RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15761/european-union-coronavirus

The EU’s failure to address the coronavirus issue earlier has resulted in the Schengen Agreement, which stipulates that the citizens of any EU state can travel freely throughout the union, becoming null and void.

Perhaps the most shameful episode concerning inter-EU relations since the start of the coronavirus outbreak was Germany’s refusal to allow the export of much-needed face masks and ventilators to Italy after the Italian government made a direct appeal to the rest of the EU for help. Instead of demonstrating the so-called solidarity that is supposed to underpin the EU’s founding ethos, the German government issued a ban on the export of the equipment to Italy.

The EU’s handling of the coronavirus has not just been incompetent. It raises serious questions as to whether it is about to become yet another victim of the deadly pandemic.

The emergence of Europe as the new epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic has as much to do with the European Union’s inept handling of the crisis as it does with the resilience of the virus itself.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15766/coronavirus-germany-anti-americanism

The attempt to whip up anti-Americanism appears to be an effort by the German government to blunt public criticism of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet for their lackadaisical response to the coronavirus epidemic.

The story was quickly picked up and uncritically disseminated by print and broadcast media throughout Europe — and America. Nearly all quoted the Die Welt article verbatim without confirming the story on their own.

“To make it clear again on coronavirus: CureVac has not received from the US government or related entities an offer before, during and since the Task Force meeting in the White House on March 2. CureVac rejects all allegations from press.” — Statement by CureVac, March 26, 2020.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell denied the allegations. “Not true,” he tweeted. “The Welt story was wrong. But Business Insider, Reuters and others went with it anyway despite not having their own sources. Now everyone is back peddling.”

The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, in an article titled, “CureVac Has Not Received an Offer from the U.S. Government,” described the Welt article as “Fake News” concocted by CureVac in order to secure government funding. The paper suggested that the German government helped to promote the lie…

“A German minister, who heard from another German minister, that a German journalist, who was not there, reported that the U.S. president offered $1 billion for a company that has not yet developed a vaccine against COVID-19…. For my taste, much hearsay, the striving of Die Welt for many clicks, the fueling of resentment against Trump and perhaps intelligent marketing by the company for public funding in times of the corona crisis.” — Reader comment in Die Welt, March 17, 2020.

The German government has promoted a fake news story asserting that the United States is trying to gain exclusive access to an experimental coronavirus vaccine being developed by a German biotech firm.

The story — which has sparked anti-American furor in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — has been swiftly debunked by the company, which denied that it had received financial offers from the U.S. government or any related entity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/video-uk-muslim-rape-gang-members-walk-streets-frontpagemagcom/

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_diamond_princess_a_floating_chinese_virus_palace_provides_suggestive_data.html

Willis Eisenbach took a closer look at the data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship on which people were quarantined and discovered counterintuitive facts.

What’s frightening about the Chinese Virus is the overwhelming amount of inconclusive data. We’re inundated with media speculation and hyperventilation, Chinese disinformation, and data that changes daily thanks to the treatment and quarantine initiatives governments are trying around the world.

The fact that the disease has different rates of contagion and mortality in different parts of the world makes things more confusing. We can understand why it exploded in China, a place of censored information, pollution, smoking, and primitive socialized medicine. But why was it so virulent in Italy?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/how_did_italy_become_the_new_ground_zero_of_coronavirus.html

Hint: The connection is Red China which the msm doesn’t want to admit.

Much is being made of the fact that Italy – an advanced European nation – has become the hot zone of coronavirus impact. The implication is that if a First World country with the equivalent of “Medicare for All” could succumb to the pandemic, it should be really serious for the USA. Right?

Wrong! Despite all of the coverage and hype about Italy and COVID-19, some important information about the epidemiology or cause of the virus’s impact on Italy is being overlooked or ignored by the mainstream media. As the Times of India reported on March 19:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-scientist-youre-not-going-to-see-millions-of-pe Isaiah (Shy) Arkin is a professor of Structural Biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose research, among other achievements, has shed new light on the inner workings of viruses. The Times of Israel spoke to him to try to understand more about the coronavirus, how it compares to other viruses, how its spread […]

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15743/china-war-on-religion

China’s totalitarian system seems to perceive any movement that permits citizens to feel allegiance to any entity other than the state as a threat.

Communist cadres, evidently not content with coercing the external conformity and behavior of their citizens, appear to want to control their people’s thoughts as well. Beijing is now re-writing Christian scripture and printing other tracts to render religious beliefs politically aligned with state policies.

The American Center for Law and Justice, chaired by the attorney Jay Sekulow, through its “Be Heard Project,” urges all people concerned about freedom of conscience to sign petitions and otherwise pressure the Chinese government to release Pastor Cao, allowing him to return to his family in North Carolina. “China Aid” director Bob Fu, who monitors human rights violations in Communist China, calls upon citizens to write letters to Pastor Cao to keep his spirits up – address below. The sheer volume of mail would also let Beijing know that Cao’s persecution remains a serious concern to the “Free World.”In addition to trying to pin the blame for the coronavirus pandemic on the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Party Chairman Xi Jinping is executing an anti-Christian campaign, the intensity of which has not been seen since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.

Persecution against Christians was reignited in earnest after the 19th CCP Congress in 2017. The state’s drive against Christian symbols, churches, and clerics seems to have become justified under the CCP’s “Sinicization of China’s Religions” initiative. The CCP appears determined to secularize religious thought, suborning it to serve state interests. Its anti-Christian project seems designed primarily to sever all international links that religious people have, whether those ties are Christian or Muslim.

Beijing is deploying the assets of the CCP’s security agencies against Christianity, in part, by establishing a regime of punitive measures, such as mandatory and intimidating facial ID screenings, restrictions on dissemination of religious tracts on the internet, and loss of “social credit” points that can result in the expulsion of the children of Christian parents from schools. Communist secret police have also been apprehending Christian preachers whom they apparently regard as effective, such as the Protestant Evangelical Pastor John Cao.

Pastor Cao, a permanent resident of the U.S., was arrested on March 5, 2017 after he crossed the border from Myanmar (Burma) to China’s Yunnan Province. Cao and his assistant, Jing Ruxia, were charged with allegedly organizing the illegal crossing of national borders, despite decades of similar movement from parish schools in Wa State, Myanmar to the Christian faithful in China. Cao, initially detained in a local jail near his arrest site, was later transferred to the regional jail in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. Pastor Cao has served three of his seven-year sentence and is in declining health. Appeals for his release have been rejected by Chinese authorities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15752/coronavirus-comes-for-europe

The Italian health system is in appallingly bad condition. There are not enough intensive care units and, as everywhere, the possibility of a major crisis simply was not anticipated. In Italy there are 2.62 acute-care hospital beds per 1,000 residents (by comparison, the number in Germany is 6.06 per 1,000 residents). The Italian health system is entirely governed by the government…. Public hospitals must manage shortages, and when an exceptional situation occurs, rationing care leads to horrific choices.

The Italian government was hoping for help from the European Union, but neither the other member states nor the European Union itself has given any at all…. The dismissive attitude of the EU and the other members states seems to have been dictated by the fear of sliding into a situation as calamitous as that of Italy.

No country in the European Union has taken a clear, hard look at the danger Europe is facing.

Italy’s healthcare system is in a state of almost total collapse. As of today, 31,506 people in Italy have been infected with the coronavirus; of which 2,503 people have died. The numbers continue to grow. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Doctors have to choose which sick person to save and which sick person not to save.

The country has almost completely shut down. Many businesses are running in slow motion or have stopped. Prisoners are staging uprisings. Millions of people have been ordered to stay home and are allowed out only briefly to buy food. Most shops are shut. All public gatherings are prohibited, even funerals. Big cities look like ghost towns.

No other Western country has been so severely affected by the pandemic as Italy. Why?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-china-response-will-weaken-it-on-world-stage/

Its bad behavior in the wake of COVID-19 will leave it in its weakest global position in memory. And the U.S. will emerge stronger.

S ometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously given the similar Chinese origins of the prior toxic SARS coronavirus and the resources of a Level 4 virology lab nearby.

Yet the government initially hid all that knowledge from its own people in particular and in general from the world at large. Translated into American terms, that disingenuousness ensured that over 10,000 Chinese nationals and foreigners living in China flew every day on direct flights into the United States (Washington and California especially) from late November to the beginning of February, until the Trump travel ban of January 31.

All this laxity was also known to the Communist apparat in Beijing, which must have been amused when Trump was roundly damned by his liberal critics as a xenophobe and racist for finally daring to stop the influx on January 31 — the first major leader to enact such a total ban.

Yet, no thanks to the Chinese, America, so far, has been comparatively lucky — despite the grave risks of damaging a multi-trillion-dollar economy with the strictest quarantining, isolation policies, and social distancing in its history. Half the country lives in the interior away from ports of entry on the coasts. Medical care, sanitation, hygiene, and meat markets operate on different premises than in China, the supposed fated global hegemon. Transparency in a consensual society together with a free-market economy is encouraging tens of millions of citizens to work in tandem and independently to figure out creative ways to ameliorate the epidemic, politically, medically, socially, and economically. The result is that as of mid-March, the U.S., the world’s foremost immigration destination and among the most visited of nations, had suffered fewer virus fatalities than some European countries a fifth or sixth of its population size.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15751/coronavirus-europe-open-borders

“Merkel knows that the instruction to close the border, in general to take consistent national measures to protect her own citizens, would be tantamount to her own declaration of political bankruptcy.” — Ferdinand Knauss, commentator on the German blog Tichys Einblick, March 16, 2020.

“Merkel is now fighting. But as always in her chancellorship, she is not fighting for her country and its citizens, for which she is responsible. She is fighting for her power, for her legacy. When the citizens come to understand this, the corona crisis will have been Merkel’s last fight in the political arena.” — Ferdinand Knauss, March 16, 2020.

In a March 13 press conference, the president of Italy’s hard-hit Veneto region, Luca Zaia, said that Europe’s borderless zone was “disappearing as we speak.” He noted that the stringent border controls imposed by Austria shows that Schengen “no longer exists and will be remembered in the history books.”

As a growing number of countries close their borders to fight the coronavirus pandemic, the European system of open internal borders — a cornerstone of European integration — is on the brink of collapse.

The so-called Schengen Area, which comprises 26 European countries, entered into effect in 1995 and abolishes the need for passports and other types of control at mutual borders. It is a key practical and symbolic achievement of European integration and is now falling apart.

In a move packed with political significance, Germany, the largest and most powerful country in the European Union, on March 16 introduced controls on its borders with Austria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland after it registered 1,000 new cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in just one day.