Truth or Consequences

Jim Geraghty at National Review has published a timeline that documents all of the lies told by Chinese authorities and their lackeys at the World Health Organization about Covid-19 from its onset in early December through January of this year.

The timeline is too long and detailed to reproduce here, but here are a few salient excerpts. Geraghty has links to all of his claims at the OP:

December 31: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declares, “The investigation so far has not found any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection.” This is the opposite of the belief of the doctors working on patients in Wuhan, and two doctors were already suspected of contracting the virus.

January 1: The Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued a summons to Dr. Li Wenliang, accusing him of “spreading rumors.” Two days later, at a police station, Dr. Li signed a statement acknowledging his “misdemeanor” and promising not to commit further “unlawful acts.” Seven other people are arrested on similar charges and their fate is unknown.

Also that day, “after several batches of genome sequence results had been returned to hospitals and submitted to health authorities, an employee of one genomics company received a phone call from an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission, ordering the company to stop testing samples from Wuhan related to the new disease and destroy all existing samples.”

According to a New York Times study of cellphone data from China, 175,000 people left Wuhan that day. According to global travel data research firm OAG, 21 countries had direct flights to Wuhan. In the first quarter of 2019 for comparison, 13,267 air passengers traveled from Wuhan, China, to destinations in the United States, or about 4,422 per month. The U.S. government would not bar foreign nationals who had traveled to China from entering the country for another month.

January 3: The Chinese government continued efforts to suppress all information about the virus: “China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them.”

January 10: After unknowingly treating a patient with the Wuhan coronavirus, Dr. Li Wenliang started coughing and developed a fever. He was hospitalized on January 12. In the following days, Li’s condition deteriorated so badly that he was admitted to the intensive care unit and given oxygen support.

The New York Times quoted the Wuhan City Health Commission’s declaration that “there is no evidence the virus can spread among humans.” Chinese doctors continued to find transmission among family members, contradicting the official statements from the city health commission.

January 18: HHS Secretary Azar had his first discussion about the virus with President Trump....Despite the fact that Wuhan doctors know the virus is contagious, city authorities allow 40,000 families to gather and share home-cooked food in a Lunar New Year banquet.

January 21: The CDC announced the first U.S. case of coronavirus in a Snohomish County, Wash., resident who returning from China six days earlier.

By this point, millions of people had left Wuhan, carrying the virus all around China and into other countries.

January 22: WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus continued to praise China’s handling of the outbreak.

January 24: The U.S reported its second case in Chicago. Within two days, new cases were reported in Los Angeles, Orange County, and Arizona. The virus was by now in several locations in the United States, and the odds of preventing an outbreak were dwindling to zero.

Had the Chinese authorities acted appropriately and honestly we might have avoided most of the suffering and most of the economic misery we're likely to incur from the quarantines we're undergoing. The Chinese need to pay a price for what, through their mendacity and irresponsibility, they've unleashed on the world.

Meanwhile, the West needs to get over its foolish obsession with political correctness and our inordinate fear of offending someone whose ethnicity differs from our own. Bickering over whether it's racist to call the Chinese virus the Chinese virus is asinine. So are sentiments like this:

On February 4th Mayor of Florence, Italy, Dario Nardella, urged residents to hug Chinese people to encourage them in the fight against the novel coronavirus. Meanwhile, a member of Associazione Unione Giovani Italo Cinesi, a Chinese society in Italy aimed at promoting friendship between people in the two countries, called for respect for novel coronavirus patients during a street demonstration. “I’m not a virus. I’m a human. Eradicate the prejudice.”

Maybe that explains, at least in part, why the people of northern Italy are suffering so much today from this contagion.

It's not "prejudice" to avoid those who might be infected. If it were then many of us today are prejudiced against our co-workers, friends and even our families.

Nor is it prejudice, or more precisely, ethnic bigotry, to condemn the handling of this disease by the Chinese authorities and to criticize them for stifling and perhaps punishing (executing?) the heroic doctors and other medical personnel who tried to get the truth out to the world.

The long-suffering Chinese people have for over 70 years been cruelly oppressed by communist despots. It's time the world stopped fawning over them and started telling the truth about them.