RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15844/coronavirus-china-cover-up

Bats were not, it seems, sold at Wuhan’s seafood market. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first Covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the market.

One more person has just disappeared. Ai Fen, a Chinese physician, who… claimed her bosses silenced her early warnings about coronavirus, appears to have vanished…. The journalists who saw what happened inside Wuhan have also disappeared.

“No one has been able to study it. How can you say it’s not a release from a lab if you can’t go to the lab? Indeed, we have seen Beijing do its best to prevent virologists and epidemiologists from actually going to Wuhan.” — Gordon Chang, in Die Weltwoche, March 31, 2020.

That is another major problem. The potential major investigator on Wuhan’s origin, the World Health Organization, is now accused of being “China’s coronavirus’ accomplice”.

Why is China trafficking in dangerous viruses in the first place?

“Debate may rage over which center it is, but at this point it seems undeniable that a center has been directly involved with research on viruses, although not necessarily on the creation of a virus.” — Father Renzo Milanese, AsiaNews.it, March 13, 2020.

We have been paying dearly for China’s lies.

“This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the world is facing a global pandemic,” said Rep. Michael T. McCaul, the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, before the US intelligence community concluded, in a classified report to the White House, that China has concealed the origin and extent of the catastrophic global coronavirus outbreak.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15846/iran-exploit-coronavirus

The international community needs to refrain from handing the Iranian regime any direct financial aid. The four-decade history of the ruling mullahs has shown that any extra revenues obtained by the leadership have not benefited the ordinary people in Iran.

If the mullahs are seeking financial assistance because they actually desire to help their own people, why did they refuse America’s offer of medical assistance? Why did their regime revoke its approval for the emergency team sent by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières), along with the materials needed to build a 50-bed inflatable treatment unit?

The international community therefore must not directly give the Iranian regime financial aid: it will most likely be funneled into supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its terror and militia groups across the region.

Instead of handing billions of dollars to the ruling mullahs, financial aid can alternatively be towards trustworthy international medical organizations to combat coronavirus directly on the ground, both in Iran and other countries afflicted.

The Iranian leaders have been pushing the international community to provide it with financial assistance to “combat coronavirus” there. The EU has apparently decided to give the mullahs €20 million (approximately $21 million), all while many EU citizens are languishing in Iran’s prisons, often on trumped-up charges. The EU taxpayers’ money will more likely be misused by the Iranian regime to advance still further the mullahs’ malign agendas.

Iran’s leaders are also demanding that the US-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) give them financial assistance. They are asking for a $5 billion emergency loan after the IMF declared that it is making $50 billion available to assist countries with the coronavirus crisis.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, on Twitter, ordered the IMF to provide Iran with money:

“IMF’s @KGeorgieva has stated that countries affected by #COVID19 will be supported via Rapid Financial Instrument. Our Central Bank requested access to this facility immediately. IMF/IMF Board should adhere to Fund’s mandate, stand on right side of history & act responsibly.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15845/china-fake-news-coronavirus

The virus is hitting China in a second wave. The second wave is claiming victims, including the Party’s propaganda narratives. The most dangerous of these narratives is that ruler Xi Jinping, with heaven’s mandate, has an obligation to dominate the international system.

To push America aside and seize global leadership, China got Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, to say that China’s response to the coronavirus showed the “superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries.” Then Beijing set about making a big show of “donating” medical equipment and diagnostic kits, most notably to stricken Europe.

Xi’s initial policies turned a local outbreak into a pandemic, and now they are making even more people sick and forcing China into another pit of disease. China’s inaccurate diagnostic kits and substandard protective gear donated around the world along with the new infections will show the truth: communism is incompetent if not downright malign.

China can lie with statistics, but the virus gets the last word. “Victory” over both COVID-19 and the United States is still far out of sight.

China has “defeated” the coronavirus and declared “victory,” Communist Party media tells us.

A funny thing happened on the way to victory, however. The virus is hitting China in a second wave. The second wave is claiming victims, including the Party’s propaganda narratives. The most dangerous of these narratives is that ruler Xi Jinping, with heaven’s mandate, has an obligation to dominate the international system.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/covid-19-and-swedish-exception-bruce-bawer/

A few weeks ago, while other countries around the world were locking down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK and Sweden chose to go with business as usual: keep everything running, act as if nothing’s wrong, let people hold parties and meetings and candlelight suppers. In response to a public outcry and a growing sense that the nation was barreling toward disaster, British officials soon backed off from this policy. But Sweden, on the advice of top government epidemiologist Anders Tegnell – described by Reuters as “only months ago a little known civil servant but now rivalling the prime minister for publicity” – stuck to its guns. Hence the denizens of IKEA-land are still going to work, kids are still going to school, and shops and bars and restaurants and gyms and barbershops are still open.

To be sure, this approach has its share of credentialed and outspoken domestic critics. Epidemiologist Joacim Rocklöv has called it “a big and risky experiment with the entire population that could have a catastrophic outcome.” Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér, a virologist at the Karolinska Institute, used the same word: Sweden’s government, she charged, is “leading us to catastrophe.” Meanwhile, a mathematics professor at the University of Stockholm has warned that thanks to the official hands-off strategy, half of the country’s population could be infected with the virus by the end of April. And at last count, no fewer than 2300 academics, including the head of the Nobel Foundation, have signed a petition calling “for more stringent measures” against the virus.

In neighboring Denmark, which has pursued a lockdown along the line of America’s, the state of affairs in Sweden is causing no small degree of trepidation. “Looking at Sweden is a bit like watching a horror film,” a Danish TV reporter, Lisbeth Davidsen, said the other day. The reaction in next-door Norway has been similar.