Jeffrey A. Tucker
December 26, 2022
Commentary
Audio PDF
And then just like that, COVID controls are gone in China. So far as we can tell, it has all come to an end, without explanation and of course without apology. For almost 3 years now, China has faced random and draconian lockdowns and testing requirements, complete with extreme quarantines, all based on the myth that a respiratory pathogen can be controlled by a powerful government.
In many ways, Chinese leader Xi Jinping regarded his use of these methods as his greatest triumph. He punished people in the CCP who raised doubts. He incentivized many local officials to lie about cases and deaths. He bragged publicly and privately about his glorious achievement. All except for one thing: it didn’t actually work.
So far as we can tell, the policy end was forced on Xi because it became too expensive. Local governments were running out of money for mass and frequent testing. The population was becoming very restless, even protesting in the streets, which is risky in China beyond anything people in the West can imagine.
Plus, it’s possible that Xi feels politically safe enough to do this now, whereas he did not six months ago. In addition, even if he cannot claim to have stopped COVID, he can at least take credit for having trolled the entire planet Earth to destroy their own economies. Even if China’s GDP took a huge hit, he inspired most governments of the world to undermine human rights, violate privacy, engage in massive censorship, and demoralize their populations.
The trolling began in January 2020 with a series of fake videos that gave a wildly incorrect impression of the deadliness of the disease. Bots were spamming the world with videos of people dropping dead in the streets, hospitals overwhelmed, and terror in the population. The gullible West believed it all and began to prepare for the onslaught in case the virus made its way here, which it did.
Then the CCP locked down Wuhan for a few weeks and claimed that it had magically made the virus disappear. It invited a delegation from the World Health Organization, which came to Wuhan and other countries in mid-February. Among them were representatives from the United States, UK, and Europe. They released a disgusting report that said:
“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities. Despite ongoing outbreaks in their own areas, Governors and Mayors have continued to send thousands of health care workers and tons of vital PPE supplies into Hubei province and Wuhan city.
“At the individual level, the Chinese people have reacted to this outbreak with courage and conviction. They have accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures—whether the suspension of public gatherings, the month-long ‘stay at home’ advisories or prohibitions on travel. Throughout an intensive 9-days of site visits across China, in frank discussions from the level of local community mobilizers and frontline health care providers to top scientists, Governors and Mayors, the Joint Mission was struck by the sincerity and dedication that each brings to this COVID-19 response.”
Those words are nothing short of treason. And the United States signed off on it, as if the lying Communist Party knew more about mitigating a respiratory pathogen, a mild one for most of the population, better than trained scientists in the U.S. who had actually studied this. Anthony Fauci’s own deputy assistant was on the trip and bragged about the China response. This favorable report echoed the previous words of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the WHO who had told the world that China is “setting a new standard.”
In a matter of weeks, most of the world had adopted the tactics of destruction that China itself has now abandoned. And what do the disease mitigators have to say for themselves now? They are trying to pretend like it never happened, even as whole social orders have been traumatized beyond anything previously imaginable.
And what of China today? The whole population has a vast immunity debt to pay, which will mean massive sickness for the better part of a year. You might say: oh this was smart because now the variant on the loose in the world is more mild. But please get this straight: what is a mild versus what is a serious variant is largely contingent on pre-existing and acquired immunity. A pathogen that you and I might shake off in a day or two could kill a member of a native tribe in an Amazon rainforest who had never been previously exposed.
So after two years of trying to suppress this virus, China is going to face a very hard time in the coming year. But of course under the Chinese political system, no one will pay the price for this economic and public health disaster. Xi and the CCP will continue to rule and pretend that they did everything right.
One might think that this situation would amount to a complete humiliation for the likes of Fauci and the NIH, not to mention dozens of U.S. agencies that were involved in this fiasco, to say nothing of the hundreds of governments around the world that went along with the ridiculous and evil CCP methods of virus control. But we are not seeing it, and that is simply because the whole of the Western media played along with this and denounced anyone who resisted the absurdities.
Not only that: Xi and the CCP have managed to bring practices to the West with which we have been previously unfamiliar. Only three years ago, a person in a mask would have been regarded as a danger and probably a robber. No one ever wore them but perhaps crazy people or surgeons standing over open bodies, or perhaps miners wanting to filter the air. Regular people would never wear a mask in the normal course of life. Somehow we survived.
But today, we see between 10 and 50 percent of the population masking up despite the lack of any evidence that they achieve anything to stop the spread of a respiratory pathogen. Not to put too fine a point on it but the holes in the mask are vastly larger than the virus itself. Wearing them is nothing short of a superstition and a tacit homage to Xi Jinping. It is not the way of the West!
Also we are careening fast into a world of vaccine passports. Why do you suppose that the United States retains them for visitors from other countries? It is because certain elites want to hold on to some vestige of control in hopes of implementing them here on the way toward a China-style social credit system. This is also why social media censorship survives everywhere except Twitter among the major platforms.
Despite all the failures, the CCP has something to be proud of from its COVID response. It utterly and completely flopped as a measure to control a virus but it did troll the entire planet earth but for a few nations to go along with its totalitarian measures, thus reducing economic growth for the whole world and giving China a leg up in its struggle to be the world’s leading superpower. The complete failure of a policy then becomes its greatest moment of success.
And even today, we see nothing like honesty from any ruling-class elites on what they did to freedom here and all over the world. Meanwhile, China seems to have given up its battle for Zero COVID, just washing its hands of the whole operation as if it never happened. Very clever.
We in the West need to get wise as to what happened. There should be hearings and some kind of justice for those who went along. We need retractions of lying interviews and articles plus some kind of coming to terms instead of continued coverup about what happened. Finally, we need the complete elimination of all censorship and controls that came about over three years. The only way to beat tyranny is with the practice of freedom. We need to embrace that now before it is too late.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-...d_4943740.html
eReading:
Red Dragon Menacing (III)- On CCP’s All-Out Aggression Against Humanity(8) – PDF(preview)(9M); ePub(8M); MOBI(7M)
The Destructive CCP Model(IV) PDF(Preview2.8MB) ePub(2.5MB) Mobi(2.2MB)
The Mother Of All Evils --
Jiang Zemin‘s Legacy to Mankind PDF(1M) ePub(<1M) Mobi(<1M)
December 26, 2022
Commentary
Audio PDF
And then just like that, COVID controls are gone in China. So far as we can tell, it has all come to an end, without explanation and of course without apology. For almost 3 years now, China has faced random and draconian lockdowns and testing requirements, complete with extreme quarantines, all based on the myth that a respiratory pathogen can be controlled by a powerful government.
In many ways, Chinese leader Xi Jinping regarded his use of these methods as his greatest triumph. He punished people in the CCP who raised doubts. He incentivized many local officials to lie about cases and deaths. He bragged publicly and privately about his glorious achievement. All except for one thing: it didn’t actually work.
So far as we can tell, the policy end was forced on Xi because it became too expensive. Local governments were running out of money for mass and frequent testing. The population was becoming very restless, even protesting in the streets, which is risky in China beyond anything people in the West can imagine.
Plus, it’s possible that Xi feels politically safe enough to do this now, whereas he did not six months ago. In addition, even if he cannot claim to have stopped COVID, he can at least take credit for having trolled the entire planet Earth to destroy their own economies. Even if China’s GDP took a huge hit, he inspired most governments of the world to undermine human rights, violate privacy, engage in massive censorship, and demoralize their populations.
The trolling began in January 2020 with a series of fake videos that gave a wildly incorrect impression of the deadliness of the disease. Bots were spamming the world with videos of people dropping dead in the streets, hospitals overwhelmed, and terror in the population. The gullible West believed it all and began to prepare for the onslaught in case the virus made its way here, which it did.
Then the CCP locked down Wuhan for a few weeks and claimed that it had magically made the virus disappear. It invited a delegation from the World Health Organization, which came to Wuhan and other countries in mid-February. Among them were representatives from the United States, UK, and Europe. They released a disgusting report that said:
“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities. Despite ongoing outbreaks in their own areas, Governors and Mayors have continued to send thousands of health care workers and tons of vital PPE supplies into Hubei province and Wuhan city.
“At the individual level, the Chinese people have reacted to this outbreak with courage and conviction. They have accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures—whether the suspension of public gatherings, the month-long ‘stay at home’ advisories or prohibitions on travel. Throughout an intensive 9-days of site visits across China, in frank discussions from the level of local community mobilizers and frontline health care providers to top scientists, Governors and Mayors, the Joint Mission was struck by the sincerity and dedication that each brings to this COVID-19 response.”
Those words are nothing short of treason. And the United States signed off on it, as if the lying Communist Party knew more about mitigating a respiratory pathogen, a mild one for most of the population, better than trained scientists in the U.S. who had actually studied this. Anthony Fauci’s own deputy assistant was on the trip and bragged about the China response. This favorable report echoed the previous words of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the WHO who had told the world that China is “setting a new standard.”
In a matter of weeks, most of the world had adopted the tactics of destruction that China itself has now abandoned. And what do the disease mitigators have to say for themselves now? They are trying to pretend like it never happened, even as whole social orders have been traumatized beyond anything previously imaginable.
And what of China today? The whole population has a vast immunity debt to pay, which will mean massive sickness for the better part of a year. You might say: oh this was smart because now the variant on the loose in the world is more mild. But please get this straight: what is a mild versus what is a serious variant is largely contingent on pre-existing and acquired immunity. A pathogen that you and I might shake off in a day or two could kill a member of a native tribe in an Amazon rainforest who had never been previously exposed.
So after two years of trying to suppress this virus, China is going to face a very hard time in the coming year. But of course under the Chinese political system, no one will pay the price for this economic and public health disaster. Xi and the CCP will continue to rule and pretend that they did everything right.
One might think that this situation would amount to a complete humiliation for the likes of Fauci and the NIH, not to mention dozens of U.S. agencies that were involved in this fiasco, to say nothing of the hundreds of governments around the world that went along with the ridiculous and evil CCP methods of virus control. But we are not seeing it, and that is simply because the whole of the Western media played along with this and denounced anyone who resisted the absurdities.
Not only that: Xi and the CCP have managed to bring practices to the West with which we have been previously unfamiliar. Only three years ago, a person in a mask would have been regarded as a danger and probably a robber. No one ever wore them but perhaps crazy people or surgeons standing over open bodies, or perhaps miners wanting to filter the air. Regular people would never wear a mask in the normal course of life. Somehow we survived.
But today, we see between 10 and 50 percent of the population masking up despite the lack of any evidence that they achieve anything to stop the spread of a respiratory pathogen. Not to put too fine a point on it but the holes in the mask are vastly larger than the virus itself. Wearing them is nothing short of a superstition and a tacit homage to Xi Jinping. It is not the way of the West!
Also we are careening fast into a world of vaccine passports. Why do you suppose that the United States retains them for visitors from other countries? It is because certain elites want to hold on to some vestige of control in hopes of implementing them here on the way toward a China-style social credit system. This is also why social media censorship survives everywhere except Twitter among the major platforms.
Despite all the failures, the CCP has something to be proud of from its COVID response. It utterly and completely flopped as a measure to control a virus but it did troll the entire planet earth but for a few nations to go along with its totalitarian measures, thus reducing economic growth for the whole world and giving China a leg up in its struggle to be the world’s leading superpower. The complete failure of a policy then becomes its greatest moment of success.
And even today, we see nothing like honesty from any ruling-class elites on what they did to freedom here and all over the world. Meanwhile, China seems to have given up its battle for Zero COVID, just washing its hands of the whole operation as if it never happened. Very clever.
We in the West need to get wise as to what happened. There should be hearings and some kind of justice for those who went along. We need retractions of lying interviews and articles plus some kind of coming to terms instead of continued coverup about what happened. Finally, we need the complete elimination of all censorship and controls that came about over three years. The only way to beat tyranny is with the practice of freedom. We need to embrace that now before it is too late.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-...d_4943740.html
eReading:
Red Dragon Menacing (III)- On CCP’s All-Out Aggression Against Humanity(8) – PDF(preview)(9M); ePub(8M); MOBI(7M)
The Destructive CCP Model(IV) PDF(Preview2.8MB) ePub(2.5MB) Mobi(2.2MB)
The Mother Of All Evils --
Jiang Zemin‘s Legacy to Mankind PDF(1M) ePub(<1M) Mobi(<1M)