Reply 22 - Posted by:
girlhowdy 3/17/2020 5:41:46 PM (No. 349286)
This is the interview from LifeSite News on February 20, 2020, about the coronavirus from China. Podcast available at:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-coronavirus-from-a-china-expert
Here is the transcript of this show:
John-Henry Westen Show
Coronavirus: Leading China Expert Details the Reality - 02/20/2020
[00:00:00] JHW: Welcome to this special episode of the John-Henry Western Show, where we'll be discussing the Coronavirus, or COVID-19, with one of the USA's foremost experts on China. Wouldn't you want to verify that those viral videos of the Chinese people talking about the virus are actually accurate? Are those words that they're playing on the bottom of the screen actually what they're saying? Or is it just something used to instill panic? What's actually really going on in China with the virus and what threats do we face from it in the West? You'll want to stay tuned.
[00:00:32] JHW: Steve Mosher, welcome to this episode of The John-Henry Weston Show.
SM: It’s good to be here. John-Henry.
[00:00:37] JHW: Now, most of you will know Steven Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute, the one who first alerted the world to the forced abortion practices in China. He's the author of Bully of Asia, Why China's Dream is the New Threat to World Order. And he's a former National Science Foundation fellow. He studied human biology at Stanford University and he holds advanced degrees in biological oceanography, East Asian studies, and cultural anthropology. One of America's leading China watchers, he was selected in 1979 by the National Science Foundation to be the first U.S. social scientist to do field research in China. So, Steve, we're really happy to be talking to you about this.
[00:01:22] JHW: And let's begin, as we always do with the Sign of the Cross. In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[00:01:30] Okay. So first of all tell us, what we know about the coronavirus is really scary. Everybody hears that it's a deadly virus with no cure, no vaccine. But what really is the coronavirus?
[00:01:43] SM: The coronavirus is called a coronavirus because it has crown-like extensions on the virus packet. The extensions are what enables it to attach itself to cell walls inside your body, inject the RNA from the virus into the cell, take over the cells’ reproductive machinery, and then produce hundreds of thousands of copies of itself, after which the cell is destroyed and those copies go on to infect other cells. That's how viruses work in general.
[00:02:11] SM: Now, the strange thing about the coronavirus is that we have never seen it before. This is a unique organism. It bears some resemblance to viruses found in an animal called the pangolin. It bears some resemblance to viruses found at bats and rats. But again, it is unique, which raises questions about its origins.
[00:02:38] JHW: Right. Do we know how the virus is spread?
[00:02:43] SM: Well, the virus is spread by three means. Basically, it's spread by touching a surface on which there are live viruses that have been left there by someone touching the surface who has the disease. It can be spread, of course, by coughing through the air if you're within a few feet of someone who has coronavirus. And it can also be spread apparently by aerosol transmission, which is to say that tiny droplets of water in the air containing the virus packets can stay in the air for a while, and infect people who walk by. I think that's the most worrying thing about the the infection possibilities. But the problem is, John-Henry, that the Chinese government, which is of course run by the Chinese Communist Party, has been completely opaque about the coronavirus epidemic in China from the beginning.
We believe that the first cases were discovered back in November. The Chinese government did not admit it had a problem until January 20th, by which time the virus epidemic had already reached epidemic proportions in China. So basically, it did what the Chinese Communist Party always does: It lied, covered up. It deceived its own people and the world about the dangerous epidemic that was raging inside of China, unnecessarily costing many, many lives in China and potentially many lives outside of China. So once again, the Chinese Communist Party has over the years succeeded in killing hundreds of millions of its own people in famines and political purges, in the one-child policy. But now it's found a new way, a novel way one might say after the novel coronavirus, a novel way to kill even more of the poor Chinese people who suffer under its misrule.
[00:04:44] JHW: Right. So they've been hiding the numbers, lying about their numbers. What are the actual numbers, A, that they're putting out there right now and B, that you believe they would be based on, what the numbers are more actually like, rather than what they're trying to foist on the public?
[00:05:01] SM: Well, as I mentioned, the first deaths and the first infections were reported on January 20th, just about a month ago. But in fact, we know that there was an emergency meeting of the standing committee of the politburo. That is to say, president-for-life Xi Jinping, who's the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and the other politburo members, standing committee members who actually run China. We know there was an emergency meeting of the politburo back in early January. And we know even before that, there were universities in Shanghai, which is 200 miles east of Wuhan, the center of the epidemic, universities in Shanghai which were saying: do not allow any strangers on campus because there is a new epidemic raging. So already by January 2nd, by January 3rd, we had evidence that there was an epidemic of major proportions in China, that it had already reached the city of Shanghai 200 miles to the east, and the local units, what we call in Chinese local institutions, local factories, were already taking precautions against the spread of the disease. And yet three more weeks went by before the Chinese government even admitted that it had a single death. So obviously, the numbers that they give us of roughly now 2000 dead and 70,000 infected are a vast underestimate of the actual scale of the epidemic.
Let's say for purposes of discussion, that the epidemic really began not on January 20th, but on December 20th, a month before, but followed the same pattern of expansion that we see in Wuhan from the official numbers. By now, if it had started in December 20th, which is a very reasonable supposition, we would have seen a million and a half people infected in China and probably 30,000 deaths. Now, if it started before then and spread at the same rate, the numbers would be even larger. So I believe that the epidemic is many times worse than it is being reported. I believe the Chinese Communist Party deliberately covered up the epidemic for probably two months. And now the Chinese people once again are paying the price for the incompetence and sheer evil of the people who rule them.
[00:07:39] JHW: Unbelievable, unbelievable. Well, there's something very interesting going on. Speaking on Fox News, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, he raised the possibility that the virus had originated in a high security biomedical lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city that is the center of the outbreak.
Videotape/Senator Cotton: I want to talk about the biggest and the most important story in the world: the Wuhan coronavirus. This coronavirus is a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China. But actually it is probably worse than Chernobyl, which was localized in its effect. The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic. While you were all sleeping overnight, the number of diagnosed cases in China increased by 30 percent. Now let me be clear, that is not new cases, that is just newly admitted cases. It is probably several orders of magnitude higher than that. Also while you were sleeping, China now has its entire border with Russia closed: 2600 miles, Russia has closed that border. El-Al has shut down travel between Israel and China. Air France has shut down travel between China and France. And that is in addition to all the other countries that have already shut down travel. From what we know so far, and there are still many unknowns, this virus could have both a long incubation period—as much as 14 days—and individuals could be contagious while asymptomatic, which was not the case with SARS in 2003. Furthermore, from some cases, it appears the virus could be aerosolized, which means it does not require the kind of contact that you have with say a married couple kissing each other or a family living in close quarters in a hotel or apartment, but rather the distances that we are all sitting apart right now. Yet China is still lying about all of this. They have been lying about it from the very beginning. And you don’t need their history of lying about SARS in 2003, though it is relevant here, you just have to see what has happened over the last few months. We now know that the first case, manifested no later than December 1, even though China did not reveal it to the WHO until a month later on December 31, when they continued to hide it from their own citizens, and they continued to say that it had been contained inside Wuhan. Today it is in every single province in China. They also claimed for almost two months, until earlier this week, that it originated in a seafood market in Wuhan, that locals had contracted it from animals in say, bat soup or snake tartare. That is not the case. The Lancet published a study last weekend demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including Patient Zero. As one epidemiologist said: that virus went into the seafood market before it came out of the seafood market. We still don’t know where it originated. It could have been another seafood market. Could have been a farm, could have been a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan also has China’s only biosafety level IV super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens, to include, yes, coronavirus.
JHW: Do you think that this is a possibility or is just some kind of conspiracy theory?
[00:08:02] SM: No, I think that we can be fairly certain that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is located of course in the city of Wuhan, which is the epicenter of the epidemic. And I think we can be certain that it escaped from the lab for two reasons. The first reason is: China's bioweapons program is an open secret in the United States and intelligence circles. We know they're working on re-engineering, genetically re-engineering viruses and bacteria to make them more lethal and to be used as weapons of war. We know that because they've said that openly. They've written books. The former head of the National Defense University of the People's Liberation Army of China wrote a book in which he said the new high ground is the development of bio weapons that target specific ethnicities. All right? What specific ethnicities would be targeted? Well, we assume that they wouldn't be targeting people of Chinese extraction. They would be targeting people from Africa, other Asian populations and, of course, people from Europe and North America. So that's one bit of evidence.
We know that the only level IV bio-containment laboratory in China is located in Wuhan. We know that's where the most advanced research is being done. We know that they have viruses they've collected from around the world, including viruses they've secreted out of Canada. They stole from Canada and took to the Wuhan Institute of Virology last year.
And finally, there's this. On February 14, General Secretary Xi Jinping, who heads the Chinese Communist Party and is as close to an absolute dictator that we have seen in China since the days of Mao Zedong, held a meeting in which he said that lab biosafety should be treated as a national security issue. He hosted a meeting in February 14 saying that, he spoke about the outbreak of the COVIG-19, the novel coronavirus that we've been talking about. And he said the government must stop the epidemic and set up a system to prevent similar outbreaks in the future. Now, if that is not an admission, John-Henry, that the coronavirus escaped from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, I don't know what is. And the very following day, the meeting was on February 14th, the following day February 15th, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China rolled out new regulations which are called “Strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses at the same level as the new coronavirus.” All right? So I think that they've let the cat out of the bag. I think that they've revealed exactly what happened, that the virus escaped from the laboratory and infected large numbers of people. The officials at all levels probably tried to cover up their crime, beginning with the people who work in the Institute of Virology themselves. And then moving to the city government of Wuhan, then the provincial government and then to the national level. And the result of all these levels of cover up has been a two-month delay in reporting the actual scope of the disease and continuing to lie about how it's spreading in China and what the mortality rate is.
You see, the way to handle a potential epidemic like this is to identify the new virus threat as quickly as possible, track where it came from, how it spread, what the mortality rate is, and get a handle on how to contain it very, very quickly. In China, they did exactly the opposite. They covered up its origins. They hid the spread of the disease. They in fact, this is a manmade epidemic. This need never have happened. It is a result of the total incompetence of the labs in China and the sheer duplicity of the Chinese leadership in hiding this from the world. And by the way, John-Henry, the World Health Organization has done us no favors, because the World Health Organization, which works of course for the United Nations, reports to the major countries on the National Security Council, including China. And I think the World Health Organization was anxious not to offend China. So even after the Chinese government admitted it had a problem, the World Health Organization delayed calling for a quarantine of areas in China, delayed calling for a ban on direct flights to and from China, delayed telling us about the seriousness of the epidemic because they didn't want to upset the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. So they finally were able, two weeks into the epidemic as reported by China, were finally able to send a delegation to China that should have been on the ground two and a half months ago.
[00:13:33] JHW: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Let's unpack some of that. I mean, there's lots that you've just said there. So you said there was evidence that they stole the virus from Canada. Where is that evidence, what is that evidence?
[00:13:51] SM: Well, last March, there were shipments of viruses intercepted by Canada Post that were being sent from Canada to China. And in June of last year, two Chinese researchers were escorted out of Canada's only level IV viral research laboratory, under guard by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And there is an ongoing investigation as to what they were doing in the level IV laboratory and about the shipment of these viruses to China. The two Chinese researchers who were arrested, by the way, had made multiple trips to, you guessed it, to Wuhan, to the Institute of Virology there. So we know that China has been collecting dangerous viruses, including coronaviruses from different parts of the world, in order to do research on them.
We also know that that they are making an effort to develop bio weapons. No, I'm not saying that the coronavirus is a bio weapon. The jury is still out on that point. Whether or not it has been genetically engineered to make it more lethal Is an open question. But the truth of the matter is that it's fairly clear, I would give you pretty good odds, that this coronavirus escaped from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, which is located just a couple miles from the seafood market which was blamed as being the origin of the virus.
Remember, a few weeks ago we were hearing about the seafood market in Wuhan City being the source of the virus. We were told that it came from live snakes that were being sold in the seafood market. It turns out, John-Henry, snakes do not carry any coronaviruses. We were then told that it came from bats, that bat soup and other bat delicacies that were being sold in the seafood market in Wuhan was the source of the coronavirus. Well, bats are in hibernation in November and December. Bat soup is not sold at the seafood market. And genetic analysis shows that bats do not carry any coronavirus like the one that's causing the epidemic.
So, again, we've seen a whole series of excuses for the origin of the coronavirus, when I think it's increasingly apparent that the coronavirus was being experimented on in the laboratory in Wuhan and escaped from the lab.
Now, here's another little bit of evidence. Here's another data point. Some people may remember in 2003, we had a SARS epidemic in China that spread to other countries around the world. SARS stands for Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome. It killed less than a thousand people in China. But, you know, it was very dangerous. It killed 10 percent of the people that it infected. There was a laboratory in Beijing which twice in 2004, the year after the epidemic, while doing research on the SARS virus, knowing how dangerous it was, let it escape from the lab twice, causing additional deaths and infections. So we know that laboratory protocol in China has been very lax in the past. We know that viruses, lethal viruses have escaped from labs in the past. So they have a history of careless handling of these things.
And finally, there is this. We also know that a number of researchers in China have been charged with the crime of selling research animals on the open market. That is to say, you take a cow or a pig or a chicken or a bat or a snake or whatever animal or rat or a monkey that you're experimenting on, that you're injecting viruses into, to see how their systems respond. And once you're done experimenting on the animal, you then take the animal to earn extra money. You sell it on the local live animal market. You're supposed to cremate it, right? Because it may carry dangerous viruses that you've been experimenting upon. But that doesn't always happen in China. What sometimes happens in China is these experimental animals, which are purchased with research funds from the central government, are taken if they're still alive, and sold to a butcher at the live animal market and sold as an exotic food in China for a great deal of money.
[00:18:57] JHW: Unbelievable, unbelievable. What do you think we can expect to see on this? And what do you think we can do, if anything, to help stop this or stop it in the future?
[00:19:17] SM: Well, I think there are several things we can do. The good news is that we have in place in North America and now in Europe, we have fairly strict quarantine protocols in place. We're improving our testing methods for testing for the coronavirus infections, almost on a daily basis. And I think we're going to be able to contain the spread of the disease here. I do not think that we need to be worried about a coronavirus epidemic in North America. We are working as fast as we can to develop a way of immunizing people against the new coronavirus. That research takes some time, of course. It's not something you can do overnight. In order to develop a vaccine, you have to first of all identify something on the coronavirus that you can attach to what you inject into the human body, to generate an antibody to the pathogen. And this takes time. I mean, we can start testing the vaccine within six months. We will probably have a vaccine within a year. So if we can keep the corona virus from reaching from becoming serious in the United States until the end of the year, like other viruses, we will have the ability to immunize people against it.
And I would say this. Whereas the SARS virus had a morbidity rate of 10 percent, that is one in 10 people who contracted the SARS virus died. The mortality rate of the coronavirus seems to be around 2 percent. We would know more precisely if the Chinese government would simply stop deceiving us about the numbers. So it's less lethal than the SARS virus. We're quarantining it, but we have to understand that there are many dimensions to the China threat. We have heard a lot recently about the military threat from China, which is real. We've heard a lot recently about the economic threat from China, which is real. The undervaluing of Chinese products, currency manipulation, and all the rest. But there is a new threat from China and it's twofold. It's a health threat. The first part of the health threat is that many of the medications that we consume in North America are made now in China, because a Chinese consortium of drug manufacturers has driven North American manufacturers out of business in the early 2000s and now have a virtual monopoly on many of the common generic medications that we use in the United States. That's a vulnerability. Many of those factories are located in Wuhan city. Many of them are located in Hubei Province. If China shuts down Hubei for another month or two, we're going to start running short on vital medications that many Americans need to stay alive. That's part one.
Part two is we now see a more general health threat from China. We see that these dangerous pathogens seem to emanate from China, seem to come from China on a regular basis, not only because they're violating the biological weapons protocol that they signed in 1972 and are developing bio weapons, but also because they are so careless in their handling of lab animals and handling of live viruses. So we have to distance ourselves. We cannot be dependent upon Chinese medications, medications produced in China to maintain our own health. And we have to be very careful about new viruses that might come from China in the future. So China is really under the misrule of the Chinese Communist Party. China is a threat across all domains: the military, the economic, the trade, and now the health domain.
[00:23:35] JHW: Unbelievable. What can people do, other than pray? A lot of viewers are going to be praying for the Chinese people and for an end to this horrific Communist government there. But is there a political solution? Is there any kind of solution to the problem that is China today with the Communist Party?
[00:23:54] SM: Well, the people of China have seen again and again how they've been brutalized by the Chinese Communist Party. I refer to the Chinese Communist Party accurately, I think, as the biggest killing machine in human history. If you think about the forty-five million people who died in the great famine of the early 1960s, caused by the Chinese Communist Party, caused by Chairman Mao's failed experiment in communization of agriculture. If you think about the political purges of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, if you think about the long-running, one-child policy which killed hundreds of millions of unborn children, you total that up and the death toll from the Chinese Communist Party is probably around five hundred million people. That's just a number. But we're now seeing thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands of people added to that number right now in Wuhan, and in other parts of China. Right now in China we have not just Hubei province with its 60 million people. We have Guangxi Province, and we have Heilongjiang province in the far north up in Manchuria, also quarantined. That's one hundred and seventy million people, John-Henry. We have four cities quarantined, major cities quarantined, and we have about twenty-six minor cities quarantined. That's another hundred and ten million people. So we have right now under quarantine in China, with rail traffic and road traffic basically at a standstill, we have almost twenty-five percent of the Chinese population under quarantine, from an epidemic that should never have happened in the first place.
JHW: That’s equal to the population of the United States, or thereabouts.
SM: We need to be praying for the people of China. We know that Catholics and Christians have always gone above and beyond the call of duty in situations like this. I’m sure that our brothers and sisters in Christ are doing all they can to help the sick and the dying, which we see from YouTube videos. There are dead bodies lying on the streets of the city of Wuhan. There are corpses lined up in the hallways of hospitals waiting to be loaded into hearses, to be taken to crematoria, to be cremated as quickly as possible. We know the ovens are going day and night to create the bodies of those who died from this. But we also know that our Christian brothers and sisters are doing all they can to help the sick and dying.
[00:26:35] JHW: Absolutely. There was one video I saw that was going viral of people, it looked like people were shooting, officials were shooting people in the streets. Any idea what that is and if that was connected at all to coronavirus.
SM: China has a great wall around its Internet. And so, not every video shot in China makes it out of the country. And so it's sometimes hard to say when the videos were shot and what's actually happening in the videos. I saw the same video. I'm following everything I can get my hands on out of China as closely as possible.
[00:27:16] I've seen many heartrending videos of people being brutally arrested and beaten by the police for going out on the street without a mask on their face. I've seen other videos of police going to the doors of people who have the coronavirus and taking them by force into what are called quarantine centers, but are really detention centers, really concentration camps to hold those people who are sick with the dying and isolate them from the larger population. And make no mistake about what the priorities of the government are here. We know what the priorities of the government are here, because they've said openly what they are. The priorities of the Chinese Communist Party, according to the director of the National Health Service, are, number one, politics. Number two, safety. And number three, a cure. In other words, we have to politically protect the image of the Chinese Communist Party and prevent the epidemic from creating a counter-revolution against Communist rule. So politics is in command.
Number two, safety. Safety means arresting anyone who has the coronavirus and putting them in a detention center, to separate them from the rest of the population. So it's a forced quarantine, not the kind of quarantine we have here where you get to go outside and you're just told to stay 10 feet away from your neighbor to avoid infecting them. The quarantine there they are putting putting them in buildings with bars on the windows and police outside and very little in the way of medical care. Cure comes third. The people who are being put into these detention centers are basically being abandoned. The Chinese government calls them hospitals. A hospital has medical workers and it has medical supplies. These detention centers have virtually none of either. They are places where you send people where they either get well on their own or they die. But they're isolated from the larger population. So this is a kind of brutal triage system where the infected are simply taken away, put in detention centers and left to have their own immune systems handle the disease.
But if you've seen pictures of the detention centers, the beds are only three feet apart, four feet apart. And what that means is that you may go into the detention center with a mild case of coronavirus and can be reinfected by a person in the bed next to you, or maybe someone down the row has another infectious disease that you get a bacterial pneumonia on top of your viral pneumonia and you die from a secondary infection. So these are places that are very, very dangerous in terms of the mortality rates, I'm afraid in these places is going to be very, very high. But remember, politics first, safety of the larger population second, and maybe we'll find a cure at some point. But in the meantime, we're going to simply deal with those who have the infection by cutting them off, by amputating them from the body politic altogether.
[00:30:30] JHW: Wow. One of the most interesting things about speaking with you, Steven, is that you understand so many of the Chinese languages. You're able to watch the videos in their original without needing to see the text underneath. Not only do you know they're accurate. What is the message that the Chinese themselves are trying to convey to the rest of the world?
[00:30:49] SM: Well, I've seen many videos out of China that were recorded by journalists in the early days of the epidemic. Those journalists have now all disappeared. They've been arrested and they're being held somewhere in prison. Maybe they're being put in a detention center so they can be infected and die as well. Who knows? But occasionally people do record interviews. There was one, I saw a heartbreaking video that came out just recently of a young woman who had lost her family to the epidemic—the father, mother and siblings—and was now alone in the world and was crying out to the Chinese people and crying out to the world about how the Chinese Communist Party was once again destroying the Chinese people. She was calling for independence for China. She was calling for independence for Hong Kong. She was calling for independence for Taiwan, independence for Tibet. And she was saying at the end, she said: I know that my life is now forfeit because I've made this recording, but every revolution requires sacrifice and I'm willing to sacrifice my life so that we can end the rule of the Chinese Communist Party in China.
[00:32:13] She may already be dead, John-Henry.
[00:32:18] JWH: Unbelievable. Well, any closing words for us Steven, for all of us who are listening, and really praying for the Chinese people, for an end to this criminal Communist government?
[00:32:30] SM: The Chinese people are, of course, the first and foremost victims of the atheistic communist regime that has ruled China for the last 70 years. But we know that every dynasty in China has fallen sooner or later, and the coronavirus epidemic may provide the impetus for the collapse of this regime as well. If you look not just at the epidemic but at the pressure that the West is now beginning to put on China because of its cheating on trade; if you look at the the other problems that China has in Hong Kong, the continued independence of Taiwan as a beacon of freedom for the Chinese people, a beacon of hope for them to think that they, too, might one day be free. All of these things are coming together. We can pray that this is the perfect storm that, by God's grace, will lead to the end of communist rule in China and a new dawn of freedom and religious freedom for the Chinese people.
[00:33:41] JHW: Amen, Amen. Steven Mosher, thank you so much for being with us on this episode of the John-Henry Westen Show. May God bless you.
SM: Thank you, John-Henry. God bless you.
JHW: And God bless all of you, too. We’ll see you next time.
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