Max Blumenthal is the editor of TheGrayzone.com and the author of several books including The Management of Savagery (Verso, 2019).
During the early days of the crisis around Wuhan, Chinese authorities took some ham-fisted measures to suppress public discussion of the outbreak. Perhaps Beijing was in denial about the gravity of the epidemic, or terrified of its societal ramifications. It was not long, however, before the Chinese government made the genome of the virus public, shared detailed information about the virus with the international community, and provided intelligence to the WHO, which relayed it to the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC). In fact, Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar recently revealed that the CDC first learned about coronavirus from Chinese colleagues on January 3. Tragically, while Beijing was buying valuable time for the West to prepare for the lethal pandemic, and losing the lives of medical personnel in the process, Washington chose conflict over cooperation.
The same U.S. leadership class that launched the first Cold War and reignited it during the Obama and Trump eras has also presided over a systematic degradation of America’s public health system. While the task of providing health care was handed over to corporations, the number of beds per 1,000 Americans declined steadily from 4.5 in 1975 to 2.5 in 2014, according to the CDC. Having left its citizens on the verge of mass suffocation by a ghastly respiratory infection, the U.S. government has little to offer them today beyond Cold War bluster and corporate bailouts.
Inside China, an already effective coronavirus screening regimen is likely to improve thanks to an innovative test that can be administered in airports, and that produces results in just 40 minutes. The creator of the groundbreaking test, Weihong Tan, was a professor at the University of Florida’s cancer research lab until last year, when the Department of Justice targeted him with a McCarthy-style investigation. Accused by a Cold War-crazed U.S. government of failing to disclose Chinese funding for his department, he returned to Hunan University, where he found ample government support for his lifesaving research.
As the pandemic spreads across the country, college students have descended on the beaches of South Florida for the spring break beer bash that has become a rite of passage for the young and mindless. The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a Harvard graduate who was narrowly elected after warning his African American opponent would “monkey this up,” defended his decision to keep beaches open for the annual bacchanal. “If you have a Floridian that goes and walks their dog, like a married couple on the beach,” De Santis eloquently explained, “as long as you’re not within six feet of each other, they view that as a healthy thing.”
