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Wuhan Virus Watch: Drs. Fauci and Birx Dispute Claim U.S. Didn’t Act Quickly

Wuhan Virus Watch: Drs. Fauci and Birx Dispute Claim U.S. Didn’t Act Quickly

Fauci: “I believe … we acted very, very early.” Birx: We thought it was going to be “more like SARS” and not a “global pandemic” because “we were missing a significant amount of the data” from China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CFVgUmaHpo

As President Donald Trump promised during Monday’s Coronavirus Task Force briefing, Tuesday’s session would have math, statistics, and charts.

The 2-hour briefing offered highly detailed information on the modeling that the federal Task Force is using to make decisions and inform the states. As is often the case, the most crucial portion may have been the media exchange that occurred after the initial presentation.

It appears that the new media trope, which is also a Democratic Party talking point, is that Trump did not establish restrictions and guidelines soon enough. For example, CNN gadfly Jim Acosta asked Coronavirus Task Force member, Dr. Antony Fauci, if social distancing should have happened earlier.

Fauci robustly pushed back on that speculation, reminding the media that China was less than forthcoming with critical data.

Another point Fauci made, which is nearly as critical, is that without antibody testing, there is no way to determine if social distancing would have worked any sooner because there is no way to ascertain if the virus was even present in the country.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator, also gave the American media a stark reminder that the information provided by China on any aspect of this pandemic is unreliable.

Therefore, Birx indicated that the medical community misjudged this early in the outbreak as a SARS-like virus, based on the data China was providing at the time. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome pathogen hit Asia in 2003 but disappeared relatively quickly not to be seen again.

As the elite media will push the big numbers given out of this briefing: 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. But the media is trimming out an essential part of the entire answer by Fauci when discussing the models:

Asked if Americans should be prepared for 100,000 Americans to die from COVID-19, Fauci said point-blank, “The answer is yes.”

“As sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it,” Fauci continued. “Is it going to be that much? I hope not. And I think the more we push on the mitigation the less likelihood it would be that number — but being realistic we need to prepare ourselves that that is a possibility that that is what we will see.”

Personally, I am concerned that the Task Force is using the numbers for New York to project onto the rest of the country. I suspect the number of fatalities related to COVID-19 will be much smaller than feared.

I am going to predict that when this crisis ends, the media will add its coverage of the coronavirus pandemic to its roster of reporting shame that has been exponentially expanding since Trump began his campaign for the presidency.

Barack Obama blames the pandemic on….climate change

Obama accused Trump of “climate denial.”

Obama weighed in on the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak in the context of warning about the impact of Trump’s decision to ease up on fuel-efficiency standards the Democratic president had put in place to combat climate change.

“We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall,” he added, linking to an article announcing the rollback of environmental mileage standards put in place by Obama in 2012.

The Netherlands recalls ‘defective’ masks bought from China

China has been a bad actor during the pandemic in more ways than one.

Hundreds of thousands of masks sent to Dutch hospitals have been recalled after tests showed they failed to protect the face or had defective filters. The Netherlands recently bought 1.3 million masks from China.

The Dutch government has ordered a recall of around 600,000 masks out of a shipment of 1.3 million from China after they failed to meet quality standards.

The defective masks had already been distributed to several hospitals currently battling the COVID-19 outbreak, news agency AFP and Dutch media reported. The Dutch Health Ministry has kept the rest of the shipment on hold.

An inspection revealed that the FFP2 masks did not protect the face properly or had defective filter membranes. The fine filters stop the virus from entering the mouth or nose. The masks failed more than one inspection.

China delivered faulty coronavirus test kits to Spain, Czech Republic

The test kits China supplies are also defective.

After Spain, the Czech Republic has reported that the majority of coronavirus test kits provided by China are faulty.

Up to 80 per cent of the 150,000 portable, quick coronavirus test kits China delivered to the Czech Republic earlier this month were faulty, National Review reported citing local Czech news site Expats.cz.

The test can produce a result in 10- 15 minutes but are really less accurate than other tests.

Because of the high error rate, the country will continue to rely on conventional laboratory tests, of which they perform about 900 a day.

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Comments

Every time I read that some European country is touting the landing of a “mercy mission” plane from China, I shudder. I guess if allowing “refugees” to overrun Europe isn’t enough, they may as well let China kill them off. Bad masks, ineffective tests, what else is coming on those planes?

You need to understand how Communist dictators think.
They have no regard for life, no regard for people, no regard for human rights. The state is bigger than God and no sacrifice is big enough in the “fight” to expand Communism. And the fight never stops.
Each individual is a soldier of the Communist cause, willing or not, and they can be used and disposed by the state at any time. Those millions of Chinese individuals, traveling all over the world for months, could easily be considered soldiers, or weapons of China’s Communist army. Maybe they didn’t know, but that’s beyond the point. They were spreading the virus for months before the world got a hint of what was going on.
China has been buying influence for decades, and we can see it in the fact that UN, WHO, media companies all over the world including here in America, are actively pushing Chinese propaganda. They are now cleaning their tracks.
Yeah, I could be wrong, but I don’t buy the “bat soup” story for a quarter of a minute.
Call me crazy. Call me conspiracy theorist. Call me what you will. I lived in a Communist dictatorship long enough.

    jlronning in reply to Exiliado. | April 1, 2020 at 10:13 am

    “the state is bigger than God” – yes, that reminds me, this virus broke out over the world around the time that Xi mandated that Chinese churches hang a picture of Himself in them.

    RonF in reply to Exiliado. | April 1, 2020 at 10:46 am

    Actually, I do buy the “bat soup” theory; see the link below as to why. However, the nature of how a Communist society is governed leads to local leaders who pass bad news up the food chain end up dead. And the top leaders are always quite resistant to publishing bad news because it makes them look bad to their subjects – which they cannot risk or else, given the terrible conditions their subjects live under, they might end up dead. So it has the same effect. Bad things happen, they don’t tell us, and we end up with the current situation.

    Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-zero-future-pandemic-180965213/

      Exiliado in reply to RonF. | April 1, 2020 at 11:23 am

      Did they kill all the bats?
      What about the bio-lab in Wuhan? What happened to it?

      Your theory is plausible, but no more than the bio-weapon theory.

        Milhouse in reply to Exiliado. | April 1, 2020 at 2:32 pm

        What about the bio lab? There’s nothing sinister about the mere existence of a bio lab. There are hundred of them, all over the world, including here. The one in Wuhan has been there since the 1960s. Why should it have had anything to do with this?

        There is simply no reason at all to suppose a bio-weapon, and plenty of reasons not to, starting with the fact that it’s not nearly lethal enough.

        Sonnys Mom in reply to Exiliado. | April 4, 2020 at 9:18 am

        The fresh meat market (“wet market”) located practically adjacent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is reported not to sell bats. The species of bat that is a reservoir for this type of coronavirus lives in a colony located 500-600 miles from Wuhan. However, Chinese researchers are known to collect biological samples from wildlife in their own country and all over the world for research. It is also known that in spite of signing-on to an international treaty against bioweapons, China has continued doing research into lethal microorganisms. Also, Chinese researchers often break decontamination, labeling and other lab safety protocols, according to people in countries outside China who have worked alongside their visiting scientists. There is a past case of someone from the Wuhan Institute of Virology selling diseased lab animals to the adjacent wet market. Also, hand-washing is not a culturally ingrained habit over there and the most common method for assessing how fresh the meat is, is to pinch it with (quite possibly unwashed) bare fingers.

    JusticeDelivered in reply to Exiliado. | April 1, 2020 at 11:53 am

    Whats worse, Communism or Islam? On balance, I think that islam is marginally worse.

    Sonnys Mom in reply to Exiliado. | April 4, 2020 at 9:03 am

    Agree ?. The children of the “sixties radicals” are all grown up and deeply burrowed into our social, cultural and government institutions. US public schools started teaching “history according to Howard Zinn” back in the mid-1990s. For years, China has been funding “friendship missions” like the Confucius Institutes on college campuses. Ever notice how much all those chanting Occupy Wall Street layabouts, antifa goons, college snowflakes, Black Lives Matter thugs and intersectional woke-sters sound exactly like Mao’s Red Guard?

    I do think we will start seeing changes going forward, even if the changes are gradual. Americans have now seen for themselves: CHINA LIES. THE CCP LIES. Once those lessons are learned, people will automatically, unconsciously evaluate all incoming information against that basic fact. So any MSM propaganda will automatically become “free press” for the pro-American side and the enemy can’t do a darned thing about it.

stevewhitemd | April 1, 2020 at 10:14 am

Another point: despite SARS, Swine flu and MERS, our country’s public health system is under-practiced in dealing with pandemics. From the CDC to our local public health departments, we’re not used to dealing with serious, wide-spread, communicable viral infections. Our public health people have been focused on other problems, and while there’s a part of CDC that has been working on Ebola, Zika, Marburg, etc., a lot of people there in Atlanta are doing other things.

So COVID is a wake-up call to us — pandemics exist, and we have to re-learn how to deal with them. All of us. It’s a painful lesson, but in the future we’re going to be more vigilant, and our elected officials from both parties are going to be much better about taking action. With all the fighting and foolishness now, we’ll learn.

    LibraryGryffon in reply to stevewhitemd. | April 1, 2020 at 11:55 am

    I just hope we learn the right lessons.

    The left is learning how easy the populace in general is to control.

    What I would like to see as a takeaway from this, at a minimum, is for employers to stop demanding that workers show up sick or risk losing their jobs. I’ve even seen this tried at a hospital. (The policy was quietly reversed about 6 months later.)

    And then then TPTB wonder why half their employees look and sound like death in need of warming over and are coughing and wheezing badly enough to have customers acting worried. (Which never seemed to me to be great customer service.)

    rabidfox in reply to stevewhitemd. | April 1, 2020 at 9:49 pm

    Ebola, SARS, MERS etc. are legitimate concerns for the CDC. Shooting deaths are not. Neither are drunk driving deaths or terrorist deaths. None of these are diseases.

I believe … we acted very, very early

They did. But the Dems and the reporters weren’t paying attention, so how should they have known about it? Anything that happened while they weren’t looking might as well not have happened.

Though in hindsight it would certainly have helped had we started the distancing a week earlier.

    n.n in reply to Milhouse. | April 1, 2020 at 11:32 am

    Especially at medical centers, and from the social contagion that herded people. That said, social distancing, maybe; good hand (to face) hygiene, definitely.

    Paul in reply to Milhouse. | April 1, 2020 at 12:21 pm

    The Dims and their media lapdogs were in the throes of their sham impeachment frenzy at the time; that was all they cared to see.

1. Fauci, Birx, Pompeo, Trump, et al should immediately start calling this the Wuhan Virus or the Chinese virus or the CCP virus in all press conferences. Do not relent! Stop with this COVID19 or coronavirus crap.

2. Trump’s initial fault was only trusting Chinkmaster Xi when he downplayed the outbreak, lied, and said everything was under control. Never trust a commie, never.

    Neo in reply to walls. | April 1, 2020 at 10:53 am

    I favor the “Killer Xi Virus”

    Neo in reply to walls. | April 1, 2020 at 10:55 am

    “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

    Another Ed in reply to walls. | April 1, 2020 at 2:33 pm

    The virus has a name – SARS-CoV-2.
    The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 has a name – COVID-19.

      Milhouse in reply to Another Ed. | April 1, 2020 at 3:08 pm

      No, its name is the Chinese coronavirus from Wuhan, a city in China ruled by Chinese Communists where the Chinese-sourced Sino-virus came from. “Covid 19” is a made-up name explicitly invented for the sole purpose of pleasing the Chinese who inflicted it on the world.

      Barry in reply to Another Ed. | April 1, 2020 at 6:49 pm

      Another Ed,

      Another commie,

      Responsible for 100 million + deaths over the last century.

      When can add the China Virus to the list of commie murders.

ScottTheEngineer | April 1, 2020 at 10:37 am

Trump isn’t spreading the virus and could do nothing to stop it. It’s up to you. Your the only one that can keep from getting it or stop giving it to others.

Stop blaming the government and stay away from the superdome or you’ve already lost.

    Exactly. People need to follow recommendations and use common sense. We’ve been told what to do and what to avoid.

    And then you see pictures of snowflakes doing some Wuhan virus challenge by licking toilet bowl rims and escalator handrails. I’ve seen the videos. And I’ve seen videos of New Yorkers too closely packed watching the Navy hospital ship arrive in NY Harbor. If people are stupid and don’t follow recommendations, this agony will only be prolonged. And how is this Trump’s fault?

Isn’t it fun to call it the Wuhan Virus. Lets just call it the LyingChineseWuhanVirus and then wet our panties every time we say it? Or just call it the Covid19 as does the rest of the world. AND then get back to the serious business of the lies and deceptions around it. Both Chinese, WHO, NATO, FBI, James Comey, Hillary, and of course the OrangeMan. And even “our” own mistakes too.

    Exiliado in reply to RasMoyag. | April 1, 2020 at 11:25 am

    It is not fun. It is accurate.

    JusticeDelivered in reply to RasMoyag. | April 1, 2020 at 12:26 pm

    I still think that China’s leaders will dislike labeling it Chin’s Wuhan Virus more than just Wuhan Virus. Furthermore, I enjoy the idea of tweaking them over the name, and kicking their ass over economic and life losses. We need a crash program to return manufacturing to America in the form of highly automated flexible production lines.

    Milhouse in reply to RasMoyag. | April 1, 2020 at 2:42 pm

    No, let’s not “just call it covid 19”, because the only reason anyone in the world has ever called it that is to please the Chinese. And we should refuse to play that game, on principle. Words are important. Language is important. And we should not change the way we speak in order to kowtow (another Chinese word) to tyrants.

    For that matter we should refuse to change the way we speak to cater to anybody’s political or commercial agenda, which is why I’m still fighting a rearguard action against “kiwi fruit” — it’s still “Chinese gooseberry” to me — and why I still speak of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. And Saigon. Sometimes also Peking, although there was no political agenda behind that change. But this is a far more important case, because the change is directly serving the interests of tyranny, so we all have a duty to resist it and remind the world that this is the Chinese coronavirus from Wuhan, a city in China ruled by Chinese Communists where the Chinese-sourced Sino-virus came from.

    Milhouse in reply to RasMoyag. | April 1, 2020 at 3:06 pm

    In Hebrew “covid” means “respect”. And I refuse to give the Wuhan Disease the respect of calling it by that ridiculous name.

    Barry in reply to RasMoyag. | April 1, 2020 at 6:54 pm

    More Chinese bullshit/propaganda.

    Call it what it is, a China Virus.

    Add Wuhan if you like.

    Wuhan China Virus

Evidently the DNC and the Leftwing media, from the self-described ‘Party of Science’, are having trouble getting the scientists to go along with their desired narrative.

Wuhan… Raccoon City hides… smothers her secrets under a layer of privacy. A resident evil that progressed behind the Chinese leftists’ wall.

I have a big favor to ask of everyone. Please stop using the term pandemic. All a pandemic is is a disease which has outbreaks in multiple countries around the world. The disease does not even have to meet the criteria for an epidemic, to be labeled a pandemic. Also, this labeling is not applied uniformly. Technically, we see an influenza pandemic every single year with from 500,000 to 1.5 million flu related deaths in a myriad of countries. Yet, we never here these outbreaks labeled a pandemic. The term is being used as a scare tactic, because it sound like the word “epidemic” and it scares people.

Now, about the medical leadership touting potential deaths of 100,000+. Doctors routinely present the worst case scenario to patients. They are conditioned to do this because of liability. If a patient is told that he has 6 month to live and he lives for the next 5 years, he and his survivors never sue. And, the patient is more likely to agree to a more aggressive [dangerous] course of treatment when confronted with the worst case scenario. If people believed that the COVID virus was little more dangerous, to the bulk of the general public, than influenza, they would not stand still for the draconian measures being imposed upon them. They only go along with them because the media, the government and the medical profession is terrifying them with unsubstantiated claims.

“”Personally, I am concerned that the Task Force is using the numbers for New York to project onto the rest of the country.””

Dr Birx addressed this point during the briefing, confirming their understanding that the NY number were skewing the model.

China shipping out defective products, sounds like standard operating procedure.

smalltownoklahoman | April 1, 2020 at 7:18 pm

“Personally, I am concerned that the Task Force is using the numbers for New York to project onto the rest of the country. I suspect the number of fatalities related to COVID-19 will be much smaller than feared.”

Agreed. Population density matters. Respiratory diseases thrive in densely populated areas like NYC and other large cities. The vast majority of the interior of the US does not have people crammed so tightly together. While that’s no excuse for people who live in smaller, more spread out, communities to be careless it’s far less likely they will see nearly the same rate of infection as New York.

If you assume that Commies are not being totally truthful with you, you will be right more often than wrong!