The Pitfalls of a Coronavirus Origin Investigation
There were innumerable US failures in the US responses to the Coronavirus spread in the first few months, and in fact since then. Some of them even involve the Wuhan Lab. I am not the CIA with information gathering and verification capability, so I am just going by my imperfect memory.
However, we have been subjected to six years of stimulation of racial and immigrant hatred by the Escalator President, Donald Trump. It is hard to separate the motivation of Trump and his supporters to cast blame abroad to detract from his failures. Chinese Americans who certainly had nothing to do with a Wuhan lab and may never have even been to China have suffered a year of fear and physical and mental abuse.
It is hard to imagine that the Coronavirus was engineered as a weapon. If so why would they release it in China, much less in the same city as the lab was in? Give me a break. The Coronavirus variants, each much more transmissible than the last, would argue that it was kind of the weapon’s designers to only unleash the least transmissible one.
As far as the lab escape theory, lets go back to stories released early on. This is where I rely on my memory. The US had researchers in the Wuhan lab. Seeing how dangerous such bat viruses had been, this was most appropriate. The story I remember, also, is that a US or WHO team had inspected the lab, and found several security problems. The lab appealed to the US for funding to improve security. The US turned them down. If this version is upheld by the CIA investigation, it places part of the lab escape responsibility squarely on the Trump administration. The US also canceled the research contract of the US researchers at Wuhan. Had they stayed, they could have investigated things on the spot.
Let’s just hit the highlights of the US response failures early on. There had been an administration early response Team set up to rapidly respond to viral infections anywhere in the world. The Trump administration canceled this early warning system.
Trump tried to mislead the public as to the seriousness of the virus. Trump and the CDC tried to hold onto the control of responses by centralizing testing in the CDC, which held back effective testing and then tracing for months. Tracing was never followed effectively.
At the start, we said that any Asian Americans abroad could come home. I remember hearing once that 120,000 did return. This is not an effective response to a pandemic. Furthermore, that happened with Americans in Europe, also. While Trump was blaming the infection on Chinese, the New York catastrophe was already being caused by a variant from Europe.
Everyone remembers the “flattening the curve” approach. However, while pandemic experts wanted a response to reduce cases to nothing, that was never Trump’s approach. It was always just to not overfill hospitals but to soften restrictions to allow hospitals to fill up. Everyone also remembers Trump arguing for restrictions or we would have one or two million deaths. According to the IHME model for real Coronavirus deaths, we have now almost reached a million deaths, and we are still relaxing protocols without killing the spread.
This is reflected in the 20-25% of the public not willing to get vaccinations. To legally protect himself, Trump ONCE half-heartedly said that people should get vaccinated. But in December of 2020, he hid the fact that he and Melania had gotten vaccinated.
How can one forget Trump violating the protocols in his need for packed, cheering, and unmasked election rallies in crucial states. An analysis of excess infections of counties around where he had been, even by September, estimated his rallies had caused 30,000 infections and 700 deaths.
Attempting to pinpoint the leak to the Wuhan lab is again ignoring the vast crimes done to the American people by an unscrupulous politician who continues to undermine American values and the rights of all Americans to vote.
