind of, stamped out any potential opposition. I mean to hear about small uprisings in different parts of China but I guess that the nightmare scenario is that this mass suffocation of freedom is so successful that it stifles the opportunity for backlash. What hope do you see against that?

L: Well, the United States is very different, I mean, structurally very different. Right? First of all, I mean, China is an enormous country but the United States is very big in different ways, right? I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that one of the things that happened at Tiananmen Square was that Chinese soldiers from outside of Beijing were sent into Beijing to quell the protests there. This can't happen here in that way, because what we're looking at is that most of the families who send their men and women to serve in our Armed Forces are people who also tend to be more religious. They believe in their god-given rights to freedom. They believe in the Constitution. So what we'll be talking about, therefore, is the Biden Administration sending red-state young men and women against their red-state parents. So that kind of conflict is highly unlikely. But what we will see, what we will continue to see, though, is that the Biden Administration continuing to use their praetorian guard which is the FBI. We’ve seen the news says that the left is put the FBI to, at least since Russia gate if not before, I mean, the different ways that they've hunted down January 6th protesters. Many of them are nonviolent offenders and they're being detained by the Department of Justice. Some of them going on, well, we were soon approaching a year that they've been detained for. A lot of people are happy to go along, to get along, to avoid trouble. These are not the people who will be fighting for Liberty. These are not the people who will be fighting for Freedom. There are enough of them. But we have to remember, as we're engaged in the struggle, it's not going to be 330 million Americans who are on our side. A lot of people don't care. A lot of people want no part of the trouble. Nonetheless, there is a very vocal and very powerful, and very meaningful number of Americans in this. This is true as we've seen as you mention that these protests throughout Europe and Australia. There is a very meaningful minority that will continue to fight for their freedoms and win them.

B: What you say, it reminds me of something I believe you said last time, you talked about how the… I mentioned something about the strength of America's Constitution, you said the American Constitution doesn't really mean anything without human relationships and I think, I mean, that seems to be the fundamental hope lies in that. People value their relationships that they’ll stay with these traditional principles. And then there's a large enough segment of the population that isn’t going to compromise that, I think, in that there lies hope.

Thank you very much for coming on the show again, Lee. It's always a pleasure to look forward to having you on again soon.

L: Thank you very much, Brendan. I really appreciate it.

B: You can look forward to hearing more of Lee Smits’ insights in future episodes.

What do you think? Is there hope for Western democracies to reverse the apparent Trend towards autocracy? And the erosion of individual freedoms? Leave your thoughts in the comments. And if we're lucky they won't mysteriously disappear. That's it for this edition of the Wide-Angle. We'll see you next time!

https://youtu.be/0hh04s_O8H4

Is the Chinese Communist Party Orchestrating the New Global Wave of COVID-19 Lockdowns?

By Trevor Loudon

(Transcribed from video with omissions)

Greetings!

Welcome to CounterPunch with Trevor Loudon. The show exposes the ongoing World Communist Revolution. Please like the show and share the show and especially subscribe to Epoch TV.

Now today’s show would be, I believe, one of the most important I've ever done and I hope you pay full attention. This show focuses on the United Kingdom but is applicable all over the world.

I have a theory. I believe that the wave of lockdowns we are seeing in the world because of covid-19, the China virus, I believe the new wave that is coming has been orchestrated by the Communist Party of China. I think the Communist Party of China is using its network of communist parties’ subservient politicians, and labor unions to enforce these lockdowns worldwide, to drive people into misery and poverty all the better for World Revolution. I'm going to show the pro-China British communists have been deliberately forcing Boris Johnson's conservative government to enact some of the most draconian lockdowns in the world and to extend these lockdowns as long as possible.

Boris Johnson's government has been taking advice from the SAGE group, the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies. This is a group of top scientists who consult with the government on issues of the day, especially emergencies.

One of the key SAGE members is a behavioral psychologist named Susan Michie. She is, more than anyone, identified with stringent, long-term, unending lockdowns, mask-wearing et cetera.  She is the poster woman for the strategy. Sometimes ago several media outlets in Britain confirmed that Susan Michie is a lifelong member of the communist movement. First, it’s with the Communist Party of Great Britain, and now, it’s with the Communist Party of Britain.

A TV show host asked Susan Michie: “There are a lot of commentaries about this in the British media, about you. You have been a member of the Communist Party for about 40 years now. You are still a member. I just wonder I’m putting this question on behalf of those who wonder about your politics. If your politics actually informs you of a sense of control, it's not a medical argument. But you have a political bent to want the state to tell people what to do”.

Susan Michie replied: "you don’t ask other scientists about politics. So, I’m very happy to speak about science, which is what my job is, and to limit it to that".

This cost a little bit of alarm at the time and a lot of headlines. But there's a lot more to the story than this. Susan Michie is not just any communist she is communist royalty, both literally and figuratively.

Her parents both were communist party members, Aristocrats, and very prominent scientists. Her father Donald Michie worked during World War II at a top-secret facility at Bletchley Park, which helped to break the Nazi codes during World War II, a very, very highly sensitive job. He was later identified as a full-blown communist who traveled regularly to Soviet Bloc countries.

Susan Michie was in a very hard-line faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Not even just a moderate communist, she was a tanki’s tanki. The tankis were those communists who supported the use of tanks to suppress, the invasion of, Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even after that, Susan Michie was part of the pro-Soviet hard-line faction, known as “Straight Lift.”  When the Communist Party of Great Britain dissolved in the early nineties, Susan Michie and her husband, Andrew Murray, both moved into   the hard-line Communist Party of Britain, the main Communist Party in the United Kingdom today. Susan Michie’s “Straight Lift” hard-line husband, Andrew Murray, stayed in the Communist Party until 2016 when he left to become the advisor to Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn, by the way, also came from a Communist Party family. Susan Michie later on married to another behavioral psychologist, Robert Wiest, who’s also part of the SAGE group, also advises the government on Covid policy. Susan Michie is a vice-chair of the Communist Party-controlled Cuba Solidarity Campaign. In 2005, she keynoted a psychology conference in communist Cuba. She’s written extensively on Cuban psychiatry.

Once slightly pro-Soviet, the Communist Party of Britain now whole-heartedly supports the Chinese Communist Party(CCP).

[The editor of] Morning Star, the paper of the Party, Ben Chacko,   lived in communist China for several years. The Communist Party General Secretary Rob Griffiths has led several delegations to Beijing. The Party paper Morning Star regularly promotes China and Chinese policies.

Griffiths [once said of the CCPin a speech]: It was an unequal struggle in terms of resources and in terms of technical capacity. But what tip the balance in favor of the Revolutionary process was that the Chinese Communists represented the interests of working people and therefore represented the interests of the vast majority of society. Otherwise, I think it would have been impossible to achieve victory without the support of the massive people. I'm sure it does. All my visits to China and all of my discussions with members and supporters of the Chinese Communist Party at every level of the Party do indicate to me the original idealism that this is about the interests of the people this is about serving the good of the people and serving the interests of humanity more widely.”

Here is a 2020 tweet from Susan Michie, all about supporting and praising the Communist Party of China:

Susan Michie had also actually worked in China on smoking cessation policy if you can believe that. Susan Michie is a behavior modification expert. She knows how to manipulate populations. That's what she studies. She is an expert on this, one of the world's leading authorities. Is she using what she learned in Cuba and China on the British people Right now? The Communist Party of Britain certainly supports the SAGE group and the policy of lockdowns. Here is the Party leader Rob Griffiths explaining:

“More than five weeks ago the Tory government SAGE panel of experts warned that urgent steps were needed to stem a second wave of the Covid-19 epidemic. On top of recommendations was a national lockdown to break the circuit of contagion. Since then there have been four and a half thousand Covid related deaths and almost half a million new infections reported across Britain. These levels are many times higher than when SAGE first issued its recommendations, with our black and ethnic minority communities being hit particularly hard. Only now, more than a week behind Wales is the government in London introducing a lockdown throughout England. This is typical of the shambolic betrayal of the people by a government that has fought hard to put the interests of big business first. The Communist Party, on the other hand, has been clear from the beginning that supporting the NHS and Care Homes for the Elderly and protecting people's jobs, incomes, homes, and vital supplies must come before shareholders profits.”

The Communist Party of Britain is only about 1,200 members strong. It's a tiny party. So, how can this tiny group have the influence to make policy on a nationwide scale?

Here's the answer: the Communist Party of Britain controls or influences almost every major labor union in the country; the Communist Party is pushing Covid lockdown policy into the unions, which in turn influences millions of people plus the labour party and even the Conservative Party.

So, Chinese policy comes to the Communist Party of Britain. They make it labor union policy and the unions make it general nationwide policy through the influence and control of the labour party and even the influence over the conservatives. So, the Communist Party of China tells its 200 affiliated communist parties around the world to push lockdowns. The communist parties then use their friendly politicians, their labor unions to make this a general policy in every country to the degree that they can. Pretty soon this communist party policy, this Chinese Communist Party policy is 15 hundred of million people worldwide. And i n Britain one of the key ways the Communist Party influences public policy is through a group called The Institute of Employment Rights.

This is a charity.  I t's a trade union think tank. It’s led by a prominent Communist Party member, Carolyn Jones, and Communist Party sympathizers, Professor Keith Ewing and Lord John Hendy, QC. Susan Michie’s Marxist brother Jonathan Michie is also a member. The leadership of almost every major British labor union is also affiliated to The Institute of Employment Rights.

These include Unison, Unite the Union, Public and Commercial Services Union, GMB, the National Union of Journalists, the National Union of Mineworkers, the National Education Union, ASLEF, TSSA, UCU, Nautilus, the Bakers Union, the RMT, e t cetera,  e t cetera, e t cetera.  Most of these unions have actively supported lockdown policies. Here is Mark Serwotka of the Public and Commercial Services Union and Howard Beckett of Unite the Union. Both of these leaders are affiliated with The Institute of Employment Rights. The goal of communism is always to increase the misery of the working class, the exact opposite of what they say. But I want to increase the misery of the working class, the poverty, the general level of discontent. The more general unhappiness there is, the greater the revolutionary potential. So shutting down schools and universities is hugely disruptive to working families. It certainly increases misery and tension, and unhappiness. So shutting down in educational establishments is very much in line with communist policy.

Now here is Jo Grady. She's with the Institute of Employee Rights and she’s General Secretary of the University and College Union. Jo Grady is a Labour Party member, but as recently as February this year yet she addressed the Communist Party of Britain Forum at the Marx Memorial Library in London. The National Education Union which covers primary and secondary school teachers is also deeply penetrated by communists.

Here is a graphic of a Communist Party Conference designed to promote lockdowns from late 2020, It involved a Communist Party of Britain education Committee Member, National Education Union activists Laurel Briggs, fellow Communist Party member John Foster and Gawain Little who serves as the National Education Union International officer.

Here is Laura Briggs talking about how the National Education Union pushed lockdowns: [It’s] one extremely impressive mobilization of members within an hour of the enouncement, with 50 thousand members [completed the survey and petition and half million signatures]” And she’s also talking about the Revolutionary potential of lockdown and the misery that it caused.

Here is the graphic of a poster for a Zero-Covid conference from November 2020. Speakers at the conference include SAGE members Suzan Michie and her husband Robert Wiest. Also included was Johnny Hunter, a leader of the Young Communist League. Also involved were four labor members of parliament including Jeremy Corbyn and representatives and leaders from at least seven major labor unions. And wait! It doesn't stop there. A group of scientists in Britain is now pushing for continued tougher lockdowns worldwide. In July 2021 they started the World Health Network and its whole goal is to spread the British model all over the world.

According to Express UK, union officials at a preparatory meeting for this organization stated that the ultimate goal was to bring down capitalism and that Britain needed Soviet-style socialism to stop the Covid epidemic. Susan Michie and her husband Robert Wiest are both members of this group. Their influence is going worldwide. It is clear by now that the forced lockdowns have very little to do with public health. The question is who benefits from them. It certainly isn't the business people. It certainly isn't the working people of Western Nations who are affected by these lockdowns. You know they are suffering huge economic and social damage from the lockdown with very little public health benefit if any.

I believe the real beneficiary out of all of us is the Communist Party of China. It's using its minions in every country, its compliant politicians, its the network of communist parties and labor unions to push lockdowns endlessly. And we are getting ready for another wave of lockdowns with the so-called new mutation. While these mutations could be endless, the Communist Party of China has an endless appetite for destruction. So unless we stand against this, the Communist Party of China will continue to push lockdown until the West collapses to have a general economic meltdown. And then Revolution is on the horizon. The West will have to fight back against communist Chinese invasion or military action. The lockdowns are really a military tool. Most people in the world have zero ideas that It has benefited the Communist Party of China more than anyone else.

So I think in summation that the lockdowns are tools of the Communist Party of China. I think that is being spread worldwide I think Britain is a model but this model will be applied everywhere. What do you think? I hope you find this interesting and provocative.

Please share the show, pass it around to everybody you can, Britain, America, Canada, United States, France, Germany anywhere. We're all affected by these policies. So thank you very much for watching. I will see you again soon. God bless the great United Kingdom. I'm wishing you well my British brothers and sisters. What you are going through is what we all going to be going through if we don't turn this around. So thank you very much. I will see you in the next episode. God bless you all. Thank you.

http://mp3mp4pdf.net/media/ccplockdown.mp4

How Beijing’s Pandemic Narratives Influenced Western Actions in Curbing the Spread of COVID-19

People line up to get a booster shot of a COVID-19 vaccine in a tent set up outside a shopping mall in Beijing on Nov. 1, 2021. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

How Beijing’s Pandemic Narratives Influenced Western Actions in Curbing the Spread of COVID-19

Mimicking China’s methods for controlling the disease was a serious mistake

Stu Cvrk

December 28, 2021

Epoch Times Commentary

Clichés and euphemisms are useful tools for Marxists and other garden variety leftists to shape public policy. Endless repeated catchy phrases help convey a sense of “progress” and newness in pushing leftist political objectives and solutions.

Communists the world over have added political phrases galore to an ever-expanding lexicon of balderdash over the decades. Some examples include the following:

- Workers of the world, unite.

- Occupy the factories.

- Abolish alienation.

- Abolish class society.

- Peaceful coexistence.

- Live and let live.

- From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

- All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.

- Communism is not love; communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.

Those last two quotes are from former Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) leader Mao Zedong, who regularly used slogans as a means of propagandizing his underlings and the masses.

And today, the CCP is at the forefront in ginning up meaningless phrases that sound good but advance CCP causes, for example, whole-process people’s democracy, socialism with Chinese characteristics, shared future, common development, among other things. A particularly execrable claim is that the CCP has a “spiritual legacy,” as noted by state-run China Daily . A legacy of evil spirits maybe, but that of course is not what the communists meant!

All of these euphemisms and phrases intend to advance political objectives and to marginalize opponents. A key CCP political objective is to convey that China  is a world leader in all human endeavors.

A particular focus on Chinese leadership relates to control of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The attendant messages include: China’s response to the virus demonstrates world leadership, China’s strict lockdown strategy worked, Chinese social distancing and use of masks worked, the China vaccine strategy worked, Chinese benevolence in providing medical supplies to other countries is leading the world, etc.

Fear of the virus was interwoven with the propaganda to amplify the claimed success of China’s “virus leadership,” with the message being “the virus is very deadly and contagious, but the total society response orchestrated by the CCP is the model for the world.”

The constant propagandizing of these messages and claims by state-run Chinese media and diplomats was picked up and repeated by China-sympathetic Western media and leftist politicians around the world over the past two years.

Many governments implemented social distancing, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns that were modeled on the authoritarian methods implemented by China, which claims to this very day a grand total of 4,636 Chinese deaths from the virus—a number that has not changed since May 2020, as compiled and maintained by Worldometers . And that number MUST NOT change if the propaganda narrative that China has “defeated the virus” is to retain credibility and influence.

The title screen of a propaganda program called “How Xi Jinping Led China’s COVID-19 Battle,” from the CGTN archive, is seen as it plays on a computer monitor in London, England, on Feb. 04, 2021. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

However, politically-motivated phrases, slogans, and euphemisms frequently have expiration dates or, rather, dates beyond which their propaganda values for political purposes are “counterproductive.” Exposure of the truth that disproves the claim is the leading factor in determining expiration dates. And a number of phrases and slogans enabling the authoritarians in the West to implement virus control measures identical to those touted by China have already passed their expiration dates.

Let us examine some of the widely disseminated virus-related claims made by “government experts” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and repeated endlessly by the legacy media echo chamber during the virus panic over the last two years.

15 Days to Slow the Spread

At the recommendation of government public health authorities, especially Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the president’s chief medical adviser, President Donald Trump issued the first national guidelines on March 16, 2020, recommending that Americans should “ stay home for about two weeks ” in an effort to contain the spread of the virus.

Many governors, particular in blue states, took that as a signal to implement a series of lockdown measures and social distancing mandates, which have had questionable effectiveness not just in the United States but also in Europe, as this study reported by the Swiss Policy Research Foundation  on Dec. 23 headlined (emphasis added): “Austria, one of the most repressive European countries during the coronavirus pandemic, has recently overtaken Sweden in terms of total covid  mortality, showing that almost all government interventions have been ineffective and unjustified.”

Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve

This is a variation on the preceding theme. Flatten the curve relates to the graphing of new virus cases and deaths with/from the virus over time. Supposedly, the lockdowns and stay-at-home measures would prevent escalating cases and deaths in the future and keep the associated time-series curves “flat.”

A grossly underreported fact that has been virtually ignored by federal health authorities and the legacy media is that U.S. deaths attributed to the virus in 2021 exceeded the total deaths  in 2020. So much for the phrases that initiated the authoritarian lockdowns in early 2020 that disrupted people’s lives and businesses.

A Vaccine  Prevents Infection

A vaccine today isn’t the vaccine your mother told you about! Most people understood the traditional definition of a vaccine because they had received several over their lives and were told what to expect by their doctors.

Before 2015, a vaccine meant a killed or weakened virus introduced into the body to prevent a disease (which was why they were once called “immunizations”). The definition was modified in 2015 to “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease,” with the word “immunity” suspiciously being changed to “protection” in 2021, according to the Miami Herald .

Were people purposely fooled into taking the various COVID-19 vaccines because they believed they were being “immunized” against the virus according to the old definition? Because there are plenty of news stories about the (in)effectiveness of the various mRNA injections and the need for “boosters” on a seemingly ever-decreasing periodicity.

Here is one such media report  summarizing a recent study: “A Harvard study of 68 nations and 2,947 counties in the United States published in the European Journal of Epidemiology  is shattering the argument that the mRNA therapeutic drugs being marketed as ‘vaccines’ do anything significantly to stop the spread of Covid-19.”

A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated

This is the latest fear-mongering phrase from those pushing mRNA injection mandates, claiming without evidence that all new cases are being spread by “the unvaccinated.”

The definition of “the unvaccinated” seems to change every day. First, it referred to anyone who had not gotten a first injection. Then, it referred to those who had not received a recommended booster (one could have gotten the initial injection, but would be considered to be “unvaccinated” for not having received the booster).

Now, with studies showing that the injections lose effectiveness in a few short months or less , an endless series of boosters is being forecasted as a requirement in order to be “fully vaccinated.”

The definition is like shifting sands and changes after each expiration date is achieved! In addition, studies have shown that vaccinated people themselves have spread the virus to others , and that large numbers of previously injected people have been subsequently infected by virus variants  over the past few months.

Fully Vaccinated

See above for the changing definition of what it means to be “vaccinated” according to rapidly changing federal health guidelines. No one ever predicted in early 2020 that multiple booster shots would be deemed necessary over time. Virtually everyone who received the first injection believed they were being immunized against the virus.

Is it a stretch to imagine boosters being recommended monthly at some point in the future? “Fully vaccinated” is another political weapon used to control behavior to which people are becoming wise.

Asymptomatic People Spread the Virus

Medical authorities have insisted that asymptomatic people can spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as noted here  and here . Yet, there have been studies such as this one  and this one  that have been buried that determined that asymptomatic transmission were rare “if occurring at all.”

However, it is quite interesting that the NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, claimed on Dec. 24  that the recent spread of the virus among NFL players is not due to players who are asymptomatic: “I think all of our concern about [asymptomatic spread] has been going down based on what we’ve been seeing throughout the past several months. … [W]hat I can say to you is that I think it’s a very, very tiny fraction of the overall problem, if it exists at all.”

Sills knows the truth from direct experience, it would appear.

Los Angeles Rams’ Brandon Powell flips into the end zone during a 61-yard punt return for a touchdown in the second half of an NFL football game against the Minnesota Vikings in Minneapolis, on Dec. 26, 2021. (Bruce Kluckhohn/AP Photo)

The Vaccines Have No Adverse Effects

Federal health authorities such as Dr. Fauci  have maintained that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are “safe and effective” since their emergency use authorizations (EUAs) were first granted in December 2020 to Pfizer  and Moderna .

However, key points from Dr. Joseph Mercola’s analysis  of the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System Data (VAERS) as it relates to mRNA vaccines dispute that claim in spades:

- “Data suggest 1 in 317 boys aged 16 to 17 will get myocarditis from the COVID shots, and after a third booster, that number may be even higher.”

- “VAERS reporting is likely underreported by a factor of 41. Since there are over 8,000 domestic deaths reported to VAERS, and 98% of those deaths are ‘excess deaths,’ this suggests that as many as 300,000 Americans may have died from the COVID shots thus far.”

- “The deadliest vaccine ever made is the smallpox vaccine, which killed 1 in 1 million vaccinated people. The COVID shots kills 822 per million fully vaccinated, making it more than 800 times deadlier than the deadliest vaccine in human history.”

No wonder the mRNA injections are only provisional under the FDA’s emergency use authorizations—because the lawsuits would be flying if the FDA had fully authorized their use and removed the legal protections granted under EUA approval!

Super-Spreader Events

This politically-charged phrase was all the rage in leftist circles in the United States during the 2020 presidential campaign. Legacy media reporters consistently claimed that large gatherings of Trump supporters and others were accelerating the spread of the virus and its variants.

The term super-spreader event  was applied to all Trump rallies , patriotic events such as Fourth of July parades , boat rallies in support of Trump, and even the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis , South Dakota. Except that the massive explosion of new cases did not happen as predicted. The phrase cannot be politically exploited by the Democrat media via their media echo chamber anymore and is rarely, if ever, used these days except at places like the Poynter Institute .

The Zoonotic Theory Is Correct

Since early 2020, the CCP has claimed that the virus originated in animals and was passed to humans most likely in a Wuhan wet market (the “zoonotic theory”).

Chinese propaganda has subsequently been laser focused on obfuscating the origins of the virus, with the “denial and blame-shifting about the virus origins [that] has continued unabated in Chinese state-run media from early 2020 to the present day,” as previously noted by The Epoch Times .

That article also noted: “ The WSJ reported  that the CGG-CGG amino acid sequence found in the virus is manmade and can only have been inserted through gain-of-function research, as the CGG-CGG sequence is not found in nature.”

There is zero evidence of the zoonotic theory and increasing evidence of a laboratory leak of a bioengineered virus.

This phrase has passed its expiration date, too!

The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Masks Work!

The wearing of masks was mandated without any clinical studies demonstrating their effectiveness. As reported in August , Dr. Francis Collins, the now-former director of the National Institute of Health, admitted in an interview with Hugh Hewitt that school mask mandates are not based on science.

It gets worse. As reported by Life Site News , there have been “47 studies confirming that masks are useless in preventing Covid infection and transmission.” Furthermore, there have been “32 studies confirming the negative health effects caused by frequent mask wearing, especially for young children,” including increased incidence of bacterial diseases and adverse psychological effects due to long-term use.

In short, mask mandates are not scientifically based. Was it medical malpractice for Collins, Fauci, and the rest to have buried these studies on the wearing of masks?

Vaccine Passports Work!

Well, no, they don’t, according to experts from Spain’s inter-regional COVID-19 committee, who “have concluded that Covid passports are ineffective in terms of reducing infection, and may even be sending out the dangerous message that being vaccinated means a person cannot spread the virus,” according to The Telegraph.

Check out the 9:22 a.m. log entry  at The Telegraph for the details, as the study applies to other European countries, too.

Yet, despite the science, U.S. authorities and others are feverishly planning for the implementation of vaccine passports  for air travel and commerce-related activities.

What happened to the omnipresent leftist slogan of “trust the science”?

Children Must be Vaccinated!

U.S. federal health authorities have been pushing mRNA injections for children of increasingly younger ages, with Dr. Fauci again leading the charge as reported by CNBC  here: “I do believe … that we should vaccinate the children, and there are a number of reasons.” Except that, once again, he is wrong.

A major study recently completed in Germany  shows that there have been ZERO deaths due to the virus among healthy children: “[N]ot one healthy child in Germany from ages 5 to 18 died of COVID-19 during the first 15 months of the pandemic.”

And never mind the increasing reports of myocarditis and other adverse reactions in teenagers receiving the injections, with even the CDC reporting that myocarditis risks are “ higher than expected .”

Meanwhile, as reported by Dr. Robert Malone , the inventor of the mRNA technology used in the vaccines, over 16,000 physicians and medical scientists around the world have signed a declaration publicly declaring that healthy children should NOT be vaccinated for COVID-19.

The general population is starting to figure out the dangers, too, as lawsuits continue to stop local school vaccine mandates in several states and counties in the United States.

China has ‘Beaten the Virus’

Lastly, this prevailing myth has taken some major hits lately.

On Dec. 22, Chinese authorities locked down the northeast city of Xi’an and ordered all 13 million residents to stay home .

And an article from The Wall Street Journal  summarizes other recent events that demonstrate that China has NOT “beaten the virus,” including locking tens of thousands of people inside Shanghai Disneyland, the closing of two schools in Beijing, Beijing residents reporting having been “sent to centralized quarantine or being locked in their homes” (with contact tracing sensors placed outside their doors!), etc.

On Dec. 24, China Daily reported  some drastic medical preparations for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be held in Beijing: “The competition zones in Beijing and its Yanqing district have set up 88 medical stations for on-site medical treatment and triage of the sick and injured and have 1,140 medical staff members assigned from 17 designated hospitals and two emergency agencies.”

Do Chinese authorities still claim that China has “beaten the virus”? No one should believe them.

Conclusion

Leftist politicians and their legacy media allies adopted CCP narratives associated with false claims of successful Chinese responses to contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Those CCP narratives helped enable the authoritarian lockdowns and mandates that have crippled the world economy and destroyed millions of lives over the past two years.

The clichés, euphemisms, slogans, and phrases used as political weapons to psychologically influence and control people during the lockdowns and mandates have virtually all subsequently exceeded their expiration dates—for political expediency purposes—and have proven to be false.

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-beijings-pandemic-narratives-influenced-western-actions-in-curbing-the-spread-of-covid-19_4180463.html

The Great Social Experiment: China’s Draconian Lockdowns and the Loss of Human Agency

This photo shows nearly empty roads in Xi’an city, in China’s Shaanxi Province, on Dec. 28, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

John Mac Ghlionn

January 14, 2022

Epoch Times Commentary

Do lockdowns actually work? The answer appears to be a rather resounding no. The argument in favor of lockdowns—both from a scientific and medical standpoint—carries very little weight .

Not only are lockdowns ineffective, they are unnecessarily cruel. This cruelty comes in many forms: economically, psychologically, spiritually, and existentially.

Human beings are social creatures. We are not designed to cut ourselves off from society. Extended hibernation is necessary for many animals, but it’s detrimental to human beings.

The cure, as they say, should never be worse than the disease. Lockdowns, especially mass lockdowns, pose a far graver threat to society than Omicron, a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But try telling this to the tyrants in Beijing.

In Xi’an, a large city and capital of Shaanxi Province in central China , millions of people now find themselves placed in restrictive lockdowns.  The city, once called Chang’an or “Eternal Peace,” has become an Eternal Prison.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to reports , has reportedly set up “brutal, eerie-looking quarantine camps” throughout the city, just weeks before the country hosts the Winter Olympics.

Why has the CCP locked down the city? All in the hope of achieving “zero COVID.” China is now the last major country  to pursue this rather ridiculous goal. I say ridiculous because the idea of “zero COVID” is just not realistic . We must learn to live with the disease.

To quote Jeremy Farrar , an infectious disease physician, the key question facing society is this: “How do we move on, rationally and emotionally, from a state of acute [emergency] to a state of transition to endemicity?” Although the “transition period is going to be very bumpy,” it’s necessary.

Human beings cannot live in a perpetual state of fear. Just like the common cold, COVID-19, it seems, is here to stay. Governments must learn to adapt. People need to move on with their lives. Again, though, try telling this to the tyrants in Beijing, who appear to be doubling down on the most misguided of “zero COVID” strategies.

What’s the endgame here?

A sort of slow-motion self-destruction? Perhaps.

Not surprisingly, China’s economy appears to be taking a hit. Analysts at Goldman Sachs recently cut  China’s 2022 growth forecast to 4.3 percent, from 4.8 percent previously. But, I argue, the ideological myopia of the CCP is far more concerning than the actual slow-motion economic suicide that’s now occurring.

Workers labor at a construction site in Shanghai, China on July 12, 2021. (Aly Song/Reuters)

An Isolated China

Of course, many Westerners, especially in the United States, will read this and say, “So what if China, our biggest rival, self-destructs.”

However, as China becomes more isolated , it becomes more dangerous. The idea of a globalized China, I’m sure, fails to fill many readers with a sense of joy. But an isolated China would be much more dangerous . A more isolated China wouldn’t necessarily mean a China that disappears from the rader; a country that size and that powerful doesn’t just disappear, nor does it just fade away into obscurity. It goes out with a bang—and that bang would have a global impact. A more isolated China would become an increasingly desperate one—more willing to engage in serious acts of subterfuge and deceit. We already have one Hermit Kingdom; we don’t need a second.

Also, a more isolated China would result in even more brutal acts being carried out on innocent people throughout the country. It’s of utmost importance that we separate the Chinese people from the CCP. The cruelty being inflicted on tens of millions of innocent Chinese people is as inhumane as it is unnecessary. These people, powerless in the extreme, are not representative of the oppressors in Beijing—we should never forget this.

In the aforementioned Xi’an, as the journalist Nicole Hao recently noted , Chinese authorities sealed residents’ homes, “but didn’t arrange for a reliable food supply.” These people, locked down for roughly three weeks, are “lacking in food and are on the edge of mental breakdown.”

There’s a perverse, social experiment being carried out in Xi’an, and innocent people are losing their minds. Some, sadly, will lose their lives. Some wonder if Hell is a real place—it is. Millions of people already live in it, and many of these people are situated in China.

There’s a lesson to be learned here. Lockdowns are not the answer. They never were. Human beings are not farm animals. We should not be sealed off from society. Our every move should not be monitored. We deserve the right to make our own informed decisions. We deserve to be free.

What’s occurring in China is brutal, but it’s not necessarily surprising. In many ways, the Chinese people have always been prisoners, regularly subjected to cruel and unusual punishments. Now, though, the people of Xi’an are literal prisoners, quite literally sealed off from society. When will they be freed? A week from now, a month, a year? Sadly, we don’t know.

John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. His work has been published, among others, by the New York Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, and The Spectator US. He covers psychology and social relations, and has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-great-social-experiment-chinas-draconian-lockdowns-and-the-loss-of-human-agency_4210362.html

Pandemic Lessons Learned: Scientific Debate Silenced, With Deadly Consequences

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a Senate committee hearing on the COVID-19 response, on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 18, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images)

Joe Wang

February 5, 2022

Epoch Times Commentary

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines science as “knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation.” So science is human knowledge of facts, which has nothing to do with human intention or politics.

Yet Mao Zedong said in 1940 that “Natural science is one of man’s weapons in his fight for freedom.” In Mao’s China, science became a tool for the communist leader and his comrades to conquer the world and achieve their “freedom.”

For my purposes here, I will call fact-based science Objective Science and Mao’s totalitarian science Subjective Science.

My Sister Didn’t Have to Die

I lost two brothers to infectious diseases, and one sister to famine.

I am the ninth and the youngest child in my family, and I was named Jiu (meaning “ninth” in Chinese). But three of my siblings died very young. Two boys died from unknown infectious diseases days after they were born, and a girl, Zhen, died from malnutrition during the Great Famine in 1960 when she was only 3 years old.

Life was tough growing up during China’s Culture Revolution, to put it mildly. However, life was also very beautiful, as I enjoyed the love of my parents and my siblings. I thought it was so unfair that my two brothers did not make it. As for Zhen, it was unfortunate, but the Great Famine was a natural disaster, as we were told by the government. There was nothing anyone could have done about it.

I did not want the tragic death of my brothers to ever happen to another defenseless child, so I devoted my scientific career to vaccine development. Thanks to the well-tested, safe, and effective vaccines that have been developed, we see far fewer children die from infectious diseases today than 70 years ago.

A small group of Chinese youths walk past several dazibaos, communist revolutionary placards, in downtown Beijing during the Cultural Revolution in February 1967.  (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)

As a vaccine research scientist in Canada, I realized my dream of advancing fact-based science to reduce the child mortality rate. Also, unlike in China, where information the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deems harmful is censored, I had access to uncensored information in Canada. That’s how I discovered a phenomenon that could be more deadly than any infectious disease: Subjective Science.

I learned that my sister Zhen did not have to die; she would have lived if it wasn’t for Mao’s insane Great Leap Forward campaign. Many families in our village died with no survivors, while my family was one of the luckiest with only one dead.

And it was a good harvest year! After the start of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in order to please their superiors, local communist officials exaggerated the reporting of their agricultural output, sometimes 10 times or more than the real output. They then had to collect the harvest in its entirety as tax, leaving nothing for the farmers. The Great Famine was largely man-made.

There were scientists and scholars who voiced their disbelief about the reported figures. However, they were labelled as rightists and anti-revolutionists and silenced. Some were executed.

As a direct result of the communist propaganda and the controlled narratives based on political campaigns that ignored common sense and scientific findings, millions of people like Zhen died. The agricultural experts who verified and praised the fake reports, representing the science as Mao wanted them to, were practising Subjective Science.

Some may argue that even though the Great Leap Forward was an abysmal failure, the CCP has changed. Today, CCP officials are well-dressed, smart businesspeople. Nobody would stoop to verifying fake reports, even if pressured by their superiors.

Well, I wanted to believe that too. But in essence, today’s CCP is the same as it was back in 1958. All you have to do is look at how they handled the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019 and January 2020. They still practice Subjective Science. Facts are not important. The CCP’s narratives are the only allowed thoughts on SARS-CoV-2, be it the origin of the virus, human-to-human transmission capability, lockdown measures, etc.

Not only that. Since the pandemic , it looks as though the CCP’s Subjective Science had pervaded the United States and the free world.

Dr. Fauci: ‘I Represent Science’

On Nov. 28, 2021, I watched Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical adviser to the President of the United States, say on CBS’s Face the Nation: “It’s easy to criticize [me], but they are really criticizing science, because I represent science.”

I thought, how interesting, in China, science is used to serve the Communist Party. The CCP represents science in China. The CCP’s science is not to be criticized or questioned, but to be followed. If you criticize the Party, you are criticizing the representative of science. Now suddenly in the United States we have an individual who says he represents science! And anyone who dares to challenge him is deemed anti-science.

Science is about facts and truth. The interpretation of facts is often debated to reach well-thought-out conclusions. Research findings must go through a peer-review process before being recognized as scientific. When was this basic scientific principle replaced by CCP-style science, where a powerful and influential person claims to represent science, and therefore cannot be criticized?

In June 2021, after the contents of redacted emails from Dr. Fauci on the origins of COVID-19  were published, some things that had puzzled me from the beginning of the pandemic started to make sense.

I was a true believer in science and devoted my career to vaccine development for two decades, the second of which was with the largest vaccine company in the world at that time. I always believed in my fellow scientists as being noble, trustworthy, honest, and humble. So I almost fell out of my chair when I read a research paper in February 2020 on Nature Medicine’s website titled “ The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 .” It was written by Kristian Andersen (Scripps Institute), Andrew Rambaut (University of Edinburgh), Ian Lipkin (Columbia University), Edward Holmes (University of Sydney), and Robert Garry (Tulane University).

A creative rendition of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles. Note: not to scale. (NIAID [shorturl.at/hHKWY])

The authors showed that SARS-CoV-2 binds to human ACE2 much better than any computer programs predicted. “Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation,” they wrote.

Excuse me? If SARS-CoV-2 infects people better than your computer predicts, then the only conclusion you can draw is that your computer sucks. How did these world-renowned scientists get the basic logic so wrong? And how did the prestigious publication Nature Medicine not catch that? Did anyone even read the paper before publishing it, not to mention peer review it?

This paper, as crappy as it is, has been read 5.64 million times, referenced by 2,123 other papers, and used by authority figures such as Dr. Fauci to conclude that the debate on COVID-19’s origin is over, and label the possibility of a non-natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 as a conspiracy theory.

It seemed that the SARS-CoV-2 origin narrative had been decided upon—even when the existing facts did not support the narrative. The scientists took the existing facts and forced them to fit the preferred narrative, and also forced the general public to accept it, while silencing all other opinions and essentially banning scientific debate on the issue.

These scientists remind me of the agricultural experts in China in 1958.

Seeing what was happening in the science world, and the controlled narrative of the authorities on scientific matters, as a former proud scientist I was dismayed and distressed. I couldn’t believe prominent scientists like Kristian Andersen and publications like Nature Medicine could betray the very principle of science: telling the truth. Instead, they used people’s trust in science to silence scientific debate and advance their own narrative. This is Subjective Science, the Mao-style totalitarian science, at work in the free world!

I decided to write to Nature Medicine to complain about the paper and demand a retraction or at least an explanation. I sent my letter, titled “It is Premature to Conclude that SARS-CoV-2 Did not Have a Lab Origin,” by email on April 15 but did not receive a reply. Then I forwarded my email to Andersen, the paper’s lead author, with no response either.

Maybe I was being naive to question their science. It might have actually been their intention to use the facts to draw conclusions that are opposite to the facts, and drive the narrative directed by their masters—just like the so-called agricultural experts praising the fake reports in China during the Great Leap Forward.

It would take a corrupt system to do that. Is this really happening in America, I wondered?

Andersen’s Flip-Flop

Well, the Fauci emails accessed via Freedom of Information Act requests made public in June 2021 revealed what happened. On Jan. 31, 2020, Andersen emailed Fauci about the coronavirus, saying, “some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” The next day, a group of people, including Fauci and Andersen, held a secret teleconference. The Nature Medicine article concluding that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” was published online a few days later (and finalized on March 17, 2020).

Kristian Andersen briefs reporters in San Diego on Dec. 30, 2020. (The Associated Press)

We now know that in early February 2020, something happened to change Andersen’s opinion from “some of the features (potentially) look engineered” to “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Sounds exactly like what Subjective Scientists would do.

Interestingly, after the publication of the paper—which was used by Fauci to silence all other voices—the main authors, Andersen and Garry, received an $8.9 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID on Aug. 17, 2020.

A win-win-win all around. But the taxpayers are the losers, the public are the losers, and potentially millions of lives are at risk due to this Mao-style Subjective Science.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one questioning the Nature Medicine paper. In January 2021, Dr. Steven Quay from Seattle published a paper titled “ Bayesian Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Origin ” where he revealed he had written to Andersen on May 25, 2020, questioning his conclusions. He didn’t get a response either. Instead, Andersen blocked Quay from following his Twitter account.

There are so many lessons to be learned from missteps during this pandemic, such as the rushed vaccines, the damaging lockdowns, the denial of sound early treatments, the disregarding of natural immunity, and so on. In my opinion, the most important lesson is that we must get back to science that is fact-based, Objective Science. Any scientific conclusions must be vigorously debated based on raw data, and no one should be allowed to claim to represent science.

Facts and truth are stubborn. They are sometimes slow in coming, but they do bubble to the surface eventually. Dr. Fauci and company tried very hard to suppress the scientific investigation that SARS-CoV-2 might have escaped from a laboratory. Now, it has become an accepted possibility, after all attempts to find a natural origin failed.

Natural Immunity

The issue of natural immunity and how it was cut out of the equation in the fight against COVID is another example of Subjective Science.

It is known to all scientists with even a slight immunology training that a person develops natural immunity after recovering from an infection. The protection afforded by natural immunity is what all vaccines strive to achieve; some do it better than others, but vaccines rarely surpass natural immunity. It was extremely anti-science to impose vaccine mandates on the millions in Canada and America who contracted and then recovered from COVID-19. Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control admits in a report released  on Jan. 28 that natural immunity against COVID-19 is superior to any of the available vaccine regimens.

So what happens to people who lost their jobs because they refused to take the jab, but have recovered from COVID and are now immune? Why not adjust the vaccine mandate accordingly? Why are public health policies still dictated by a few people “representing the science” rather than by science itself?

It is refreshing, though, to see that the scientific community has started to awaken to the narrative-driven reports in scientific journals. For example, the prestigious British Medical Journal published an editorial on Jan. 19 titled “ Covid-19 vaccines and treatments : we must have raw data, now.” It is a timely call and relates to the very core of the issue. In order to know the science, we have to have the facts.

But don’t expect to be able to peruse the raw data on the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines any time soon, as Pfizer has indicated that it will not

begin entertaining requests for trial data until May 2025. We paid for the vaccines with our tax dollars (and many paid with their lives, as vaccine-related deaths do happen), but we’re asked to just take the vaccine and blindly trust the “representatives of science” like Dr. Fauci, without any kind of verification that the vaccines are safe and effective?

The agricultural experts in China during the Great Leap Forward did release their data, just no one believed any of it was real. I just hope people’s trust in scientists today is not in danger of plummeting to that point. Substantial changes in our scientific funding system are needed if confidence in science’s reputation is to be restored.

Before Canada and the United States become Mao-style communist states, we still have a chance to get rid of Subjective Science and restore fact-based, Objective Science. That will put us in a much better position to take on the next challenge Mother Nature may throw at us.

Joe Wang, Ph.D., was a lead scientist for Sanofi Pasteur’s SARS vaccine project in 2003. He is now the president of New Tang Dynasty TV (Canada), a media partner of The Epoch Times.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pandemic-lessons-learned-scientific-debate-silenced-with-deadly-consequences_4256843.html