From late January 2020, the international press featured growing talk of a strange virus that seemed to have started in Wuhan, China. People in the United States were curious but not panicked. The data on the fatality rate had a huge range, with the World Health Organization (WHO) putting out numbers like 3 and 4 percent but other sources estimating death rates closer to a bad flu year.
Life went on as normal but there were strange happenings in China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was charged with disease mitigation and they used extreme methods, such as locking people in their homes, even welding doors shut, and fumigating empty streets with workers dressed in Hazmat suits. It was all pretty dramatic, especially with viral videos showing people literally dropping dead in the streets.
The lockdowns continued for a few weeks, and after one month, the CCP declared the virus as having been controlled. This got the attention of the WHO which decided to organize a fact-finding tour with a chartered airline.
On the trip were 25 national and international “experts” from China, Russia, Germany, Japan, Korea, Nigeria, Singapore, the United States, and the WHO. The Joint Mission was headed by Canadian Dr. Bruce Aylward of the WHO and Dr. Liang Wannian of the People’s Republic of China.
Where did they go? To Wuhan but first other cities, including Beijing and Guangzhou Province. It was obviously a guided tour, mostly consisting of Chinese authorities showing off hospitals, labs, clinics, camps, and so on, seeking to impress the foreign visitors with the country’s amazing medical expertise.
Wuhan was the last stop and they were able to show how life had gone back to normal, thanks to the masterful management of chairman Xi Jinping. It seems completely incredible at this vantage point that Western observers were so credulous about all of this. Of course the respiratory virus was never contained at all. This was a false claim, and obviously so, which anyone with knowledge of such viruses with a zoonotic reservoir knows.
This is a point of modern virology that is completely uncontested. The claim that society-wide lockdowns could eradicate such a virus is so preposterous as to not merit any debate in several hundred years, even dating back to the ancient world. And yet here we were, a crew of experts willing to believe the impossible because Chinese Communists told them so.
The trip ended and the flights home took off. That’s when officials gathered to compare notes and write the report. The main author was the Stanford-trained medical official Maria Van Kerkhove, who worked for the WHO. She already started on the report while on the plane, and finished it for release on Feb. 28.
“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.”
The report continued: “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.”
As the trip was taking place, CDC official Nancy Messonier gathered a wide range of reporters from the corporate media for a briefing, explaining that disaster was headed to the United States in the form of a deadly virus and that unusual measures would be necessary for control. That was Feb. 24, 2020. According to Donald G. McNeil of the New York Times, Messonier was in close touch with Anthony Fauci and others.
None of them had briefed the Trump administration, so far as we know. The CDC in combination with the New York Times had essentially mapped out the pandemic plan without White House consultation. As late as March 9, 2020, Trump was still suggesting that lockdowns would not be necessary and that therapeutics could manage the virus just fine.
The nation’s press would have none of it. On Feb. 27, the day before the final filing of the WHO report, the daily podcast of the New York Times sounded the alarm and effectively called for lockdowns similar to what they did in Wuhan. The paper the next day carried a piece calling for the United States to reject normal public health practices and instead “go Medieval” on the virus.
Within a few weeks, starting on March 12 and continuing for weeks, months, and even years, harsh measures against the population were imposed in the United States, UK, EU, and all throughout Asia and Latin America and all Commonwealth countries. Only three nations in the world did not go along (Tanzania, Sweden, and Nicaragua).
Many people who closely followed these events at the time have said to me privately that there was simply no way that this global response to the virus, which wrecked whole economies and societies the world over, would ever have happened without that Feb. 28, 2020, report from the WHO on how wonderfully the CCP dealt with COVID.
That was five years ago. We’ve come a very long way since then. It’s time we have open talk and discussion about this tragic episode in contemporary history.
