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Feb. 19, 2020 - Clif High
38:38
interview with cliff choi out of hong kong about on ground situation there now - sun disease
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Time Text
Handling this machine.
Okay, there we go.
Good morning, everybody.
It's 7:54 a.m. Pacific Coast time on the 19th of February.
I'm talking with Cliff Choi in Hong Kong.
He's a doctor of chiropractic.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
Yes.
And so I'll turn it over to you, Cliff, to provide your CV and you can talk about how we can connect it and stuff.
Okay, great.
So, yes, I'm a Dr. Chiropractic.
I also used to be a paramedic.
I went through paramedic training in the U.S. Of course, at that time, we had the H1N1 virus go through the States.
And, you know, basically, I left the States and stuff like that.
Worked at a few hospitals, a government hospital in Shanghai.
This was what year?
This was about 2010.
So I worked in government hospital.
It was a government Chinese hospital and also tried to help start up some hospitals in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Yunnan also.
But I moved to Hong Kong after failing in trying to get those hospitals started up.
And of course, I'm a Bitcoin guy because of you.
And yeah, I mean, basically, I've followed you since 98, I guess.
It was coast to coast or something.
Right, the very early ones.
Yeah.
Right, right.
So then I contacted you and we talked about Bitcoin stuff, trying to get some scripts going or something like that.
But the way of the world, yeah.
That's right.
So you're in Hong Kong now.
What part of Hong Kong?
On the island.
Oh, okay.
So right in the middle.
I was going to say downtown, essentially.
Yes.
Yeah.
And what are the conditions like?
Well, right now, everyone's seen the toilet paper joke, right?
So, of course, toilet paper, sanity napkins, those are still around, but bleach and other sanitizing products are basically out.
Some people are hoarding them.
But really, like, it's a ghost town out here.
Of course, you know, we've had those protests and stuff like that.
And, you know, I've seen and kind of predicted through your stuff that, you know, this place would empty out.
And we've seen a big exodus.
A lot of the stores are closed.
Companies are all locked down basically.
And no expectation, no discussion about future.
It's a ghost town.
And, you know, there's some other stats.
I think there was about 200,000 visitors coming through Hong Kong.
And maybe it's 3,000 now.
So it's really a ghost town.
I've never seen it like this.
And so, frankly, if things don't get going in a few months, I don't think Hong Kong is going to recover.
And let's analyze that.
There's certainly in the morning format.
I'm a little slow here.
But so you say a few months.
How long do you actually think realistically from this point forward if nothing changes and it gradually gets worse?
What's the prognosis?
That in three months, maybe a significant portion of the population will have left?
Well, a lot of the expats are leaving right now.
Of course, we've had an exodus from the protests and stuff like that.
But I'm thinking by June, we'll have just a maximum breakdown.
The real estate's starting to drop.
People are actually protesting again about the rental rates.
Of course, it's the highest in the world.
People are just working from home, stuff like that.
All the schools are closed down until about March, but I think that'll be extended till about June.
And these are like primary schools, secondary, universities.
So far, reasonably vital services are still maintaining, still electricity, obviously internet.
Right.
All right.
Well, funny thing, like I was going to flush the toilet and it just flushed today.
And I think they turned the water off.
So you're going to have to.
Or there might have been a.
This is something I heard from, and I'm going to butcher the place, but it's a small, smaller town outside of Guangdong where they said that the sewage treatment plant lost electricity or no, the pumping station lost electricity.
So everybody's water is shut down.
Yeah.
Well, it could be just my building or something, you know, and I could freak out.
But yeah, we're in this like really surreal state, kind of like when I was in New York during 2001, everything was shut down from 14th Street down.
And that's kind of what we're seeing here.
So it's like walking around in the zombie apocalypse without very many zombies on the street.
That's right.
Actually, when I talk to the kids, we tell them that the drunk people are the zombies, but now there aren't very many zombies here.
Right, right.
Right.
Oh, sounds.
But now, what about necessary supplies?
How are deliveries being handled?
Do you see trucks moving?
Yeah, I actually took a picture of a FedEx the other day.
But I was expecting, you know, a package to get here.
But I think that's what I'm saying.
I was thinking more in the way of bulk goods, food stores, that sort of thing.
Well, there's only like a few chains.
So, of course, all the toilet paper's out.
Sometimes the eggs are out.
A lot of things are sourced from China.
So I think that'll start drying up pretty soon.
I've heard that there's been a huge reduction in Chinese, you wouldn't call them mainland workers or transients that go through Hong Kong on a daily basis.
There used to be a considerable number, and now it's like essentially stopped.
That's right.
From Senjen, people are quarantined for 14 days before they can enter Hong Kong.
I see.
Okay, that's what's going on.
All right, I've got it.
Okay.
Yeah.
And 14 days, it turns out doesn't mean anything in the way of this.
That, you know, there's people showing symptoms 42 days after the last time they could have been exposed.
Right, right.
And I think those numbers are right what you're saying, probably 20 days or something.
Of course, we had our second death in Hong Kong.
So I think the numbers are 65 total cases.
So let's talk about the strangeness of this from my perspective.
Okay.
What struck me instantly was that the central Chinese government did not, and this is an area where you certainly declined to answer any question.
Okay.
So, but the question comes down to: it is my impression that this time was extremely atypical.
That unlike anything else in the way of a potential pandemic, SARS, MERS, any of these other things that have come through, that the central Chinese government, relation to those old ways, seriously overreacted.
Now, now it seems that maybe that was not an overreaction.
But initially, it certainly looked like it to the point where that was glaring.
Did you guys feel it that way as well?
I thought it was really suspicious because during the H1N1, we had N95 maths and we didn't suit up.
So that looked really suspicious to me.
It just kind of seemed out of place for a normal flu.
And so, you know, some of my other friends, their doctors, of course, and then there's other expats.
Basically, they got word that all the flights are going to be shut down from China.
And so they just decided to leave.
Yeah, we're seeing a great number of returning expats of Chinese ethnicity to the U.S. It's actually gotten noticeable in my little berg out here because we had a brief transit of some of these people, which actually brings us back to my area.
They've got 712 people under observation as of two days ago.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, so in general, I could characterize it as the Chinese government behaved atypically.
I would agree with that.
Okay.
And so we can leave aside any sort of suspicions or conspiracies or anything that might get anybody into trouble.
But we could just discuss the curious nature that appears to be unfolding about this, right?
And that is from my perspective, again, we're seeing individuals become ill outside of Asia.
But so far, there's been no deaths that we've been able to locate of a non-Asian ethnicity person.
Even those who are dying outside of Asia are of Asian ethnicity or Chinese that happen to be tourists somewhere else and died there.
Right.
So it begs an interesting question, don't you think?
Yeah, from the research that I've seen, the genome doesn't seem like it would be a natural thing.
A natural occurrence.
Yeah.
So is that the understanding?
I know that the things are shut down and it's not like you're out there gossiping in the hallway with your neighbors.
But is it your sensation or your impression that many people share your understanding of this?
Well, these are only people with medical knowledge, I would say.
Actually, it was somebody from the U.S. that's working on mapping this genome and they said it was atypical.
So, you know, complacency, somebody said something about complacency, and really, like, that's what I'm seeing.
Like, people really aren't taking it too seriously because, of course, they get their information from maybe the mainstream or something like that.
And they've had previous instances where they've been trained to see it ramp up and then die down rapidly.
Of course, of course.
So the words of the information I'm getting out of mainland, I'm talking with a couple of people from Chengdo, and there are several other areas where they're still able to send me pictures and so on from the internet.
And that is that in spite of the claim to the contrary, maybe 90 plus percent of all state-owned enterprises are shut down and that there's no traffic in subways, there's no traffic on the streets and stuff.
Is that the case in Hong Kong?
Are people sheltering now or they're just sort of doing business as usual?
It's more like a self-imposed exile, I would say.
Because, of course, yeah, I am getting the same reports in China.
So, but in some of the smaller cities, people actually are not allowed to go out or they're allowed to go out only to the grocery store.
All of the other restaurants and stuff like that, the social things are shut down.
And how far does that do that here?
Yeah, how far does that extend into China?
Because the official word in China that it's hubei, and that's it, basically.
Right, right.
No, this is this is coming from like Shanghai, Guangzhou.
I haven't heard too much from Beijing.
I've been trying to contact some of the doctors that I used to work with, but you know, a lot of the expats actually got trapped during this flight shutdown, either inside the country or outside of the country.
So some of them can't get back in, some of them can't get out.
You know, a lot of people are kind of running out of money.
So it's very curious.
Yeah, I was just going to say, just that exact statement.
It's a very curious way to cause predictable social upset.
So in my way of thinking, the people in charge, the Powers that Be, know something that is so shocking to them that they think that these measures are the lesser of two evils.
That would seem to be the case for, coming out anyway, from the information we're getting.
There's tons of denial.
There's all kinds of information about mobile crematoria and all of these sorts of things that indicate a very much higher death rate.
There's an official, there was one official in one of the hospitals in Wuhan who admitted that anybody who didn't actually pass two out of four tests to have the virus, even if they died, they weren't officially dead of the virus.
And so they might be listed as pneumonia and so on.
Yeah, you know, working in hospitals and the government hospitals, I'd like to say they could take care of it.
But frankly, I think this is going to be over a lot of people's heads.
And, you know, they're trying to contain it, but I think there's a lot of, I'd say, misinformation.
And of course, if it were As bad as some people think it was going to be, yes, it's totally out of control.
Right.
So, in that sense, it is not contained.
I mean, we have to acknowledge that to some degree, it's not.
It's not a full-blown let it go everywhere and see who survives kind of a situation.
But the ability to contain is becoming unraveled the further we go.
We're seeing, I've seen a bunch of videos of people essentially defying central party authority as it's expressed on the ground in their confrontation with police and so forth.
And it's getting to the point where irritation and anger is going to take over rationality on both sides, right?
We've seen it.
Oh, it's I've seen it up close.
I mean, you know, basically, after you've lived in China and kind of met the locals and the expats and, you know, some of the authority there, you know, a lot of them, I would say, are very nationalistic.
And so the party, if you're not in the one party, then you're not on the team.
And if you're not on the team, you know, they'll make other plans for you.
So, yeah, it's a very, I would say, bad situation.
Politically.
Yep.
Politically, inside China, there's this is a mass disruption that they don't.
Will they be, in your opinion, will the central party be able to recover from this if it extends a couple of more months?
Well, actually, I was thinking maybe by June we'll have maximum chaos.
So, you know, after that, it could be every man for himself.
Right.
Anybody's guess as to how it works out.
Yeah.
You know, I've been talking about that since 2011.
You know, I frankly didn't want to come to Hong Kong because, you know, I kind of know how things work.
And if you're not on the team, you know.
The universe puts us where we need to be, unfortunately.
So, you know, so I'm with you on there.
I wouldn't necessarily want to choose a whole lot of places, but universe would certainly plop us there.
So it seems like the situation relative to, well, now, what about the, okay, so there was the period of protests, and there was tension that developed between the protesting groups and authority in Hong Kong, and that extended tension between the authority in Hong Kong and the authorities in the mainland that had to sort of control or supervise it.
Am I taking it to the point?
Yeah, it's yeah, I mean, I would agree with that.
I mean, because, you know, there's been such a large push here.
I mean, 2 million people on the street is, you know, large percentage of Hong Kong.
But I think the timing of this virus is kind of interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is the tension still there, though, that you're aware between the Hong Kong management and the Chinese management, or is Hong Kong pretty much falling in line with what mainland wants?
Well, as far as the virus.
As far as the virus, yeah, I mean, everybody's kind of sticking with the program.
But, you know, the doctors in Hong Kong went on strike.
And so, I mean, that group stepped up and put more pressure on the CEO.
So there's tension on all sides, really.
And is your expectation now that you will face a situation where the virus is running through Hong Kong the way that it seems to be in other areas of China?
Do you figure that's headed your way?
Yeah.
You know, I tried to push antiviral mass back in 2017.
You know, basically, it's got a zinc ion layer sprayed on there.
And so that's a 99.9% protection layer.
Of course, it basically kills the virus on contact.
So I was pushing that back in 2017.
Of course, I was visiting hospitals trying to push them up to the mainland, too.
But, you know, the government hospitals, I don't, from what I saw, I don't think they'll be able to handle a mass incident or MCI, what we call it, mass casualty incident.
So if it does get out of hand here, then, you know, basically this, everyone's going to be stuck, I think.
Right.
In that case, you personally wouldn't necessarily even seek health care in a hospital if you assume they're going to be overwhelmed and infectious.
No, that would be a risk, too, you know.
But, you know, there's a few other docs that I know here.
Of course, I'm trying to get a consensus, but, you know, not a lot of docs are, I guess.
Conspiracy-oriented?
Yeah.
Well, I guess they're busy.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, there you go.
They're just busy fellows.
Yeah, yeah.
So, well, yeah, I think I'm going to go down to Bangkok.
One of my uncles, he had a zinc oxide plant.
Oh, okay.
And so, basically, I'm going to see if I can try to get some of those masks made.
Basically, I tried to contact that.
I'm certain you would find people more receptive now.
Oh, of course.
Oh, yeah.
Of course.
We've got probably, I've had orders up to about 200 million masks.
So, I don't think, actually, the original manufacturer had them made in China.
And so, they're out.
Right, right.
No, and so many things.
We're starting to see some of the, I actually had personal experience with a chunk of equipment, fairly heavy-duty equipment for my sewage system here, not coming from China.
And that was basically the only sole source for it.
Right, right, right.
So, you know, it's impacting the planet, although, albeit, nowhere near the impact in China itself.
Right, yeah.
So, a question here about your foreknowledge of this, okay?
So, you were sitting in Hong Kong.
Were you aware in October that the military Olympics or military exercises were going on in Wuhan?
No, no.
We were pretty much occupied by the protests.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So, until, so your first understanding that the virus was out and about in the mainland came when?
I was, well, I was back in the States.
So, we came back sometime in January.
And then, I guess it was the middle of January when I started hearing about this.
Of course, then I checked your old reports, and it was 2016 when you called it.
Right.
So, then I did research.
Yeah.
And so, your contact with the doctors, their impression of the, those who are paying attention, I understand many will not.
They'll just be involved in the day-to-day.
Right.
Are there, what I'm basically trying to ask in a polite fashion is, how aware are other doctors of the unusual nature of the virus, and do they consider this something to ponder over?
Well, I don't think they've seen the papers yet.
Okay, gotcha.
So, it's an information flow.
So, it is an information flow.
Of course, you know, there's a lot of good information on PubMed.
That's where I've been getting most of the, like, genetic stuff, the genome stuff.
And I think once they look at it, then, and it gets peer-reviewed, of course, everybody will be on board, right?
Right, right.
So, after that, then, everybody will be on the bandwagon, right?
Right.
Okay.
So, let's back over to social-political kind of things.
And you're wandering through the Chinese medical infrastructure in 2017 and thereabouts, and you met these people.
And I'm just asking, after a basic impression, what's your impression of their reaction to, after this is over, things sort of die down a bit, everybody starts recovering?
What would happen if they came to understand that the virus was perhaps not natural?
Would it influence their political understanding of where they relate to their party in the country?
Oh, yeah.
I well, I'd have to speak for myself, but I think that there would be a collapse, let's say, in the belief system.
I mean, we're pretty close, perhaps, anyway.
Yeah, and frankly, like, I think there's a lot of discontent with how it was dealt with right now.
I mean, just I mean, transparency is kind of like a way of life now, you know.
Of course, right, we're blockchain guys, and uh, well, we're actually watching the failure.
As you pointed out, actually, that's a very astute point.
In a lot of the West, we're moving in towards transparency, and even in China, they're moving in towards transparency.
But we're actually observing the failure of them reversing that direction right now.
They reverse to go non-transparent, and it's just breaking down everywhere.
I didn't think about it that way, but that's quite true.
Yeah, right.
Well, I mean, this Hong Kong has a lot of bright people, and of course, you know, Hong Kong has woken up, and I think the news has leaked into China, and I think they're waking up too.
And the repercussions will be probably worse than China if things are in my way of thinking would last a number of years.
If this lockdown lasted even into June, repercussions might go on for two, three years afterwards.
Oh, yeah.
June is where I think things will just collapse.
I mean, if they don't recover it by June, then you know, the supply chains, when they break down, then everything else breaks down.
When I went through the war college with my father in the 60s, one of the key elements that I recall from the biological warfare training was the inbuilt assumption that no social order could withstand a bioweapon and that all organized government would collapse about six months from the first lockdown.
So, your timing is almost six months.
Yeah, that would place it actually around either June 2nd to June 27th, depending on whether we take the naval college being the first place lockdown or the actual town of Wuhan.
Right, right.
So, yeah, I'm going to try to go to Thailand, get some masks, or you know, manufacture masks, try to get some traction or something.
Um, but uh, I think, like, um, this is if the numbers that they're reporting aren't correct, uh, this is gonna get wildly out of hand, just wildfire, like you said, right?
So, and it's a it's a terrible situation for everyone, um, even now, even at this level, uh, for both China and the rest of the world.
I mean, this is just uh terrifically horrific, you know, it is now this is a horror for people, uh, you know, the the the WHO actually ranked China at 144 out of 191 countries,
so I think the Western world will be able to contain it, but you know, when you're ranked, you know, on the bottom half of the scale, um, there's you know, there's going to be some problems.
Well, the United States is 37, so we're not like number one or anything.
So, our healthcare system, should that come to?
I did some calculations, okay, right, right.
Admittedly, I based these calculations on reported uh ethnicities in various different parts of the U.S. And I made the assumption in my calculations that it would be first would be people of Asian extraction and ethnicity that would suffer the virus.
And that I just stopped it right there.
And I made the assumption that nobody else was going to get ill except for Asians.
All right, this is not accurate thinking.
This was just for the purpose of illustration.
And even then, within the United States, our healthcare system breaks down.
If we have to treat even a quarter of all the Asian population, our hospitals cannot cope, right?
Right.
And then we don't have the supplies.
I mean, we've got issues of the disinfectants and masks and stuff not being available here.
And there's gouging now starting to show up on the industrial supplier side.
I expected that to take a little bit longer.
Yeah.
No, I totally agree with you.
I mean, definitely once a supply chain breaks down, we're talking maybe if they're saying it's an R2, but if the supply chain breaks down, we're talking R5.
And see, okay, let's define that for people.
Okay, so R0 is how they, so an R2 is if I get sick, I infect two people.
And R5 is if I get sick, I infect five people.
Right.
We've got a weird situation here where I'm actually seeing R25 being reported.
Holy crap.
In from people that, now, this admittedly was a doctor that I can't validate, but he did send me his certificate from the Chinese party that certified him as being able to practice at this hospital.
Okay.
I have yet to translate it, but I translated it enough to know that he is a doctor, was official from a hospital.
It was in 2018 that he was granted this.
And he's saying that now he lives in an, I won't talk about where he's at, okay, because he's a Han Chinese, but he's living in an area that is mostly not Han Chinese.
And he's saying that the ethnic Han Chinese, he's seeing a lot of them in the hospital, but so far, the local population that is more rural and herdsman kind of people are not showing up in the volume.
And he actually is saying that he thinks it's an R25 in the population that he's dealing with in his situation.
And he's basically losing his mind over it.
Right.
No, I could not consider that.
Yeah, I saw that paper on the ACE2 entry point.
And actually, there was another study that said basically it's Guangzhou area, southern Chinese, southern Han, and also Tokyo, Japan, has the ACE2.
So maybe there's some genetic family relationship there, you know, relation.
But anyway, genetically, those are the two highest populations that'll be affected.
So Hong Kong's going to be having problems.
Are you able to do things like have you investigated the Chaga mushroom and these kind of things?
I've looked around.
I've looked around, but I kind of stay at home.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Sure, sure.
I understand.
Yeah.
But yeah, I will be kind of doing some recon later.
Of course, I have that mask, so I feel a lot better.
I've got goggles.
Right.
Also, by the way, another, I've heard a local, perhaps more accessible version for you would be Taiwano fungus.
Okay.
That unique fungus grown in Taiwan and exported as a tonic, usually in liquid form with alcohol, would be perfectly fine.
Okay, I'll look that up too.
Yeah, because it's also touted as being an HIV protease inhibitor.
That appears to be a weakness that might be engineered into this.
I saw that paper too.
And, you know, when that first came out, it basically got shut down.
Right, right.
So, but it got removed and there was actual pressure put on the fellow that put that out.
You can contact him and he won't say much, but he will say, yeah, they came and stomped on.
Okay, okay.
No, however, I heard it was confirmed out of Russia as well.
Well, I'm hearing from Boston that, you know, this is not a natural thing.
Right.
So, well, okay.
And so given medical knowledge, would you say it's at least a wise precaution to assume that that might be a vulnerability, that it's not natural, and therefore there may be inhibitors that could boost your immune system.
So in other words, if it's not natural, it would have to have been engineered by humans and they may have screwed up and made it weak in an area they had not anticipated.
That's sort of my thinking, right?
No, actually, I heard a report out of Japan maybe, but they are using the HIV antivirals to treat it.
Right.
And with effect, I've also heard that out of the early days.
That's weird.
Yeah, yeah.
Even in Thailand, too.
So that's weird.
And so my thinking then, as soon as I heard that, and then I talked to my friend in Wuhan or by email, you know, and he said that none of his patients taking chaga had come down with it.
I went and looked up chaga, saw the HIV leak and went, aha.
Right, right.
No, that's that's excellent.
And actually, two of his patients did come down with it, but it was extremely mild, only lasted three days, sniffles, regular kind of flu, and there was nothing, not even an appreciable fever.
Right, right.
No, I heard that, of course, from you guys, and I'm definitely going to have to do some research, but I think you're on to something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've got a limit, unfortunately, on my Zoom this morning.
But let's, anything else you care to hear to get out?
I've got a few minutes here, so anything else you need to say about this?
Observations, real thoughts.
Well, of course, here's a weird contrast.
We have this happening.
25% of Hong Kong is finance.
There's a lot of the crypto companies here.
Of course, I work for an OTC and the Bitcoin Association.
But I think what we're going to see also, just to flip the script, but we're going to see the crypto company survive here in Hong Kong and then everything else just falls apart.
Of course, things were falling apart with the protests.
And this just totally decimated the tourists and everything.
Thanks for in a sense, though, that actually may have been certain saving grace.
I mean, during that period of time, the protests were terrible, but it did shut down travel, which might have led to a bigger bloom in Hong Kong.
Right, right, possibly, possibly.
You know, old Taoist, you always look for the good, right?
Yeah.
Some people call me a cynic, but no, I'm a positive person, right?
But sometimes you get bad, you know, the logic just doesn't make sense.
So, but you got to stick to the science, right?
And say basically what's going on with it all.
Yeah.
So anything we can do to assist?
I mean, is there, I mean, I know that things are in lockdown and it's chaos for months and months, but anything you can think that might ease conditions anywhere that could be done by people on the outside?
Put me on the spot.
I understand.
Yeah.
Well, I think the information, the knowledge will protect you.
Yeah.
The information needs to get out.
And also, I hate to say it this way, and I don't want to get the video pulled or anything.
But let me state that if I had been born, actually, my Chinese uncle used to say it a particular way.
Okay.
If I had been lucky enough to have been born Chinese, I would be very, very, very personally focused on my health because it would seem that Chinese at this moment in time are not so lucky.
Oh, yeah.
And so I'd be very focused on that and exploring alternative ways, boosting my immune system.
Right, right.
Terrible thing.
If you're a Viking and they engineered an anti-Viking disease, then, you know, it's not like the Italians are going to be able to help you because it simply won't affect them.
And so if you're a Viking, then you've got to do Viking things to deal with it because it's on you at that point.
Then recriminations and, you know, all of the other stuff in the far future, once we're through it all.
Right.
No, definitely.
It's the knowledge is going to protect.
And, you know, you've been putting out some good information.
And, you know, I'm really proud for you that you've been.
Well, thank you very much.
You know, like I say, I'm just an old bald guy doing what I can.
You know, we all got to stick together.
You know, it's us humans all on this big lifeboat together.
So yeah, no doubt.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
I'm going to ask to say Daj Yahoo.
And I'll keep you posted.
Yes, yes, please do.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Thanks, Cliff.
Thank you.
Bye now.
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