Jan. 25, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:04
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine. | |
| I hope you're doing well. I'm here on the line talking with John, who is a friend of mine from Hong Kong, who has been keeping me up to date on the coronavirus and has agreed to tell us what he has noticed and what he has observed. | |
| Thank you so much for taking the time today, John. | |
| What is going on that you can see? | |
| In a nutshell, I would call this quite possibly the Chernobyl of modern Communist Party China. | |
| I say this because actually we noticed this since October of last year. | |
| At first it was only some reports from social media, WeChat, but actually it gradually grew and grew and grew and I think it was around November December, that the official numbers finally appeared. | |
| And when they appeared, I think it started from single digits. | |
| And we knew that was artificially low. | |
| And what that means is that it's not the correct thing. | |
| So it's false and correct. | |
| I would say that there's many unknowns. | |
| We don't really have any visibility. | |
| There is a lot of plausible deniability there. | |
| And basically, no one really knows the actual numbers. | |
| And I would call that two things. | |
| I would call that a cover-up that most people Are actually aware of now, so in mainland China, on social media, many people are actually openly stating the facts as they see them and contradicting the official numbers. | |
| And of course the same is obviously true for Hong Kong, which has been the The place of major protests since June of last year. | |
| So there is a cover-up, but there's also incompetence, I would say. | |
| Incompetence in the sense that because there is a lack of a culture of transparency, of honesty, partly because that is not incentivized by the system in China, This has really caused many different levels, | |
| even within government, to run extremely inefficiently, leading to inefficient and inaccurate decision-making that actually compounds the already inexperienced medical system in handling a crisis of this sort, | |
| which has basically led to what is occurring now, which is essentially a runaway exponential growth of infected and an unknown number of deaths. | |
| So in terms of numbers, the exact numbers are unknown. | |
| However, There is an estimated death rate of about 15% of infected people. | |
| We know that the HSI index, which I would say is the Hang Seng index of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, fell about 800 points. | |
| And so there is an economic impact there. | |
| And I believe the Dow Jones has also fell slightly. | |
| So the economic impact is I would say unknown, but I would say it's definitely compounded by the significant growth and spread of this virus. | |
| As of yesterday, There are reports from Reuters stating that the U.S. is actually evacuating its citizens from Wuhan, which is the city where this virus originally first appeared, | |
| supposedly. Well, and of course, as you've pointed out, there's a suspected case of doctors infected By this virus, which turns out to be the case, that means it's in the hospital system, which means people who are coming to get sick or people who are sick who are getting to the hospital for other reasons could be infected. | |
| And of course, because doctors see so many people, the opportunity to spread if the doctors have been infected is enormously high. | |
| And then your medical system is working against what you want it to do, which is to contain the virus, because it's actually kind of spreading it, if I understand this correctly. | |
| Yes. The hospitals, according to the videos that have leaked through the mainland Chinese social media network, WeChat, have indicated that basically the hospitals are over capacity. | |
| There are no beds available. | |
| Sick people are being told to go home after they have been tested. | |
| And basically, there have also been this particular video that showed that there were actually supposed dead bodies in the corridors of the hospital that were not picked up after a significant amount of time, | |
| which According to some speculation and comments, have indicated that the system is obviously understaffed right now, overutilized, and the medical staff are afraid to actually deal with certain situations. | |
| And so what we see here is unequipped or Not particularly well-trained professionals that are of extreme... | |
| They are a hazard. | |
| If they're infected, they will easily infect others. | |
| Basically, we're also seeing the collapse of the healthcare system. | |
| As you said, the system is now working against actually healing people and resolving this crisis. | |
| Well, as you point out, so for a couple of days, Hong Kong protesters and medical professionals in Hong Kong have been trying to get the mainland Hong Kong border sealed. | |
| And this, I think, just happened over the last 12 hours that, well, the order has been given by Beijing. | |
| No more free travel between regions, no more tour groups. | |
| But also Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam has frozen travel to Wuhan. | |
| She has shut the schools and canceled public events. | |
| So there does finally seem to be some assertive action. | |
| But because the virus appears to be able to transmit prior to symptoms appearing, it's really hard to know how far it's spread at this point. | |
| Yes. One of the major precautions introduced by the government, not just the Hong Kong government, but also the mainland government, is temperature checkpoints. | |
| So to catch people that have abnormal temperature or fever. | |
| So the problem with that is that there are There are some cases now reported that have patients actually not having a fever but having other symptoms. | |
| So basically the check for temperature is not foolproof and many people could be slipping through the net. | |
| And the main solution advocated actually quite early on since December by the The Hong Kong medical professionals and some of the unions was to essentially close the border entirely for a specified duration. | |
| And actually, for anyone actually coming in, what they have to do would be to actually declare that their intention to enter the border or to cross the border And then be quarantined for approximately the amount of time it takes for the infection to show symptoms. | |
| And if after that time they have no issues, no symptoms, then they will be free to leave. | |
| So I would say that does seem to be quite a standard approach, I think, to to major epidemics. | |
| However, this has not really occurred. | |
| However, there are plans to do this now. | |
| So we are hopeful that eventually this can reduce some casualties. | |
| But at the same time, we're also very concerned that this is too little too late. | |
| So Another issue, I think, which is related to this lack of border controls is that actually few people are willing to self-incriminate and declare themselves sick. | |
| As you know, there are these health declaration forms that one has designed to enter Quite a lot of countries and cross borders. | |
| However, the thing is there's no one really to check whether that is true or not. | |
| So you're basically relying on their honesty and that's not really reliable. | |
| And actually there have been cases of people who Knowing that they would be quarantined and having clear symptoms actually took certain medication like Tylenol to actually mask the fever and cross the borders. | |
| So it's porous. | |
| People who I think should be quarantined to prevent them spreading the disease are not being quarantined. | |
| Actually, that point really stuck out to me because I remember there was a show quite a while ago, one of your shows, that described a free market, voluntarist approach to dealing with the problem of quarantine. | |
| And that was to basically pay or compensate the people being quarantined. | |
| And actually let them pay them whatever their day's wage is and then just pay them to stay in a comfortable, relaxed place of their choice and just don't go anywhere, don't see anyone. | |
| And I feel that actually would have worked much better in this case because the way that we are What the government right now is trying to do is entirely through force and through threat of force. | |
| And that is not really working because, obviously, people don't like to be coerced into quarantine. | |
| They also do not really trust the healthcare system. | |
| As far as the social media comments have led me to believe. | |
| Right. And the quarantine is a very big deal at the moment. | |
| I don't know if people are aware this is noon-ish on the 25th of January 2020. | |
| But as of, I guess, here in my time late last night, over 50 million people are quarantined. | |
| That is a very, very big deal. | |
| Now, of course, quarantine, we have to sort of understand what that means in this context. | |
| So these aren't 50 million people isolated in bubbles. | |
| These are 50 million people who are prevented from leaving a city or an area or a region, which means that they can still, of course, go about and infect everyone else around them. | |
| them. | |
| So it's not quarantine in the way that you just sort of talked about, which is you get put in a room that's isolated and you can't infect anyone. | |
| So they are contained, I would say, rather than quarantined. | |
| That is a huge number of, I mean, this is more than the population of Canada, considerably more than the population of Canada has been quarantined. | |
| And And the president of China just declared heightened emergency as of late last night, warning of accelerating spread, accelerating spread, which is not what you want to hear in this kind of situation. | |
| Yes. | |
| Speaking of the accelerating spread, there is a paper by some British scientists from Lancaster University, in cooperation with some other ones there is a paper by some British scientists | |
| indicating that the RO, or the basic reproductive number of the infection, is around 3.6 to 4.0. | |
| So what that means is that for every infected case, that person is likely to go on to infect around 3 to 4 other people. | |
| So it is a very infectious disease. | |
| It is on the same... | |
| It's on par with SARS that happened around... | |
| 14 years ago. | |
| And so basically, if this situation does not change, we can expect many other outbreaks in other Chinese cities. | |
| And actually, depending on what paper you read, there are many statistics, but they all point to some pretty grim numbers. | |
| According to this particular paper, they say that our model actually suggests that travel restrictions from Wuhan city or two are unlikely to be effective in halting the transmission across China. | |
| Let me just go through these. | |
| Sorry, let me just, if you hold your thought, I want to just go through these numbers because I looked at the same sort of tweet series, and I'll link to all of this below. | |
| So the basic reproduction number of the infection is 3.8, 95% confidence interval, as you point out, between 3.6 and 4.0, indicating that 72 to 75% of transmissions must be prevented by control measures. | |
| For infections to stop increasing. | |
| So 72, so almost three quarters, just below, a shade below three quarters of transmissions must be prevented just for the infection to stop spreading. | |
| And again, because there are reports out that you can transmit prior to exhibiting symptoms, that means virtually impossible. | |
| So the estimator says only 5.1% of infections in Wuhan are identified. | |
| And by 21st January, a total of 11,341 people had been infected in Wuhan since the start of the year. | |
| If the epidemic continues unabated in Wuhan, right, so that's even within the containment area, the prediction is that the epidemic will be substantially larger by 4th of February, with over 191,000 infections. | |
| The infection will be established in other Chinese cities, and importations to other countries will be more frequent. | |
| Our model suggests that travel restrictions from and to Wuhan city are unlikely to be effective in halting transmission across China. | |
| With a 99% effective reduction in travel, the size of the epidemic outside Wuhan may only be reduced by 24.9% on the 4th of February. | |
| And this is a huge trouble. | |
| I mean, so basically this, and this is the 29 outbreak, it's higher compared to other emergent coronaviruses, suggesting that containment or control of this pathogen may be substantially more difficult. | |
| It cannot be stopped by containment alone. | |
| And 99% quarantine lockdown containment of Wuhan will not even reduce the epidemic spread by even one third in the next two weeks. | |
| And this guy says, he says, I really hate to be the epidemiologist who has to admit this, but we are potentially faced with possibly an unchecked pandemic that the world has not seen since the 1918 Spanish influenza, which killed tens of millions of people. | |
| Let's hope it doesn't reach that level, he says, but now we live in a modern world with faster travel than 1918. | |
| And just to compare this attack rate number of infections, the seasonal flu in most years, the R0 is 1.28, right? | |
| So 1.28 for every infected person. | |
| The 2009 flu pandemic had an R0 of 1.48. | |
| The 1918 Spanish flu had 1.8 infections. | |
| The new Wuhan coronavirus reproductive value again, 3.8. | |
| And there are some unpublished estimates that it's actually down as far as 2.5, but that's still twice as high as seasonal flu and higher than the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which of course was exacerbated by the mass movement of soldiers returning from the Second World War. | |
| And this is the fellow. | |
| He says, And he says, here are my responses. | |
| Some folks think I'm trying to incite fear. | |
| I'm not trying. I'm a scientist. | |
| This is hashtag coronavirus, hashtag Wuhan coronavirus is serious. | |
| Over 50 million people are quarantined, plus case counts will go up much more. | |
| Predict World Health Organization will declare emergency. | |
| Let's hope for the best. Prepare. | |
| I mean, that's the data. | |
| That's the expert who is trained in the field. | |
| And I've been fairly conservative with regards to things like the Ebola virus. | |
| I did shows on that and said it wasn't a big deal. | |
| I don't feel the same way about this one. | |
| Now, John, is there any sense of... | |
| Not that it hugely matters at the moment, but I think people are quite curious about the source of this. | |
| Is it eating bats? Is it the fact that in... | |
| This city, this is from two years ago, China tweeted, China's first biosafety level 4 lab has been put into operation in Wuhan, central China's Hubei. | |
| It is capable of experimenting with highly pathogenic microorganisms. | |
| This lab will conduct research in antivirus drugs and vaccines. | |
| This is 20 miles from the seafood area. | |
| Market where some people say it may have originated. | |
| Is it to do with eating bats? | |
| Did it escape from a lab? | |
| This is something that I guess people, we don't really know for sure, but what is the speculation where you are? | |
| Yes, so there are two main theories about it that I'd like to present. | |
| The first theory is that the story about bats actually That started around last Thursday or so. | |
| And so around that time, we saw a sudden flood of Of social media posts, of everybody sharing these images of Chinese people eating bats, bat soup, some exotic frog stew, insects, sashimi, something like that. | |
| The overall emotion evoked there was just blatant disgust. | |
| At that point, actually, people reacted very strongly to this. | |
| And at the same time, I felt that that definitely led or diverted their focus away from this significant government criticism that was actually spreading like wildfire through both Chinese social media and Hong Kong social media. | |
| So I would As others have argued, that this is quite a sophisticated form of deception. | |
| And yeah, it's basically deception. | |
| So I would say that we, to be frank, are not sure about this theory. | |
| We feel that while it is definitely possible that the virus came from bats, I think it was ferrets, as SARS did back in 2003. | |
| But actually, we aren't sure about this because this virus is just too good. | |
| It's able to spread very silently. | |
| The symptoms are very subtle. | |
| Actually, the respiratory symptoms for the Wuhan pneumonia, or ANCOV as we now call it, is actually predominantly in the throat. | |
| People would begin to cough. | |
| Eventually, they would cough up blood because of some lung complications. | |
| But to the largest extent, it is actually very subtle. | |
| It could be easily mistaken for a flu. | |
| And most of all, the victim actually may not have a fever. | |
| So they can definitely cross those border checks quite easily. | |
| So the more, I would say, Or those of us who do not trust the government so much, which I would say is making up an extremely large number right now, would say that it is actually a weaponized virus that was potentially leaked intentionally or unintentionally from the maximum security biolab in Wuhan. | |
| So I would say that, personally speaking, I would If I were to allocate maybe 10 points of certainty factor to each one, I would say I would lean about 8 points towards the biolab leak, intentional or unintentional, and 2 points to the bats. | |
| So I think the bats theory is more of a play on popular psychology and a kind of Diversion, I would say. | |
| So I would say just be really, really careful about what you read. | |
| Even if those facts are true, make sure you see the presented facts or the posts in the context of the current situation, | |
| what the What powers the elites want you to think and also what they have to gain from it and what their main motivation and most pressing need is in order to maintain their power because I would say at the end of the day this epidemic is of course about medicine but To a much greater extent, | |
| it is about politics, control, and power. | |
| If I were to sum that up in one saying, there's a saying in Chinese where we say that it's the Greatest doctors are the ones who heal entire nations. | |
| The more mid-level doctors are the ones who can heal communities and do research on medical issues. | |
| I would say the lowest level of doctor are the ones who cure the diseases. | |
| So we believe or I would say in general there is a feeling that the problem is not in the disease. | |
| It's in the It's in the way that it was handled, and it is in the system that caused this way of handling this disease. | |
| Right. Okay, so we are looking at some great issues. | |
| Sorry to interrupt, but some thoughts popping in my head. | |
| Number one, of course, is that, as you say, it's kind of like a perfect virus from a weaponization standpoint, and if it was related to eating bats, well, it's not like... | |
| People in China just started eating bats last October, right? | |
| So that question of where it came from and the fact that it's airborne, the fact that it's asymptomatic for the first little while, according to some reports, the fact that it has such an extraordinarily high reproduction rate, to me, does somewhat quash the theory that it comes from bats. | |
| And also, of course, when I see sort of show trials and I see a Chinese television presenter being forced to go on air to apologize for a show he did talking about how great it was to eat bats, that strikes me as a scapegoat. | |
| But also when the information, as you say, sort of floods quickly, it seems like there's a coordinated attempt to shape the narrative away from the lab, this biosafety lab. | |
| And so there does seem to me whether it's out accidentally. | |
| And you said that they may have released it. | |
| I mean, there's a possibility, of course, that they released it intentionally. | |
| But I can't fathom as to why they would do that within their own population. | |
| I mean, help me understand if there's any theories behind that. | |
| Well, for this theory, there is a subset of this theory that I do know a possible explanation, and that is some conspiracy theorists in China blaming the CIA for the leak. | |
| So basically, what they're saying is, oh, this disease, it will have a substantial economic impact, and the substantial impact of An even more substantial impact on the investor confidence in China. | |
| And this will lead to actually China being in a less than ideal bargaining position at the trade negotiations with the US. So that is okay. | |
| I can stretch it Not that far, but as of yet, I believe there is no extensive evidence in supporting it. | |
| I think if the Chinese government had any evidence of that, it would be kind of front and center because that's even more compelling than the bat theory. | |
| Okay, well, listen, I really, really do appreciate the time... | |
| I know it's late for you and I appreciate you staying up to chat with me and please keep me posted and I will funnel what I can from what you provide to me through Twitter and other places to keep people informed about this. | |
| My personal opinion is that this is a big one. | |
| This is going to be a big... | |
| This is not something to me, even on the level of SARS. It's not something to me, even on the level of Ebola. | |
| Of course, it's just my amateur opinion, but this is one I'm really keeping my eye on, and I'm telling you. | |
| I mean, obviously, I don't have to tell you, but stay away from crowded areas and wait until we see just what kind of spread this has, and whatever spread you think it has is probably much larger because of this asymptomatic transmission. | |
| So, yeah, thanks so much for your time today. | |
| Please, please keep me posted, and please stay safe, my friend. | |
| Sure, thank you. If I can finish with a call to action that I feel could maybe help things, I would say that it is a great opportunity, both in Hong Kong and internationally, to promote personal responsibility. | |
| I believe that it is with such an infectious virus that actually centralized control It's too slow to actually make the decisions necessary to contain such a virus. | |
| And not just contain it, but to make sure that fewer people get hurt. | |
| So I highly recommend that if you're in a major city where there are flights coming from, say, China, please consider wearing a mask. | |
| Besides that, definitely get in the habit of washing your hands for 20 seconds with soap every time you go to the bathroom. | |
| Wash your hands often and don't touch your face. | |
| So protect yourselves and if you do nothing else, pray for this situation. | |
| Because we do not really see an end to this. | |
| At least not until I would say around May when the supposed temperatures will increase around to I think around 30 degrees or so and the conditions will make it less likely for the virus to spread. | |
| So we have a long time till May. | |
| Is that because people will be out of doors more or less contained or enclosed? | |
| Yes, so the idea is that because the temperature is increased, the viruses which stick to airborne particles and airborne fluids, they will dry out faster, and that means that the virus will not spread as far or as easily. | |
| Okay, okay, good, good. | |
| All right, well, thanks again. I really, really appreciate your time today. | |
| Stay safe, keep me informed, and appreciate the conversation. |
Export Selection