Declan Hill: Covid - The Slow Motion Chernobyl: Part 3 - The Big Silence

In time for the US Congressional Hearings into the origins of Covid, we re-release this series - The Slow-Motion Chernobyl.  
Originally broadcast in February/March 2022, it was censored and blocked on Twitter and LinkedIn.   
Please listen. You will hear the true story of the Wuhan research laboratory complex.  You will not hear partisan political attacks but just the facts.   You will hear about the extraordinary censorship from film festivals to mainstream journalism to social media sites to the World Health Organization all to prevent you from knowing the true story of Covid.

Listen.  Comment. Subscribe.

And, as always, if there are any errors please let us know.  Unlike the agents of censorship, we will correct any mistakes!

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The inside story of the most preventable, human-made disaster in history: the Covid virus that has affected countries around the world and killed somewhere between 18 and 24 million people. 
In our first episode - 'The Silent Chernobyl' - we showed how laboratory leaks occur frequently across the world but in China the safety standards are so low that it is common practice for some technicians to sell lab animals to local butchers for meat.   We examined the grotesque lack of professional standards in Chinese medical  labs - researching, against all common sense, dangerous viruses. 
In the second episode - ‘The Big Lie’ - we showed how Communist Chinese officials suppressed any investigation that may show the incompetence of their research infrastructure.
Throughout these episodes -  we told the stories of what happened in China using their words of the extraordinary whistleblowers like Chen Qiushi or  Zhang Zhan - who have been imprisoned, tortured and possibly killed for their work in exposing the appalling response by the Communist officials.
In this third episode, we examine how the Communist Chinese regime has been aided in their cover up by some of the largest international organizations, media companies and scientists. 
We call it ‘The Big Silence’...

Please subscribe, rate, review or like this episode of CrimeWaves at YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.  
For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
www.crimewavespodcast.com
www.declanhill.com
Twitter: declan_hill

Transcript

Covid: The Slow-Motion Chernobyl - The Big Silence

Declan Hill: [00:00:00] The big silence. This is a story that LinkedIn doesn't want you to know. This is a story that in February 2022, the censors on LinkedIn pulled down. And if it were only that site. But Microsoft, one of the largest companies in the world who owns LinkedIn, also censored that iconic photo of the Tank Man.
You know, the one during the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The middle aged man holding a grocery bag and standing unarmed in front of a line of tanks. It's a symbol of peaceful resistance against evil authority, and Microsoft censored it from their search engines on June 4th. The anniversary of the brutal crackdown on democracy.

If it were only Microsoft, but this episode is about the widespread censorship, conflict of interest and corruption that have helped suppress discussion about the greatest [00:01:00] industrial accident in the history of humanity, we call it. The big silence. Welcome to CrimeWaves.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are in the world. Welcome to CrimeWaves. I'm Declan Hill, and I'm an investigative journalist and associate professor at the University of New Haven, and each week, I and my student producers, this week and on this series, It's the brilliant Alexia Miller.

We bring you some stories of the best investigators in the world, [00:02:00] but in this series, we decided to switch it around and bring you the inside story, the most preventable human made disaster in history. the COVID virus that has affected countries around the world and killed, according to the latest studies, somewhere between 18 and 24 million people.

In our first episode, The Silent Chernobyl, we showed how laboratory leaks occur frequently across the world. But in China, the safety standards are so low. that it's common practice for some technicians to sell lab animals to local butchers for meat. We examined the grotesque lack of professional standards in Chinese medical labs, researching against all common sense, these dangerous viruses.

In the second episode, The Big Lie, we show the official communist Chinese suppressing any investigation that may show the incompetence of their research infrastructure. And throughout these episodes, we told the stories of what [00:03:00] happened in China Using the words of the extraordinary Chinese whistleblowers like Chen Xi or Xang Z who've been imprisoned, tortured, and possibly killed for their work in exposing the response by the communist officials.

And we use that term, communist Chinese because we want to draw a clear line between the repressive government and the Chinese people. In this third episode, we're gonna examine how those Communist Chinese has been aided in their coverup. by some of the largest international organizations, media companies, and scientists.

Quote, much of the misinformation on this topic, faults or inaccurate info presented as fact, intentionally or otherwise, has come from prominent scientists and has been amplified by top media. Unquote. Those words come from Alina Chan, a Canadian research scientist working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [00:04:00] MIT, and Harvard in March 2022.

We want to emphasize those words because one of the key takeaways of this series is that almost every Western agency that was supposed to do the right thing during COVID, including, most shocking of all, the institution that's supposed to prevent international epidemics, the WHO, or World Health Organization.

Quote, only one form of contagion travels faster than a virus, and that's fear. Unquote. Those words come from Dan Brown's international best selling novel, Inferno. If you've read it or seen the movie, then you know the popular view of the World Health Organization. It's supposed to be led by stern, no nonsense leaders who put the health of the people ahead of any other consideration.

Quote. Next time something strange and new comes anywhere in the world, let us come in as quickly as possible, [00:05:00] unquote. Well, that used to be true. Because those were the words of the Norwegian, Gro Bruntland, who was the former leader of the Hu. She was speaking in 2003 after the SARS epidemic was shown to have spread because of a delaying, tepid, communist Chinese response.
It killed hundreds of people around the world and Brooklyn said that SARS could have been prevented if the communist Chinese had just been open about the problems that they were dealing with. According to a superb and relatively little seen series of articles in the Times of London by the investigative journalist Jonathan Calvert, And George Arbinot, Communist China swore that would never happen again.

Not that there would never be another made in China international epidemic that would kill people around the world. No, no, no, no. What Communist Chinese officials were concerned with was that they would never be embarrassed by the Hu again. And so they set out to undermine [00:06:00] This international agency, just as the United Nations Human Rights Council is presided over by serial abusers like Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia, or the international police agency Interpol, has been systemically undercut by the Russian government.

So it now hunts for their political opponents overseas. The communist Chinese have set out to destroy almost everything about the once great World Health Organization. And they have. largely succeeded. After Grove Brundtland stepped down in 2006, the communist Chinese got their own candidate, Margaret Chan of Hong Kong, elected.

Chan has an unclear reputation among many medical scientists because during the SARS epidemic, she led Hong Kong's pro Beijing response to the epidemic. So in delaying and denying that there was a problem, many experts claim had resulted in far more casualties. from SARS the necessary. [00:07:00] However, it was during her reign as leader of the WHO that Chan put in place a strange pro communist Chinese action.

For example, she made communist leader Xi Jinping's wife a goodwill ambassador for the organization. Then she nominated Robert Mugabe, the human rights challenged leader of that nightmare run health system in Zimbabwe. A HOO leader. She also declared the medical system of one of China's top allies, North Korea, the envy of most developing nations.

That's very odd. Because a few months later, the human rights group, Amnesty International, described the North Korean medical system as crumbling. Quote, this is from one of their reports, they write, we have documented how widespread and chronic malnutrition. Which suppresses people's immune system, has triggered epidemics, and mass outbreaks of illness related to poor [00:08:00] diet.

Interviews with North Koreans depict a country that professes to have a universal, free health system, but in reality struggles to provide even the most basic service to the population. Health facilities are run down and operate with frequent power cuts and no heat. Medical personnel often do not receive salaries, and many hospitals function without medicines or other essentials. Unquote. This was the system that the Chan led Hu said was the envy of most developing nations. And then Chan and the Hu got Chinese traditional health practices declared an equally important tool to fighting ill health. as evidence based medicine. Critics claim that this is both against best medical practices and very, very bad for the pangolins, rhinoceroses, and sharks of the world.

Because these wild animals, [00:09:00] and many others, are killed in their millions for their reputed traditional medical benefits. And that's harmful for both their habitat, but it also promotes the spreads of disease from the trade in wild animals. Finally, under Margaret Chan, the WHO's response to the Ebola epidemic in 2014 was strangely slow.

It took them months to declare the situation a public health emergency, even when the international charity Doctors Without Borders was declaring it a medical disaster and countries around the world were treating it as such. Leaked emails obtained in 2015 by the Associated Press revealed that the delay was caused by WHO officials Who did not want to upset the African countries hit by the outbreak and damage their economies.

And those African countries were linked with communist China. They quote Michael Osterholm, prominent infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota. Quote, that's like saying you don't want to call [00:10:00] the fire department because you're afraid the fire trucks will create a disturbance in the neighborhood.

Medical experts claim that more than 1, 000 people died. because of the WHO's delay. In the WHO's reaction to the Wuhan epidemic, similar charges have been leveled at the organization. Margaret Chan left the WHO in 2016, but the Communist Chinese government mounted an aggressive campaign to get the present incumbent Tedros Ahanwan Ghebreyesus elected.

The communist Chinese managed to do this despite a number of serious accusations of Tedros's involvement in large scale massacres in his home country of Ethiopia. However, it is the Hu's lack of action in the early stages of the COVID epidemic in the winter of 2020 that is truly bizarre. So let's look at all they chose not to do.

Quote, Quote. Initially, I thought it was somebody lying [00:11:00] there receiving intravenous injection. Then I looked from the other side. I realized that the patient's face was covered by a white cloth. Without breath, that must be a corpse. Unquote. Those are the words of the Chinese independent journalist Cheng Qixi.
He in January 2020 filmed conditions across Wuhan. In a typical video, Cheng went to one hospital and interviewed a nurse. The entire hallway was stuffed with patients. Couldn't even move. Must have been more than a thousand patients. We were so nervous then. That was great pressure. We were crying all the time during those days.

Chen Qishi was jailed by the Communist Chinese for filming such interviews. But during these crucial weeks of January 2020, the Hu accepted the Communist Chinese word that there was not a public health crisis in Wuhan. And they did this despite warnings, public, by journalists like Chen [00:12:00] Qishi, who was all over YouTube, or the Taiwanese government.

The WHO kept silent for more than a month after communist Chinese officials discovered that there was human to human transmission. It was almost a month since the Taiwanese government had publicly called the situation a public health disaster, and done what the WHO did not do. And sent an independent team of public health officials to investigate the situation.

And it was almost two weeks after Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was shut down. And yet, all during this crucial time of January 2020, the Hu never said anything about the situation. Now, fair play, you might say, it was the communist Chinese who were suppressing the news that there was human to human transmission of COVID, but it's the WHO's job not to take government words, but to check for themselves, and they didn't do it.

It was only on January [00:13:00] 31st, 2020, that the WHO finally declared COVID a public health emergency. However, even on that day, Tedros, the president of WHO, issued the following statement. Quote, in the past few weeks we have witnessed the emergence of a previously unknown pathogen which has escalated into an unprecedented outbreak and which has been met by an unprecedented response.

China is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak. The decision is not a vote of no confidence in China. There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel.
So for the next six weeks, the World Health Organization actively campaigned not to stop trade to and from China. And for those six weeks, the virus continued to spread around the world. The [00:14:00] WHO did not declare COVID a pandemic until March 11th. And during that time in America, flights from and to China had been very controversially suspended.

In Italy, much of the north of the country had already been locked down, yet the WHO, according to one of their own officials, Dr. Francesco Zamboni, who would later claim that they suppressed a report on the spread of the disease during this time in Italy. He said in a Sky News report of April 2021, quote, we in Italy didn't have time to prepare, but this report would have allowed them to buy time, which was by far the most important route for getting better prepared for the pandemic.
I think the problem. It's about a lack of independence and a lack of transparency of the World Health Organization. The mandate is to preserve, to promote the health of the citizens of the entire world. And the story that happened shows that the organization is bound by [00:15:00] personal interests, by government interests.
And by financial powers, unquote, all this non activity greatly increased the spread of the disease around the world. There's a study by the University of Southampton researchers entitled effect of non pharmaceutical interventions for containing the COVID 19 outbreak in China. And it shows that if the country had reacted more quickly, the number of cases could have been reduced by 95%.

In total, that's millions of people around the world whose lives would have been spared. Yet, the Hu's extraordinary sucking up to the Communist Chinese continues to this day. And in part four of our series, The Slow Chernobyl, which we call Democracy vs. Repression, we're going to examine the Hu's acceptance of the Communist China's lies about their death toll.

They officially claim that not a single [00:16:00] person has died in China from COVID. Since February 2020, and the WHO has also approved the communist Chinese made but non functioning vaccines Whose very scientists say they only have an efficacy of 10 percent So all this means that at exactly the moment when the people of the world needed the most The WHO failed them.

Yet the worst example of the control of Hu by the Communist Chinese is in the dreadful stage show of an inspection on the origins of COVID one year later in the winter of 2021. It was a proverbial middle finger raised by the Communist Chinese to the international public health community.[00:17:00] 

In 1787, Grigori Potomkin had a problem. He was a minister in the Russian government and his empress, and sometimes lover, Catherine the Great, was going to visit the newly seized territory of Crimea. The whole place was a war devastated wasteland. And Potomkin and his fellow government cronies had, rather like what's happening in the Ukraine now, told their boss that the region was prosperous and happy under Russian rule.
He had a problem. How was he going to impress his boss? And what Potomkin did was import a lot of Russian speaking people who at each stop that the Empress would do, they had [00:18:00] already constructed a fake village. And then they wandered in front of the Empress speaking Russian. And she was suitably impressed.
And as soon as she left, they would take down the so called Potomkin villages and rush down the road past the Empress to build the new place in the history of the geopolitical stage shows. It's up in the very top 10. It gave us the name Potomkin villages. However, the world health organization trip in January, February, 2021 to find the origins of the COVID epidemic.

In China is surely a clear contender quote in the beginning They didn't want anything about the lab in the report because they said it was impossible So there was no need to waste time on it We insisted on including it because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated Unquote Peter and M Barack was a scientist on the [00:19:00] who team In a later Danish documentary, he claimed from the very beginning of the study trip, they weren't even allowed to call it an investigation, the communist Chinese were putting extraordinary pressure on them.

Look, there's actually a very easy way of testing for a potential lab leak from a scientific research facility. It's a standard WHO tactic. It's called a laboratory audit. They even have a specialized team of scientists who investigate whether a research center is actually safe. They review all the paperwork, they check the supplies, and meticulously go through all procedures and test if and when a leak might have occurred.

So you might have thought that the WHO would have been allowed to do so. But not at all. Communist China has blocked every single one of the requests for those tests. And as you heard, they even tried to block discussion of a lab leak. Their pushback started with the composition of the WHO's team. [00:20:00] The Chinese insisted that there be 36 scientists.

18 Chinese, 18 international, except among the 18 international scientists was another communist Chinese, so they always had a majority success for any vote. The British Medical Journal quotes Gary Ruskin of the non profit group U. S. Right to Know, which has been investigating academics for conflict of interest and undisclosed ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And he says, quote, If there was a Nobel Prize for scientific and political incompetency, surely who would be in the running for it? Unquote. When they actually came to investigate the laboratory complexes in Wuhan, the communist Chinese officials would not allow more than a three hour visit to the main biosafety lab four.

None of the other laboratories, who had lower safety standards, But we're doing very controversially COVID [00:21:00] research, we're examined. And look, one Australian research scientist claims that to even get into a BSL lab, if it's done properly, it takes at least an hour of showers and changing clothes and going through this whole rigorous procedure.

And then to come out, it takes another hour, which means that in a three hour visit. The WHO team would have had no more than one hour to quote investigate and their work was hampered because many of the translators in the laboratory were provided by the communist Chinese officials. So even if a lab worker did have a suicide wish and did speak the truth in front of all those government witnesses, it's doubtful that any of the WHO team could understand what they had said.
However, it gets worse. So much worse. Because one of the men leading the international section of the team, including that visit to the Wuhan [00:22:00] laboratory, had been implicated in their dangerous COVID research in China for years, including in that very laboratory. He had passed them millions of dollars in American taxpayer grant money, and he had helped orchestrate A very successful campaign to ensure that there was no discussion of a laboratory leak in Western media.

He was, according to many experts, the definition of a walking, talking conflict of interest. And he was helping to lead the purported independent examination of the Wuhan Research Complex. His name is Peter Daszak, and he's a man that some U. S. congresspeople said should have been put on trial for involuntary manslaughter for his role in the epidemic.

If they're accurate, it should not be involuntary manslaughter. but involuntary genocide. Here is a huge grotesque summation of all the scientific debate [00:23:00] around the origins of COVID. It's unfair, but it's essentially accurate. On one side is the scientific establishment, the prestigious medical research journals, and a number of high profile universities.

They mostly claim that COVID came from an intersection between bats, an unknown animal, And on the other side is a small disparate group of scientists and public health researchers. They either claim that COVID came from a laboratory or that the debate is still open. And the main group that has come together arguing this side is called DRASTIC.

They're the source of almost every piece of independent research that we have mentioned in this series. Here's the unfair, but essentially accurate summation of these two sides of the debate. A significant section of the mainstream scientific media gets paid to say that COVID comes from a wild animal.

Now, I want to be clear, [00:24:00] it's not all of them. not even the majority, not even the greatest section of them, but enough to significantly alter the debate, particularly as a number of them have actually engaged in specific attempts to gerrymander the debate. And on the other side, drastics and the other scientists claiming that the origins of COVID are either unknown or from a lab don't get paid.
I want to be very clear. This does not mean that every scientist who believes that COVID comes from the wild is corrupt or has another kind of agenda. It only means that within that community is a section of scientists who are deeply invested in doing gain of function research on COVID viruses, and they are driving much of the debate around the origins of the virus.

Let's take a quick step back. We'll get some review here. Okay. Gain of function is where the scientists took previously existing dangerous viruses. [00:25:00] and made them more dangerous. And their intellectual defense was their work would make epidemics less harmful because scientists would know what to expect from nature.

And in the last 10 years, they got a lot of money, millions of dollars for doing this work. And while they were doing it, other scientists were saying very loudly, this is crazy. It's madness. One prominent researcher claimed that it was like looking for a gas leak with a lit candle. And gain of function was so controversial that President Barack Obama banned American laboratories from conducting this research.
And what some of the gain of function scientists effectively did was end run that ban. In my opinion, to continue playing Dr. Frankenstein with a bunch of dangerous viruses. souping them up to become more virulent, they off shored their work to the communist Chinese laboratories in Wuhan. [00:26:00] And now that there's a widespread epidemic, there are two concerns.

First, as this entire series underlines, it does seem really, really suspicious that an international epidemic of COVID viruses emerges in the one city of the world where gain of function research has done the most. And two, if the whole point of gain of function research is to prevent future public health epidemics, It does seem rather like they fail.

For example, in March 2022, Dr. Frank Sweeney, the anesthesiologist and podcaster of Straight Talk Doctor, wrote, quote, This pandemic prevention business is getting stinkier and stinkier. It didn't prevent a pandemic. It didn't provide early warning a pandemic pathogen was spreading globally. It had no ability to respond to the pandemic They can't find the origins of SARS 2, [00:27:00] unquote.

What would you do if there were a deadly viral outbreak on the doorsteps of the laboratory where you have been shipping off millions of dollars of research money to? Well, you might do what Peter Daszak did in February 2020 and help orchestrate an open letter to a prominent medical journal denouncing any possible discussion of a laboratory leak.
Quote, To promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture, we stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID 19 does not have a natural origin. Thanks to the researchers at U. S. Right to Know, we can now see the emails going back and forth between Daszak and some of the other scientists discussing how to make this letter seem more independent and thus effective.

It worked. For over 15 months [00:28:00] during the world's largest pandemic in a century, the preeminent medical research journal, The Lancet, and many others, refused to publish any papers advancing the idea that the virus came from a laboratory. Now some of the researchers claiming that the scientific community should at least look carefully before deciding that the debate was over were the best in the world.

Nobel prize winning scientists were metaphorically begging Lancet and similar journals to open up the debate. But their papers were largely rejected and their arguments sidelined. And to add salt to the wound, many editors of these scientific journals turned down the article stating, in effect, that there was no debate because there were no other articles arguing for a possible lab leak.
Well, that's a circular argument. There weren't any scientific papers because at the time, many of them had been suppressed. Now look, to be clear, [00:29:00] part of the reason that there was a suppression of the debate around the origins of COVID was that the communist Chinese have a lot of influence in the scientific publishing industry.

Like their control of Hollywood films that we looked at in episode two, they've invested heavily in academic publishing houses and some universities, which makes many in the academic community reluctant to speak out. There was one publishing house that was shown to have started to censor references to Tibet and the Uyghurs after they were taken over by a Chinese company.

However, some of the suppression of the debate was orchestrated. Peter Daszak helped steer millions of dollars of American taxpayer money to the laboratories in Wuhan to conduct gain of function research in the years before the outbreaks. When the outbreak occurred, he helped orchestrate the Lancet letter and that campaign to stop any discussion of a possible lab leak.

Peter Daszak also [00:30:00] helped the WHO's investigation into the origins of COVID in the winter of 2021. Now to be clear, we're not saying that Daszak was paid bribes or was any way corrupt. He clearly believes what he's saying is true. However, Daszak's campaign of influence didn't stop there. He was also a scientific advisor to arguably the world's most powerful corporation, Google, and the same company that owns the internet search engines and YouTube, the internet's effective visual archives.

And as such, he was presumably able to help steer the non discussion of lab leaks.[00:31:00] 

One of the greatest media stories of our times are the connections between big tech companies, Microsoft, who owns LinkedIn, Google, who owns YouTube, Facebook, who owns WhatsApp, and Apple, who owns everything that Google doesn't. And the Chinese communist regime, the big tech companies are happy unless carefully watched to hand over almost anything to the communists in a desperate attempt to gain access to the Chinese market and their range of sucking up to the dictatorships.

Boggles the mind. As we discussed at the top of the show, LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, took down photos of the famous tank man, that unarmed protester who stood in front of tanks on their way to kill more unarmed pro democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. And speaking of Tiananmen Square, if [00:32:00] you want to see nauseous sucking up, watch the 2016 video of Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, now called Metta, desperately jogging around a polluted Tiananmen Square in a PR effort to get the communist Chinese to open up their market.

Zuckerberg has also publicly declared that all Metta senior executives have and read copies of Chinese Premier Xi Jinping's. Now, all this corporate flattering is disturbing, but what it means in COVID terms is that the American social media companies have at times been complicit in removing anything that challenges the big lie of the Chinese Communist Party.

We're not suggesting that the big tech companies are paid to do so, or in any way corrupt. But we are saying that from February 2020 to March 2021, [00:33:00] that first long year of COVID, almost any mention of a potential lag lab leak was taken off social media. It means that even now, something as low profile as this podcast is under active censorship on LinkedIn, where many of our listeners follow this podcast.

We cannot openly say what our shows are about. We're not the only ones. You remember those brave Chinese journalists and whistleblowers who showed the world the true picture of Wuhan and ended up in jail? Well, Chen Quixi's work on YouTube is behind a community standards wall. For some reason, his work is considered so potentially offensive that anyone who wants to see it has to give their name and email address to YouTube.

And hope that they'll not reveal it, accidentally or otherwise, to the Chinese government. And you remember that documentary film, Coronation Wuhan, made by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose reputation got the film accepted at international film [00:34:00] festivals. until the communist Chinese stepped in? Well, his film can't be seen on YouTube.

And the man giving them scientific advice? Peter Daszak. Now, to be clear, Daszak didn't ask that Coronation Wuhan or any other film be taken down. And he also clearly believes that what he is doing is right. And there's no suggestion that he's being paid or is corrupt. However, what is also clear is that one scientist was such a clear preference on one side of the debate has been able to significantly affect the public discussion of this important debate.

Let's leave this issue with the words of a letter released in 2021 by a group of international scientists desperate to open up the debate around the origins of COVID from the suppression seen in the Lancet letter. Quote, this approach seems consistent with the views presented near the conclusion of the Lancet statement.
Quote, to promote [00:35:00] scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture. Unquote. But, a little word makes a whole difference. A scientific question has never been solved and should never be approached by asking scientists to promote unity. Science, by definition, explores and embraces alternative hypotheses, contradictory arguments, verification, refutability, and even controversy.

And departing from this principle risks establishing dogmas and abandoning science.[00:36:00] 

The nuclear accident at Chernobyl was the death knell for the Soviet system. It convinced millions of people, not only of the incompetency of the system, but the dangers of that incompetency. And the big lie and the big silence around COVID is also important. It is an existential moment for the communist Chinese, because for them, the domestic audience is much, much more important.
than the foreign one. In the early 2000s, there were a series of corruption scandals that rocked the communist Chinese regime. Milk powder for babies was discovered to have been poisoned by corrupt bosses, who then paid off inspectors to look the other way. There was an earthquake that collapsed shoddily built, corruptly constructed schools, killing thousands of children.

And those scandals triggered a wave of riots and demonstrations that terrified the communist party structure. [00:37:00] So now, If the Chinese people understood what really happened in Wuhan, it would be the end of the communist system. And there are other reasons why the big lie and the big silence is important to the communist Chinese.

Their economy made money and continues to make money out of COVID. They did this first by suppressing information in January 2020. You remember that? That was that first crucial month as the epidemic is spreading around the world. They suppressed information, but at the same time they built up a near monopoly of medical supplies.

Quote, We further assess the Chinese government attempted to hide its actions by denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data. There was a report by the U. S. Department of Homeland Security that said China, during that month, increased its import of [00:38:00] surgical masks by 278%, surgical gowns by 72%, and surgical gloves by 32%, and similar items, all during January 2020.

And in February, worldwide imports from China of critical medical supplies significantly declined. The report goes on to say, quote, Based on a comparison of global trade data, On 38 types of medical supplies from October, 2019 through February, 2020 of the previous five years, there's a 95 percent probability that the dramatic shift was not within the normal range.

Unquote. You get it? The communist Chinese could see there was a major epidemic coming down the pipeline, even as they were denying it to their own people. and to us around the world. And they were stocking up on surgical masks and all kinds of surgical [00:39:00] supplies that they'd sell at great profit a couple of months later to the rest of the world.

However, if that truth emerges that COVID came from a communist Chinese laboratory, the rest of the world could demand Tens of trillions of dollars in reparation. In our next episode, we're going to examine the question of how the world was offered two public health options for dealing with COVID. The first came from a democratic government that was, for the most part, very effective.
And the second came from an authoritarian, repressive regime that was largely a waste of time and human lives. And guess which one our politicians [00:40:00] chose.