[Spectator] China got the P4 it wanted from La Belle France. The world got a pandemic.
| The irony is that the crisis sickening France and ruining whole swathes of its economy arguably can be traced back 16 years to France and its desire, for largely geopolitical and commercial reasons, to cozy up to China. It chose to do that by providing the blueprints, technology, and knowhow for a sophisticated new virology lab in Wuhan. |
Chestnuts are in blossom, but there are no holiday tables under the trees this spring as Gay Paree struggles with the coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...
. For the past seven weeks, its citizens have been confined to their homes, sans sidewalk cafes, sans restaurants, sans museums and everything else that makes the city a delight. The economy is on the ropes, with unemployment soaring and a drop of 6 percent in GDP in the first quarter. Among the tens of billions of euros the government of President Emmanuel Macron has spent to prop up businesses has been $8 billion to Air La Belle France — a virtual nationalization of the airline — with another $5 billion for that other national champion, Renault. Urgently needed restoration on fire-damaged Notre Dame cathedral has been neglected as locked-down workers are only now beginning to return to work.
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Some 25,000 French have died from COVID-19, the fourth-highest number of deaths in the world and, incredibly, nearly four times the figure for neighboring Germany. Increasingly, French citizens are blaming the government for its hesitant, vacillating, often contradictory management of the crisis, especially its woeful lack of protective masks and testing kits, which led to the high mortality rate. Polls show a majority no longer have confidence in the Macron administration, convinced that it lied to them about the virus.
In 2017 they drew back from the transformative vote that would have been the “far right” Marine Le Pen, choosing instead Emmanel Macron, described as the Peter Pan of Europe. Now they’re getting the results of their choice good and hard. The irony is that the crisis sickening La Belle France and ruining whole swathes of its economy arguably can be traced back 16 years to La Belle France and its desire, for largely geopolitical and commercial reasons, to cozy up to China. It chose to do that by providing the blueprints, technology, and knowhow for a sophisticated new virology lab in Wuhan.
This of course presupposes that the new coronavirus came, accidentally or deliberately, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (also known as the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory). Many refute that, including a front man for Emmanuel Macron, who says there is "no factual evidence." Then there is Yuan Zhiming, a top researcher at the lab and, not incidentally, secretary of its Communist Party committee, who states flatly, "There is no way this virus came from us." Anyone who disagreed was "deliberately misleading people." He is seconded by the pro-Chinese WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who maintains there is no irrefutable proof. They are all, all honorable men.
Honourable. The sarcasm, it burns. But the alternative story, that the virus came from a Wuhan seafood market selling tasty bats as gastronomic treats, doesn’t hold up — the first victims had no connection to it, and the fish market doesn’t sell bats. I find the common-sense argument of White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro more convincing: "We know that ground zero for this virus was within a few miles of that lab," he told Fox News. "The simplest explanation is the most likely. I think it’s incumbent on China to prove that it wasn’t that lab." Or as Sen. Tom Cotton puts it in a Wall Street Journal column, "This evidence is circumstantial, to be sure, but it all points toward the Wuhan labs."
Laboratory accidents do happen with worrisome frequency. During the Cold War, a Soviet bacteriological weapons lab in Sverdlovsk leaked a cloud of anthrax spores, killing over 60 people. In 2004, the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing was guilty of a serious breach of safety guidelines when an infected researcher provoked a new outbreak of SARS. In the UK, there were over 40 events at labs from June 2015 to July 2017 — one every three weeks. But such an event at China’s new and most prestigious virology lab would be especially bad for the country’s global reputation in general, and for President Xi Jinping’s standing with his own Politburo in particular.
Because of that, and given the bald-faced mendacity of the Chinese communists, it is unlikely that we will ever know exactly how the new coronavirus was loosed on the world. "To do so would require finding ’a smoking gun,’ " Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel of the National Security Agency, says. "I wouldn’t be surprised if we never end up with the actual definitive answer." The Chinese authorities block every attempt to understand its origins, shutting down the Shanghai laboratory that published its genome on January 11, while the two Wuhan-based doctors who first expressed fears over the virus have either died or mysteriously disappeared. As the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu taught, all warfare is based on deception.
But it is possible, using available information, to piece together the train of events that likely led to the pandemic due to La Belle France’s botched involvement in Chinese virological research.
At every stage the naive French, eager to be seen as one of the big boys, were played by China. American warnings of the risks were brushed off. 
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