This week, President Donald Trump addressed the nation on our national response to the COVID-19 epidemic. As expected, the World Health Organization has declared the spread of this coronavirus variant a global pandemic.

There are two significant global beneficiaries of a “fear pandemic”-induced U.S. economic recession — and the consequences for Trump 2020. Those beneficiaries are Red China’s Xi Jinping and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

This week, Russia’s wink and nod with the Saudis, combined with China’s CV19 “fear pandemic,” caused the continued equity-market plummet. That has very real implications for our economy and, by extension, Donald Trump’s reelection prospects.

Having spent a couple of decades as an executive-branch appointee engaged in national-security planning and training with senior military officers, I can attest that our readiness models have, since World War II, involved preparation for war on two fronts — east and west. The economic impact China and Russia have had on the U.S. in the last week is unmistakably reminiscent of a Sino-Soviet reunion. If you could script surprise economic attacks on two fronts, it would look like events this week. And the impact of those “economic attacks,” combined with the dangerous agendas of domestic enemies of Liberty — the legions of political and media-propaganda leftists — has dealt a devastating blow to our economy and all working Americans and their families.

In our comprehensive coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak, “The Flu and You,” I included a reference to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who made this connection in January: “We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.” While Cotton was not suggesting that the coronavirus strain responsible for COVID-19 was bio-engineered and then intentionally released, the connection is certainly notable.

The fact is, the Wuhan market where COVID-19 was first contracted is just a few miles from China’s only P4 (Pathogen Level 4) super laboratory researching infectious diseases. The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is engaged in research on the Ebola, Nipah, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses — and, yes, coronavirus variants. By the way, the institute has clear ties to the PRC’s bioweapon programs.

We also noted that the Red Chinese directorate of disinformation, the “Information Department” of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was seeding Chinese social-media networks with rumors that the virus was actually developed by the U.S. and deliberately released in Wuhan. Our sources in the intelligence community conclude that such disinformation is designed to help the communist politburo to counter and deflect any claims by the U.S. that the release is associated with the PRC’s P4 labs in Wuhan.

In fact, China’s state-run media is now all but saying that the U.S. planted the coronavirus contagion in Wuhan. Chinese Ambassador Lin Songtian declared, “Although the epidemic first broke out in China, it did not necessarily mean that the virus is originated from China, let alone ‘made in China.’”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) adds, “The Chinese military portal Xilu.com recently published an article baselessly claiming that the virus is ‘a biochemical weapon produced by the U.S. to target China.”

Gordon Chang, national-security analyst and author of The Coming Collapse of China, declared, “This an all-out assault on the United States. … We all need to unite.”

Cotton notes: “The Chinese Communist Party has once again been caught red-handed covering up, suppressing, and censoring a serious public health risk, which could increasingly be a global public health risk. For weeks, China did not come clean about the coronavirus that they first said was only being passed from animals to humans in a seafood market in Wuhan in China.”

While nobody in the Trump administration is publicly claiming a connection between CV19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yet), this week National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien affirmed Cotton’s suppression assessment. “This outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” said O'Brien. “There’s lots of open-source reporting from China, from Chinese nationals, that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation … so that the word of this virus could not get out. It probably cost the world community two months [of prep time].”

According to O'Brien, “If we’d had those [two months] and been able to sequence the virus, and had the cooperation necessary from the Chinese — had a WHO team been on the ground, had a CDC team, which we’d offered, been on the ground — I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what’s now happening across the world. … We’ve sent our condolences to China, but now we’re in a place where we’re having to deal with the crisis here.”

Despite the pandemic threat, O'Brien said that Trump’s travel restrictions on China “bought the United States six to eight weeks to prepare.”

China’s suppression of the facts is because of concerns for communist-party stability. The politburo punished Dr. Li Wenliang, who first issued public warnings about the virus in Wuhan. Li is now deceased. Marion Smith, director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, notes that “on Chinese social media, people [are] referring to him as a 'martyr’ … for the cause of honesty and justice and free speech.”

Tang Yiming, a professor at a Wuhan university, risked saying last week, “If the words of Dr. Li had not been treated as rumors, if every citizen was allowed to practice their right to voice the truth, we would not be in such a mess. We would not have a national catastrophe with an international impact.” He is now subject to central-government rebuke. Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun, who was removed from his job in 2018, added, “The political system has collapsed under the tyranny, and a governance system of bureaucrats, which has taken [the communist party] more than 30 years to build, has floundered.”

Indeed, according to Chinese specialist Rob Spaulding, the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak is “a terrible blow, coming at exactly the wrong time for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.” Heritage Foundation China analyst Dean Cheng adds, “It is going to introduce a lot of political pressures on Xi. I’m not saying that the Chinese Communist Party is all of a sudden going to collapse. What’s going to happen is Xi Jinping’s detractors are going to have increased sway within the party, and then you begin to create fissures within the party, more so than they currently are.”

Predictably, Red Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang put a smiley face on Xi’s actions, declaring: “China’s experience … has set an exemplary standard. President Xi’s visit to Wuhan sent out the message of sure victory to the world.” Laughably, Geng insisted that the government has been “acting with openness, transparency, and a high sense of responsibility to global health security.” The communist government has even published and distributed a book about how well it handled the outbreak — and it has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic.

Tragically, there is no truth to any of Geng’s assertions.

Meanwhile, Xi and Putin can’t wipe those smirks off their faces as the U.S. economy — and millions of Americans — suffer.

Footnote: Maybe the institution that should be shut down is Congress … on second thought, don’t.

(Visit our comprehensive China Virus Pandemic response and recovery page, and see our related pages.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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