The Speaker is using the coronavirus to push through legislation for her very wealthy, very loyal base…
On Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden (who, one must remember, holds no elected office at the moment) promised that any further coronavirus legislation might just contain something of “my green deal.” It’s not clear if he was referring to some sort of environmental plan—or how he expects to craft legislation from his basement in Delaware—but even Sleepy Joe seems to think that a global pandemic signals a time for pork-barrel politics.
None among the Democrats has embraced this ethos more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however. As the coronavirus crisis rages on around us, Pelosi is still looking for creative ways to spend your tax dollars.
After failing to stuff the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package with a bevy of her social justice pet projects, Pelosi had the gall to announce that Democrats had made the bill about “workers first.”
“It went from a corporate first proposal that the Republicans put forth in the Senate to a workers first—Democratic workers first—legislation,”said Pelosi, at one of her increasingly bizarre news conferences where the grand dame of Congress appears to be crumbling under the weight of her own rhetoric.
“The bill that was passed in the Senate last night [Wednesday] and that we will take up tomorrow [Friday] is about mitigation: mitigation for all the loss that we have in our economy while still addressing the emergency health needs that we have in our country.”
What the Speaker neglected to mention, however, was how her bill would have forced any airline receiving government bailout money to cut their carbon footprint in half and any business to implement a “diversity plan.” Oh, and she made sure the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts received a handsome handout (note: after they grabbed the $25 million in cash, the management promptly started laying-off musicians).
Now, Pelosi is moving on to “phase four” of the Democrats’ coronavirus rescue package: save the (Democratic) millionaires.
PELOSI WAGES CLASS WARFARE—BUT NOT ON BEHALF OF THE CLASS YOU’D EXPECT
The Pelosi plan would remove a cap on the state and local tax deduction (SALT) that could quickly put cash in people’s pockets—but the beneficiary won’t be average American workers. The beneficiaries will be the real base of the Democratic Party: millionaire liberals from coastal states.
The tax rebates would affect approximately 13 million families—very wealthy families, all of which are earning at least $100,000 and many over a million per annum. “More than half of the proceeds from fully repealing the SALT cap would go to the top 1 percent, households making more than about three-quarters of a million dollars a year,”reports Politico.
To hear Nancy explain the cash infusion, it’s just some extra beer money at the end of the month: “We could reverse that for 2018 and 2019 so that people could refile their taxes” and receive more substantial rebates, Pelosi told The New York Times. “They’d have more disposable income, which is the lifeblood of our economy, a consumer economy that we are.”
The cruel irony of this latest Democratic ploy is that the SALT cap was put in place as part of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017. Those are the same tax cuts that Pelosi wanted to repeal because, supposedly, only the wealthy would benefit from them.
Democrats have wanted the cap removed for quite some time. Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was so angry about it in 2017 that he accused the president of waging “economic civil war” on blue states with the measure. It was a huge issue during the 2018 midterm elections, especially among bleeding heart Democrats fighting for their millionaire friends.
“In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats wielded the SALT limits in House campaigns against Republicans in wealthy blue-state suburbs of cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago,” writes the Times. According to Politico, House Democrats “who made large gains in upscale suburbs as they took the majority in the 2018 elections” voted last year to repeal the cap, but the effort died in the Republican-controlled Senate—“where few states represented by Republicans are all that troubled by the $10,000 limit.”
Removing the SALT cap benefits the people who really embody what Pelosi’s party has become: a coffee clatch of free-thinking progressives who have nothing better to do with their time but think of ways to socially re-engineer the rest of society by obsessing over the LGBT-GQ agenda, inventing genders that don’t exist, and worrying about hate speech lurking under every bed. The kind of people who have the inclination to attend a Seattle yoga class in “undoing whiteness.” The only blue-collar workers they know are the ones who fix the plumbing and pick up the garbage.
“These are people who won’t spend the extra money and don’t really need it,” Michael Linden, executive director of the progressive Groundwork Collaborative, told Politico.
“That’s why they were left out of the cash assistance in the first place.”
But, as Pelosi demonstrated during the last COVID-19 stimulus bill, a health crisis provides a serendipitous opportunity to pass a plethora of unrelated legislation—and Madame Speaker is apparently up to her antics again.
Looting Wave Strikes New York City Amid Coronavirus Lockdown
We’ve been laying out the possible case for the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic could be social unrest.
Millions of Americans have just lost their jobs, have no saving, and insurmountable debts, are flooding food banks across the nation to survive. With the economy crashed and now entering a depression, last week was a significant milestone in the progression of the crisis, as looting of businesses in California and South Carolina began.
Now the looting is spreading across the nation. We noted how stores in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago, were boarding up their windows, preparing for civil unrest.
After all, when 10 million people lose their jobs in two weeks, and an estimated unemployment rate that could reach 15-20% in the second quarter, as per RealInvestmentAdvice.com’s Lance Roberts latest report, the ripple effect on society is so sudden that there could very well be an outbreak of unrest when the weather shifts too much warmer trends, and geographically be situated in low-income areas of inner cities. Hence why the National Guard was called up and now being positioned around and or in major metros.
The beginning innings of social unrest could now be unfolding across New York City. Households are cracking as hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs over several weeks. The city has become the epicenter of the virus crisis, recording 103,060 confirmed cases and 2,935 deaths (as of Saturday afternoon, April 4).
The Wall Street Journal reports an increase in burglaries of commercial establishments across all five boroughs from March 12-31, coinciding when mass shutdowns went into effect.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) recorded a 75% jump in burglaries of businesses during the period, or about 254 burglaries, compared with 145 over the same period last year.
“The increase in burglaries coincided with steps to stop the spread of the coronavirus. On March 15, the city ordered restaurants and bars to cease on-site service, prompting many establishments to close altogether or limit operations. A March 20 decree by Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for the closure of all nonessential businesses, leading many retail stores to shutter,” the Journal noted.
“We knew with the closing of many stores that we could see an increase and, unfortunately, we are,” said NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael LiPetri.
LiPetri said the most targeted establishments by criminals had been restaurants, supermarkets, and retail stores. Between March 12-31, there were over 30 reports of burglaries of supermarkets, a 400% increase over the same period last year.
He said thieves were specifically after food, alcohol, and retail goods. Many gained entry from rooftops and or forcing doors open or breaking windows.
The Journal notes that some retail chains have boarded up shops across the city, citing fears that social unrest could soon follow. Here are some shops that have already boarded up windows:
Thousands of stores in New York have boarded up their doors and windows to avoid possible looting pic.twitter.com/Bc0UvZGuoO
New York Gazette ™ Store owners boarding up buildings across Manhattan: https://t.co/aEawtKmPAq – NEW YORK – A growing scene for those who venture out into the streets of Manhattan these days is boarded up storefronts. From luxury retailers to small… https://t.co/te7a7D74atpic.twitter.com/Bo5wbvFMWh
As looting surges in New York City, the next fear is that the NYPD could become overwhelmed by virus-related incidents and or a shortage of officers.
On Friday, one out of every six NYPD officers was sick or in quarantine. Over 1,500 have tested positive for the virus, which could lead to decreased patrols while crime is surging across the city.
“It’s a worst-case scenario across the board,” a sergeant told The New York Times.
And now it should make sense why President Trump recently signed an executive order to activate up to one million troops – that is because the evolution of the virus crisis and economic collapse, is social unrest and looting and whatever else that may bring.
There’s no proof the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a laboratory, but we can’t take the Chinese government’s denials at face value.
It is understandable that many would be wary of the notion that the origin of the coronavirus could be discovered by some documentary filmmaker who used to live in China. Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out.
The Google translation of the job posting is: “Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity. Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals.” (“Omics” is a term for a subfield within biology, such as genomics or glycomics.)
On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”
Tye contends that that posting meant, “we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus, and would like to recruit people to come deal with it.” He also contends that “news didn’t come out about coronavirus until ages after that.” Doctors in Wuhan knew that they were dealing with a cluster of pneumonia cases as December progressed, but it is accurate to say that a very limited number of people knew about this particular strain of coronavirus and its severity at the time of that job posting. By December 31, about three weeks after doctors first noticed the cases, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization and the first media reports about a “mystery pneumonia” appeared outside China.
Scientific Americanverifies much of the information Tye mentions about Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species.
Shi — a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years — walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals — particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”
. . . By January 7 the Wuhan team determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered — a conclusion based on results from polymerase chain reaction analysis, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus — now officially called SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the SARS pathogen — was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan, they reported in a paper published last month in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.
Analyses of the SARS-CoV-2 genome indicate a single spillover event, meaning the virus jumped only once from an animal to a person, which makes it likely that the virus was circulating among people before December. Unless more information about the animals at the Wuhan market is released, the transmission chain may never be clear. There are, however, numerous possibilities. A bat hunter or a wildlife trafficker might have brought the virus to the market. Pangolins happen to carry a coronavirus, which they might have picked up from bats years ago, and which is, in one crucial part of its genome, virtually identical to SARS-CoV-2. But no one has yet found evidence that pangolins were at the Wuhan market, or even that venders there trafficked pangolins.
On February 4 — one week before the World Health Organization decided to officially name this virus “COVID-19” — the journal Cell Research posted a notice written by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology about the virus, concluding, “our findings reveal that remdesivir and chloroquine are highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro. Since these compounds have been used in human patients with a safety track record and shown to be effective against various ailments, we suggest that they should be assessed in human patients suffering from the novel coronavirus disease.” One of the authors of that notice was the “bat woman,” Shi Zhengli.
In his YouTube video, Tye focuses his attention on a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology named Huang Yanling: “Most people believe her to be patient zero, and most people believe she is dead.”
There was enough discussion of rumors about Huang Yanling online in China to spur an official denial. On February 16, the Wuhan Institute of Virology denied that patient zero was one of their employees, and interestingly named her specifically: “Recently there has been fake information about Huang Yanling, a graduate from our institute, claiming that she was patient zero in the novel coronavirus.” Press accounts quote the institute as saying, “Huang was a graduate student at the institute until 2015, when she left the province and had not returned since. Huang was in good health and had not been diagnosed with disease, it added.” None of her publicly available research papers are dated after 2015.
The web page for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Lab of Diagnostic Microbiology does indeed still have “Huang Yanling” listed as a 2012 graduate student, and her picture and biography appear to have been recently removed — as have those of two other graduate students from 2013, Wang Mengyue and Wei Cuihua.
Her name still has a hyperlink, but the linked page is blank. The pages for Wang Mengyue and Wei Cuihua are blank as well.
(For what it is worth, the South China Morning Post — a newspaper seen as being generally pro-Beijing — reported on March 13 that “according to the government data seen by the Post, a 55 year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 on November 17.”)
On February 17, Zhen Shuji, a Hong Kong correspondent from the French public-radio service Radio France Internationale, reported: “when a reporter from the Beijing News of the Mainland asked the institute for rumors about patient zero, the institute first denied that there was a researcher Huang Yanling, but after learning that the name of the person on the Internet did exist, acknowledged that the person had worked at the firm but has now left the office and is unaccounted for.”
Tye says, “everyone on the Chinese internet is searching for [Huang Yanling] but most believe that her body was quickly cremated and the people working at the crematorium were perhaps infected as they were not given any information about the virus.” (The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that handling the body of someone who has died of coronavirus is safe — including embalming and cremation — as long as the standard safety protocols for handing a decedent are used. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether those safety protocols were sufficiently used in China before the outbreak’s scope was known.)
As Tye observes, a public appearance by Huang Yanling would dispel a lot of the public rumors, and is the sort of thing the Chinese government would quickly arrange in normal circumstances — presuming that Huang Yanling was still alive. Several officials at the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued public statements that Huang was in good health and that no one at the institute has been infected with COVID-19. In any case, the mystery around Huang Yanling may be moot, but it does point to the lab covering up something about her.
China Global Television Network, a state-owned television broadcaster, illuminated another rumor while attempting to dispel it in a February 23 report entitled “Rumors Stop With the Wise”:
On February 17, a Weibo user who claimed herself to be Chen Quanjiao, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reported to the public that the Director of the Institute was responsible for leaking the novel coronavirus. The Weibo post threw a bomb in the cyberspace and the public was shocked. Soon Chen herself stepped out and declared that she had never released any report information and expressed great indignation at such identity fraud on Weibo. It has been confirmed that that particular Weibo account had been shut down several times due to the spread of misinformation about COVID-19.
That Radio France Internationale report on February 17 also mentioned the next key part of the Tye’s YouTube video. “Xiaobo Tao, a scholar from South China University of Technology, recently published a report that researchers at Wuhan Virus Laboratory were splashed with bat blood and urine, and then quarantined for 14 days.” HK01, another Hong Kong-based news site, reported the same claim.
The first conclusion of Botao Xiao’s paper is that the bats suspected of carrying the virus are extremely unlikely to be found naturally in the city, and despite the stories of “bat soup,” they conclude that bats were not sold at the market and were unlikely to be deliberately ingested.
The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan [area] of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization could not confirm if bats were present at the market. Botao Xiao’s paper theorizes that the coronavirus originated from bats being used for research at either one of two research laboratories in Wuhan.
We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus. Within ~ 280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention. WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province. The expert in Collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT). Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019. He described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him.
Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market. The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital (Figure 1, bottom) where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.
The second laboratory was ~12 kilometers from the seafood market and belonged to Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences . . .
In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.
However, Xiao has told the Wall Street Journal that he has withdrawn his paper. “The speculation about the possible origins in the post was based on published papers and media, and was not supported by direct proofs,” he said in a brief email on February 26.
The bat researcher that Xiao’s report refers to is virologist Tian Junhua, who works at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control. In 2004, the World Health Organization determined that an outbreak of the SARS virus had been caused by two separate leaks at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. The Chinese government said that the leaks were a result of “negligence” and the responsible officials had been punished.
In 2017, the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Media Group made a seven-minute documentary about Tian Junhua, entitled “Youth in the Wild: Invisible Defender.” Videographers followed Tian Junhua as he traveled deep into caves to collect bats.
“Among all known creatures, the bats are rich with various viruses inside,” he says in Chinese.
“You can find most viruses responsible for human diseases, like rabies virus, SARS, and Ebola. Accordingly, the caves frequented by bats became our main battlefields.” He emphasizes, “bats usually live in caves humans can hardly reach. Only in these places can we find the most ideal virus vector samples.”
One of his last statements on the video is:
“In the past ten-plus years, we have visited every corner of Hubei Province. We explored dozens of undeveloped caves and studied more than 300 types of virus vectors. But I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life. Because humans need not only the vaccines, but also the protection from the nature.”
The environment for collecting bat samples is extremely bad. There is a stench in the bat cave. Bats carry a large number of viruses in their bodies. If they are not careful, they are at risk of infection. But Tian Junhua is not afraid to go to the mountain with his wife to catch Batman.
Tian Junhua summed up the experience that the most bats can be caught by using the sky cannon and pulling the net. But in the process of operation, Tian Junhua forgot to take protective measures. Bat urine dripped on him like raindrops from the top. If he was infected, he could not find any medicine. It was written in the report.
The wings of bats carry sharp claws. When the big bats are caught by bat tools, they can easily spray blood. Several times bat blood was sprayed directly on Tians skin, but he didn’t flinch at all. After returning home, Tian Junhua took the initiative to isolate for half a month. As long as the incubation period of 14 days does not occur, he will be lucky to escape, the report said.
Bat urine and blood can carry viruses. How likely is it that bat urine or blood got onto a researcher at either Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Alternatively, what are the odds that some sort of medical waste or other material from the bats was not properly disposed of, and that was the initial transmission vector to a human being?
Virologists have been vehemently skeptical of the theory that COVID-19 was engineered or deliberately constructed in a laboratory; the director of the National Institutes of Health has written that recent genomic research “debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.” And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.
But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.
“Medical Supply Arbitrage”: How Hordes Of Middle Men, Profiteers & Scammers Massively Inflated Prices Of N95s
Americans hear it every day now during Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s press briefings. In the middle of a crushing pandemic, New York and other states are being grossly gouged as they shop around for medical supplies. With most of their regular relationships exhausted, states are competing against each other, a nonsensical and costly “bidding war” that Cuomo has blamed on President Trump.
N95 masks, which are now among the most prized commodities on the planet, are in such short supply, that some hospitals in NYC simply don’t have them to provide to workers, forcing them to improvise. Cuomo says masks that recently cost just 40 or 50 cents are now being sold for $7 a pop, a roughly 13x markup.
While the administration’s failure to better prepare for the epidemic certainly hasn’t helped, the New York Times on Friday pointed out another, bigger factor that’s greatly contributed to this problem. Complex globalized supply chains have been disrupted by the outbreak, and with production largely centered in China, producers are effectively using the masks as political chits: Beijing has given them to Italy, and the UK – and even a few to the US.
But beyond that, the chaos caused by the outbreak caused such a mad scramble to buy up these supplies, that brokers are selling them at crazy markups, many because they bought them at already-crazy markups, and are now either trying to make a sliver of profit, or just break even. Even wannabe ‘Good Samaritans’ have fallen prey to this cycle, as the dogooders ask simply to be reimbursed for their costs, or just accept that they will lose money, which is hard to do during a time of looming economic catastrophe. At a certain point, it almost becomes difficult to differentiate the scammers from the do-gooders.
Others are exploiting relationships to act as ‘brokers’, middle-manning N95 masks and other supplies – the masks especially will become even more scarce and costly once the White House and CDC inevitably advise people to wear them in public – for modest profits.
Rampant crisis profiteering has already been well-documented by the press, as have the efforts by states and the federal government to police it. Earlier this week, AG Barr got up at the White House’s daily press conference and warned that federal prosecutors would be cracking down. And many have been publicly shamed.
But even as Amazon bans the sale of masks to the general public, next-level ‘brokers’ are using the power of the internet to deal with hospital systems and other health-care providers who have essentially been forced to participate in the shadowy grey market to acquire essential supplies at a time when people’s lives – even the lives of young, healthy people – are very much on the line.
One of the details that most stood out to us in Friday’s New York Times story was the description of the practice as “medical supply arbitrage.” Here’s how it works, according to NYT:
Not every new entrant to the market is a good Samaritan. Groups on Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram are teeming with posts hawking thousands of masks at inflated prices.
Some are wholesalers who bought pallets of masks from China or in liquidation sales and then marked them up. Many more are simply middlemen who call themselves brokers. They scour the groups for masks advertised for a relatively low price, and then repost the offer for a few thousand dollars more. They don’t handle the masks or put up their own money.
Yaear Weintroub is one of those brokers. A 22-year-old community college student from Brooklyn, he typically sells wholesale electronics to Amazon sellers. But the online forums he searches for deals became flooded with listings for masks last month, so he now spends his days trying to connect buyers and sellers for a bit of medical-supply arbitrage.
In a recent interview, he said he was working with a partner to close a deal for 280,000 surgical masks that would increase their price 20 percent and net the pair a roughly $40,000 profit. He said many of the brokers sold to other brokers, each one marking up the price, until the masks presumably make it to a nursing home or a hospital. He said he would prefer to sell directly to hospitals.
“They’re just more serious,” he said. “So if I have the goods, I want a serious buyer for them. And besides, it’s a morally good reason.”
To these sellers, medical supplies are simply another hot product to flip for a profit. Avraham Eisenberg, a New York wholesaler who is trying to ship masks from China, compared the rush for masks to the fad several years ago for fidget spinners.
As prosecutors crack down on re-sellers of medical supplies, the line between what constitutes ‘gouging’ and simple sales of products that aren’t illegal to sell to the general public is becoming more difficult to discern. Barr’s press conference appearance aside, last month, the DoJ said it would investigate people manipulating the medical-supply market. Then, five days later, federal authorities charged a Brooklyn man with lying about price gouging after he tried to sell 1,000 masks and other supplies to a doctor for $12,000 (he was also charged with assault for coughing on one of the agents).
It might still be legal, but anybody who’s still doing this should watch their backs.
COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. Coronaviruses belong to a group of viruses that infect animals, from peacocks to whales. They’re named for the bulb-tipped spikes that project from the virus’s surface and give the appearance of a corona surrounding it.
A coronavirus infection usually plays out one of two ways: as an infection in the lungs that includes some cases of what people would call the common cold, or as an infection in the gut that causes diarrhea. COVID-19 starts out in the lungs like the common cold coronaviruses, but then causes havoc with the immune system that can lead to long-term lung damage or death.
SARS-CoV-2 is genetically very similar to other human respiratory coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. However, the subtle genetic differences translate to significant differences in how readily a coronavirus infects people and how it makes them sick.
SARS-CoV-2 has all the same genetic equipment as the original SARS-CoV, which caused a global outbreak in 2003, but with around 6,000 mutations sprinkled around in the usual places where coronaviruses change. Think whole milk versus skim milk.
Compared to other human coronaviruses like MERS-CoV, which emerged in the Middle East in 2012, the new virus has customized versions of the same general equipment for invading cells and copying itself. However, SARS-CoV-2 has a totally different set of genes called accessories, which give this new virus a little advantage in specific situations. For example, MERS has a particular protein that shuts down a cell’s ability to sound the alarm about a viral intruder. SARS-CoV-2 has an unrelated gene with an as-yet unknown function in that position in its genome. Think cow milk versus almond milk.
The infection begins when the long spike proteins that protrude from the virus particle latch on to the cell’s ACE2 protein. From that point, the spike transforms, unfolding and refolding itself using coiled spring-like parts that start out buried at the core of the spike. The reconfigured spike hooks into the cell and crashes the virus particle and cell together. This forms a channel where the string of viral genetic material can snake its way into the unsuspecting cell.
An illustration of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein shown from the side (left) and top. The protein latches onto human lung cells. 5-HT2AR/Wikimedia
SARS-CoV-2 spreads from person to person by close contact. The Shincheonji Church outbreak in South Korea in February provides a good demonstration of how and how quickly SARS-CoV-2 spreads. It seems one or two people with the virus sat face to face very close to uninfected people for several minutes at a time in a crowded room. Within two weeks, several thousand people in the country were infected, and more than half of the infections at that point were attributable to the church. The outbreak got to a fast start because public health authorities were unaware of the potential outbreak and were not testing widely at that stage. Since then, authorities have worked hard and the number of new cases in South Korea has been falling steadily.
How the virus makes people sick
SARS-CoV-2 grows in type II lung cells, which secrete a soap-like substance that helps air slip deep into the lungs, and in cells lining the throat.
As with SARS, most of the damage in COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, is caused by the immune system carrying out a scorched earth defense to stop the virus from spreading. Millions of cells from the immune system invade the infected lung tissue and cause massive amounts of damage in the process of cleaning out the virus and any infected cells.
Each COVID-19 lesion ranges from the size of a grape to the size of a grapefruit. The challenge for health care workers treating patients is to support the body and keep the blood oxygenated while the lung is repairing itself.
How SARS-CoV-2 infects, sickens and kills people.
SARS-CoV-2 has a sliding scale of severity. Patients under age 10 seem to clear the virus easily, most people under 40 seem to bounce back quickly, but older people suffer from increasingly severe COVID-19. The ACE2 protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses as a door to enter cells is also important for regulating blood pressure, and it does not do its job when the virus gets there first. This is one reason COVID-19 is more severe in people with high blood pressure.
SARS-CoV-2 is more severe than seasonal influenza in part because it has many more ways to stop cells from calling out to the immune system for help. For example, one way that cells try to respond to infection is by making interferon, the alarm signaling protein. SARS-CoV-2 blocks this by a combination of camouflage, snipping off protein markers from the cell that serve as distress beacons and finally shredding any anti-viral instructions that the cell makes before they can be used. As a result, COVID-19 can fester for a month, causing a little damage each day, while most people get over a case of the flu in less than a week.
At present, the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 is a little higher than that of the pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, but SARS-CoV-2 is at least 10 times as deadly. From the data that is available now, COVID-19 seems a lot like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), though it’s less likely than SARS to be severe.
What isn’t known
There are still many mysteries about this virus and coronaviruses in general – the nuances of how they cause disease, the way they interact with proteins inside the cell, the structure of the proteins that form new viruses and how some of the basic virus-copying machinery works.
What is amazing so far in this outbreak is all the good science that has come out so quickly. The research community learned about structures of the virus spike protein and the ACE2 protein with part of the spike protein attached just a little over a month after the genetic sequence became available. I spent my first 20 or so years working on coronaviruses without the benefit of either. This bodes well for better understanding, preventing and treating COVID-19.
Outrage After COVID-19 Test-Scammers Set Up Pop-Up Tents In Louisville
Unbelievable as it sounds at a moment local and state police are in many instances imposing draconian measures limiting citizens’ movement across state borders, and in some instances fining them for not wearing virus protective face gear, as well as ticketing small businesses for alleged price gouging, this one has slipped past authorities, apparently:
Kentucky officials are warning residents of fake coronavirus testing sites in the Louisville area, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Medical marketing companies offering coronavirus tests, including one that promises results in 24 hours, have charged people up to $250 per test.
We should also note this seems an incredibly dangerous threat to public safety, given scammers posing as medical professionals administering ‘fake COVID-19 tests’ on people showing up with symptoms itself increases the likelihood of local spread.
No doubt the scammers are not at all following safe health protocol like changing over gloves and strict sanitization procedures, so the presumed ‘test’ itself could spread the virus.
“Metro Council President David James and several local advocates have been hunting down a group they say are fake COVID-19 testers,” local media reports say further of the group, which has been in the state before conducting similar medical-related scams. “So far, James said the scammers have set up pop-up drive-thru testing tents at Wayside Christian Mission, Sojourn Church and at Broadway and 17th Street.”
“It’s a scam,” James said. “They couldn’t even spell HIPAA right on their name tags!” He further said of the health risks posed by the unique new con:
“They would test somebody and use the same gloves they used on the person before. They get your $240 dollars plus they can turn in fake Medicaid claims.”
Some states have begun issuing warnings against fraudulent test sites, such as Indiana which also recently saw some examples. Kentucky and others have begun requiring that test sites and labs be approved to work with the state.
The Louisville Courier Journal reported of growing public outrage regarding the increase in unapproved ‘pop-up testing sites’:
A spokeswoman for Mayor Greg Fischer’s office said that the city has received calls about multiple pop-up testing sites and that police are investigating for “further review and possible action.”
“At this time, we are advising residents experiencing symptoms to seek COVID-19 testing from hospitals, health care providers or government resources,” Louisville city spokeswoman Jessica Wethington said after the fraudulent activity was exposed.
Screengrab of local footage of fake testing site, via Louisville Courier Journal.
And one local advocate, Tara Bassett, who’s been investigative the group said they’d been run out of town on prior occasions.
“They showed up again in late February, early March and I actually ambushed interviewed one of the guys that’s still on this team,” Bassett said. “They’re the scum of the earth and they’re preying on the poorest of the poor and I’m going to do everything in my power to get them the hell out of Kentucky.”
We live in a very different world than we did back in January when the calendar turned to 2020 and everyone was anticipating the great things they’d accomplish in the brand new decade.
Only 3 months ago, we all had futures we imagined…
Kids graduating from high school or college
A vacation we were planning
A new job we were striving toward
Retirement so close you could practically smell the beach where you’d spend your golden years
The health and fitness goal you were finally going to achieve
A positive lifestyle change you were planning to make
A relocation to a new destination
The advancement of your relationship, whether it was a new one or one you’d been in for a while
A summer road trip
Getting a new pet
An empty nest and what you were going to do with that newly vacant bedroom
A new family member
Three months ago, we all had dreams, goals for the future, or at least some idea of what the upcoming year would hold for us.
I’ll bet none of us even considered on New Year’s Eve that we’d spend the first half (at least) of the year dealing with a deadly pandemic. Heck, I sat on a balcony in a little seaside village in Montenegro, toasting the new decade with a friend and some Jack Daniels, watching fireworks over the Adriatic Sea, and planning what European destination I’d be heading to next.
How utterly terrifying to know that we’re all likely to lose somebody we love to this virus or to a medical condition that would have been survivable if the local hospital hadn’t been overflowing with COVID patients.
We know there’s nary a roll of toilet paper to be found in a huge swath of the United States. We know that our supply chain, if not broken, is at the least, badly bruised. We know that if a person we love goes into the hospital with COVID-19, there’s a frighteningly large chance they may never come out again unless it’s in a body bag. We know that medical professionals in New York City don’t even have personal protective equipment to keep themselves healthy while they try to keep people alive. We know that yesterday in the state of New York, 23 people died every hour of the day from the coronavirus that has destroyed the world as we know it.
We nearly all know people who have been laid off. Maybe it’s someone in your family. Maybe it’s you. And if you haven’t yet lost your job, are you waiting for that hammer to drop? We all know of businesses that aren’t going to make it through months of this shutdown.
We know people who couldn’t pay their rent this month. We know people who pulled it together this month but won’t be able to pay May’s rent if this lockdown should continue. We know it’s so bad that the government has said landlords can’t evict tenants in many states – which means the landlords may not be able to pay their mortgages.
We may not know much right now, but we know that the economy is a f*cking disaster.
And we have no idea when this current purgatory will end.
The uncertainty is one of the hardest parts.
The advent of COVID-19 has changed our lives so much that none of us has any idea what the future will bring. Whereas before we’d be thinking about our summer plans, perhaps a holiday at the beach or a camp for the kids, now we don’t know if we’ll even be able to leave our homes by the time summer rolls around.
How absolutely bizarre to have no idea what our worlds will look like in 3 months.
My family, so far, is blessedly healthy, a fact for which I give thanks every day. But it’s become difficult to think of much beyond that. We don’t know if my one daughter’s plan to relocate to another state for an opportunity will still be available. We don’t know if my other daughter’s workplace will reopen. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to head back to Europe and continue my long-awaited trip around the world.
When the lease is up at my daughter’s apartment, we don’t know where we’ll go because we don’t know what the world will look like then. Will we need to tap into those homesteading skills we learned back in California? If so, we sure can’t do it from where we live right now. Where will we go?
Will running a business online still even be a possibility at the end of this? Everything…every single thing…is in question.
All of us have some variation of these same questions running through our heads right now. It’s pretty hard to plan when you don’t know if the post-COVID world is going to look more like Mad Max, The Walking Dead, or Little House on the Prairie. Or maybe it’ll be a lot like the pre-COVID world, only with more money problems.
It’s hard to figure out your plan when you have no idea what post-apocalyptic world you’re going to end up in. So how do you keep from going nuts? How do you find some peace in a world with so much uncertainty?
How to survive in a world of uncertainty
The word “survive” may sound melodramatic, but for a lot of people who are finding themselves living with broken dreams, for those who have vulnerable loved ones, for those living with sudden financial uncertainty, and for those who are sacrificing time and contact with loved ones due to their own exposure to the virus, it fits the bill right now. No, we may not die from this but when your peace of mind suffers, it can be a real struggle.
Below are some ideas that may help you to get through this if you’re struggling.
Make plans every day. While you can’t really make plans for 6 months down the road, you can make plans for the day or even the week. Create a schedule for yourself. Don’t just lay there on the sofa watching Netflix and Amazon Prime all day long. It’s not good for you. Get up and get dressed (not necessarily office-dressed but don’t wear the same thing to live in and sleep in for three days in a row.) Figure out what nutrient-rich meals you’re going to make that day. Think about how you’ll exercise – will it be a walk with the dogs around the neighborhood or will you go to a nearby hiking trail? What work do you need to get accomplished? What room are you going to deep clean? Write it all down on a whiteboard or a piece of paper on the fridge so everybody knows what’s on the day’s agenda.
Don’t lay around watching television all day. Set yourself a time at which you’ll watch a movie or show online. I’ve worked from home for years, and one rule I’ve held for myself throughout it is that we don’t turn on Netflix until it’s getting dark. That means in the summer, it’s later because we can spend time doing things outdoors during the nice weather. With us being home all the time now, I’ve relaxed that rule slightly to 6 pm. But if you start watching while you have lunch it’s way to easy to get sucked into a series and the next thing you know, it’s bedtime and you never accomplished anything. This isn’t healthy mentally or physically so I strongly advise that if you are a television viewer or a person who likes to stream shows you limit this to evenings.
Prepare for what you can. We all know that we need to prep with the basics of food, water, seeds, tools, and the like. This doesn’t really change, regardless of what the future holds. So keep doing what you can to build up supplies and skills. A lot of things are out of our hands but you can control what is within your power.
Don’t consume a constant diet of bad news. I spend a lot of time researching this virus, the effects on our economy, how it has decimated other parts of the world, reading the heartbreaking stories of loss. I’ve been doing this since January 20th, when it first really appeared on my radar. I do not advise it to anyone. It can be hard to see the light when you spend your time delving into the darkness. I’ve been doing this for years and can compartmentalize to some degree, but this has been a long haul. Limit the amount of time you spend reading about this outbreak and the difficulties surrounding it. Unless your job depends on you knowing every detail about COVID-19 and it’s effect on the world, you can stay informed reading about it for 30 minutes a day instead of 6 hours a day. Trust me when I say this: your outlook will become much brighter when your day is not filled by press conferences, the follies of incompetent government officials, and stories of suffering.
Enjoy making healthful, home-cooked meals. Remember all those times you said you didn’t have time to cook? Now, if you’re currently out of work, you finally have time to cook. Don’t just heat up frozen pizza after frozen pizza! Get in that kitchen and whip up all those tasty delights you’ve wanted to make for years. Learn to bake bread if you don’t know how to do so. Cook things that take half a day to prepare. Make every tiny detail from scratch. Set the table with the nice china and give your food the showcase it deserves.
Work on some projects you never had time to do before. What projects have you always put off because you didn’t have the time? We’re currently converting a storage room in my daughter’s small apartment into a second bedroom since it looks like I’m going to be here for a while. We’ve been going through the boxes of our past and enjoying the walk down memory lane. I’m finally getting all this stuff into scrapbooks. We’re devising clever storage methods and purging things we don’t need. Soon we’ll have an adorable tiny room off the laundry room for some much needed extra space. After that, we’re building some shelves with curtains in front of them for the kitchen to put away our canned and boxed goods, hidden from prying eyes. We also each have some craft projects on the go for entertainment because productive hobbies are always a great idea.
Spend time outdoors. If your municipality allows it, spend some time outdoors. You can still be socially distant while getting fresh air. Avoid the clusters of humans and walk the challenging trails at your local hiking place. Or go early in the day while everybody else is still sleeping in. Getting some fresh air, exercise, and sunshine is healthy for both your body and your mind. If you can’t go out for a walk, at the very least, sit on your balcony or patio and read for a while.
Find something to be thankful for as often as possible. An attitude of gratitude makes tough times easier to stomach. Even now, there are things for which we can be grateful. I am spending time with my daughter and talking regularly on the phone to my other daughter. I am enjoying the blossoming of the spring flowers – always a favorite time of year for me. I am grateful that for now, I still have work online. I’m grateful my daughter is no longer working in retail during this outbreak and that she’s safely home. I’m grateful I have the time to cook delicious meals, experience my daughter’s cooking (she’s really good at it), and spend some bonus time with her. We have two dogs to walk and two cats to cuddle. Life could be much, much worse so take a moment to appreciate what you have right now.
Find something to anticipate. As we talked about before, we live in a period of extreme uncertainty. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find anything to anticipate. I’m looking forward to the new room we’re setting up this week. I’m looking forward to a movie we plan to watch this weekend when all our tasks are done. I’m even looking forward to organizing the kitchen because that will be such a satisfying task. I also have a book on Kindle I plan to read on my birthday that is coming up. I noticed that daffodils are poking their heads through in the front yard and I can’t wait to see how the place looks when there are sunny yellow flowers everywhere. My homesteader friends back in California are filling my social media feeds with baby goats and baby chicks and I’m counting down the days until a friend’s baby is born.
Sure, these things are short term, and some of them aren’t even my things, but right now, the short term is all we have. Take the joy that’s there. Find things that will occur within the week and don’t look too far in advance.
Stop focusing on things going back to “normal.”
We’d all like to think that one day this will suddenly be over. The kids will return to school. We’ll go back to our offices and our commutes. We won’t be struggling over money anymore. Life will return to the pre-COVID days.
But is this the healthiest way to look at the situation?
Spending all your time looking forward to the day when this is over is an exercise in frustration because nobody knows when that will be. And more than that, nobody knows what “normal” is going to look like when all the lockdowns are over. A lot of things will never be the same.
You can help yourself by learning to adapt now to changed circumstances. This will help you learn to live with the new normal, whatever that turns out to be. Major events are bound to cause major and long-lasting changes. This has happened throughout history.
In reality, the things we’re experiencing right now, while not necessarily easy, aren’t so bad. Things will probably get worse before they get better, but eventually, some form of “better” will come.
Your ability to adapt is indicative of your ability to survive. So let’s get through this lockdown and keep our mindsets positive. Let’s get through the part that comes next.
Then, eventually, we’ll come out on the other side, ready to tackle the new normal, whatever that ends up being like.
“Don’t Disrupt The Supply Chain”: The 9 States Still Resisting Stay-At-Home Orders
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been talking up a federal-imposed nationwide ‘stay at home’ order, though many might challenge the very legality or possibility that Washington would even have the power to impose it on states. Thus far Trump has resisted such a move, preferring to leave these questions to the governors.
Fauci told CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the end of this week of a federal order, “I don’t understand why that’s not happening.” He said, “If you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that. We really should be.”
Meanwhile much of the mainstream media has directed its ire at the last “hold-out” states which have “dragged their feet” on the issue. Many governors have expressed that they don’t see the need to take such a drastic step that could decimate their local economies, leaving social distancing to the ‘good judgments’ of counties, towns, and individuals.
Via The New York Times
For example CNN has headlined its story: “Why these 8 Republican governors are holding out on statewide stay-at-home orders?”
The nine states that have resisted shutting everything down are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa expressed this during a recent press conference, saying:
“What else are we doing by doing a shelter-in-place or stay-at-home order except for potentially disrupting the supply chain, putting additional pressure on the essential workforce, and making sure that we are considering how we bring that back up?”
In some instances like Iowa, schools and ‘non-essential’ businesses have been closed, while a state-wide ‘one size fits all’ approach has been resisted. Oklahoma has also come practically close to a stay at home order, without actually issuing the formal directive.
Map & data via The Guardian/Johns Hopkins CSSE
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts also affirmed it should be a local and regional matter. He was cited in ABC News as saying, “We’re a different state than states like New York that are doing that. We are much earlier in the epidemic curve than New York.”
By the New York Times’ numbers, some 311 million people have been urged to stay home in at least 41 states:
In a matter of days, millions of Americans have been asked to do what might have been unthinkable only a month ago: Don’t go to work, don’t go to school, don’t leave the house at all, unless you have to.
The directives to keep people at home, which began in California in mid-March, have quickly swept the nation.
On Friday, Alabama and Missouri became the latest states to issue such orders. A significant majority of states, the Navajo Nation and many cities and counties have now instructed residents to stay at home in a desperate race to stunt the spread of the coronavirus.
This means at least 311 million people in at least 41 states, three counties, eight cities, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are being urged to stay home.
Governors have said they’ve “agonized” over the decision, given the economic effects among the earliest states to give the directive were felt immediately.
Ohio for example just days after its governor essentially shut down the state, saw an immediate 600% rise in unemployment filings, with that figure climbing steadily since.
Fast forward to 2020 and public fears of COVID-19 have encouraged law enforcement to turn neighbors into government snitches.
Geekwirerevealed how the Bellevue Police Department has turned a public service app into a report on your neighbors app. You can report these incidents through the MyBellevue app on your electronic device or the MyBellevue portal.
“Police in Bellevue, Wash., are asking residents to report violations of the state’s “stay home” order online in an effort to clear up 911 lines for emergencies.”
A recent Associated Pressarticle revealed that people are all to happy to report on their neighbors.
“Snitches are emerging as enthusiastic allies as cities, states and countries work to enforce directives meant to limit person-to-person contact amid the virus pandemic that has claimed tens of thousands of lives worldwide. They’re phoning police and municipal hotlines, complaining to elected officials and shaming perceived scofflaws on social media.”
LA Mayor Offers Snitches Rewards For Reporting On Neighbors
According to a CBS LA4article Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the city would reward snitches.
Four businesses have been referred to the city attorney’s office for misdemeanor filings.
“You know the old expression about snitches, well in this case snitches get rewards,” Garcetti said. “We want to thank you for turning folks in and making sure we are all safe.”
When law enforcement encourages Americans to turn against each other we all lose. We become a nation controlled by fear.
“Suspected violations are tracked in the MyBellevue app and generate a heat map that shows where gatherings have been reported. The map shows hot spots of activity throughout the City of Bellevue, which is about 10 miles from Seattle.
The Bellevue Police Departments’ MyBellevue page claims police need the public’s help monitoring their neighbors.
“The vast majority of people in our community are following the “Stay Home” order and are being safe,” said Chief Steve Mylett. “But we need your help in reporting violations where there may be a large amount of people at risk.”
Report Gatherings: You may report gatherings here in violation of the State mandate to “Stay Home”
Contact Your Police Sector Captain: Got an issue affecting your neighborhood? Contact the sector captain for your area! A captain is assigned to each of three geographical sectors — North, South and West — and is ultimately responsible for issues taking place in their sector.
“Sometimes there is a need to implement extreme measures but often these crises are used as justification to implement surveillance and data collection measures for purposes beyond that crisis,” the ACLU of Washington’s Jennifer Lee said.
Reporting on your neighbor apps fly in the face of the freedoms Americans have enjoyed for centuries.
The MyBellevue mobile app can be found at the Apple store and Google Play store. Two recent reviews spell out how everyone should view apps that encourage Americans to report on each other.
Leo Rosas said,
start sarcasm “Yes daddy, step on me harder, oh yes take my constitutionally protected rights away!* end. YOU SOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES! tell on your neighbors for leaving their house is BS you have no clue where they are going or for what. Since no crime has been committed in traveling, the police have no right to know where you go or why. There is no right to Abridge constitutionally protected free travel! Y’all were sworn to protect and uphold the constitution, covid doesn’t change that.”
Matthew Harphan said,
“I bet Hitler is rolling in his grave, super Jealous of your app used to violate civil rights through unconstitutional enforcement during Corona virus. You swore an Oath to Uphold and Defend the Constitution.. this is pathetic. I expect better from police. Despicable”
Now is the time to fight for our freedoms before a panicked nation willingly gives them away.
UN Blasted As “Absurd & Immoral” For Appointing China To Key UN Human Rights Panel
In what will no doubt be taken as a direct shot across the Trump administration’s bow, China has been appointed to a key United Nations human rights post.
Fox reports on Saturday: “China has been appointed to a panel on the controversial U.N. Human Rights Council, where it will help vet candidates for important posts — despite its decades-long record of systematic human rights abuse that the U.S. has said fueled the coronavirus pandemic.”
UN file image
The timing couldn’t be worse, given the soaring tensions and weeks-long war of words between US and Chinese officials, both floating bombastic charges against the other of intentionally spreading COVID-19.
President Trump has even taken to calling the deadly virus the “Chinese virus” – given as he said last month: “It could have been contained to that one area in China where it started.” He followed at the time by saying of China “certainly the world is paying a big price for what they did.”
Jiang Duan, minister at the Chinese Mission in Geneva, will represent Beijing on the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Consultative Group, alongside four other international representatives.
A Geneva-based human rights watchdog called UN Watch, meanwhile, slammed the development as “absurd and immoral” for the UN to allow China to have a hand in selecting human rights officials for the top body.
“Allowing China’s oppressive and inhumane regime to choose the world investigators on freedom of speech, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances is like making a pyromaniac into the town fire chief,” UN Watch said in a statement, according to FOX.
The Human Rights Council, itself long subject of controversy – especially after the Saudis recently occupied a top spot on the bloc – examines freedom of speech, war crimes, and disappeared persons issues around the world.
The central irony is that China – itself long documented to have an extensive ‘political prison’ system and with more recent charges of “disappearing” doctors and scientists who have tried to blow the whistle over its COVID-19 response – will now have a key role in selecting the top human rights body’s make-up.
