We’re stuck with the Wuhan coronavirus, whether we like it or not. Democrats have inflated the crisis totally out of proportion, choosing to run around in panic mode circles, while President Trump has the more practical answer — be prepared. There’s a treatment drug entering clinical trials, a vaccine is under development and effective measures are already in place.
Inflated fears stoked by doom and gloom reports
Now that Pandora’s box is open, there’s no way to stuff 2019-nCoV back into the test tube it escaped from. Scientists confirmed that a lab created “chimera” has been unleashed upon the world. The best strategy now is to accept the facts and avoid misinformation driven panic. The bad news is that the engineered bioweapon seems to have both an extended incubation period and the ability to spread before the host knows that they are even infected. The good news is that it’s not as lethal as the previous SARS outbreak. Hopefully, once it makes the rounds, it will die out and go away, like SARS did.
Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases blew everything out of proportion with her inflated pandemic fears. To put the word “pandemic” into perspective, one-third of all Americans are highly sensitive to common household chemicals, including perfumes or anything with a fragrance. By CDC standards, it’s a pandemic. Most Americans have no idea that it’s even considered a medical condition. It’s only when CNN starts talking about a “pandemic” that suddenly a cousin to the common cold gets treated like the Andromeda Strain.
One interesting thing to note is that the CDC and the media both stopped talking about 2019-nCoV. Since the reports naming it as a bioweapon, everyone is now calling it “COVID-19” which is actually the name of the disease caused by the 2019-nCoV bioweapon. They were going to rename the virus itself to “SARS-CoV-2” but that didn’t go over so well. Officials don’t want people to mentally associate it with the horrible fatality rate the last version had. They settled on “HCoV-19” as a new name for the virus to help frustrate web searches linking the virus to the labs it came from.
Liberals hit the panic button
Liberal Democrats can’t handle when President Trump actually gets on top of a crisis so they’re accusing him of bungling the virus response. San Francisco, for example, declared a state of emergency. They can’t keep the crap off their sidewalks but suddenly have a health emergency. According to the Mayor, London Breed, “although there are still zero confirmed cases in San Francisco residents, the global picture is changing rapidly, and we need to step-up preparedness.”
As Nancy Pelosi demonstrated, liberals insist on throwing more money at the problem so they can rake a cut off the top. That’s why liberals inflated the need for more funding. The White House is planning on asking for $1.25 billion to get things started, and they can shift some money over from overlapping Ebola preparedness budgets. After all, a virus is a virus. If they need more later, they plan to ask for it. To Pelosi and the Democrats, that’s not enough. How do you expect them to get any slush funds set up without a bigger budget. They won’t be able to rake any off the top if there isn’t any excess. They want to give Trump double that, so they can pull back half through back channel deals.
Speaking of money, the global stock markets continued tanking for a fifth day in a row. Investors are “concerned about how the coronavirus is weighing on consumer demand, manufacturing supply chains and major economies around the world.” Things are bad, but they aren’t terrible. At least not for anyone but China at this point. President Trump and a number of leading economists say what’s happening is more of a “correction.” The markets will recover but there’s no doubt they will all take a big hit. China has been virtually closed for business more than a month now. Any goods that come from there will be delayed for who knows how long.
All around the world the travel and tourism industry are crippled. Not only does that affect the airlines, all the industries that supply the resorts are feeling the pain. Diageo, who distills labels like Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Guinness and Captain Morgan, expect a $421 million sales loss this year. Food brand Danone will lose $109 million just this first quarter.
We’ve been prepared for years
According to our Secretary for Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, “We have been preparing for decades for the spread of a virus like this, so we know what we’re doing.” His advice to America is don’t panic. “We all need to take a bit of a deep breath here. The government is working on this. We want to treat everybody like adults. The president has insisted on radical transparency. That’s what the CDC and NIH were doing today, making sure that the American public knows we’ve aggressively contained this for the moment.”
Azar is certain we will have more cases sooner or later. “We cannot hermetically seal off the United States to a virus and we need to be realistic about that. We’ll have more cases in the United States, and we’ve been very transparent about that.” When we do, we’ll be ready. “We’re working with Congress to ensure we’ve got the right resourcing, and the president’s providing the aggressive leadership on this.”
On the technological front, there is a medicine in clinical trials and a vaccine under development. Antiviral drug remdesivir is being tested on “an American who was evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan.” It was “previously tested in humans for Ebola and in animals for MERS and SARS.” Meanwhile, Biotech company Moderna is working at emergency speed on a breakthrough vaccine. They just “shipped an experimental coronavirus vaccine to US government researchers.” Miraculously, they were able to do it “within 42 days of the company obtaining genetic information on the coronavirus.” It took almost two years to do that with SARS. Folks are wondering if the fact that Moderna is located in Boston has anything to do with the speed with which they came up with a vaccine. Boston is home to Harvard University, which is linked to the Wuhan Institute of Technology through a Biology professor who was just arrested for lying to the FBI about all the money the Chinese paid him to set up a secret bio lab in Wuhan.
