China’s Disgusting Wet Markets Reopen, Essentially Guarantee Another Outbreak
Posted at 7:00 pm on March 31, 2020 by Bonchie
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping talks by video with patients and medical workers at the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province, Tuesday, March 10, 2020. China’s president visited the center of the global virus outbreak Tuesday as Italy began a sweeping nationwide travel ban and people worldwide braced for the possibility of recession. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. (Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via AP)
If you thought the Chinese might actually get serious after unleashing yet another deadly plague on the world, this one the worst in modern history, they aren’t.
The now famed “wet markets” which are suspected of originating the Wuhan virus are back open for business. Whether you want deep fried cat or freshly prepared bats, they’ve got what you are looking for, and without a health regulation in sight.
I apologize for the picture, but it is what it is. Despite these wet markets being the cause of multiple global outbreaks in just the last few decades, it appears the Chinese government is not up for fixing this situation. It’s almost as if they like the results they are getting? That’s probably too conspiratorial I suppose.
China ordered that its wet-markets be shut down in January, after facts emerged suggesting that coronavirus was first transmitted to humans via bats and other live animals sold in the often filthy places of commerce, according to Business Insider. However, now that China says it’s beaten the virus, the markets seem to have resumed business as usual.
“The markets have gone back to operating in exactly the same way as they did before coronavirus,” said a Daily Mail correspondent who observed the markets re-opening Dongguan. “The only difference is that security guards try to stop anyone taking pictures which would never have happened before.”
Like all communist countries, the Chinese aren’t concerned about actually solving the issue, but would rather just suppress any information about it. They had a chance to shut these things down for good but have instead chosen to stop people from taking pictures to distribute to the rest of the world. An on the ground reporter from the UK is doing the legwork though (don’t except any American correspondent to actually investigate China in this way). He’s found that cages of dogs, cats, and bats are still there. They are still being unsafely prepared and fried whole for people to by.
In other words, another pandemic is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.
The question is whether anyone in the United States will do anything about it. If we were serious, we’d continue to stop all travel to and from China until they take action. But we won’t be. We’ve already seen Democrats and the media trying to shift blame and absolve the communist regime. Instead of focusing on the cause, they’ve fallen on the mainstay of screaming racism and xenophobia.
In the end, it’s unlikely any real measures will be taken and we’ll be hit again by Chinese malfeasance.
-Justin Thyme-Two cents worth of opinion. 'Holy crap Chinaman, don't eat bats, rats, cats or dogs'!
President Trump speaks during a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 29, 2020. (Al Drago/Reuters)The president fends off ankle-biting Democrats in Congress and the media.
Even in such a worrisome and dangerous time as the current public-health and economic crisis, there are some entertaining election-year maneuvers. The Trump-hating media have been reduced to desperate weaving back and forth in their search for a plausible alternative to the incumbent. And President Trump’s domination of prime-time television every day with a demonstrably competent executive performance, even if it has not been without its Trumpesque flourishes of hyperbole and shifts of position, is propelling the practicing, wildly-out-of-the-closet Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi to severe lapses of judgment. I don’t watch much television, but out of duty and in order to make an informed comment when necessary, I do a reasonable survey of the television, Internet, and national print news. Striding to the front of a dense congestion of thundering hooves as the media charge to the November election finish in their competition to smear the president, Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC told his viewers last week that the president had said that if the country wasn’t on its way back to work and school by Easter Sunday, it would be “dead.” By this alarmist proposition, he apparently meant that the president had said that the whole country would be on suicide watch. The president was always clear that April 12 (Easter) was “aspirational,” and all he said about suicide was that financial difficulties do increase the probability of extremely depressive and hopeless thoughts.
When the president was assuring everyone that the danger was overrated, the media magnified terror stories of the spread and possible lethality of the coronavirus. The usual opinionated talking (air) heads empurpled the airwaves with gloom and accused Trump of disregarding and scoffing at scientists, and of being a militant know-nothing who disparaged science in general. When the president executed a 180-degree turn on two wheels, they tried to shadow him by swarming the television studios and op-ed pages predicting six- to seven-month shutdowns that would bring the entire population except Bernie Sanders’s “millionaires and billionaires” (such as, in the first category, Bernie Sanders) forward to feast off the destruction of the wealth of the middle and working classes. When Trump appeared to be impudently dodging that bullet by saying that the shutdown was necessary but need not be prolonged, this was the signal for former Labor secretary Robert Reich, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and the lamest duck in American history, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, none of whom knows enough about epidemiology to fill an eye-dropper, bravely to prepare the nation for six or seven months of quarantine, and, implicitly, grinding poverty and societal chaos. In de Blasio’s case, this descent to an economic Stone Age was to be supervised by the armed forces, though what their role, apart from contracting the coronavirus themselves, was to be has not yet been explained.
The president has trimmed his sails again and extended the present lockdown conditions to at least April 30. He appears daily with Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, renowned authorities in this field, squashing all the nonsense about disagreements between them and Trump’s animosity to science, and in the latest attempt to mobilize the moral outrage that his enemies consider must be in a constantly febrile state, they have accused the president of changing his mind. No one can claim that he has not assembled, with the vice president, an outstanding task force; no one can say he has not been guided by its counsel. No one can say he has not moved swiftly and decisively to increase testing ability, distribute possible ameliorative medication, raise the country’s supply of ventilators and distribute them fairly, and increase hospital capacity. And with a six-trillion-dollar financial-assistance and liquidity-assurance plan, he has responded and led effectively in a way no one can dispute.
But the most unmistakable sign of the Democrats’ desperation was House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s appearance on CNN on Sunday, in which she announced that the administration’s delay in recognizing and addressing the coronavirus crisis would have to be “investigated.” The president’s polls have risen steadily, and all polls show public appreciation of his leadership in the crisis, yet the speaker not only demurs, but flops backwards into the Democrats’ helpless addiction to trying to criminalize policy differences and personal antipathy towards Trump. The country awaits the results of the Durham special-counsel investigation of the origins of the Russian-collusion fraud by which Trump was belabored for over two years, and it was on Pelosi’s miraculous conversion to the agitations of her extreme leftist House of Representatives colleagues that the most spurious impeachment attempt in the country’s history was limply played out. (None of the previous three — Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton — was justified, but the Trump impeachment was unfounded and unconstitutional, a disgrace and a mockery from A to Z.) Speaker Pelosi is technically the highest-ranking Democratic office-holder, though in protocol terms she would rank behind former presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama, and if she is reaching for an investigation, like a drunk in the extremity of alcoholism reaching for the bottle, the Democrats really are gasping, biting the carpet, and scratching the walls.
The Trump-hating media have, successively, accused Trump of calling the coronavirus a “hoax,” when in fact he used that term to describe criticism of his response to the pandemic (Politico), and falsely claimed that the U.S. resisted purchasing test kits from the World Health Organization (NBC, CNN, NPR). The Washington Post published an op-ed that falsely accused the president of having closed the White House pandemic office, and this was taken up; MSNBC suggested Trump is guilty of homicidal negligence because of his handling of the issue; the media generally accused him of calling the coronavirus “the China virus” for racist reasons; MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Rachel Maddow and others have advocated not covering Trump’s daily press briefings; ABC accused him of causing the death of a man who self-medicated with something purported to be chloroquine (which Trump has suggested, with professional concurrence, could be potentially beneficial) that was in fact fish-tank cleaner.
At his press briefings, about a third of the journalists routinely arraign the president for his alleged previous utterances, attempt to mousetrap him, debate with him, and imply that he is distributing more aid to states that have voted for him than to others. Never in my time of watching these press encounters with the president, going back to the Eisenhower era, has there been such a blatant attempt to provoke the president to immoderate responses, or a more sustained effort to misrepresent what he says and does. The fact that it is finally blowing up in their faces must aggravate the frustration and the rage of the anti-Trump media beyond imagination. They are grossly demeaning the status of the free press, which is dangerous for any democracy; none of their bullets now wounds the target.
As the president rises in the polls, meets the crisis, and walks the line between an over-hasty lifting of the shutdown and a rigid posture that would invite fearmongering about the enforced reduction of commercial activity continuing into the autumn, the Democrats have to face the implications of their position as, in their favorite phrase, “the walls close in.” Trump gets the credit for acting promptly opposite China (for which he was reviled by officeholding and media Democrats as a “racist” and “xenophobe”), for launching a skillful containment of the coronavirus, for producing a mighty financial-assistance package, and for maintaining hope for a reasonably timely reopening, and the Democrats are reduced to trying to hide their presumptive candidate. Joe Biden cannot opine coherently on public-policy issues and seems like someone running for a position as a rural public-health commissioner, demanding a voice for the elderly, not as the 44th direct successor to George Washington. No civilized person takes pleasure in a man’s serial embarrassment, but those who drafted Joe Biden for this role cannot possibly imagine that he can do more than spare the Democrats the utter annihilation they would suffer if they nominated Bernie Sanders.
Now that Congress has passed its broader humanitarian aid packages in response to the COVID-19 virus, it’s likely that the nation’s most fiscally irresponsible states will request bailouts for something completely unrelated to the virus: their bankrupt pension plans.
Bad as that may be, it’s likely some sort of assistance will materialize from Congress. If that happens, any support should be conditioned on pension reform.
It’s not a stretch to think that federal money will somehow find its way into the nation’s most dysfunctional pension plans. New Jersey’s Phil Murphy, governor of a state with one of the worst pension crises in the country, is seeking a multi-billion-dollar, flexible block grant. Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, whose city is already junk rated largely due to pensions, has warned “this is a B-sized problem, meaning something that can only be solved with billions in needed stimulus support from the federal government.”
With the shortfall in pension funds exceeding what Stanford’s Pension Tracker says was $5 trillion even before the meltdown, you can bet those governments most mired in pension debt will seek additional help. They could demand direct aid for their state and local pensions, or for their own operations that indirectly support those pensions. But states and cities that bankrupted their funds through corrupted governance long before the current crisis shouldn’t get a free pass.
Many states, including Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut, have refused real reform for decades, wreaking havoc on their residents and the retirement security of their workers. That’s reason enough to require preconditions for any federal support.
The rationale for requiring reforms with any aid is threefold. First, supporting irresponsible states with no strings attached is fundamentally unfair to those states that have already enacted major reforms. Second, structural reforms reduce the risk of future federal bailouts by setting those states on a path toward stability. Third, requiring reforms would reduce the cost of any potential federal aid to those states.
Illinois is a perfect example of a state that shouldn’t be bailed out at the expense of fiscally responsible governments. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the state legislature and Chicago Mayor Lightfoot all reject structural pension reforms that would fix Illinois’ problems. They continue to block efforts to amend the state’s pension-protection clause through a constitutional amendment and they refuse to authorize the option of municipal bankruptcy, something that only requires a legislative majority.
Instead, like their predecessors, they’re protecting the status quo. As a result, Illinois’ Net Primary Position – basically its net worth – has worsened by $190 billion since 2001. Those losses resulted primarily from growing unfunded pension and retiree health insurance liabilities. Illinois’ pension crisis is now the nation’s worst, both in terms of total shortfall and on a per capita basis, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The agency rates Illinois just one notch away from junk.
Conditions in New Jersey are no better. The Garden State’s pension funds were flush at the turn of the century, but since then, gross bipartisan mismanagement and pension holidays have led to near insolvency. S&P warned in June of 2019 that: “[The state’s] inability to contribute [its] annually determined contribution after 10 years of national economic recovery raises questions about what could happen in another recession.”
Connecticut is also swimming in unfunded pension and retirement health care debts. Those obligations equaled nearly 40% of its GDP in 2018 – the highest among all states, according to Moody’s. And like Illinois, the state has resorted to decades-long reamortizations and is considering asset transfers instead of real, structural reforms.
If that’s not evidence enough, consider this. In 2018, the plans for Chicago’s 30,000 active and retired public safety workers were just 22% funded. The funding for Kentucky’s 90,000 state workers was even worse, at just 16%. And the plan for New Jersey’s 136,000 public employees was only 32%. All those workers lost their retirement security due to politicians’ corrupt practices long before the current crisis.
The unwillingness of such states to make hard choices on their own is precisely why any help from the federal government must come with preconditions.
Defined contribution plans, cost of living reforms and increased retirement ages are all part of the suite the federal government should require. And for states that have constitutional protections, lawmakers must commit to removing them or lose out on aid.
Whether the federal government eventually provides direct aid to state and local governments remains to be seen. However, it’s imperative that any such support not be used to bail out pensions or enable irresponsible states to further ignore their retirement crises.
Ted Dabrowski is a former international managing director for Citibank and current president of Wirepoints, an independent, nonpartisan research and news organization focused on fiscal and economic policy.
Mark Glennon, a former bankruptcy lawyer and venture capital investor, is executive editor and founder of Wirepoints, an independent, nonpartisan research and news organization focused on fiscal and economic policy.
Police stand guard outside Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where a number of people related to the market fell ill with a virus in Wuhan, China January 31st, 2020
Chinese researchers isolated deadly bat coronaviruses near Wuhan animal market.
By Bill Gertz- The Washington Times - Monday, March 30, 2020
Chinese government researchers isolated more than 2,000 new viruses, including deadly bat coronaviruses, and carried out scientific work on them just three miles from a wild animal market identified as the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Several Chinese state media outlets in recent months touted the virus research and lionized in particular a key researcher in Wuhan, Tian Junhua, as a leader in bat virus work.
The coronavirus strain now infecting hundreds of thousands of people globally mutated from bats believed to have infected animals and people at a wild animal market in Wuhan. The exact origin of the virus, however, remains a mystery.
Reports of the extensive Chinese research on bat viruses likely will fuel more calls for Beijing to make public what it knows about such work.
“This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the world is facing a global pandemic,” Rep. Michael T. McCaul, Texas Republican and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said last week. Mr. McCaul has said China should be held accountable for the pandemic.
A video posted online in December and funded by the Chinese government shows Mr. Tian inside caves in Hubei province taking samples from captured bats and storing them in vials.
“I am not a doctor, but I work to cure and save people,” Mr. Tian says in the video. “I am not a soldier, but I work to safeguard an invisible national defense line.”
Chinese officials have said the virus likely spread from wild animals to people at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, not far from the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national center for China’s bat virus research.
Wuhan is finally stirring back to life after a harsh crackdown on travel and street activity was imposed in late January. The city’s bus, subway and train systems started to run again over the weekend. Shops downtown were operating with some restrictions Monday, although customers were scarce.
But British news accounts also reported over the weekend that some of the stalls at China’s so-called “wet” wild animal markets, as they reopen, have begun once again selling bats and scorpions and resumed questionable practices such as slaughtering small animals right at the site.
Chinese officials refused to provide samples of its coronavirus strains to U.S. researchers shortly after the outbreak became public and did not allow international disease specialists to visit Wuhan for weeks.
