China Expert Warns of Communist Chinese Coronavirus Deception

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Bill Gertz, a noted national security correspondent who has covered Chinese geopolitics for several decades, criticized the Chinese communist government for its ongoing deception about the global coronavirus pandemic.

Don Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Academia, interviewed Gertz on the Accuracy in America live-streamed channel about his new booklet, “How China’s Communist Party Made the World Sick.” The booklet discusses the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and the communist cover-up of the virus’s spread. You can order a copy online at Encounter Books or Amazon.

Gertz credited the quick turnaround for the booklet to his publisher, Encounter Books. After Gertz published his latest book in September 2019, “Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy,” Encounter Books suggested he delve into the coronavirus pandemic and publish a booklet about what he found in his research and through his sources.

“I had been covering extensively the Chinese mishandling of the virus outbreak in China,” Gertz said, “In fact, on January 26, I was the first to report in The Washington Times that the virus may have escaped from the laboratory.” Gertz acknowledged that his reporting “drew an immediate attack from the Chinese government as well as a lot of liberal politicians and media outlets here [in the U.S.].” Considering that his critics have yet to discredit his original reporting, Gertz noted that his story is “holding up pretty well.”

Gertz added that he “also reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was linked to China’s covert virological weapons program.” Until he reported the connection between the pandemic and the Wuhan lab, “we haven’t had the information on that.” He said his book “is really a close look at how China mishandled the outbreak and really caused devastating damage to the world economy and killed tens of thousands of people.” He averred that the pandemic “could have been avoided; it could have been averted if China had taken the proper steps early on in the outbreak.” “Instead,” Gertz lamented, “as [with] most communists, they lied and deceived their own people and the result was this horrible pandemic that we’re now dealing with.”

For context, as of the publishing date of this article, there were over 100,000 U.S. deaths from the coronavirus, with at least 1 million testing positive for the virus.

When asked about China’s complicity in the pandemic, Gertz blamed the Chinese government, “The Chinese had been totally, overly secretive, misleading, and deceptive about it.” He had traced the origin of the outbreak to December 1, 2019 in Wuhan. According to his research, “an elderly gentleman showed up at the Wuhan Central Hospital with these various pneumonia-like symptoms” that the doctors “recognized as similar to the SARS, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that originated in China back in 2003.” The doctors believed “they were seeing another outbreak of SARS” and began to genome map the virus. “It turns out,” Gertz said, that “this was a completely new virus.”

Despite the Chinese government’s “near-totalitarian control on its information,” Gertz lauded the efforts of “a few doctors in Wuhan” who were the “real heroes” and warned their colleagues and coworkers about the novel coronavirus. These doctors did their duty despite being “repressed mercilessly” by the government. Gertz praised the efforts of the late Dr. Li Wenliang, who was “actually one of the big heroes” and had fought off Chinese government persecution to bring the world the truth. His unfortunate death from the coronavirus led to the immediate recognition within China of him “as someone who stood up to the Communist Party.”

Contrary to American media reporting, Gertz believed that the actual coronavirus data in China could be “fifty times higher than” what was reported by the Chinese government. If anything, Gertz said that the global pandemic has been “a wake-up call for the world to understand the nature of this communist regime.”

During his research and conversations, Gertz was surprised to find out that “Americans are completely uneducated about the communist system in China.” Americans “were familiar with the Cold War, and the Soviet Union, but they have not fully understood that this is a new type of communism.” As a result of this lack of understanding, the U.S.’s integration with the Chinese economy has backfired due to the pandemic. “My argument has been,” Gertz said, “We had a forty-year gamble that if we just traded with China, if we ignored their human rights abuses, if we ignored their arms proliferation around the world, that this would create a moderate, non-communist state. And it’s been an utter failure.” He concluded, “The forty-year gamble is a real disaster for the United States and the rest of the world.”

Gertz, in his booklet, recommended two steps for the U.S. government post-pandemic: First, the U.S. government should “launch a full investigation of how the pandemic started and interview doctors, obtain samples and trace the genome map.” Second, Gertz recommended that the government should “make sure our supply chains are protected” and not have “our supply chains dependent on China” after China threatened to cut off the U.S. from pharmaceutical supplies made in China.

Third, “we’ve got to stop training Chinese technical and managerial people.” Gertz alleged that “the people who run the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control, were trained in the United States and Europe.” He said, “We see that they have not been protecting those laboratories from mishaps or leaks, mishandling of deadly packages.”

The last recommendation is to deal with new international organizations and China’s growing influence in them. Gertz claimed that the Chinese government “completely corrupted the World Health Organization, which has one mission, to just deal with pandemics that we have.” “Instead,” Gertz said, “It’s become an organization that followed China’s lead. It lied to the world about it early on, about travel from China, including millions of people who included people who were infected and spread the virus to Europe.” It is time for the U.S. to evaluate the value of these organizations to American interests and potentially leave them to “create new organizations run by democratic, open, free systems that aren’t corrupted by Chinese influence.”

Gertz blasted liberal politicians for the prolonged economic lockdown across the country. He recently met with several military doctors and they told him that the U.S.’s approach to containing the coronavirus failed the country. To combat a virus, the government has to foster herd immunity, therapies and treatments, and then vaccines. But the current government policy ignored herd immunity, which is important to stop a virus’s spread.

“It’s my own view that this is part of the radical equality that the liberals have promoted for so much,” Gertz said, “That everyone should sacrifice for a few, rather than the few sacrificing for everyone.” He lamented, “Our economy is right now on its knees as a result of the lockdown procedures that have been taken by the states and the federal government.” He criticized the overall pandemic approach and said, “Unfortunately, this disease, we have to take care about taking people, but we’ve got it backwards.” In past disease outbreaks, the government did not shut down the economy, Gertz added.

He also criticized the media’s pandemic coverage, “Most of the people who contract the coronavirus disease don’t die from it. They have minor symptoms. It’s those older people and those with other conditions that are really facing problems.” Gertz said, “This has been the biggest, most self-inflicted wound on our economy that we’ve ever experienced.”