Rantz: China is responsible for the coronavirus. Full stop
Apr 7, 2020, 10:03 PM | Updated: Apr 8, 2020, 5:52 am
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
It doesn’t matter if you call it the China coronavirus or the Wuhan Virus or simply COVID-19. You can pretend there were no recent China coronavirus deaths, if you’d like. I don’t care whether or not you support President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.
China is responsible for the coronavirus pandemic. Full stop.
Dr. Fauci offers WA praise but warns against complacency
China must own the coronavirus
When the coronavirus was merely considered an outbreak, public health officials here didn’t sound the alarms. They said they were paying attention but we shouldn’t panic. They were, of course, wrong. But it wasn’t their fault. China tried to cover up the coronavirus.
China knew about the COVID-19 in late December. On January 1, an official Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered the destruction of coronavirus samples even as doctors knew this was a new virus. When officials had a genetic map of the new virus, it was initially withheld from the public. For a week, Chinese government officials lied and said there were no new cases of the coronavirus. But then it started to spread to other countries.
By January 21, the US had it’s first coronavirus case due to a traveler from Wuhan to Washington state. Two days later, Wuhan went on lockdown. Then the entire country followed. By then, it was too late. Not just too late for China, but for the rest of the world.
Had China acted three weeks earlier — about exactly when they knew what they were dealing with but decided not to act — cases could have been reduced by a full 95%, according to one study. Had China not continued to withhold data, even after their lock-down, the world would have been much better off, too.
Trump acted quickly
Under President Trump, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the coronavirus on January 31, announcing restricted travel with China to go into effect on February 2. This move was early, swift, and deliberate: It was based on data that we fully realized after it became clear China had been engaged in a cover up.
“It’s unfortunate because what the Chinese did is that at a time when it was clear that there was human to human transmissibility, they were saying that this is mostly animal to human, with inefficient spread from human to human,” Dr. Anthony Fauci explained to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “That, I think, had a bunch of countries not fully grasp that when you finally got the data, it was clear that not only was it not just animal to human, it was human to human, but importantly, it was highly efficient human to human. And whenever you hear highly efficient human to human, that’s when you’re in trouble and we got in trouble.”
At the time, Trump was attacked by the media and Democrats.
China coronavirus? Meh.
The media downplayed the seriousness of the virus and attacked Trump for xenophobia. CNN pretended it was offensive to call out wet markets as obscene. The Seattle Times argued it’s not as serious as the flu and that we must focus our attention on potential bigotry.
These journalism “watchdogs” are frauds 👇🏻 https://t.co/N5mw4gqvTa pic.twitter.com/O1hTMkodhw
— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) April 2, 2020
Joe Biden, before supporting the China travel ban, called it xenophobic. Other Democrats, before virtually every other country severely restricted travel, said Trump was wrong to ban travel.
Then, when it became clear Trump was right and acted quickly, the media knew they had to act. His polls were rising and they can’t allow him a single victory. And in doing so, they are helping China get away with inflicting the coronavirus on the world.
China coronavirus propaganda
Most media outlets have attacked Trump instead of focusing any meaningful attention on his successes — and China’s failures. Some literally promoted Chinese propaganda. NBC, as I wrote in the Daily Wire, was the worst offender. Their most recent example:
U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours.
Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported. https://t.co/ooXkR9X2L5
— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 7, 2020
Even the most anti-Trump media outlets concede information coming from China is falsified. Yet, NBC will gladly position China has global leaders. Indeed, they literally call China — the communist country that tried to cover up the coronavirus — a “global leader“.
Keir Simmons, on the Today Show, credited China for “delaying the arrival of the coronavirus” while NBC’s Kimmy Yam claimed incredulously that the U.S. was trying to “pin” coronavirus on China.
Some outlets proudly reported China was donating personal protective equipment to foreign nations dealing with the coronavirus, though most of that was a scam.
And when the President said “Chinese virus” or “China coronavirus,” an act meant to push back against Chinese propaganda blaming the U.S. for the spread of the virus, media members jumped on him. It’s racist, they claimed, despite never uttering a peep of discomfort at Spanish Flu, London flu, MERS, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme Disease, Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever or the West Nile virus.
China. Is. To. Blame.
This week will have some staggering numbers in the U.S. but it appears the curve is flattening. It will continue to flatten as we continue to commit to social distancing. The modeling seems, at this point, to have overstated the deaths. While we should celebrate fewer innocent lives lost, the media will go into overdrive to call this a failure and pin the deaths we did have on Trump.
Don’t let them do that. Call out tweets you don’t like or mitigation guidance you disagree with. But don’t let the media — or any Democrat — put the coronavirus blame on Trump. We’re in this situation because of China. They’re to blame for their cover-up and inaction.
Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3-6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here. Follow @JasonRantz on Twitter.