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Feb. 28, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:27
CORONAVIRUS CRISIS: Steven Mosher and Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom and Hope you're doing well. I'm here with Stephen Mosher.
He is an American social scientist, anti-abortion activist, and an author who specializes in anthropology, demography, and the rather ominously named field of Chinese population control, which actually might be worldwide population control these days.
He's the president of the Population Research Institute, an advocate for the rather scant record of human rights in China, and has been Well, thank you for having me on the show.
Okay, so let's talk about the origins of COVID-19 or coronavirus or whatever the name du jour is.
This idea that it lay dormant, covered up and controlled by the CCP from early mid-November to early January Thank you.
Thank you. Well, it's a total lack of responsible behavior here.
I mean, think about what you should do in the case of discovering a new potential epidemic, viral epidemic.
You shouldn't tell your own people as quickly as possible You should alert the world.
You should allow the leading virologists from around the world, not only the World Health Organization, but from countries in Europe and North America, to help you discover everything you can about how the virus is spread, what the incubation period is, whether it can be spread asymptomatically or not, and all of these other critical points of fact that you need to know in order to effectively control the spread of the disease.
In fact, China, or rather I should say, because I love the Chinese people, I lived in Asia for 10 years, let's put the responsibility where it properly lies, and that is with the Chinese Communist Party.
Consciously hid what was happening in China, not only from the world, but from the Chinese people themselves.
I was just reading again a startling document that was issued by the Wuhan Naval University of Engineering, which is the PLA, People's Liberation Army, has its Engineering School for the People's Liberation Army Navy, based in Wuhan, which is the center of the epidemic.
In this directive, which is dated January 2nd, weeks before the world knew about the coronavirus epidemic in China, weeks before the Chinese people were informed, they already had said, we're closing our doors to strangers because there is a new and dangerous pneumonia Out and about in the streets, and we have to protect the students and the faculty of the engineering school by not allowing strangers on the campus.
That's January 2nd.
But in that directive, they referred back to an earlier 2019 directive from the Wuhan City Municipal Health Agency saying the same thing, that there was a dangerous pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan and that people should take precautions.
And that directive also mentioned that there had been someone sent from the National Health Ministry in early December down to the city of Wuhan to look into what was happening there in terms of this new outbreak of a potentially dangerous pneumonia.
So you can see from that directive That the authorities in China, not just in the city of Wuhan, not just in the province of Hubei province, but at the highest levels, at the National Health Ministry in Beijing, knew about the spread of this dangerous coronavirus as early as December, probably, clearly November, because they were sending people there from the national government down to look into it and see what should be done about it.
Not only was the world not told, again, the Chinese people weren't even told what was happening within their own country.
I think this goes beyond just incompetence.
If you think about a cover-up, You think about, in the Chinese context, lower-level officials hiding bad news from their superiors.
So one of the thoughts I had last month when this first came to public attention was, all right, well maybe the city officials in Wuhan knew they had a problem, but they hid it for several weeks from the provincial authorities in Hubei.
And maybe the provincial authorities, after finding out they had a problem, of epidemic proportions, hid it for a week or two from the national authorities.
What this directive from the People's Liberation Army Navy's University of Naval Engineering says is that the national authorities knew about this As early as late November or December.
So it wasn't a matter of one level of the bureaucracy hiding it from the next higher level to protect the reputation.
This was a matter of the highest levels of the government hiding it from the people of China and the people of the world.
So I think this is not incompetence.
I think this is... How should we characterize it?
A guilty conscience is what I would say.
I think that's evil, letting people die unnecessarily.
Well, and if it is the case, and I think that there's significant evidence pointing towards this, of course, if it is the case that it had something to do with the bioweapons lab in Wuhan, in other words, you know, the story that, oh, it came from bats. No, wait, bats are hibernating.
Oh, it came from snakes. No, no, snakes don't support the coronavirus in this way.
If it does turn out, and of course we may never know, probably never will know, that it was maybe a researcher selling infected animals for profit, maybe some crazy person who wanted to release the virus.
Like you see these videos of a woman licking the buttons on an elevator and so on.
If it came from that, then this explains, of course, why they wouldn't want the virus to be talked about because it points straight back to a catastrophic failure at the highest levels, I would assume, of containment of deadly viruses.
I wonder if you can give people the sort of breadcrumbs of trails that lead to that potential conclusion from the facts that we have.
Yeah, it does suggest that the shroud of secrecy that the Chinese official threw over this suggests that they have something to hide beyond mere incompetence.
And I think the trail of breadcrumb starts with this.
It starts back in 2003 when we had a SARS epidemic in China, largely, that killed 10% of the people infected.
It was very deadly in terms of a virus, not as infectious as the current coronavirus, but more deadly in terms of those that did affect.
So China took the SARS virus and was experimenting with it in their lab in Beijing in 2004.
What happened in 2004 in Beijing?
Well, there were two more SARS epidemics in and around Beijing in 2004.
Why? Because the virus had escaped from the laboratory.
That was a level three laboratory.
Okay, so China has a history of letting these dangerous pathogens, these dangerous viruses escape from the lab and cause death and injury among their own population.
So that's breadcrumb number one.
Breadcrumb number two is that in 2007, A group of researchers based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan being the city which is the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic.
In the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they were doing a study of how to insert segments from the HIV virus into a coronavirus to make it possible for the coronavirus to attach itself to human lung tissue.
Because you see, with a virus, the whole question is, does it have the key that fits into the lock in the cell wall of a particular type of human tissue, enable it to attach, inject its RNA, take over the cell's reproductive machinery, and then produce hundreds of copies of itself, killing the original cell in the process and lysing it, as it's called, and then it spreads to other similar tissue.
So they were actually conducting experiments that they reported on in a 2008 issue of the Journal of Virology, an internationally well-respected journal, in which they publicly talked about their research and how to make a coronavirus able to infect viruses.
I'm sorry to interrupt you at this point, but if you can just help my poor little head comprehend this, I would really appreciate it.
On what possible grounds would you want to do something to create this Franken-monster of a coronavirus with HIV inserts?
It can't be because, well, you know, if we spontaneously find this in the wild, we'll be able to deal with it.
Like, on what conceivable grounds other than biological warfare would you want to create such a thing?
You'd never want to create such a dangerous pathogen which doesn't exist in nature and whose only purpose would seem to be used in infecting and killing large numbers of human beings.
You just wouldn't do that kind of research.
And yet we know because of this published work that that research was being done in the Wuhan Institute of Virology 12 years ago.
Over a decade ago, they were already using genetic engineering to produce dangerous viruses that don't exist in the wild and probably would never exist by means of random mutations in the future.
Now, I'm sure that the justification for it in the beginning was we're just doing scientific research to advance the frontiers of knowledge, but to my view, that's like, I don't know, I have trouble finding a metaphor that expresses the danger of this.
Like setting off a nuclear explosion with the possibility of creating a black hole that would suck in the entire universe and destroy it.
I mean, this, you're creating a dangerous virus which has the potential of killing millions of human beings.
Why would you ever do that?
Especially if you're doing it in a lab, in a situation, in a country where the The rules governing biotechnology research are not Do not reach the ethical standards that we have in the West, where the biotech safety standards do not reach the level of biosafety that we would like to see in the West to contain these dangerous pathogens.
And another breadcrumb is this.
Once the epidemic was well and truly underway in China, and we were beginning to see cases in other countries, in February 14th, The head of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping, as we call him, held a meeting in which he said, we need to strengthen lab safety.
For the sake of national security, for the sake of protecting the health of the Chinese people, we need to put in place new rules governing biolab research.
And the very next day, February 15th, just a couple of weeks ago now, The Ministry of Science and Technology published new guidelines concerning the control of biological research in bio labs that were handling dangerous pathogens of the order of the coronavirus.
All right? That's the entire title of it.
That they put out new regulations on how biolabs ought to handle dangerous pathogens like the novel coronavirus.
Now that to me is an admission that they were doing unsafe research And unsafe by conception.
I mean, why would it create such a dangerous virus?
And number two, they were handling it in a way that allowed it to escape from the lab.
And now that the horses left the barn, we're going to close the barn door.
And now that the epidemic is spreading among the people, we're going to put in place new safety regulations to prevent a future epidemic from happening.
Well, it's too late guys.
You've already infected tens of thousands of people in China, probably many, many more, and thousands of people around the world.
Well, okay, so let's talk about some of these guidelines that were supposed to be enforced.
You know, Stephen, one of the guidelines that I would think would be fairly self-evident is, I don't know, how about you don't take infected animals from the lab and sell them in a market where people might eat them?
That seems to me like you wouldn't even need to write that down, would you?
But there's some evidence that there may have been one of the sources.
Well, when you think about how the coronavirus could have escaped from the lab, I think one thing comes to mind, that a lab worker didn't have his mask on properly or his breathing apparatus on properly, and he somehow got infected with the coronavirus, left the lab not knowing he was infected, And communicated the disease when he was asymptomatic before he showed symptoms to other people and the disease spread from there.
That's what you would normally think.
But there's another possible vector in China, and we know this because there are now Chinese biotechnology researchers who are sitting in prison Because they have received grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology,
from the Chinese equivalent to CDC and other things, and have purchased lab animals to do research on, rats and bats and snakes and pigs and chickens and so forth.
And once they have finished doing their research, which may involve infecting the lab animal with a certain chemical or with a certain infectious disease, if the animal is still alive, they've taken the animal and sold it on the open market to a butcher who then they've taken the animal and sold it on the open market to a butcher who then will butcher the infected animal and sell it, um, to, to people who don't know that they may be consuming an animal that has Uh,
So it almost boggles the imagination to think that any reasonable person would ever do that.
But that has happened in China before.
As I say, there are people sitting in jail in China, lab researchers, because they tried to monetize.
They've tried to turn a profit from the surviving infected lab animals that result from their research.
So that's another possible vector explaining how the coronavirus could have escaped from the laboratory.
I mean, it's absolutely appalling.
Let's zoom out a little bit because some of the interviews that I've seen of you, Stephen, you really do talk about the moral horror, the ethical void at the center of the Chinese Communist Party.
Let's just go back a little bit.
You came up with a death count figure.
I hesitate to repeat it from memory because it was enormous.
But I wonder if you could just give people a sense of the callous disregard for human life that has characterized the CCP since the late 1940s.
Well, I guess even before if you count the Civil War.
Well, I mean, let's start with the Civil War because the Chinese Communist Party has always been very profligated of human life.
They have not hesitated to brand people as counter-revolutionaries, as class enemies, and eliminate them basically en masse.
The death toll from the Communist Revolution in China was probably 30 to 40 million.
After the revolution, things did not calm down because Chairman Mao was in charge and he wanted to eliminate, class by class, all of the counter-revolutionaries that were preventing him from creating a socialist paradise and creating a new socialist man, new socialist woman.
And there were certain people that he just believed could never be transformed into new socialist men and new socialist women, and they simply had to be eliminated.
In the village that I did research in back in 1979, 1980, and I should say that I was the first American social scientist allowed to do on-the-ground research in China.
In 1979 and 1980, that's right when we normalized diplomatic relations with China.
I was on the ground.
We normalized diplomatic relations on January 15th of 1979.
I was on the ground on March 1st of 1979.
I was selected by the National Science Foundation and the State Department to fill that role.
I was at Stanford University at the time.
I wound up living in a village where I learned firsthand about the purge, the killing of the landlords and rich peasants in rural China.
About 10 million people were executed in the land reform.
They were called by the Chinese Communist Party landlords and rich peasants.
A landlord may have owned 10 acres of land.
And their children were called little landlords and also executed.
A couple of acres of land, right?
So anybody who had more land than they could till themselves and rented it out for that reason alone was considered to be exploiting the masses and they were They were trotted out before the people.
They were struggled and tortured and killed.
So that's 10 million. Then we had the series of anti-rightist campaigns in the 1950s where millions more died and wound up in prison.
Then we had the Cultural Revolution with several million deaths.
Then we had the longest political campaign in the history of the People's Republic of China began when I was in China.
It was the One Child Policy.
Beginning in about 1980 and continuing to 2016, they were arresting young women for the crime of being pregnant without the permission of the government.
In the cities, you could have one child.
In the countryside, after a few years, you could have two.
But any woman who was pregnant outside the plan was considered to be carrying an illegal child and there were arrests and forced abortions.
The number of women who were arrested and aborted in that way, the Chinese government says, was around 400 million.
So I think they're also victims of the Chinese Communist Party.
And now we have...
So total of that, that's about 500 million.
So we already have the Chinese Communist Party as what I describe as the biggest killing machine in human history.
The number of people killed by the Communist Party in China dwarfs the number of people killed by Hitler and the Nazis, dwarfs the number of people killed by Stalin under the 70 years of following the Communist Revolution.
And you had a holodomor that basically consumed most of the country in the forced collectivization of the farms and the resulting brutal starvation that occurred as well.
What, 50, 60 plus million people died from that?
Yeah, let me go back and mention that.
From 1960 to 1962, the worst famine in human history occurred in China.
A Chinese Jew, a friend of mine who was under the reformist leader of the Chinese Communist Party...
Zhao Zhiyan went from province to province collecting data and said 42.5 million people starved to death in China from 1960 to 1962.
Why?
Because Chairman Mao had forced everyone into people's communes, which were better at producing political tyranny than at producing food.
And as a result of this mismanagement of the economy, 42 million people starved to death.
There are entire villages that no longer existed in China after the Great Famine of 1960 to 1962 because every living person had died.
All right.
So I think we have to add that to the death toll as well.
But now we have a new political campaign underway in China.
What am I talking about?
I'm talking about the new political campaign to eliminate the carriers of the coronavirus.
And notice that I didn't say to eliminate the coronavirus epidemic.
I said to eliminate the people who are infected with coronavirus because the head of the National Health Service of China several weeks ago held a meeting and laid out the priorities of the party in this moment of crisis.
And the priorities were, number one, politics, number two, safety, and number three, curing the people who had the disease.
Well, what does number one mean?
Putting politics ahead of everything else means that you must protect the image, you must protect the power of the Chinese Communist Party at all costs.
So this is, above all, a political campaign to suppress dissent.
A lot of people are very unhappy in China today.
Those who express their unhappiness, even privately and certainly those who try to express on the internet, will be arrested, will be punished, will be sent to jail.
Directives have come down saying that people who spread rumors, quote unquote, rumors on the internet about the seriousness of the epidemic can be put in jail up to 10 years.
So that's what I mean by political campaign.
That's what I mean by putting politics first.
Second is safety.
What does safety mean?
Well, safety in the Chinese communist context means that we have to segregate and detain all people who are suspected of carrying the coronavirus.
Now, we think in the West of quarantine is being put at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California in a nice, comfortable hotel, and you're able to go out and walk around.
You just can't get within six feet of other people, and you have to be careful to wash your hands and not touch your face and so forth.
That's not quarantine in China.
Quarantine in China is where we amputate People from society.
We take them and put them in big detention centers or we tell them they must stay in their homes.
They cannot go out on the street under any circumstances.
We completely segregate them from society.
And what happens to those people once they're in those detention centers is basically up to their own immune system.
We've seen pictures of these gymnasia, these sports centers, these hospitals so-called that were built in a week.
I'll tell you what they built in a week.
They didn't build a hospital.
They built a detention center.
A hospital has medical equipment.
A hospital has nurses and doctors and medical supplies to treat people who are ill.
These detention centers don't have anything but people walking around in protective garb, taking people's temperatures.
If you go into the detention center with a mild case of coronavirus, you may infect someone next to you who actually doesn't have coronavirus at all but may just have the ordinary flu.
Or you may get reinfected from someone else.
These are not places where you go to be cured.
You're on your own in terms of your immune system when you go to these places.
So that's safety second is to cut off from society everyone suspected of carrying the virus.
They are the new class enemies, you see.
They are the new people who have to be hounded and segregated and struggle and control.
And finally, we get to the cure.
Well, that's way down the list, isn't it?
That's number three. So, yeah, we'll cure people, we can.
But you notice that no senior officials have contracted the disease.
And even most of the middle-level officials have been safe from the disease.
There is a hospital in Wuhan, very well-equipped.
Where any senior official or middle-ranking official can go to receive top-notch equipment, top-notch treatment.
They have top-notch medical equipment and supplies in those hospitals.
They're very well supplied. As for the rest of the population, well, you know, you sort of take what you can get.
If you can get a bed at a hospital, so much the better most people can't.
So that's what is going on in China, is a new political campaign, the coronavirus political campaign.
Which puts politics first.
Politics is in command.
And safety second.
And a cure?
Well, maybe if you're lucky, you'll get some help in that regard.
Well, and they have every right, so to speak, to be concerned about this level of suffering causing big political dislocations.
I mean, if you look at the Black Death and how that smashed the manorial feudal system, if you look at the upheavals in France and the poverty in France that smashed the monarchy there, there are very significant historical precedents for this level of suffering and challenge to begin to have people break the relationship, there are very significant historical precedents for this level of suffering and challenge to begin to have people Because the general, the deal has been, okay, we don't want freedom, so maybe we want freedom, but we'll accept just making money in lieu of freedom.
But as the economy shuts down and the mothballs gather in the factories, people can't make money.
And they don't have political freedom.
That does create a lot of discontent on the population as a whole, I would say.
Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
The regime is legitimized not by elections.
There are no free elections in China.
Obviously, everybody knows that.
The regime is legitimized by performance.
And right now, the regime has suffering from very severe performance anxiety because the Chinese economy has basically ground to a halt.
It ground to a halt at the Chinese New Year, of course, because the quarantine was placed on Wuhan and three other major cities around China and three entire provinces.
The province of Heilongjiang in the far north in what we used to call Manchuria, Jiangxi province on the coast north of Shanghai, and then we had, of course, Hubei province itself.
So that was probably about 20% of the Chinese population was under direct quarantine.
But what that meant was it effectively stopped the movement of goods and services throughout the rest of the country.
So the economy was at a halt until mid-February, when all of a sudden, Xi Jinping and the other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party realized That they better force people back onto the production lines or they were going to suffer a serious economic setback which would lead to serious political consequences.
And so, Xi Jinping at that point last week, a week and a half ago, ordered everybody back to work.
What did that mean in practice?
What that meant in practice is if you owned a small business or a small factory, the police would show up at your door and say, it's time for you to open your business.
It's time for you to get your factory up and running again.
And so you, perhaps escorted by the police, would dutifully go to your factory and try to get your production line up and running again.
Well, the problem is, in most parts of China, you don't have enough workers to get the production lines running again.
Why don't you have enough workers?
Because at the time of the Chinese New Year, which was on February 25th, 26th, 200 million people went back to their native places in China.
They left their, where they were living, they left their place of employment in Wuhan or in Shanghai or in Beijing and went back to the town or village they were from.
Largest human migration takes place in China at the time of the Chinese New Year.
Then the quarantine locked them down in their villages and their towns and their smaller cities.
If you go back to Shanghai now, because Xi Jinping, President Xi, wants you back on the assembly line working despite the coronavirus, if you go back you have to suffer through a two-week quarantine.
So where would you rather be in the middle of an epidemic?
Would you rather be at home in your village?
Would you rather go back to Shanghai or Tianjin or another city, suffer through a two-week detention, a quarantine, during which time you may get sick, during which time you may not have enough food to eat or money to buy food, And so you can get back on the assembly line and get back to work.
I think it's a no-brainer.
I think most people in China are staying home and waiting this thing out rather than taking the risk of getting on the road and going back to work in these dangerous circumstances.
Well, and it's safer in the country just as it was in the Black Death.
Fewer people to be infected by.
There's food in the countryside.
That's where the food in China is grown.
That's where the food is stored over the winter months by the farmers.
and there's a saying in China that, um, that if you're going to get sick, uh, better to get sick at home because you can die if you get sick on the road.
Right.
That's how you say that in Chinese.
You know, if you're sick at home, you'll probably be fine.
If you're sick on the road, you may die.
So they don't want to be sick on the road, so they're sticking out at home, and it only makes sense.
That's rational behavior, especially when you have a government that's actually...
Misleading you, lying to you about the severity of the epidemic.
Now, you ask yourself, would the Chinese Communist Party actually sacrifice thousands or tens of thousands of workers to a fatal disease just to get the production lines up and running?
Well, of course it would. Of course they would.
Of course it would. There's no question that they would.
Because production comes first.
They're in the middle of this performance anxiety now.
The economy is at a standstill.
They've got to get things back up and running, or they're going to have even more serious problems down the road.
Well, and it being China, I'm not saying this is the causality behind it, but I'm sure that the senior leaders at the CCP are somewhat aware of how the coronavirus that strikes the elderly in particular might do quite a bit to decapitate a rather elderly, top-heavy population that resulted from the one-child policy and is going to save them quite a lot of pensions.
Well, would they be thinking in terms of how to use the coronavirus epidemic to their own political advantage, economic advantage?
Of course they would. There would be no ethical, moral, or humane considerations going into that calculus at all.
And it is true that the numbers we have from China suggest this.
And as I say, you can't trust any of the numbers out of China really, but you can calculate from the numbers they released that the death rate among men is about 2.9%.
So that's about 3% of the men who contract the disease die.
The rate for women is about half that.
Now, I would suggest that the reason the death rate is higher for men is that in terms of smoking camels or cigarettes, China is about where the United States was in 1940.
All the men smoke and many of the women smoke.
And so if you're a heavy smoker, and many Chinese men are heavy smokers, that means your lungs are already under stress from the burden of the particulate matter you're putting into them from smoking.
Add to that the fact that Chinese cities have the worst smog in the world.
There are days in Shanghai and Tianjin and Guangzhou where you cannot see the sun.
The smog is so thick overhead.
And people, even before the coronavirus epidemic, you would see pictures from urban settings in China where everyone was wearing a mask.
Why?
Because they were trying to keep those tiny particles of soot out of their lungs because China had, even before the coronavirus epidemic, it had the highest rates of pneumonia, of flu, of throat cancer, of stomach cancer, lung cancer in the world.
Why?
Because of the heavy burden of smog, of pollutants in the atmosphere.
So put the coronavirus on top of that and you see why the death rate in China is probably going to be a lot higher than it is in any other country.
So that, I think, accounts for, in part, for the severity of the disease in China.
The other part, of course, is that they're simply not well equipped to handle an epidemic like this in China.
Now, let's talk about some of the more optimistic outlooks that you have for the United States with regards to this illness.
Well, Well, if you look at the analyses that have been done by Johns Hopkins University in terms of the readiness of all of the 195 nations in the world to cope if you look at the analyses that have been done by Johns Hopkins University in terms of the readiness of all of the 195 nations in the world to you see that the United States ranks number one of all the countries in the world.
That is, we have the best virologists, we have the best biolabs, we have the capability of creating a vaccine faster and better than anyone else using the proper protocols, abiding by the proper ethical standards.
And so we, I think, have the ability to deal with an outbreak better, I think, than any other country has.
And add to that the fact that we've had several weeks of warning.
We haven't had nearly as much warning as we should have had, Stefan.
We should have known about this in early December.
We should have been able to send our own virologists, the best in the world, to China to help To help China combat this new and dangerous pathogen.
They didn't let us in.
Had they let us in, we would be well on our way into trials by now.
We would have a vaccine by the end of summer.
That whole timetable has been pushed back because of the deceit, the duplicity on the part of the Chinese Communist Party.
That whole timetable has been pushed back by several months.
And I must, I have to tell you, I believe that everybody in the world, not just in China, but everybody in the world who is a victim of the coronavirus epidemic, whether they fall ill or whether they die from the epidemic, everybody is a victim of the Chinese Communist Party.
This was a preventable pandemic.
This could have been stopped at the outset by proper quarantine protocols.
It wasn't. It was left to fester and spread throughout China and throughout the world.
Remember back at the time of the Chinese New Year.
We did not have a quarantine in Wuhan.
The epidemic was already raging out of control in this city of perhaps, including the suburbs, 15 million people.
And what happened in the days leading up to the Chinese New Year?
Five million people left the city of Wuhan.
Some of those five million were carrying the coronavirus inside their bodies.
Some were already showing symptoms.
Many were unsymptomatic.
Where did they go?
They went to all of China's provinces.
They went to Xinjiang in the west, Tibet in the south.
They went to Heilongjiang in the north.
That's why Heilongjiang is under quarantine now.
And they went to other countries around the world.
Why was that allowed to happen?
That was allowed to happen because China was hiding the epidemic.
The reason why we have outbreaks in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong is because the quarantine was not put in place when it should have been put in place.
And those people, that diaspora from Wuhan, not just infected people throughout all of the province of China, it infected people in many countries around the world.
And I am deathly afraid For what is about to happen in Africa.
Because Africa has virtually no public health sector to speak of.
And there are a million Chinese expatriate workers in Africa working on building railroads, working in the mines, working, buying and selling.
And how many of those million Chinese workers were in and around the epicenter of the epidemic back in November and December and January when it was spreading?
How many traveled from there to Africa?
They don't have the means to diagnose the coronavirus in Africa.
They won't even know they have an epidemic until the hospitals are full of people who are dying, whose lungs are filling up from fluid because they have the coronavirus-caused pneumonia.
That's why Bill Gates said months ago that if a viral epidemic spread in Africa, that potentially tens of millions of people could die.
And again, all of those victims are victims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Have you heard the, I won't say the rumors, because there have been some tests, although the numbers of patients are very low, that it does appear to be ethno-specific.
In other words, that it, and maybe it's because of the smoking, as you point out, like half of Chinese men smoke, but that it does seem to affect East Asians more than it would other ethnicities.
I have no opinion on that point right now.
I kind of attribute it to environmental factors at this point.
The only data point that I would offer in that regard is we do know that the former president of the National Defense University, who is a four-star general and who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party from, I think, 2012 to 2018, published a book.
Called The New High Ground, in which he talked about the development of the use of genetic engineering to engineer dangerous viruses was the new frontier in researching new weapons.
And he said the ideal weapon would be an ethno-specific virus.
But I don't think the general had in mind an ethno-specific virus that would target the Chinese.
Do you? No, that seems rather incomprehensible from even an amoral geopolitical and military standpoint.
Okay, so let's, I guess, close off.
There's two topics we can touch on briefly, if you don't mind.
The first is, and this is way beyond my realm of expertise, so I'm probably going to get most of this wrong, but it does seem like a vaccine for a rapidly mutating virus would be a big challenge, and I'm sort of drawn to the fact that According to some studies, up to 14% of people who've got the coronavirus can get reinfected, which means that even their own antibodies are not enough to stave off the second wave.
How long do you think it could be?
And I know we're really speculating here, but let's just do it for the sake of the argument.
But how long do you think it might take if this is a mutating virus to come up with any kind of effective vaccine?
Well, this is the case with viruses in general, of course, which is why we never, with our flu vaccine, we never get it quite right.
We have to sort of guess which viral strains are going to be predominant in the upcoming flu season and then incorporate into the vaccine specific, you know...
Antigens to create those antibodies that will fight those specific flus.
And we know that coronaviruses in particular have a tendency to mutate.
A virus in general doesn't contain DNA. It contains RNA, which is much more subject to mutation over time.
So... Again, these are things we should know by now, Stephan.
We should know, have a sense of the mutation rate, because if we'd been doing studies of transmission over the last three months, we would have a whole series of data points where the disease had gone from One person to another to another, and we would be able to look and see what sort of mutations that occurred during the process of the disease transferring from patient 1 to patient 10.
We don't have that because China has been hiding the data.
I hope the reinfection rate is not as high as 14%.
Because that suggests, of course, that the epidemic will be much harder to contain.
But we don't want to end by suggesting that what we're going to see in the United States is anything like what they're seeing in China.
China got it wrong.
They're still getting it wrong.
If you punish people for showing symptoms of the disease by locking them up in their apartments or by putting them in detention centers, people are going to hide their symptoms and the disease is going to spread in that way.
We're doing it the right way.
We've got the best virologists in the world at work on this.
And I think we're going to come up with, first of all, we're going to come up with antiviral medications.
Which greatly mitigate the seriousness, the severity of the disease when people get it, okay?
So they won't be, they'll get sick from it, but they won't die of it.
Secondly, we'll have a vaccine, you know, by the fall, hopefully, and we'll be able to immunize people so they don't come down with it in the first place.
At the end of the day, in another year, we're going to view the coronavirus as just another flu strain that we've been vaccinated against, and we won't worry about it any more than we worry about the normal flu during the normal flu season.
Excellent. And I guess in the short run, my major concern for people in the West is not so much the virus, but the interruption in the supply chain for just about everything from medicine to food to who knows, right?
Do you think that we are in a stage or a situation where minimal prepping might be of value, grabbing some extra food, some extra water just in case there are interruptions, not because of the virus directly, but just as you point out, the lack of productivity in China and other places that are dealing with this?
Yeah, I've been asked about that more and more frequently, and my position is this, that if you live in a large coastal city with lots of international air traffic going in or out of your local international airport,
then, yeah, you might want to put You know, buy a big bag of rice or a couple big cans of beans or something to set aside a couple weeks of food, just in case you don't want to be going to the store over that two or three week period of time.
I'm not sure that I would go beyond that.
I certainly wouldn't go beyond that in any other part of the United States.
Unless, you know, for your own peace of mind, if you're the kind of person that worries about this sort of thing, I mean, for a couple hundred dollars, you can buy peace of mind.
Why not? Buy peace of mind.
And then you'll know that you have, you know, You have enough food stored for a local temporary quarantine or you have a few face masks if you need to go out.
And just leave it at that.
All right. Well, listen, I really, really appreciate your time today.
Could you, just for my podcast listeners, give the vital statistics on where to find your work on the Internet?
Well, our website at the Population Research Institute is pop.org, P-O-P dot O-R-G, POP, short for Population Research Institute.
I have just, for the first time, reluctantly set up a Twitter account because I'm following the coronavirus on that Twitter account, and I am at Stephen W. Moser, one word, For those who are interested in the news coming out of China, mostly because I'm trying to track down, as we talked about, the origin of the epidemic and trying to get a sense of how bad things really are in China.
Because I worry about what the Chinese people are facing over the next six months or a year.
Well, I can think it's fairly safe to say they will be facing a lot of trials.
I will put the links to your website and your Twitter account in the show notes.
I really, really do appreciate your time.
I'd love to have you come back on and talk about the history of China sometime, but this was incredibly illuminating and I really appreciate your time.
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