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China attempted to cover up the initial COVID-19 outbreak.It’s made no effort to identify who ‘patient zero’ was.It’s daily ‘official’ figures leave more questions than answers. pic.twitter.com/WyMkI2Ky9o
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Meanwhile, images of a broken seal on a Wuhan lab refrigerator that kept 1500 virus strains have emerged
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8233185/Shock-photos-inside-Wuhan-lab-stores-1-500-virus-strains.html
I'd concur that option two is the way to go, but, for myself, I'm afraid I'd add a biggish touch of universal misanthropy to it. It seems that tribalism may be our Waterloo.
However there's another angle to this, which is that like alcohol China didn't just produce the problem, it also produced the solution. A few months ago we were looking at footage of the empty streets of Wuhan and talking their lockdown as this epic monstrous alien authoritarian Chinese thing, and yet here we are. The west has been used to being the leader, if not in raw wealth, of the world's governance and social ideas, and I think this is the first time in a long time that the leadership has been going in the opposite direction. It might be worth thinking about what other epic monstrous alien authoritarian Chinese things might go down better with western voters than we used to think.
Actually, if a country wanted to do something like this, I'd have thought starting it off in its own country would be the perfect way to do it. In fact, the lack of an outbreak in the rest of China is suspicious. If a country wanted to murder millions around the world, why would they be worried about losing a few of their own?
But I don't think the Chinese government is that way inclined. I suspect the real number of deaths in China is well over 100,000.
Just as Lord Beaverbrook spearheaded the wartime efforts on aircraft production, the appointment of Lord Deighton will bring renewed drive and focus to coordinate this unprecedented peacetime challenge.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/olympics-chief-brought-in-to-boost-ppe-production
ETA https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/04/12/the-government-needs-to-sort-out-the-ppe-issues-or-it-will-be-seen-as-wilfully-incompetent-or-worse/
I think this is the crux of the matter. BTW I am not seeing Sinophobia now any more than I saw much Francophobia in Brexit.
However one thing we can all (right and left) demand of governments is that they do some long-term strategic thinking, and then put their finger on the scales of the free market where that is justified.
Tough times ahead for the Chinese population.
Good times ahead for British manufacturing.
Cue the duelling banjos.....
I suspect there are some books on this, but I've always wondered how the world would have reacted to Nazi Germany perpetrating the Holocaust, without invading their neighbours.
Particularly now, post Brexit, post covid, I can see a lot of future government orders coming with a make-it-here requirement.
Either way, they're lying bastards.
We have few indigenous raw materials, so all we get is a false sense of security. The cars may be made in the UK, but if we produce no iron ore, nickel, copper, etc., then all we've done is moved the point of pain, while increasing the cost of cars to consumers.
They are an evil totalitarian dictatorship with fuck all respect for human rights.
But they didn't create the CV-19 virus and release it into the West as a weapon.
Of course the Holocaust proper was an ideological side effect of Germany invading their near and farther neighbours.
This is absolutely damning.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-govt-missed-a-series-of-opportunities-to-lessen-impact-of-covid-19-11975328
The timing of anonymous reports of secret reports from December, the stories planted in tame newspapers and journalists, it's classic stuff. The sudden concern about human rights, and animal rights, in people who previously showed no concern (in many cases more likely to go on bizarre anti vegan and anti ECHR rants).
I say screw China!
But the buck stops at no. 10 (and in the White House for the US).
It's only because we had a vaccine that it didn't become a pandemic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091
There's often a disconnect between the BBC News website and the news programmes.
But in a world where one evil totalitarian dictatorship was happy enough to use nerve agents on UK soil, I wouldn't be quite so certain about deliberate release being ruled out.
But a bat from the Wuhan facility sold on the black market looks likeliest. Given that the US had a presence in the Wuhan labs until recently, was that known to be a thing though? Did infected stuff just go walkabout?
Having half a dozen companies competing for PPE contracts is something different again.
Sky News on the other hand are happy to report news as news.
That said there is scope for agreement on one point: China putting its own house in order.
The concern is that it will (as most authoritarian states do) be more interested in smoke and mirrors and blaming others than actually making any meaningful changes.
The virus is a wake-up call that China needs to move to an open and transparent government accountable to its people and thus acting more responsibly on the world stage. That means - if we want this to not happen again - that Western policy should shift from being focussed on acquiescence and soft collaboration with the CCP to a goal of encouraging democratic reform.
Economic and political pressure is part of the toolkit.
Thanks for that contribution.
Because he's obsessed by Brexit and that's how he thinks.
Why have anonymous sources release this info when it is too late to be useful to the world, but when it is most politically useful to the gangster in the white House?
The significance may not have been clear in November or December, but must have been obvious in January.
The world should also treat the US as a pariah state for not telling what they knew, if we believe the reports.
Meanwhile President Xi laughs. He laughs his socks off.
The Tim Harford article I plugged yesterday is worth a read (Google tim harford disaster).
We clearly need to be much more circumspect in our dealings with China. It’s not a country to be trusted. But it is not a country we can shun either. Like Saydi Arabia, we need what it offers.
It's as obvious as hell, and that's been further reinforced by some podium-star Remainers coming on this thread this morning to shout "right-wing bullshitters" in unison.
Rishi Sunak is the only minister who is a threat to the prime minister, not because he plans a coup but because his popularity means any other plotters don't need Boris to save their seats. It is hard to move the Chancellor now however, even though Boris's entire recent political career is founded on the Stalinist airbrushing of former Chancellors. He has ousted three already.
It would have been Jenrick but he is safe now because to sack him over 3rd-home-gate would put the spotlight on Boris's own household(s).
I can't get worked up about Pritti Patel stumbling over reading a number which was, I suspect, badly formatted in her script.
Some of the scientifically-trained Cabinet ministers might have been expected to be able to read a graph or a table and know what exponential means, so I'd wonder if any ill-advised told-you-so's might arouse Boris's wrath.
They'd far rather use it to pursue domestic political squabbles. Just as the native Celtic tribes of Britannia did in the face of the Roman Invasion.
Anyone know how that turned out for them?
Maybe you would stop going on about it if everything Alastair Meeks posts on any subject whatsoever has a disclaimer : "Warning: the author is against Brexit"
If Mr Evil were around, he'd make damn sure they had a vaccine first - so we can assume he isn't. Eating bats and pangolins could have been inadvisable. But rye and peanuts (ergot and aflatoxin) don't have an unblemished record either.
Whatever the lessons are will be for global application. Seeking to 'blame' the place of origin is just displacement activity for politicians with questionable records themselves, starting with Trump.
I really like Boris right now but anyone who defends this Government's handling of this crisis puts themselves in the same nefarious pit as the Chinese Government.
One cannot magic an industry out of thin air, whether high end ventilators or batteries, but by referencing innovation one can pretend, for a while. And that is where the politics of Covid-19, and Brexit, are stuck, in cynical fantasies about innovation."
https://www.davidedgerton.org/blog/2020/4/18/the-governments-response-to-covid-19-and-brexit-are-intimately-connectednbsp
For tender based good cost has been everything. Going forward governments are going to gave to pay more for these goods if they want security of supply. I think that is a good use of tax payers money.
More importantly the reason why it *should not* be business as usual is that China lied. The issue isn’t where the the virus came from (IMV either natural or an accidental escape, it doesn’t really matter). It isn’t that they failed to control. But they lied to the WHO and they lied to other countries. If they had told the truth then, just possibly, lives would have been saved.
The big change in U.K. policy, for example, was when the Chinese assumptions in the model were based with Italian data. If China had been upfront then appropriate decisions would have been made earlier.
If there are no consequences of lying then there is no incentive to change behaviour
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8233435/When-vulnerable-dignity-deserve-says-SIR-KEIR-STARMER.html
At least honest enough not to hide it.....
Sadly a lot of people aren't knowledgeable enough to know the nuances of being ethnically Chinese and the number of times that my husband has been harangued at social events to justify Chinese government policy despite never having set foot on the mainland is incredible.
Criticising the Chinese government's response to the pandemic is perfectly legitimate as is looking at whether we might want to think the extent to which we've outsourced our production. However talking about leaked viruses without evidence and using terms like Wuflu has real world consequences for innocent people.