For everyone discussing Covid myself included please note that we all have the benefit of hindsight that almost no one who was making any decisions had in February or March.
I want to remind everyone that in the early part of the year almost no one had any idea what was going on and if you remember the general media and political sentiment varied wildly from one day to the next as people seized upon founded and unfounded fears and hopes.
Having said that, this is what happened:
Chinese virologist Yan Li-meng found proof of human-to-human transmission, how virulent it was, and that her own government was suppressing the information. Horrified, she tried to raise awareness but was threatened with death. She fled to the US in April.
But...before that, she contacted a Chinese blogger trying to get the word out (he's the one that advised her to flee to the US) and the Chinese blogger contacted Steve Bannon because they shared some friends. Bannon passed the Yan Li-meng information to Trump so Trump could decide for himself. Trump gathered his top men and everyone decided that while they couldn't be sure if the Yan Li-meng documents were real, many of the claims were being rapidly confirmed by independent observation. Appraised of the waning stock of PPE and the general unreadiness of the US healthcare system to deal with what could be a very virulent episode, Trump decided not to disseminate the Yan Li-meng information at that time and play the virus down to prevent any panic should the documents become public anyway. Immediately after, he began to restrict Chinese travel and started to get the PPE/ventilator industry going as hard as it could because he understood the chokepoint, to use an ungraceful analogy, was the hardware and the hospitals, not whether people went out or washed their hands because if the virulence was what was being claimed, that would not matter much.
But the virus was not that virulent after all. I mean yeah somewhat contagious, but lets all admit it - the death rate is a fraction of what we thought it was, and also importantly a fraction of what it was in the beginning.
Was Yan Li-meng a CCP plant after all? Did she and her documents arrive to panic us all when the CCP knew it wasn't that bad? Those are valid questions to ask, but now we know China was completely freaked out by this too at the time and we know for a fact they had a much higher death rate than they admit. So maybe she was just a humanitarian trying to do the right thing.
Steve Bannon told me all this. We hang out.
|