When Are We Going to Start Questioning THE REST of China's COVID-19 Narrative?
How US public health officials and the media enabled China to crush us with "new concept" psychological weaponry
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There’s been a lot of buzz lately about whether China’s Communist Party rulers might be lying when they deny cooking up COVID-19 in one of their labs.
But as welcome as it is to see some skepticism aimed their way, something is still seriously out of whack with how narrow the target is.
Why are we focusing so exclusively on the virus’s origins?
Pretty much everything else we were told about COVID-19 also came from unconfirmed and highly dubious tales told by Chinese authorities passed on as gospel truth by our public health officials and the media.
Take lockdowns.
Quarantining people without symptoms or any known exposure to infection had never been suggested in all of history before China’s successful effort to sell the rest of the world on destroying ourselves by doing just that.
The CDC’s most recent pandemic planning guide from 2017 doesn’t even mention the idea.
And in 2019, the World Health Organization rejected quarantine even for people who’ve been exposed to infection because of the “low quality of evidence.”
As we’ll see, rebranding a brutal tool of subjugation like lockdowns into a cutting-edge public health strategy wasn’t easy. The CCP had to conduct a systematic propaganda campaign that involved co-opting every source of authority we had.
But the project couldn’t even have gotten off the ground if our public health officials and big media outlets hadn’t been happy to parrot China’s dubious tale of how they conquered COVID-19 as if there wasn’t any reason at all to doubt the CCP’s word.
Blatant evidence that China’s data was rigged also had to be suppressed.
News or CCP propaganda?
On March 10, 2020, CNN reported that the head of China’s Communist Party in Wuhan, Wang Zhonglin, had complained that the CCP wasn’t getting enough credit for containing COVID under the headline,
China Wants to Take a Victory Lap Over Its Handling of the Coronavirus Outbreak.
CNN’s take was that, while running a victory lap might be a little gauche, the smashing success the CCP achieved against COVID-19 by crushing the Chinese people with lockdowns meant that Wang Zhonglin probably had a point:
Hundreds of millions of people have also been placed under lockdown, while others have been unable to return to work due to travel restrictions. Those containment efforts do appear to have been successful, with the number of new cases slowing to a trickle in recent weeks, as new outbreaks continued to emerge worldwide. [CNN]
Funnily enough, on the very same day, the Washington Post also ran a story hyping China’s “victory” over COVID-19. They too parroted the CCP’s unconfirmed tale that, because of the “draconian restrictions” they’d imposed, “the number of new infections in the country has plummeted.”
The New York Times published an article on… let’s see… well what do you know? The Times’ article regurgitating the CCP’s completely unsubstantiated story that they’d conquered COVID by mercilessly locking down their citizens also appeared on March 10.
As did The Wall Street Journal's entry headlined, “How China Slowed Coronavirus: Lockdowns, Surveillance, Enforcers,” which is focused almost entirely on pushing the CCP’s story about how severe their lockdowns were and claims of unbridled success.
Nor was peddling what looked suspiciously like CCP propaganda restricted to the press.
US Public health officials lend a helping hand
CDC director Robert Redfield appeared before Congress on March 11, 2020, just one day after all those stories coincidentally dropped. Rep. Bob Briggs (R-OH) asked him whether China’s outbreak had peaked, explicitly noting their data might not be trustworthy.
But Redfield wasn’t having any skepticism about the CCP’s absolute fidelity to the truth on his watch, no siree, Bob. He presented their unconfirmed claims as established fact while ignoring that any such aspersions to their good name had even been expressed.
I think you’re right. Clearly China has got control of their outbreak. They had 20 cases in the last 24 hours. [C-Span Video 1:51:00]
Clearly. It’s a wonder Redfield didn’t repeat it in Chinese.
Anthony Fauci also testified that day. And apart from not questioning Redfield’s willingness to peddle China’s unconfirmed tale of how they’d conquered COVID-19 with a strategy that had never been suggested in all of history, he did some peddling of his own.
Fauci cited China’s unverified data indicating that COVID-19 was “at least 10 times more lethal than the flu” as if there couldn’t possibly be any reason to doubt their word. That single quote generated hundreds of headlines which were instrumental in creating the subsequent climate of obsessive fear that gripped the nation.
Within a few weeks, to save ourselves from the virus Chinese authorities had assured us was at least 10 times deadlier than the flu, the American people found themselves crushed by lockdowns we had no reason apart from absolute faith in China’s word to believe they‘d even imposed, let alone that the strategy had extinguished the virus as the CCP claimed.
But the good news was we weren’t going to have to suffer under the brutal weight of lockdowns for very long since it would only take “15 days to flatten the curve.” After all, the CCP had managed to contain the virus within a few weeks of imposing the heretofore unheard-of public health strategy on their people.
And they would never lie.
Too good to be true
Though a computer model developed by a British professor named Neil Ferguson was also used to justify locking us down, besides having no empirical validation whatsoever, Ferguson had predicted three deadly epidemics in the last 20 years and was wildly wrong every single time.
In 2002, over 6 million cattle, sheep, and pigs were needlessly slaughtered because UK leaders heeded Professor Ferguson’s worse than worthless “expert” opinion.
Why anyone continued doing so is a topic for another day. Perhaps the tens of millions of dollars in annual funding he gets from Bill Gates has something to do with it. But the fact remains that Ferguson’s computer model had no empirical validation whatsoever even apart from his astonishing track record of catastrophic failure.
The only evidence we had that lockdowns would bring any benefits to counterbalance the obvious horrific costs our public health officials were pretending didn’t even exist depended on taking the CCP’s word on faith.
Even Ferguson himself has acknowledged that lockdowns were only recommended as a public health strategy because Xi Jinping “changed what was possible” by convincing the rest of the world “this worked for us in China.”
And the four articles mentioned above are just a small sample of the flood of media reports from the second week of March 2020 regurgitating the CCP’s unconfirmed story about how they’d conquered COVID-19 as established fact in order to push us into following their supposed lead.
Yet even then China’s data was way too good to be taken on faith even if trusting the CCP’s advice to destroy ourselves on account of a deadly new disease we only had their word was even a threat wasn’t in and of itself monumentally stupid.
Chinese authorities weren’t just claiming that their heretofore-never--considered-in-all-of-history public health strategy of crushing their citizens with lockdowns had slowed COVID-19 down.
They were claiming that, in the space of a few weeks, they’d for all intents and purposes completely irradicated a virus that had been spreading like wildfire.
16 months later, we know for a fact what any imbecile would have immediately suspected upon getting advice from his enemies that in order to avoid a great danger he needed to engage in a historically unprecedented strategy of self-destruction.
They were lying.
The sad facts
Regardless of how strict a lockdown was imposed, no other region in the world was able to duplicate anything close to the complete eradication of COVID-19 Chinese authorities claimed they’d achieved.
Indeed, in no other locale did lockdowns seem to help at all.
Swedish authorities alone among European nations refused to be swept away by China’s unverified claims and imposed no lockdowns.
Nor did Sweden create a demand for the surgical masks China was hoarding at least as far back as January 14, 2020, when there were less than 500 cases of COVID-19 worldwide, by ignoring decades of research showing masks do nothing to stop respiratory viruses; like the rest of the West’s witless or complicit leaders did.
Yet Sweden, nonetheless, managed to do better against COVID-19 than the rest of Europe who took the CCP’s ruinous advice.
In fact, Sweden didn’t do significantly worse against COVID than any of their neighbors who chose to destroy themselves because of China’s unsubstantiated claim that it was the only road to safety.
Peru, on the other hand, imposed the harshest lockdowns in the world yet somehow also wound up with its highest COVID death rate. Nobody else was even close.
Moreover, putting aside official COVID-19 death stats—which given the absence of any uniform international criteria for identifying fatalities are likely to reflect bookkeeping as much as reality—Sweden’s overall mortality rate didn’t look much different from years in which the world hadn’t been suffering under the weight of any supposed “deadly pandemic.”
Sweden certainly experienced nothing that would have justified shutting down medical treatment for all other illnesses.
Though, admittedly, only someone intent on mass murder or driven mad by delusion would have even considered that lunatic idea.
Peruvians, on the other hand, were dropping dead like flies during their strict lockdowns. And that was true even if you exclude all the deaths officially racked up to COVID-19!
Given what we now know, China’s unconfirmed story of stopping COVID-19 dead in its tracks with lockdowns has to be the lie any sane person would have immediately assumed it to be.
But even in March 2020, our public health officials already had overwhelming evidence that the CCP was cooking the books.
Rigged data
On February 20, the journal Nature reported that the exploding epidemic Chinese authorities claimed they’d extinguished was at least partly an illusion of bookkeeping:
[China’s reporting guidelines] were updated 7 February to allow physicians to confirm cases using images from chest scans rather than waiting days for lab tests. The change in diagnostic criteria saw infections in Hubei, the province at the centre of the epidemic, jump by nearly 15,000 cases in a single day. [Nature]
But, on the flip side, Nature also reported that unlike America and the rest of the world… you might want to sit down for this one… China wasn’t counting people who tested positive for COVID-19 as cases unless they also showed symptoms!
Though the public somehow never heard anything about that crucial fact, it did cause some controversy as Nature noted in their very headline:
Scientists question China’s decision not to report symptom-free coronavirus cases.”
Chinese authorities must have known that when they loosened reporting guidelines on February 7 the likely result would be a bogus rise in cases. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to suppose that Chinese physicians probably understood that had to be what their totalitarian leaders were aiming for and, to avoid any trouble, acted accordingly.
But the fact that positive test results weren’t being counted unless a doctor reported symptoms also meant Chinese authorities wouldn’t need to falsify any data themselves to get that subsequent remarkable drop in cases they wanted us to believe was caused by the beneficent power of lockdowns.
All the CCP had to do to is get the word out to doctors that they were keen to have those lockdowns they were hyping as the latest innovation in public health look wildly successful.
Indeed, given the extraordinary amount of hyping it turns out the CCP was doing, it’s again no stretch to suppose that Chinese doctors were sure to get that message absent any explicit nudge.
China’s lockdown propaganda campaign
In one of the most important articles of 2020, Michael P. Senger extensively documented that the CCP embarked on a truly chilling propaganda blitz to push western politicians into locking their people down.
China co-opted our scientists and academics to help push America into suicidal policies without a shred of scientific justification outside of their own untrustworthy word.
They also pushed blatant propaganda directly on the American people.
Hua Chunying 华春莹 @SpokespersonCHN
If this 7-year-old girl has the common sense, why some adults don't? 👇 https://t.co/txqw8rRzKIFBI Director Christopher Wray has explicitly admitted that the Chinese government directly pressured local U.S. politicians to lock their constituents down.
The fact that there’s no sign that any US authorities are investigating these successful efforts to impose needless hardship, misery, and death on the American people speaks volumes about where the FBI’s loyalties lie. And the fact that none of this ever became big news is equally telling about the media.
China also mounted a social media campaign using fake accounts to attack South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for not imposing the suicidal policies they were pushing.
And they created a fake groundswell of astroturf praise for western politicians who foolishly or treacherously gave in.
China even sent hundreds of doctors to Italy who then worked hard to push the Italians into locking down.
That’s just a fraction of the CCP’s chilling all-out blitz to get the West to self-destruct that Senger has uncovered.
But, in the cruelest of ironies, our public health officials and media once again provided indispensable aid by making sure the catastrophic consequences of lockdowns themselves worked to bolster China’s propaganda blitz.
Creating a body count
There was nothing at all surprising about the way Peru’s death rate soared during their military-enforced lockdowns.
Nor is it surprising that Italy experienced its peak in all-cause mortality 18 days after the doctors sent by China convinced them to lockdown.
Or, more generally, that in Europe and the US, all-cause mortality peaked exactly 16 to 24 days after lockdown started.
The time between first reported case and peak excess death, on the other hand, varied widely; from a low of 39 days in Denmark to a high of 84 in the US.
While there was never any evidence apart from taking China’s word on faith that we were dealing with a deadly virus or that lockdowns would accomplish anything if we were, the disastrous impact loneliness and stress have on our immune systems and will to live—apart from being basic common sense—is also well-established & uncontroversial scientific fact.
As such, it would be difficult to come up with a worse strategy for dealing with a respiratory virus than panicking people into locking down.
The CCP, as well as public health officials like Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield, had to know that depriving our frail and elderly nursing home residents of all human companionship and leaving them with just the TV terrorizing them 24/7 about a deadly virus wiping out humanity was bound to kill many already hanging on by just a slim thread.
Think of what it was like.
The few staff members who became their sole link to humanity stayed away as much as possible. When they did appear, they wore masks and gloves and avoided getting close as much as possible, in a contagious state of dread themselves.
And that finishing touch of terror was added even though literally dozens of research studies made it impossible that wearing masks would do a damned thing to stop a respiratory virus.
For how many were weekly visits by family, friends, or even mere strangers kindly volunteering to relieve the loneliest among us of that awful burden the only thing sustaining life?
China’s prescription also meant locking nursing home residents up inside with recirculated air, giving aerosol particles carrying any ordinary pathogens infecting sick fellow inmates more of a chance to infect them.
The CCP’s homicidal advice turned our nursing homes into literal death camps.
And, of course, the victims were then added to COVID-19’s daily death tally that the media terrorized us with to further feed the panic they had, by design or for dark reasons of their own, helped the CCP ignite.
As Jordan Schachtel chillingly reported, countless Americans, as well as people all around the world, were also killed by China’s insistence that ventilators—which have always been a last resort because few patients come out of one alive—were the “first choice” treatment for COVID-19.
People with moderate respiratory virus symptoms thus died awful and degrading deaths, drugged up with breathing tubes crammed down their throats. They too then got added to COVID-19’s body count, as the CCP and public health officials who consented to this atrocity surely knew they would.
In perhaps the most unbelievable part of the whole monstrous spectacle, we even followed China’s counsel to shut down health care for all other diseases except COVID-19.
Such was the delusional state of panic the media had driven us to that hardly anyone realized this lunatic idea was bound to have disastrous consequences that needed to be balanced against any of the purely theoretical gains we might get from locking down.
The media also made sure that the tens of thousands of doctors and scientists who were desperately trying to warn us of the obvious death toll lockdowns would bring for years to come stayed muzzled.
Did China really lockdown?
The press also reported China’s claims about the restrictions they’d imposed in areas to which foreigners were denied entry as established fact.
Even worse, they actually exaggerated the severity of China’s alleged lockdowns beyond what the CCP themselves were claiming!
China is the only country for which it’s impossible to come to any kind of confident conclusion about how much of the place was really locked down. Even if you take their word on faith, the CCP issued hundreds of statements at distinct times claiming that regions varying in size from a district to a province were put under different kinds of restrictions that themselves are too numerous to count.
The only comprehensive list of the measures China took against COVID-19 appears to be Wikipedia’s “COVID-19 Lockdown in China” page.
Even the CCP only claims they put around 20 cities with a combined population of 60 million under full quarantine. That comes to around only 4% of China’s 1.4 billion population.
Hubei province plus another 40 or so regions ranging in size from a district to a city were allegedly put under something called “household-based outdoor restrictions.” For cities in Hubei, where Wuhan is located, the CCP claimed this meant that “only one person from each household is permitted to go outside for provisions once every two days, except for medical reasons or to work at shops or pharmacies.” But household restrictions meant various different things in cities outside Hubei.
We’re supposed to believe that around 235 million people or around 17% of China were put under some form of household restrictions. But you can’t just add that to the 4% who were supposedly put in full quarantine since the lists overlap.
Finally, the CCP claims they put over 250 regions ranging from a district to a city into something called “closed management.” But this only involved limiting entrance and egress without imposing any business closures or other restrictions on residents apart from their ability to leave.
So, it looks like at most around 20% of China was ever really locked down.
The March 10, 2020, Wall Street Journal story hailing the success of China’s lockdowns mentioned above was written by a reporter named Liza Lin. She tried to make it look like the CCP’s lockdowns were widespread by saying that, according to her estimate, China had locked down “500 million mostly healthy people—more than the combined populations of the U.S. and Mexico.”
It’s tough to see how those numbers could be right since in no case does “closed management” seem to shut down businesses or confine people to their homes like the lockdowns she and the rest of the media helped the CCP con us into subjecting over 95% of Americans to.
But, even taking her numbers on faith like she’s asking, Lin somehow failed to mention that China’s population of 1.4 billion meant that even according to her only around a third of China was ever really locked down.
Perhaps that explains how China wound up being the only nation to benefit from the worldwide panic over COVID-19 the CCP created.
In fact, there’s good reason to think China’s claims that they’d mercilessly locked down any of their citizens were as bogus as their data saying they’d vanquished COVID-19.
“Everything is fake!”
In March of 2020, high-ranking CCP officials toured a supposedly locked-down complex in Wuhan. Though residents weren’t allowed to leave their apartments, they started yelling “Fake! Everything is fake!” and similar remonstrations from their windows suggesting that their supposed lockdown was strictly for the cameras.
After videos were posted to social media, the CCP published an article in its English language outlet, the Global Times, trying to sell us on the idea that the supposedly locked down residents were yelling about some food-delivery program that wasn’t implemented properly.
A more plausible explanation is that residents were calling their lockdown fake and the CCP was trying to get in front of the story and stop the Westerners they were so anxious to push into destroying themselves via lockdown from realizing that they’d never implemented any such entirely unheard-of and obviously catastrophic public health policy themselves.
Indeed, the fact that official Communist Party English language media published an article headlined, “Video exposed cheating still exists in Wuhan” claiming those residents were yelling about a food delivery service is the best possible proof that, in reality, they were on about something much more serious.
Fake Coverup
That’s just a small part of the story of how our public health officials and media helped the CCP gaslight us into destroying ourselves.
For example, you probably believe the CCP tried to cover up their COVID-19 outbreak when, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
As I reported back in September 2020, the CCP was already using their official English language news outlet, the People’s Daily, to convince us the Andromeda Strain was headed our way on January 1, 2020, when there were only 27 cases and no deaths.
That’s just one of many instances I uncovered in which there’s a public record of China hyping the virus before there could have possibly been any reason for concern.
That People’s Daily article pushing COVID panic porn to the English-speaking world also appeared three days before Chinese authorities supposedly punished “whistleblower” Li Wenliang for exposing the outbreak.
Moreover, as I reported a few months later, the completely made-for-TV story about how heroic Dr. Li Wenliang suffered the CCP’s wrath for trying to warn the world of COVID-19’s scourge only to tragically succumb to the deadly plague himself first appeared in one of the Chinese Communist Party’s oldest official outlets, Beijing Youth Daily.
That’s right, even the story about China supposedly covering up COVID—like everything else we were told by our media and public health officials—came straight from the CCP.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that image searches for the screenshot of Wenliang’s famous post “blowing the whistle” on COVID-19 using Google, Yandex, and TinEye turn up absolutely nothing before January 27, a month after we’re supposed to believe they went viral but, coincidentally, the very same day Chinese Communist Pary rag, Beijing Youth Daily, first alerted the world to Wenliang’s supposed existence.
I won’t rehearse all the other preposterous parts of Wenliang’s story here. If you want the full scoop, you can check out my original report.
But there’s no question that it’s a hoax created by the CCP to make us believe they were covering up a deadly outbreak when the reality was they were hyping a non-deadly one in order to drive us into enough of a panic that they could push us into voluntarily self-destructing with lockdowns.
Nor can it be said that the CCP kept what they had in store for us much of a secret.
“New Concept Weapons”
Though we were too busy watching superhero movies and desperately searching for reasons to call each other “racist” to pay much attention, in 1999 two of the CCP’s top military strategists wrote a book in which they argued that technological advances would soon render the United States’ advantage in traditional weapons of war obsolete by creating the possibility of what they termed “new concept” weapons, which could be as insubstantial as a rumor on the internet.
Rather than "using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one's will” as traditional weapons are employed, a new concept weapon involves "using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to submit to one’s interests.”
The authors, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, even explained our vulnerability:
The Americans have not been able to get their act together in this area. This is because proposing a new concept of weapons does not require relying on the springboard of new technology, it just demands lucid and incisive thinking. However, this is not a strong point of the Americans, who are slaves to technology in their thinking. The Americans invariably halt their thinking at the boundary where technology has not yet reached.[… M]an-made earthquakes, tsunamis, weather disasters, or subsonic wave and new biological and chemical weapons all have tremendous differences with what we normally speak of as weapons, but they are still all weapons whose immediate goal is to kill and destroy, and which are still related to military affairs, soldiers, and munitions. Speaking in this sense, they are nothing more than non-traditional weapons whose mechanisms have been altered and whose lethal power and destructive capabilities have been magnified several times over.
However, a new concept of weapons is different.[…] This is because the new concept of weapons is a view of weapons in the broad sense, which views as weapons all means which transcend the military realm, but which can still be used in combat operations.
They also explained what would happen when our blind spot was exploited.
[…E]verything that can benefit mankind can also harm him. This is to say that there is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon, and this requires that our understanding of weapons must have an awareness that breaks through all boundaries. With technological developments being in the process of striving to increase the types of weapons, a breakthrough in our thinking can open up the domain of the weapons kingdom at one stroke. As we see it, a single man-made stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or a single rumor or scandal that results in a fluctuation in the enemy country's exchange rates[…], all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons.
What must be made clear is that the new concept of weapons is in the process of creating weapons that are closely linked to the lives of the common people.[…] The appearance of new-concept weapons will definitely elevate future warfare to a level which is hard for the common people -- or even military men -- to imagine.[…] The new concept of weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished at the fact that commonplace things that are close to them can also become weapons with which to engage in war. We believe that some morning people will awake to discover with surprise that quite a few gentle and kind things have begun to have offensive and lethal characteristics.
It would be harder to find a better description of what happened to us in March of 2020 than that last sentence.
What’s to be done?
Even according to the CDC’s risibly inflated death stats, which among other things conflate dying with and dying from COVID-19, the virus doesn’t turn out to be any more deadly than the seasonal flu.
Indeed, on February 28, 2020, Anthony Fauci told his peers that COVID-19 would likely turn out to be no more deadly than a severe seasonal flu in the New England Journal of Medicine. That was just 11 days before Fauci perjured himself before Congress by citing China’s data indicating that COVID was, instead “at least 10 times more lethal than the flu” in order to terrorize us into lockdowns.
Regardless of whether it was created in a lab, China didn’t attack us with an old concept biological weapon. They attacked us with a barrage of new concept psychological weapons to push us into a state of unrelenting panic and convince us that our only hope of salvation was to destroy ourselves by doing something they themselves only pretended to do.
Sadly, they were 100% successful.
But though it’s indisputable that we were the victims of a CCP plot, at this stage it’s counterproductive to focus on China.
The CCP’s new concept weapon attack couldn’t have even gotten off the ground had not our public health officials and media been willing to pass off their completely unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims as gospel truth.
Tech giants like Google and Facebook who raked in unprecedented profits as working-class Americans and small business owners had their lives and livelihoods destroyed also played an important role by making sure we only heard what the CCP wanted us to hear.
The primary culprits and the ones we’re in a position to most easily punish and squeeze more details out of are the treacherous homegrown government officials and media figures without whose help the CCP’s efforts to destroy us would have been stillborn.
The first task before turning to China is to clean up the rotted and traitorous institutions at home that facilitated their plan and in the process learn more about its execution.
We need to find out which of these snakes in our own backyard were complicit and which helped the CCP destroy us for their own independent motives and exact swift and merciless justice.
But since nobody in charge seems to give a damn about the heinous atrocity they helped China perpetrate against the American people and, instead, prefer to focus on the side issue of whether COVID-19 came from a lab, it’s unlikely we’ll ever find out.
Indeed, if you ever wondered why Facebook and the media suddenly stopped censoring the Wuhan-lab-leak story, you may have your answer.
Lockdowns were the real atrocity, not some MacGuffin virus that no one would have even noticed without all the monstrous gaslighting and regurgitation of CCP propaganda by our public health officials and media required to inflict them on us and the completely predictable resulting death toll they falsely pinned on the virus instead.
And, above all else, the most important thing to the despicable homegrown villains who made China’s merciless attack on the American people possible is that we never realize that.
Well stated. Comprehensive.
I've followed Thau's COVID reporting since beginning. Reading through this brought back memories of anxiety mixed with rage at the stupidity of public health "experts" and elected officials that orchestrated this.