Thursday, May 7, 2020

There's No Good Way to Make China 'Pay' for the Pandemic | Opinion

https://www.newsweek.com/theres-no-good-way-make-china-pay-pandemic-opinion-1501910

 President Donald Trump wants China to pay for the destruction COVID-19 has wrought. After initially praising China's approach to the now-pandemic illness, Trump has recently taken a far harsher line on Beijing. "We're doing very serious investigations," he said at a press conference last week, "and we are not happy with China."
The extent of Beijing's culpability is yet to be determined, but Trump is correct that its early mishandling of COVID-19 had dire consequences, both within China and around the world. It's also true that many of Beijing's failings here, like its suppression of inconvenient information and deliberate public deception, are characteristic of its unreformed authoritarianism.
But granting those realities leaves open the question of whether there's any meaningful, feasible and prudent way to exact reparations from China. Any policy of making China pay should go beyond political theater, be realistically achievable and not—to borrow a recent favorite phrase of Trump's—make the cure worse than the problem. Unfortunately, such an option for retribution probably doesn't exist. It's certainly not among the ideas presently on the table.

As U.S. investigations shed new light on Beijing's responsibility for COVID-19's spread, the Trump administration should consider how it can put that information to better use than retribution doomed to either futility or self-harm. The wisest course is to diplomatically leverage evidence of culpability for more transparency and information-sharing going forward. If the first COVID-19 vaccine is developed in China, as is entirely possible, we want access to it. Likewise, if another pandemic illness originates in China, we want to avoid a repetition of this one's lost time and opportunities. The proper goal of holding Beijing accountable, then, isn't payback but preventing another global catastrophe and mitigating this one.

7 comments:

  1. Garnel IronheartMay 7, 2020 at 3:58 PM

    China lies about the vaccine. They send everyone defective PPE. And you want their vaccine? Oh come on!
    The proper goal is to start building up industry in Viet-name, India and other locales that can eventually replace a lot of what China supplies the West while slapping tariffs on Chinese goods to reduce their price advantage.

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  2. Kalonymus HaQatanMay 7, 2020 at 11:48 PM

    correct
    Now, let's follow this logic (and many products we have purcahsed from China turn out to be faulty, fake etc.).
    Chinese quality standards are notoriously poor. Therefore, we cannot expect their Biosecurity levels in their labs to keep up to what they claim to! A leak is hence almost to be expected!

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  3. Kalonymus HaQatanMay 8, 2020 at 3:18 PM

    "If you hear anyone claim “we know the virus didn’t come from a lab”, don’t buy it — it may well have."


    https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748

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  4. Kalonymus HaQatanMay 8, 2020 at 4:48 PM

    What he's saying is that signs of human tampering with viruses are not necessarily visible. That goes against the official line, but what we assume about the virus keeps on changing

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  5. Fair enough. We may never have direct proof either way.
    But one thing we do know is that the CCP covered it up and purposely "allowed" it to spread around the world, rather than containing it immediately, and now they not only attempt to blame other countries for its origins, they attempt to make themselves out as heroes and the saviors of the world for their "response."

    When Wuhan got locked down, travel was restricted BETWEEN provinces of China, complete internal lockdown. But the fine citizens of Wuhan were allowed to leave the country and fly to other countries. That says it all, but the arresting of doctors trying to warn the public about this early on, says even more.... CCP is an evil communist dictatorship that has cause this worldwide chaos. There is no escaping that conclusion whether the virus first infected a person by accident in a lab, in a friggin bat cave, or from a wild animal market. They didn't "learn the lesson" from SARS that the world will not tolerate their inaction and coverup of deadly diseases, they simply repeated the same pattern. I guess no one in the world had the guts to pressure them otherwise.

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  6. https://youtu.be/UAvNOI-TYg4

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