On Friday, Tucker Carlson examined the threat of Red China to the United States as shown by the coronavirus outbreak. The globalist economy, so profitable to big business, has put too much power in the hands of hostile communist China, which manufactures a large proportion of the pharmaceuticals upon which we Americans depend.
Regarding the current worldwide contagion, Dr. Drew Pinsky has made a good case that the media has driven the huge freakout about an ailment that is not as nearly deadly as the regular flu.
Even so, the larger truth is that unfriendly China “dominates the world market in pharmaceutical ingredients,” as Tucker observes, and “more than 95 percent of all the antibiotics in America are manufactured in Communist China.”
This situation is not conducive to America’s national security, particularly when Chinese economist Li Daokui suggested last year that medicine could be used as a weapon against the West:
“Just as some international analysts have pointed out, we are indeed at the mercy of others when it comes to computer chips, but we are the world’s largest exporter of vitamin and antibiotic ingredients,” Li said last March during a speech at a national advisory conference, as quoted by state-run Xinhua (Chinese). “If we cut back exports, some western countries’ medical system won’t operate well.”
Nice people, these ChiComs!
Whatever the nature of the coronavirus — global pandemic or media hiccup — the event has shown how unwise it is to allow the unfriendly Chinese to manufacture so many necessary pharmaceuticals. The global economy and healthcare are not a good mix, and especially so when Red China is involved.
Tucker Carlson sounds inclined to believe the worst about the corona illness, but nevertheless he makes important points about the big picture of the Chinese threat and the borderless world generally regarding public health.
TUCKER CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight.
There comes a time in every presidential administration when the people in charge realize they’re not really in control. Unforeseen events arise. In an instant, every assumption about the future changes. Heads of State die, wars erupt, natural disasters descend, epidemics rage — none of it was in anybody’s plan. There’s something about human nature that prevents us from preparing for this, for abrupt and radical change. We pretend the unexpected will never happen.
But there’s something in nature itself that reminds us it inevitably will. It’s always a terrifying realization.
The rise of the Chinese coronavirus is that kind of moment. The virus is quickly becoming a global pandemic. Ultimately, it could kill millions, at the very least, it will reorder the global economy and change our politics.
Could the disease help determine the outcome of our next presidential election eight months from now? Of course, it could, in fact it will. Our leaders can’t stop that.
Like all matters of life and death. It is beyond human power to affect, but they can respond to the threat in a way that makes this country stronger, not weaker.
How can they do that? Here’s how. The first step is to take the virus seriously and to convince the public that you are.
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s White House downplayed the Spanish influenza and refused to take obvious precautions to slow it spread. Wilson had a pointless war in progress in Europe to fight. His generals couldn’t be distracted from that goal.
So the government continued to ship men to overcrowded army camps across the country and to pack them on ships to France. The virus spread exponentially.
In the end, about 53,000 American soldiers were killed in combat in that war, at least 675,000 Americans died of the flu.
Could Wilson have prevented that disaster? Well, not entirely. But by early and decisive action, he could have improved America’s odds.
So what does effective action look like now? Well, we ought to be screening people when they get off the planes from infected countries. That’s not complicated. It’s obvious.
But at the same time, it is hardly a solution. We should be honest about how much we can do to keep the Chinese coronavirus from coming here.
A hundred years ago, the Spanish flu killed a significant percentage of the population in remote Aleutian Islands and that was before air travel.
Today, the entire world is connected by hourly international flights. Global pandemics are inevitable. There’s too much movement to keep viruses isolated. We should acknowledge that.
Yes, we can do our best to keep foreign diseases out of this country, but we ought to spend most of our time trying to figure out how to protect Americans once the diseases get here.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Chinese coronavirus, but two things do seem clear. It is highly communicable and the elderly and people with preexisting respiratory disease face the greatest threat from it.
That means for most Americans, the biggest risks will come not from the virus itself, but from its ancillary effects. People will panic. Travel will be disrupted. Markets will tumble and most critically, hospitals will be overwhelmed.
We’re about to learn the limits of our healthcare system. Conditions will be tough for the many thousands of Americans looking for beds to recover from the flu. In Seattle, they already are.
But things will be even worse for anyone suffering from say pancreatitis or a burst appendix; not to mention, countless other health emergencies.
People like this may not get care at all. Our system won’t be able to accommodate them.
There are many implications of this and some of them are political. For example, is this really the time to invite the rest of the world to join Medicare-for-All? Probably not. That idea was always stupid. Now, it’s clearly dangerous.
On a practical level, saving American medicine from collapse must be our leaders’ top priority right now. We need to expand emergency hospital bed capacity. We need to make certain we have enough life-saving drugs and medical equipment — the basics.
Unfortunately, that’s not as simple as it sounds or as it should be. While the rest of us who are arguing about sexism and transgender bathrooms, China took control of our healthcare system.
China dominates the world market in pharmaceutical ingredients, compounds used in virtually every essential medicine for high blood pressure, for cancer, for Alzheimer’s disease and many more come from China.
So do key components in vital medical technology, CT scanners, x-ray machines and ultrasounds.
As if tonight, more than 95 percent of all the antibiotics in America are manufactured in Communist China, 95 percent. Our chief global rival has a total monopoly on the most important medicine in the world.
That should worry you more than anything that candidates are currently talking about. Imagine watching one of your children die from an infected cut. China has the power to make that happen.
The Chinese government is acutely aware of this power. Last year, a prominent Chinese economist suggested cutting off the supply of antibiotics to the United States as leverage in the trade war. That should have been the biggest story in America. The news media all but ignored it. Why? Because it implicated them and their political party in one of the greatest crimes of our time.
Nine years ago, famously brilliant former President Barack Obama did predict the connection between China and the next global pandemic. Unfortunately, Obama got it backward. He claimed China would help us.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I absolutely believe that China’s peaceful rise is good for the world, and it’s good for America. To the extent that we have a partner in addressing issues like climate change or pandemic. . .
CARLSON: Our foremost genius. The people in charge have no idea what they’re doing and to the extent they do, they’re selling us out on purpose. We should have seen this coming.
In recent weeks, you’ve heard a lot about disruption to our so-called supply chains. Think about what that means. It means that thanks to economic changes that made a small group of business moguls incredibly rich, we no longer make the things we need to survive and prosper as a nation. People who hate us and who seek to displace us make those things.
And it’s not just medicines and x-ray machines, its computers and phones and robotics and automotive components and machine tools and essential parts for aircraft engines, et cetera.
In fact, apart from fossil fuels, it’s almost everything, and now you may have noticed many of our leaders are talking about shutting down our domestic energy sector, the last independent part of the American economy.
This is sabotage, and we’re about to learn how undermined we’ve been.
At some point, our leaders should be held to account for this. For now, we need to work as if our lives depended on it, to fix this problem. Global warming isn’t the existential threat we face, extortion from China is.
In very real ways, the Chinese government controls us. There is no greater national security danger than the one they pose. To respond, we need a modern Marshall Plan, one designed to rebuild a Central American manufacturing.
We should start tomorrow with medicine and technology to fight the coronavirus, and then with antibiotics.
Some will oppose the idea because it poses a threat to arrangements they currently benefit from. But a majority of Americans will welcome it gladly, even in the Congress. Manufacturing lifts every congressional district. It shouldn’t be hard to win bipartisan support.
No doubt the sages on television will denounce any acknowledgement of China’s threat as racism or intolerance. Joe Biden has already done that. Ignore them.
The Chinese coronavirus really is Chinese. It arose in that country for the same reason American businesses have sent so many of our jobs there. It lacks health and safety standards and endemic corruption.
China did this to the world and we should not pretend otherwise. That’s not xenophobia. It’s true.
The most bitter irony of all of that, is that a few years from now, when every last victim of this virus has recovered or have been buried, the Chinese government can easily grow stronger because of this disaster and America weaker.
China unleashes a pandemic and then overtakes the U.S. as a result. That’s too horrible an outcome to contemplate and too dangerous for us. We ought to do everything we can to make certain it does not happen.
Let’s start by accurately describing what is happening. The Chinese coronavirus isn’t some fluke of globalization, it is the inevitable byproduct of it.
Exotic diseases and the mass disruption they cause are the built-in cost of connectedness, and they always will be. The people who told us there was no downside to living in a borderless world were lying, make them eat their words, strip them of their power, never listened to them again.
In fact, and this is still the hardest thing for official Washington to accept, this pandemic vindicates Donald Trump’s entire political thesis.
On the big things Trump was right — trade, immigration, manufacturing, globalization — these are the issues our ruling class assiduously ignores and has ignored for decades in favor of silly calculated distractions like gender warfare and race politics, things that divide us.
Trump, by contrast, ran on the issues that mattered and he won precisely because the public was tired of being lied to, and he should remember that.
The White House reaction to coronavirus so far has been uneven and the limp, but it doesn’t need to be. The blueprint for an effective response, response that not only protects this country, but improves it is right there in the President’s 2016 acceptance speech in the Republican Convention in Cleveland.
Americanism, not globalism, will be the credo, he said. We are going to start building and making things again. All we need to do is start believing in ourselves and in our country again, it is time to show the world that America is back, bigger and better and stronger than ever before.
There it is. That’s the governing agenda in the age of the Chinese coronavirus.
Abandon globalism, rebuild the country, make the things we need. A strong America is an independent America. There’s no other way.
