Mapping The Global Lockdown: Where Air Travel Is Partially Open And Where It's Fully Closed
In a world gripped by partial (or full) lockdowns, the map below from Bank of America provides real-time data on the current state of air travel restrictions. It shows that 92 countries are currently partially open, 74 countries have no travel restrictions (having a list of these will come in handy during the next crisis), 50 countries are completely closed and 6 are reopening soon.
A quick look at North America reveals that the US, Canada, and Mexico extended their shared border restrictions through 21 January. This is the ninth extension since the restriction was first imposed on 18 March. “Essential” cross-border workers, immediate family members continue to be excluded from the restrictions. Additionally, on 8 October, the Canadian government announced it would allow extended family members cross-border privileges for those in an exclusive dating relationship for over a year and “have spent time in the physical presence of that person at some point during the relationship”.
Meanwhile, as a result of the ongoing partial or full lockdowns, air travel remains sharply lower than 2019. According to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), checkpoint traveler throughput numbers over the last week were 67% (on average) below what they were in 2019, which while an improvement off early and mid-April lows, which were 96% below what they were in 2019 according to BofA is a deterioration from the 56% decline observed at the start of December.
Chart 1 below shows raw number data for TSA checkpoint traveler throughput, Chart 2 depicts the year over year change in traveler throughput 2020 vs 2019.
There is no quick recovery in sight: on 9/29, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) revised its 2020 forecast to a 66% Y/Y declined in air traffic demand as measured by revenue passenger kilometers (RPK). Previously IATA forecasted a 63% Y/Y decline. The forecast was updated to reflect a weaker outlook following 2020’s “dismal end to the summer travel season.”
On 7/28, IATA said the pandemic is expected to delay the recovery of air traffic demand to pre-COVID-19 levels till 2024, as measured by revenue passenger kilometers (RPK) (vs. previous forecasted recovery in late 2022/ early 2023). At the time, IATA also revised its forecast to reflect a 63% Y/Y decline in air traffic demand (RPK) in 2020, and a 75% recovery in 2021 (still 36% below 2019 levels). Prior to that, IATA had estimated the pandemic’s impact in 2020 would be a 55% Y/Y decline with a 55% recovery in 2021(but still remaining 29% below 2019 levels).
The result of this global collapse in air travel has been a tsunami of defaults, bankruptcies and bailouts. The list below courtesy of BofA tracks the most prominent airline bankruptcies and bailouts of the past year.
Virgin Atlantic (Chapter 15 Bankruptcy filing 8/4): On 8/4, Virgin Atlantic (UK-based) filed for chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in the US, amidst increasingCOVID-19 pandemic pressures. According to Reuters, the US chapter 15 bankruptcy code allows “a foreign debtor to shield assets in this country.”
Grupo Aeromexico (Bankrupt 6/30): On 6/30, Aeromexico announced that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. The airline will continue to operate through the legal process. According to Cirium, Aeromexico’s fleet consists of 19787 Dreamliners, 6 737 MAX, 44 737 NG, 47 E190s, and nine E170s.
LATAM Airlines (Bankrupt 5/26): On 5/26, LATAM Airlines and its Chile, Peru,Colombia, Ecuador and US affiliates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection inthe US. LATAM Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay are negotiating support with the government of Brazil. LATAM and all of its affiliates will continue to operate as it works to reorganize.
Lufthansa (Bailout 5/25): On 5/25, Lufthansa confirmed that the Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF) of Germany had approved a $9.8bn aid package for theairline. The terms include a 20% government stake in Lufthansa which could increase to 25% and one share in the event of a takeover attempt. Lufthansa’s acceptance of the package is pending the approval of its Management and Supervisory boards (which is expected to happen shortly) and the European Commission’s regulatory approval.
Avianca Airlines (Bankrupt 5/12): On 5/12 Colombian airline Avianca filed for bankruptcy. According to media reports the filing identified the impact of theCOVID-19 pandemic on the airline as the reason for its filing. Avianca is the third largest airline in Latin America. According to its website, Avianca’s fleet consists of13 Boeing 787s, 8 Airbus A330s, 15 A321s, 67 A320s, 25 A319s, 15 ATR-72s and 6A330F Cargo aircraft.
Air France-KLM (Bailout 4/24): On 4/24, Air France-KLM secured $7.6bn in funding from the French and Dutch governments. The loans include some “greenties” or environmental commitments ie. Reducing its CO2 emissions by 50% overthe next 10 years.
Virgin Australia (voluntary administration): On 4/20, Virgin Australia Holdings Limited announced it has “entered voluntary administration to recapitalise the business and help ensure it emerges in a stronger financial position on the other side of the COVID-19 crisis.” Virgin Australia Holdings includes Virgin Australia,Virgin Australia Regional, Virgin Australia International and Tigerair Australia(lowcost carrier). According to Cirium, the total fleet consists of 148 aircraft: 85 737NG, five 777s, 15 A320s, six A330s, 12 ATR 72s, 19 Fokker 100s and two Fokker70s.
Air New Zealand (Bailout): New Zealand offered its flag carrier Air New Zealand aNZ$900mn ($513mn USD) loan over the next two years, separate from the NZ$600mn ($342mn USD) aviation industry support package New Zealand announced on 3/17. Air New Zealand had previously cut its long haul flights by 80%and its government owns a majority stake of the airline (52%). The airline agreed to not pay dividends to shareholders over the duration of the loan.
Finnair (Bailout): On 3/20 media reports indicated Finland was preparing to grant its flag carrier airline, Finnair, 600mn euro in support through the COVID-19pandemic. The airline had previously cancelled ~90% of its flights. The airline is~56% owned by the state.
Norwegian Air (Bailout): On 3/19, the Norwegian government offered NOK 6bn(~$535mn USD) in credit guarantees for its airline industry. Half of the amount(~$267mn) will be made available to Norwegian Air, with conditions.
Alitalia (Bailout): Italy has earmarked 500mn euro for its airline sector. A large portion of that funding is intended for its flag carrier airline Alitalia.
FlyBe (Bankrupt: 3/5): UK regional airline that had 2,000+ employees and serviced over 8mn people per year. According to media reports, Flybe operated ~40% of UK domestic flights.
Air Italy (Bankrupt: 2/25): Formerly known as Meridiana, Air Italy was Italy’s second largest airline after Alitalia. Air Italy ceased flight operations on 25 February2020.
Other smaller bankruptcies include Atlasglobal (Turkey), Trans States Airlines (US), and Nantucket Express (US).
Recently retired doctors are being prevented from helping administer COVID-19 vaccines because the NHS requires them to have “diversity training” and knowledge of “radicalisation.”
Yes, really.
40,000 doctors and nurses applied to return to the NHS back in March at the start of the pandemic but only 5,000 had been given jobs by July, according to a report in the Telegraph.
Similar bureaucracy is also hampering the vaccine rollout, with doctors having to fulfil the requirements of the Equality Act.
Dear NHS
The Red Tape faced by retired docs who want to help the vaccination roll out. 20 pieces of evidence most of us simply don't have. REALLY???
If this is a war, use your Dads Army and cut us some slack.
I can remember how to do an IM injection. Rant over 🥺 pic.twitter.com/2CfhQ2nJr2
This means that when they wade into the minefield that is the application process for helping to administer the vaccine, they have to provide 20 pieces of evidence, including documents on Equality, Diversity and Human Rights, Fire Safety, Conflict Resolution, and Preventing Radicalisation.
“Reached this page on my application and have given up for now. Can’t see many retired clinicians wading through this lot – or having all required docs,” said Professor Maureen Baker.
Reached this page on my application and have given up for now. Can’t see many retired clinicians wading through this lot - or having all required docs. Process *must* be urgently streamlined @NHSEnglandNMD Couldn’t design anything more bureaucratic in a month of Sundays! https://t.co/IJuVjb7qNC
“Yes I’m going through this today….now on my 7th hour of CPD! Not even at ‘pre-employment screening’ yet. Suspect many will have given up by now,” commented Professor Nicola Thomas.
Yes I’m going through this today....now on my 7th hour of CPD! Not even at ‘pre-employment screening’ yet. Suspect many will have given up by now 😱 https://t.co/wckLrGEvbB
The NHS responded by saying it was necessary “in order to recruit a wide array of individuals from a variety of backgrounds.”
Thanks for your feedback. We appreciate the time taken to join the National Vac Programme. We have a stringent recruitment process in place in order to recruit a wide array of individuals from a variety of backgrounds – many of whom are not registered healthcare professionals 1/2
In other words, meeting diversity quotas is more important than getting as many doctors as possible to help speed up the vaccine rollout.
Ludicrous.
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A New Year Every Two Months? Year-End Celebrations Around The World
In August, Muslim countries rang in a new year on the Islamic calendar. 1442 AH will last from Aug 20, 2020, to approximately Aug 8, 2021 – twelve days shorter than the 365 days of the Gregorian year. The date set by Saudi Arabia is based on astronomical calculations of moon cycles and while many countries in the region follow the Saudis’ lead, others wait until they can spot the new moon themselves, causing slightly different observation dates for the holiday.
Like the Islamic New Year, Statista's Katharina Buchholz notes that many regional new year’s celebrations rely on lunar calendars, causing their dates to vary each year in relation to the Gregorian calendar, which is based on one revolution of the Earth around the sun. Because the Islamic year is the only one which is significantly shorter than the solar year, the Islamic celebration is also the only one which can occur in any month of the Gregorian calendar.
Saudi Arabia until recently condemned new year’s celebrations on Jan 1 and only this year allowed fireworks to take place on the date for the first time.
Jan 1 celebrations have also caused debate in Uzbekistan, where the Persian New Year Nowruz is celebrated in March and traditionally minded Uzbeks would like to see Jan 1 celebrations – a Soviet legacy – disappear. Nowruz is considered the main new year’s celebration – and main festival of the year - in Iran and Afghanistan, while it is celebrated as “Spring Festival” in much of Central Asia.
In Southeast Asia, Jan 1 and regional celebration Songkran coexists peacefully. Its date used to be determined by the lunar Hindu calendar, but has since received set Gregorian dates varying slightly by country for convenience’s sake. In India, the Hindu calendar’s new year is celebrated on various days in March and April depending on the region, while Jan 1 celebrations are also popular.
In China, where the lunar new year occurs in January or February, Jan 1 is a public holiday but rather insignificant compared to the massive Chinese new year’s celebration lasting seven days.
Persecution is not typically doled out to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class.
Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will — in every society, including the most repressive — usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. They will be permitted to live their lives largely unmolested by authorities, while many will be well-rewarded for this servitude. Such individuals will see themselves as free because, in a sense, they are: they are free to submit, conform and acquiesce. And if they do so, they will not even realize, or at least not care, and may even regard as justifiable, that those who refuse this Orwellian bargain they have embraced (“freedom” in exchange for submission) are crushed with unlimited force.
Those who do not seek to meaningfully dissent or subvert power will usually deny — because they do not perceive — that such dissent and subversion are, in fact, rigorously prohibited. They will continue to believe blissfully that the society in which they live guarantees core civic freedoms — of speech, of press, of assembly, of due process — because they have rendered their own speech and activism, if it exists at all, so innocuous that nobody with the capacity to do so would bother to try to curtail it. The observation apocryphally attributed to socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned for her opposition to German involvement in World War I and then summarily executed by the state, expresses it best: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
The metric to determine whether a society is free is not how its orthodoxy-spouting, well-behaved, deferential-to-authority citizens are treated. Such people are treated well, or at least usually left alone, by every sovereign and every power center in every era, all over the world.
You will not feel the sting of Silicon Valley or other institutional censorship as long as you affirm the latest COVID pronouncements of the World Health Organization and Dr. Anthony Fauci (even as those decrees contradict the ones they issued only a few months earlier), but you will if you question, refute or deviate from them. You will not have your Facebook page deleted if you defend Israeli occupation of Palestine but will be banished from that platform if you live in the West Bank and Gaza and urge resistance to Israeli occupying troops. If you call Trump an orange fascist clown, you can stay on YouTube for eternity, but not if you defend his most controversial policies and claims. You can vocally insist that the 2000, 2004 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections were all stolen without the slightest concern of being banned, but the same claims about the 2020 election will result in the summary denial of your ability to use online tech monopolies to be heard.
Censorship, like most repression, is reserved for those who dissent from majoritarian orthodoxies, not for those who express views comfortably within the mainstream. Establishment Democrats and Republicans — adherents to the prevailing neoliberal order — have no need for free speech protections since nobody with power would care enough to silence them. It is only the disaffected, those who reside on the fringes and the margins, who need those rights. And those are precisely the people who, by definition, are most often denied them.
Similarly: powerful officials in Washington can illegally leak the most sensitive government secrets and will suffer no punishment, or will get the lightest tap on the wrist, provided their aim is to advance mainstream narratives. But low-level leakers whose aim is to expose wrongdoing by the powerful or reveal their systemic lying will have the full weight of the criminal justice system and the intelligence community come crashing down on them, to destroy them with vengeance and also to put their heads on a pike to terrorize future dissidents out of similarly stepping forward.
Journalists like Bob Woodward, who spend decades spilling the most sensitive secrets at the behest of the ruling class D.C. elites, will be lavished with awards and immense wealth. But those like Julian Assange who publish similar secrets but against the will of those elites, with the goal and outcome of exposing (rather than obscuring) ruling class lies and impeding (rather than advancing) their agenda, will suffer the opposite fate as Woodward: they will endure every imaginable punishment, including indefinite imprisonment in maximum-security cells. That is because Woodward is a servant of power while Assange is a dissident against it.
All of this illustrates a vital truth. The real measure of how free is a society — from China, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to France, Britain and the U.S. — is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated. Royal court vassals always end up fine: rewarded for their subservience and thus, convinced that freedoms abound, they redouble their fealty to prevailing status quo power structures.
Whether a society is truly free is determined by how it treats its dissidents, those who live and speak and think outside of permissible lines, those who effectively subvert ruling class aims. If you want to know whether free speech is genuine or illusory, look not to the treatment of those who loyally serve establishment factions and vocally affirm their most sacred pieties, but to the fate of those who reside outside of those factions and work in opposition to them. If you want to know whether a free press is authentically guaranteed, look at the plight of those who publish secrets designed not to propagandize the population to venerate elites but, instead, those whose publications result in generating mass discontent against them.
That is what makes the ongoing imprisonment of Julian Assange not only a grotesque injustice but also a vital, crystal-clear prism for seeing the fundamental fraud of U.S. narratives about who is free and who is not, about where tyranny reigns and where it does not.
Assange has been imprisoned for almost two years. He was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by British police on April 11, 2019. That was possible only because the U.S., U.K. and Spanish governments coerced Ecuador’s meek President, Lenin Moreno, to withdraw the asylum extended to Assange seven years earlier by his staunch sovereignty-defending predecessor, Rafael Correa.
The U.S. and British governments hate Assange because of his revelations that exposed their lies and crimes, while Spain was enraged by WikiLeaks’ journalistic coverage of and activism against Madrid’s 2018 violent repression of the Catalan independence movement. So they bullied and bribed Moreno to throw Assange to the wolves — i.e., to them. And ever since, Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, a facility used for terrorist suspects that is so harsh that the BBC asked in 2004 whether it is “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.”
Assange is not currently imprisoned because he was convicted of a crime. Two weeks after he was dragged out of the embassy, he was found guilty of the minor offense of “skipping bail” and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison, the maximum penalty allowed by law. He fully served that sentence as of April of this year, and was thus scheduled to be released, facing no more charges. But just weeks before his release date, the U.S. Justice Department unveiled an indictment of Assange arising out of WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and war logs that revealed massive corruption by numerous governments, Bush and Obama officials, and various corporations around the world.
That U.S. indictment and the accompanying request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial provided, by design, the pretext for the British government to imprison Assange indefinitely. A judge quickly ruled that Assange could not be released on bail pending his extradition hearing, but instead must stay behind bars while the U.K. courts fully adjudicate the Justice Department’s extradition request. No matter what happens, it will takes years for this extradition process to conclude because whichever side (the DOJ or Assange) loses at each stage (and Assange is highly likely to lose the first round when the lower-court decision on the extradition request is issued next week), they will appeal, and Assange will linger in prison while these appeals wind their way very slowly through the U.K. judicial system.
That means that — absent a pardon by Trump or the withdrawal of the charges by what will become the Biden DOJ — Assange will be locked up for years without any need to prove he is guilty of any crime. He will have been just disappeared: silenced by the very governments whose corruption and crimes he denounced and exposed.
Those are the same governments — the U.S. and U.K. — that sanctimoniously condemn their adversaries (but rarely their repressive allies) for violating free speech, free press and due process rights. These are the same governments that succeed — largely due to a limitlessly compliant corporate media that either believes the propaganda or knowingly disseminates it for their own rewards — in convincing large numbers of their citizens that, unlike in the Bad Countries such as Russia and Iran, these civic freedoms are guaranteed and protected in the Good Western Countries.
(The ample evidence showing that the indictment of Assange is the single gravest threat to press freedoms in years, and that the arguments mounted to justify it are fraudulent, has been repeatedly documented by myself and others, so I will not rehash those discussions here. Those interested can see the article and video program I produced on this prosecution along with my op-ed inThe Washington Post; Laura Poitras’ New York Timesop-ed last week on the indictment; former Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s Guardianop-ed calling for Assange’s immediate release; the editorial from The Guardian and column from The Washington Post’s media reporter Margaret Sullivan condemning this prosecution as abusive; and statements from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Columbia Journalism Review, and the ACLU warning of the serious dangers to press freedoms it poses).
Even Assange’s conviction on “bail jumping” charges, and the way it is portrayed in mainstream media discourse, reveals how deceitful these narratives are, and how illusory are these supposedly protected liberties. Assange’s misdemeanor bail jumping conviction was based on his decision to seek asylum from Ecuador rather than appear for his 2012 extradition hearing in London. That asylum request was granted by Ecuador on the ground that Sweden’s attempt to extradite Assange from the U.K. for a sexual assault investigation could be used as a pretext to ship him to the U.S., which would then imprison him for the “crime” of reporting on its illegal and deceitful acts. Such retaliatory imprisonment, said Ecuador, would amount to classic political persecution, thus necessitating asylum to protect his political rights from attack by the U.S. (the case in Sweden was subsequently closed after prosecutors concluded that Assange’s asylum rendered the investigation futile).
When the U.S. grants asylum to dissidents from adversary countries in order to protect them from persecution, the U.S. media heralds it a noble, benevolent act, one that proves how devoted the U.S. Government is to the rights and freedoms of people all over the world.
Recall the celebratory tone of U.S. media coverage when the Obama administration gave refuge in its Beijing embassy and then permanent asylum to the blind Chinese activist-lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who had faced numerous criminal charges in his home country for his work against various policies he regarded as oppressive and unjust. American liberals depict asylum when granted by the U.S. Government, to protect against persecution in other Latin American countries, as so sacred that the Trump administration’s efforts to limit such asylum invoked their sustained fury (that fury is about to dissipate as Biden does the same, but with the softer and gentler language of reluctance).
But when asylum is granted by other countries to protect someone against persecution at the hands of the U.S. Government, then suddenly asylum is transformed from a noble and benevolent shield against human rights abuses into a dastardly, corrupt crime. That is how U.S. and British journalists routinely malign Ecuador’s decision to shield Assange from the possibility of being shipped to the U.S to be punished for his journalism, or how they still speak of Russia’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, which shields him from being shipped to the U.S. to face a likely punishment of life in prison under the repressive Espionage Act of 1917, a law that bars him from even raising a defense of “justification” in court and thus obtaining a fair trial. Under this propagandistic framework, not only the governments that grant asylum against U.S. persecution (such as Ecuador and Russia) but also the individuals who seek asylum from U.S. persecution (such as Assange and Snowden) are cast by the U.S. and British media as villains and even criminals for availing themselves of this internationally guaranteed asylum right.
Indeed, the British judge who doled out the maximum sentence to Assange for bail jumping, Deborah Taylor, sneered at his sentencing hearing that he “used his asylum at the Ecuadoran Embassy to insult the British judiciary.” She added: “It’s difficult to envisage a more serious example of this offense. By entering the embassy, you deliberately put yourself out of reach, whilst remaining in the U.K. You remained there for nearly seven years, exploiting your privileged position to flout the law and advertise internationally your disdain for the law of this country.”
Snowden’s asylum in Russia — the only thing standing between him and decades in a high-security cage in the U.S. for the “crime” of revealing unconstitutional spying by Obama officials — is similarly scorned in elite U.S. media and political circles as something shameful and even treasonous rather than a perfectly legal shield under international asylum conventions against persecution by the vengeful and notoriously repressive U.S. security state.
Here we see the blinding propaganda to which U.S. citizens are endlessly subjected. Asylum is always warranted when extended by the U.S. Government to dissidents or outcasts from inferior countries, but is never warranted when granted by other countries to U.S. dissidents or other journalists and activists whose punishment the U.S. seeks. This warped formulation is potent because the U.S. media succeeds in peddling the toxic mythology that the U.S. has unique rights and entitlements that lesser countries do not because, unlike them, the U.S. is a freedom-loving democracy that honors basic human rights and steadfastly guarantees fundamental civil liberties of free expression, a free press, and due process to all peoples.
The next time someone makes that claim, explicitly or otherwise, tell them to look at the fate of Julian Assange, one of this generation’s most effective journalists and activists in exposing the crimes, deceit and corruption of key U.S power centers, particularly its permanent security state. Assange is not even a U.S. citizen, having spent a week total in his life on U.S. soil and having absolutely no duties — legal, journalistic or ethical — to safeguard U.S. secrets.
But no matter: anyone who effectively challenges U.S. power must and will be crushed. That is because freedom of speech and press and other civic guarantees are granted only to those who refrain from meaningfully challenging the U.S. ruling class: i.e., to those who do not need those rights. Those who do need those rights — those who dissent and are disaffected — are denied them, definitively proving that these rights exist only on parchment, that in reality they are artificial and illusory for those who actually need and deserve them.
The Chinese Communist Party’s COVID-19/Wuhan virus disinformation campaign (cover-up) rates as 2020’s biggest Big Lie. By any measure, especially body count, the CCP committed 2020’s most consequential and deadliest falsehood.
The following analysis summarizes decisions and actions by China’s communist rulers from December 2019’s final days through the end of January 2020, when U.S. President Donald Trump shut down air travel between mainland China and America.
(1) China’s rulers - or their frightened commissar and police apparatchiks - brutalized and jailed the doctors and researchers who identified the disease as a threat to life and sought to warn other Chinese and medical authorities worldwide.
(2) As these brave MDs went to jail for doing a doctor’s duty, the dictatorship initiated narrative warfare. Lower-level government mouths and controlled media denied the epidemic’s outbreak.
(3) While spinning up The Big Lie, totalitarian China, which employs The Great Firewall of China to block internet access, allowed Chinese travelers (especially Chinese New Year vacationers) to spread the disease to exotic and non-exotic - but always human biotic - international locales.
Were these decisions and actions genocidal calculation or the usual dictatorial ineptitude? That isn’t the critical killer question. Note to readers: I originally wrote “strategic issue” instead of “killer question” and then realized that “strategic issue” was a beltway euphemism.
The killer: Bio-economic attacks target everyone’s life first and wallet second. So you survive the disease. Your country suffers a costly hit to food and health.
In early January, the CCP dictatorship confronted this strategic issue: a domestic epidemic that would damage the Chinese economy.
Fact: China’s brutal dictatorship relies on economic success to pacify disgruntled citizens who know how to evade the Great Firewall and thus know the CCP ordered the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which killed over 2,000 Chinese citizens. Economic success? Translation: material bribes like small electric cars and cellphones.
What did the dictatorship do? It decided to export the contagion.
The dictatorship’s cruel analysis: The Wuhan virus pandemic imperiled the CCP’s strategic plan to dominate the globe. Ipso facto, the CCP could not let China’s economy alone suffer the Wuhan virus. Exporting the epidemic would slow the economies of China’s free market and ideological competitors. Bonus: It might sow social discontent, particularly in the United States, where freedom of movement is regarded as a right.
China’s dictatorship concealed its callous decision to infect planet Earth. It quickly deployed a propaganda and narrative warfare campaign utilizing its worldwide political, economic, academic, and intelligence agency assets.
China’s communist dictatorship decided to wage a new form of bio-economic war on human beings worldwide.
Pay careful attention (for bribed critics and ChiCom trolls will not). I’m not arguing the virus was a bio-weapon in the military and medical definition of a biological attack on animals or plants. I am arguing the CCP leadership allowed the virus to spread beyond China so every other nation would suffer the disease’s medical, economic, and social consequences.
That decision amounts to waging bio-economic warfare on non-People’s Republic of China human beings and their economies, from wealthy nations to wretchedly poor nations.
At the moment, the Wuhan virus savages sub-Saharan African nations. Over the last four weeks, U.N. agencies have issued warnings of starvation conditions in South Sudan. The epidemic inhibits food distribution in South Sudan. Thus, Chinese communist bio-economic warfare kills the poorest of the poor. Superficial media miss this story and miss the Wuhan virus-starvation connection.
Perhaps the miss isn’t unintentional. Chinese-influenced organizations, particularly in academia and media, contributed to 2020’s Big Lie. U.S Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) is clearly a CCP-corrupted politician.
As 2021 begins, the CCP cover-up will continue. A CCP court just sentenced citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to prison for questioning the CCP’s early 2020 falsehoods.
Zhan will spend four years in jail for telling the truth about communist China’s Big Lie.
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Austin Bay is a colonel (ret.) in the U.S. Army Reserve, author, syndicated columnist, and teacher of strategy and strategic theory at the University of Texas–Austin. His latest book is “Cocktails from Hell: Five Wars Shaping the 21st Century.”
