The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts infamously received a controversial $25 million from Democrats in the coronavirus relief package — and just hours later they told their performers that they will not be getting paychecks.
Nearly 100 National Symphony Orchestra musicians will receive their last paychecks on April 3.
In a Friday email from the Kennedy Center’s Covid-19 Advisory Committee, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the organization informed their employees that they will not be paid until it reopens.
“The Covid-19 Advisory Committee was broadsided today during our conversation with [Kennedy Center President] Deborah Rutter,” the email says. “Ms. Rutter abruptly informed us today that the last paycheck for all musicians and librarians will be April 3 and that we will not be paid again until the Center reopens.”
Shockingly, the email went out hours after President Trump signed the $2 trillion CARES Act, which was meant to support businesses continuing to pay their employees. The bill specifically says the money was meant to “cover operating expenses required to ensure the continuity of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and its affiliates, including for employee compensation and benefits, grants, contracts, payments for rent or utilities, fees for artists or performers.”
“Everyone should proceed as if their last paycheck will be April 3,” the email says. “We understand this will come [as a] shock to all of you, as it did to us.”
The Free Beacon reports:
“The Kennedy Center, which recently completed a $250 million renovation, received $41 million from taxpayers in 2019, but faced massive deficits after shutting its doors on March 12 due to the coronavirus outbreak. President Rutter went on a media blitz to highlight the cultural hub’s struggles, telling the Washington Post that she would forego her $1.2 million salary during the closure. Members of the orchestra chafed at the notion that they should do the same—particularly because they also face the prospect of losing their health benefits after May 31.”
If you want to see just how communicable SARS-CoV-2 is, look no further than a new – and alarming – heat map.
Tectonix, a geospatial data visualization platform, worked with location company X-Mode Social to create a map that “shows the impact of ignoring social distancing restrictions,” Fox News reports.
“Focusing on just one group of spring break revelers on part of one beach in mid-March when they left Fort Lauderdale, Fla., it quickly becomes obvious that the thousands of people who were at the beach ended up all over the country – in the Midwest, the Northeast, and other parts of the South.”
Watch the spread below.
Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin
COVID-19 was first detected in Italy on February 21st, and by March 8th all 60 million residents of the country were placed on lockdown. Despite this and other security measures, the virus’ toll has been devasating, particularly in the country’s north; Italy has seen over 3,400 deaths, more than any other country in the world. On March 19th, 475 patients died in the highest single-day death toll from any country.
Similar to the images we created of the outbreak in China, the heat maps above were constructed using data pulled from devices in Rome moving at low speeds. As can be clearly seen, the trend is the reverse of what we see in Shanghai. Between February 15th and March 18th, the amount of people moving in “normal” social patterns went down by over 80%. The drop is particularly drastic after a mandatory lockdown of numerous cities at the beginning of March, showing that people appear to be following government guidelines.
But the spread has been anomalous. Italy has about 60 million residents. Japan has more than 125 million. Yet the coronavirus COVID-19 has ripped through Italy, with more than 92,000 confirmed cases and 10,000 deaths by Saturday, while Japan has just 1,500 cases and 49 deaths, according to the latest numbers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
There are other cases of rapid containment of the virus as well. South Korea, with some 55 million people, somehow cut COVID-19 off before it got rolling. The death rate there is just 0.9% compared with nearly 8% in Italy. And Hong Kong, a city of 8 million, has also seen low numbers.
Some experts put the stunning differences down to testing. “South Korea has been conducting around 12,000-15,000 tests every day, and has the capacity to do 20,000 daily,” Time reported. “While it is hard to get accurate estimates, the CDC reports that only around 25,000 tests have been conducted in total nationwide by CDC or public health labs in the U.S. – compare this with the roughly 250,000 tests that South Korea has done to date.”
Then again, testing, despite what the mainstream media in the U.S. say, might not be a solution to flattening the curve. Japan has not conducted extensive testing for COVID-19 on its citizens. South Korea has done nearly 5,600 tests per million residents – third most in the world, according to ourworldindata.com – while Japan has done just 130 per million, putting the country in 21st place. Italy, meanwhile, is sixth at roughly 2,500 per million, while Hong Kong comes in 14th at about 700 per million.
No one really knows the true severity of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in China.
In fact, no one even knows exactly when it begin. The secretive Chinese government says the fist case of the virus was officially diagnosed on Dec. 1, 2019. Some experts say it could have been weeks earlier.
And now, even the reported number of deaths from China — especially Wuhan, which was ground zero for the virus — are in question.
China has 81,999 confirmed cases, at least according to John Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Of those cases, there were 3,299 deaths.
In the Hubei province, home to Wuhan, a city of about 8 million, there were reportedly 3,177 deaths. But massive deliveries of cremation urns to Wuhan have raised new questions about the communist country’s reporting.
“One funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, according to the Chinese media outlet Caixin,” Fox News reported.
“The long lines and stacks of ash urns greeting family members of the dead at funeral homes in Wuhan are spurring questions about the true scale of coronavirus casualties at the epicenter of the outbreak, renewing pressure on a Chinese government struggling to control its containment narrative,” Bloomberg News reported.
The families of those who succumbed to the virus in the central Chinese city, where the disease first emerged in December, were allowed to pick up their cremated ashes at eight local funeral homes starting this week. As they did, photos circulated on Chinese social media of thousands of urns being ferried in.
Outside one funeral home, trucks shipped in about 2,500 urns on both Wednesday and Thursday, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin. Another picture published by Caixin showed 3,500 urns stacked on the ground inside. It’s unclear how many of the urns had been filled.
People who answered the phone at six of the eight funeral homes in Wuhan said they either did not have data on how many urns were waiting to be collected, or were not authorized to disclose the numbers. Calls were not answered at the other two.
Some families said they had been forced to wait for several hours to pick up the ashes. The photos circulated as mass deaths from the virus spiked in cities across the west, including Milan, Madrid and New York, where hospitals were erecting tents to handle the overflow as global infections soar past 500,000, with 24,000 dead.
President Trump is an amazing leader and his poll numbers are soaring during this Coronavirus pandemic.
On Saturday, the President spoke at the departure of the USNS Comfort from Norfolk, Virginia.
The Naval hospital is headed to New York City to help assist with the Coronavirus pandemic ravaging the state.
President Trump was beaming with pride and said the USNS Comfort is equipped with “12 operating rooms, 1,000 hospital beds, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy…two oxygen producing plants and a helicopter deck which will be used very actively.”
“This great ship behind me is a 70,000 ton message of hope and solidarity to the incredible people of New York,” Trump said, standing in front of the Comfort. “We’re here for you, we’re fighting for you, and we’re with you all the way.”
“It also bears our military’s greatest weapon of all, a crew of nearly 1,200 outstanding members of the United States Navy,” said Trump.
This is what a true leader looks like.
WATCH:
Naval hospital ship USNS Comfort equipped with:
12 operating rooms 1,000 hospital beds Medical laboratory
"It also bears our military’s greatest weapon of all, a crew of nearly 1,200 outstanding members of the United States Navy." pic.twitter.com/SI6hQa69L3
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) March 28, 2020
Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson painted the grimmest of pictures: 2.2 million dead people in the U.S., 500,000 in the U.K.
His Imperial College London model was heavily cited, including by The New York Times, and has helped guide government decision-making, which has occasionally bordered on hysteria.
But Ferguson also said that things could change if governments took strong action to slow the virus and “flatten the curve” — the upward swing of the number of infected.
Earlier this week, Ferguson — who himself has contracted the virus — testified before the Houses of Parliament and said the death toll in the U.K. could be less than 20,000.
“He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him ‘reasonably confident’ the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower,” New Scientist reported.
The need for intensive care beds will get very close to capacity in some areas, but won’t be breached at a national level, said Ferguson. The projections are based on computer simulations of the virus spreading, which take into account the properties of the virus, the reduced transmission between people asked to stay at home and the capacity of hospitals, particularly intensive care units.
The Imperial model has played a key role in informing the UK’s coronavirus strategy, but this approach has been criticised by some. “To be fair, the Imperial people are the some of the best infectious disease modellers on the planet,” Paul Hunter at the University of East Anglia, UK, told New Scientist last week. “But it is risky to put all your eggs in a single basket.”
In his testimony, Ferguson said more people than expected likely have the virus (for most people, there are only mild symptoms). “I should admit, we’ve always been sensitive in the analysis in the modeling to a variety of levels or values to those quantities. What we’ve been seeing, though, in Europe in the last week or two is a rate of growth of the epidemic which was faster than we expected from early data in China. And so we are revising our quotes, our central best estimate of the reproduction… something more, a little bit above of the order of three or a little bit above rather than about 2.5.”
With more people than expected, the death drops (since the fatality rate is hovering around 1%). Researchers at Oxford say possibly half the U.K. population has already been infected, The Financial Times reported.
On March 17, Ferguson and his colleagues issued catastrophic predictions that if the U.K. did nothing more than 500,000 citizens would die from coronavirus, and that even with some mitigation efforts it “would still result in about 250,000 deaths and completely overwhelm intensive care in the NHS,” the BBC reported.
But with the new numbers, Ferguson said: “There will be some areas that are extremely stressed but we are reasonably confident — which is all we can be at the current time — that at the national level we will be within capacity.”
How Mayor De Blasio Botched NYC’s Response To COVID-19
Even as liberals whine about President Trump’s petty feuds with reporters and his newfound insistence that the country – or at least sizable parts of it – get ‘back to work’ by Easter (April 12), his approval rating has continued to climb, as Americans rally around the president during times of crisis (and, to be fair, Trump stepped up during that one Friday press conference where he sounded reassuring presidential, even if his promises about ramping up testing ultimately never came true).
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose laughable presidential campaign is still not too far in the rearview mirror. Remember how even de Blasio’s own wife expressed doubts about his suitability for the presidency? Well, as Politico documents in an in-depth report about de Blasio’s handling of NYC’s response to COVID-19, during the weeks before the city emerged as the country’s biggest hot spot, even as the suburbs immediately surrounding the city succeeded in quelling outbreaks of their own, de Blasio dithered and put off critical decisions.
The result was he waited too long to close schools and way too long to close restaurants and other "non-essential" businesses. The result is that the city’s hospitals are now being overwhelmed faster than any other hospital system in the country, like the hospital in Elmhurst where 13 people died from COVID-19 in a single day earlier this week.
All of this isn’t a coincidence: It’s a direct result of de Blasio’s decision not to take the outbreak seriously, and to wait for "more information" before deciding on critical closures.
Even once the threat at hand had been made clear, de Blasio made critical mistakes during the response, including failing to outline a response protocol for municipal employees that kept thousands coming into the office longer than they needed to.
Meanwhile, the gaffe-prone mayor, who is one of the least popular big-city mayors in the country, and is perhaps best known for his long-time feud with Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor who has emerged as a national star of the outbreak, continued to do what he does best: produce embarrassing gaffes. His piece de resistance was going to the gym the morning he ordered all non-essential businesses (including gyms) to close.
De Blasio, who uses a public gym because he’s a "man of the people" (okay pal like there’s not a gym at Gracy Mansion? You’re wasting municipal resources to cart your ass back to Brooklyn for these workouts) responded by claiming "There was almost no one there. I had heard that information prior..I suspected that we were all going to be about to close them down, and this would be the last time to get some exercise.”
There was almost no one there because most responsible New Yorkers were practicing social distancing, including avoiding public places. What kind of message does it send when the mayor doesn’t obey his own guidance.
And it was exactly these types of mixed messages that hampered the mayors response and proved his critics – who insist that he is an inept administrator and even worse politician who is only in office thanks to the well-timed implosions of his political rivals – correct.
Some even questioned whether the death of a Brooklyn principle, who succumbed to the virus this past week, is directly a result of de Blasio’s reluctance to close the schools even after the teachers unions, members of his staff and health officials pushed him to. His reason for the delay? The urgings of the city hospital system administrator, who urged him to have a plan in place for the students because she worried it would affect staffing levels at city hospitals if parents had nothing to do with their kids.
To that end, de Blasio kept schools open for days after parents, teachers and members of his own administration urged him to close them, touching off a feud with the teachers union, which chastised the health department this week after a 36-year-old principal died from the coronavirus.
Three city officials familiar with his decision-making process said he was relying on advice from Mitchell Katz, head of the city’s public hospital system, who worried school closures would compromise staffing levels at hospitals during an emergency. De Blasio was also concerned about the lopsided impact it would have on low-income students and single-parent households.
He insisted schools would remain open during TV interviews on the morning of March 15, even as he was preparing to announce a system-wide closure later that day.
"You know I hated closing the schools. I thought it was going to cause all sorts of other problems and of course it has," de Blasio said during a radio interview Friday morning. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been granted public hero status during this crisis, similarly reversed his stance on closing schools within a matter of hours that Sunday.
And then there was that senseless feud with Cuomo’s office over the "shelter in place" order, some nonsensical semantics that is a moot point now: everybody’s staying inside – people are only leaving to get food and other essential things.
He also dithered when it came to canceling the St. Patrick’s Day parade, waiting far longer than other national mayors.
He and de Blasio were also at odds over whether to require New Yorkers to “shelter in place,” an argument of semantics that went on for days as residents were left without clear guidance. De Blasio was calling for the policy earlier than Cuomo, while also signaling confusion about its implementation.
"What is going to happen with folks who have no money? How are they going to get food? How are they going to get medicines?” he asked during a news conference on March 17. "There’s a lot of unanswered questions."
In another example of his mixed messaging, he has said he will make a “first attempt” to reopen schools by April 20, while also calling President Donald Trump’s push to bring businesses back by Easter, which falls on April 12, “false hope."
Yet on Friday de Blasio tweeted that April 5 is “the day the strains we’re seeing right now on medical supplies and personnel could overwhelm us if we don’t get the help we need. This is a race against time."
De Blasio spent days deliberating over whether to cancel the St. Patrick’s Day parade, even after other cities canceled theirs, did not provide clear guidance over a municipal work-from-home policy, according to multiple agency leaders, and argued with library officials who wanted to close their branches before he was ready.
The mayor also played down fears that city hospitals might face shortages of space and equipment and supplies, all of which now appears to be happening.
Shortly after the World Health Organization deemed the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, the mayor was asked to respond to expected recommendations about a possible quarantine.
"I think we can say at this point in time we’re looking at all the guidance, but with a bit of a trust-but-verify worldview,” he said.
He also said the city’s hospitals were ready for an influx of patients. “We have 1,200 beds that we can activate readily,” he said on March 8.
"Just the fact that you’ll turn off a lot of non-essential things and turn all that talent and capacity to a crisis, should give New Yorkers a lot of confidence that, you know, even with hundreds of cases, we’d be able to handle it."
This week The New York Times chronicled the nightmarish scenes from one of the city’s public hospitals, where 13 people died in a single day.
Privately, people across City Hall have begun to wonder whether de Blasio’s week of delayed action put people in danger.
And then there’s de Blasio’s decision to criticize President Trump’s push to reopen parts of the country by Easter while de Blasio promises to take a look at reopening the schools on April 20.
To be sure, some outside experts who worked with the mayor defended his approach, and even a former director of his public works department defended the mayor’s response, saying he didn’t think he would have done anything differently. Others disagree.
And at this point, with the NYPD reporting the death of the first detective on Saturday morning as both the number of confirmed cases and deaths climbs, it’s beginning to seem like the proof will be in the pudding.
Videos of security forces beating quarantine violators with sticks and batons in India flooded social media this week. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the total shutdown of India for 21 days on Tuesday night to curb the spread of the Chinese coronavirus in the nation of 1.3 billion people.
Beginning Wednesday, the world’s largest lockdown has already produced alarming reports of severe abuses of power, including the physical assault of citizens by police for violating the strict social distancing mandates.
Many of the victims in the footage appear to be walking to food markets to stock up on basic necessities needed during the lockdown. In other video clips circulated online, police officers are seen appearing to force people to perform squats, sit-ups, and push-ups.
During the lockdown, Modi banned all social, political, sports, entertainment, academic, cultural, and religious gatherings. He also suspended transport services including air, rail, and roadways. Under the order, people could face up to two years in jail and an unspecified financial penalty if they flout the rules, Modi said Tuesday.
India will soon likely participate in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) “solidarity trial” to develop potential drugs to combat the Chinese coronavirus, Indian health officials announced at a press briefing on Friday. India did not participate in the trial earlier because “our numbers were small and our contribution would have looked minuscule,” explained Raman R. Gangakhedkar, Head of Epidemiology and Communicable diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
After Modi announced the 21-day national lockdown on Tuesday, some questioned how Indians living in slums and other low-income areas would cope with the quarantine, which threatens not just their health but their livelihood. “[I]t’s going to be very hard on the poor and vulnerable,” said virologist Shahid Jameel of the shutdown on Tuesday.
Conditions in these poorer communities — including crowded quarters, weak public services, and informal labor — allow the Chinese coronavirus ample opportunity to spread. The economic risk to the poor compounds the crisis.
Many in India fear losing their jobs due to the lockdown. This concern has been voiced most recently in Brazil, another highly populous nation facing an impending Chinese coronavirus outbreak and subsequent quarantine. In Brazil, nearly 15 million people live in crowded, often unsanitary slums. According to one poll carried out across Brazil recently, 72 percent of slum residents said they had no income if they lost their source of livelihood.
At press time Friday, India had 887 cases of Chinese coronavirus and 20 deaths.
A 38-year-old Michigan man with no underlying conditions contracted coronavirus last week and was successfully treated with the drug combination being touted by President Trump.
Jim Santilli told talk radio host Steve Gruber he is “living proof” the combination of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin works.
Santilli said he became seriously ill March 18 “with severe cardiac and respiratory issues” and was admitted to Henry Ford Macomb Hospital in metro Detroit.
According to Gruber, “Santilli said the biggest problem was waiting for test results that took four days to come back. In the meantime his condition worsened by the hour, and he thought he was going to die.”
“Santilli says he was slowly drowning and was convinced he ‘would not live until midnight.’ That’s when doctors made a decision he says changed everything,” Gruber said.
The survivor said the drug combination began to work “within a few hours.”
Santilli credited Trump for his survival.
“Donald Trump recommending that medication combination saved my life and a lot of other people’s lives,” he told Gruber.
Santilli criticized Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) for her recent threat against doctors and pharmacists, and believed it is a “terrible decision,” adding, “She is sentencing people to death.”
Whitmer sent a letter to medical professionals on March 24:
Prescribing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine without further proof of efficacy for treating COVID-19 or with the intent to stockpile the drug may create a shortage for patients with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or other ailments for which chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are proven treatments. Reports of this conduct will be evaluated and may be further investigated for administrative action. Prescribing any kind of prescription must also be associated with medical documentation showing proof of the medical necessity and medical condition for which the patient is being treated. Again, these are drugs that have not been proven scientifically or medically to treat COVID-19.
According to Gruber:
Santilli added that he isn’t the only one that is alive because of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin either. He said the medical staff told him other patients were also responding well to the treatment and their lives are also being saved.
Gruber told Breitbart News on Friday he believes Whitmer is angling to be Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee, and that his driving her opposition to Trump’s actions.
Listen to Gruber’s full interview with Santilli here.
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. Followhim on Twitter and like him on Facebook.
Despite outrage over Beijing’s initial coverup of the Chinese coronavirus outbreak, the country is already attempting to leverage the global pandemic at a time the U.S. finds itself struggling to contain the disease.
Below, in no particular order, are four major ways China is gaining ground from the coronavirus crisis.
1 – China is using the pandemic to position itself as a global response leader while the U.S. shifts to survival mode.
China greatly suffered at the start of the pandemic, including during the period it was actively engaged in a coverup of the virus. Now that the crisis seems to have somewhat stabilized in China, the country is positioning itself as the global leader in helping other nations respond to the Chinese coronavirus outbreak.
And that response offers China a unique opportunity to extend its tentacles by massively expanding its international influence and playing the role of superpower precisely at a time the U.S. has been struggling to contain the virus. In just one example, China has been supplying large quantities of masks to hard-hit countries while the U.S. is fast at work trying to produce enough masks for its own domestic requirements.
“This could be the first major global crisis in decades without meaningful U.S. leadership and with significant Chinese leadership,” noted Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Axios reported that Chinese think tanks are floating the idea of a “Beijing-led global health organization that would rival the [World Health Organization].”
“The Chinese government has been trying to project Chinese state power beyond its borders and establish China as a global leader, not dissimilar to what the U.S. government has been doing for the better part of a century, and the distribution of medical aid is part of this mission,” argued Dr. Yangyang Cheng, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University and columnist for SupChina.
Indeed, China has pledged or provided aid far and wide, from Greece to Italy, Japan, Iraq, Serbia, Spain and even Peru, in an attempt, as the New York Timescharacterized it, “to reposition itself not as the authoritarian incubator of a pandemic but as a responsible global leader at a moment of worldwide crisis.”
“The coronavirus pandemic has become a battleground,” said Bruno Maçães, a former secretary of state for European Affairs in Portugal. “I see China focused on using the crisis as an opportunity to play up the superiority of its model.”
“I think this also shows what climate change could look like in the future,” Maçães added, “less an opportunity for global cooperation and more the background for geopolitical competition, with every major actor trying to do better than its rivals.”
Peter Rough, former research director for President George W. Bush and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, questioned China’s motives in selectively providing aid to certain countries.
Take, for example, the decision by Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to donate 800,000 masks to the Netherlands. Why would the conglomerate, known for its closeness to the Chinese government, display such benevolence toward a country which, at the time, had hardly any coronavirus cases? Surely it could not be because the Netherlands’ auction of fifth-generation (5G) mobile licenses is slated for June, and because the Dutch still have to decide whether to exclude Huawei from its 5G networks over espionage concerns.
Or consider Italy, where China has sent doctors and donated ventilators that have been in short supply. Does China’s newfound interest in Italy’s well-being stem from genuine concern, or from that of Rome’s status as one of Europe’s biggest supporters of the Belt and Road Initiative?
Perhaps, then, China’s donation of 500,000 masks to Greece is an uncharacteristically generous gift. Or is it nothing but a gift horse, part of much longer campaign that has showered Greece with trade and investment? Already, Greece has been a reliable supporter of China in Brussels, which Beijing increasingly counts on to veto any measures China considers to be against its interests—on trade, security, or human rights, for example.
China may also be seeking to drive a wedge in Europe where it has focused some of its strategically offered aid on non-EU countries at a time when EU members are closing their borders.
In one of many examples, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told reporters that he penned a letter to his “brother and friend” Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, asking for medical aid, writing that “the only country that can help us is China.”
“European solidarity does not exist,” Vucic complained. “That was a fairy tale on paper. I believe in my brother and friend Xi Jinping, and I believe in Chinese help.”
2 – America and the rest of the world rely on China for pharmaceuticals, a phenomenon Beijing is already starting to leverage.
Like the rest of the world, the U.S. is perilously dependent on China for the ingredients in critical drugs since those products are cheaper there and China is subject to fewer regulations. This puts the Chinese Communist Party in a pivotal role in controlling the supply chain of the world’s pharmaceuticals.
About 80 percent of the active ingredients used in U.S. drugs are believed to come from China and India. Perhaps most dangerously, China is the only manufacturer of some generic antibiotics.
Even India, which is responsible for about one-fifth of the world’s generic drug exports, receives most of its raw material imports from China. Due to Chinese supply chain disruptions under the coronavirus pandemic, India recently announced it will need to temporarily suspend exports of 26 essential drugs and drug ingredients, including some antibiotics.
If China turned off its international pharmaceutical supply chain then “military hospitals and clinics would cease to function within months, if not days,” warned Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.”
Already, an article in the Xinhua state-run media agency considered a mouthpiece for the CCP hinted at holding back drugs from the U.S. The article warned China had the ability to impose pharmaceutical export controls which could throw the U.S into “the mighty sea of coronavirus.”
Sen. Marco Rubio said the Chinese warning proves China feels that during the coronavirus crisis “they can threaten to cut us off from our pharmaceutical supplies, they could trigger a domestic problem here that would make it difficult or us to confront them.”
“It’s a tremendous amount of leverage,” Rubio said.
Holly Strom and Kenneth Schell, both past presidents of the California State Pharmacy Board, documented:
The FDA has identified roughly 20 drugs that are solely made in or derive their active pharmaceutical ingredients from China. The U.S. is partly reliant on Chinese raw ingredients for 370 medicines deemed “essential” by the World Health Organization. **According to one research study, the prices on pharmaceutical raw materials have grown by up to 50% since the outbreak began.
Despite the well-publicized threat, reliance on Chinese medications has only increased in recent years. According to a U.S. government report released last year, U.S. imports of Chinese pharmaceutical materials grew by nearly one-quarter in 2017 from the prior year to nearly $4 billion.
While it’s quite late in the game, several prominent U.S. lawmakers are now advocating for the U.S. to take back control of the drug industry. Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Mike Gallagher introduced the Protecting Our Pharmaceutical Supply Chain From China Act aimed at ending U.S. dependence on Chinese drugs.
Among other things, the legislation offers incentives for manufactures to produce drugs domestically and requires federal entities to cut off the purchase of drugs with Chinese ingredients by 2025.
3 – China’s so-called debt diplomacy may bring it more control as Chinese coronavirus puts global economies into a tailspin.
China’s expansionist Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and other Chinese moves have long positioned China as a debt collector that can use the payments it is owed to influence those countries in its debt. With coronavirus causing worldwide economic turmoil, China may find itself with even more economic control over certain countries even though Beijing will take a big hit from its inability to collect debts.
Azeem Ibrahim, research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, took note of what he described as China’s “debt-based model of imperial control” and how the Chinese coronavirus outbreak could expand that influence.
As these countries frantically attempt to manage the economic and financial consequences of the pandemic, they will struggle to service their debts to Beijing—which will expect more favors, and the ceding of more sovereignty, as the cost of debt relief.
…
Economic suffering is inevitable; as unemployment numbers grow and small businesses stare down the barrel of bankruptcy, it’s already arrived for many. Some may be more resilient than others, but dependent developing countries such as Liberia and Niger are going to be especially vulnerable. Their capacity to respond to the pandemic will be constrained by their relatively limited resources. And preexisting exposure to debt can put them in a real bind when forced to make choices between the lives of their citizens and becoming even more vulnerable to powerful creditors, most notably China.
The role of debt in China’s expansion of its sphere of influence along the Belt and Road is already well documented and understood. So-called “debt-trap diplomacy” has already seen Sri Lanka effectively lose sovereign control of one port on the Indian Ocean. Djibouti, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Montenegro have all been identified as at risk of similarly losing sovereign control over areas of interest to China, as they all already owe more than 45 percent of their gross domestic products to Beijing over Belt and Road projects.
In the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, there are indications China is already using the coronavirus pandemic to reposition its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a development strategy with focus on securing Chinese infrastructure projects in over 70 countries, including across Europe, Asia and Africa. China critics see the Belt and Road Initiative as a Trojan horse scheme to expand Chinese dominance globally, in part using a strategy of low bids to ensure successful tenders.
In the wake of the pandemic, China is offering low-cost financing and special foreign exchange liquidity loans for companies involved the BRI, Beijing announced earlier this month. This as the BRI seems to have hit a short-term roadblock because many countries put a freeze on labor coming from China over fears the coronavirus could be spread.
While some analysts say China’s massive international infrastructure project might actually take a short term knock from coronavirus, others believe the increased demand for Chinese cooperation on healthcare and virus response will open doors for BRI’s ultimate expansion.
Matt Ferchen, head of global China research with the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Germany, saw both sides of the coin on the BRI issue. “That China would see belt and road as a natural platform for extending such public diplomacy efforts, especially in developing countries, is not a surprise,” Ferchen remarked. “The underlying contradiction, however, is that belt and road is a symbol of Chinese-led efforts at promoting the benefits of connectivity, while the virus has exposed the risks and weaknesses of connectivity on a global scale,” he said.
4. China seems to be implementing a post-virus strategy to gain ground from the U.S.
As long as the U.S. economy remains in question, China will seek to take advantage in the perceived power vacuum created during the pandemic – likely at the expense of the U.S.
“China has a long-standing strategic plan that’s focused on co-opting nodes and systems in which it thinks it can claim coercive power over the United States and the global system,” said Emily de La Bruyere, co-founder of Horizon Advisory, a consulting firm that tracks China. “Now that the world is shutting down, China sees its opportunity to move in much more quickly and aggressively to those nodes and systems.”
“They have a post-virus strategy, and it is already underway,” added Nate Picarsic, the other co-founder of Horizon Advisory.
Citing Chinese government and media sources, Horizon issued a report last week documenting “Beijing intends to reverse recent US efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at US-Europe relations.”
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin penned a piece titled, “How China is planning to use the coronavirus crisis to its advantage.”
“In Washington, there’s a lot of talk about how the coronavirus crisis could increase the push for more economic decoupling with China. But the Chinese government is thinking about it in exactly the opposite way. Beijing is preparing to use the crisis to advance China’s economic strategy against us. We better start taking notice,” Rogin warned.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein_
President Donald Trump spoke in Norfolk, Virginia, on Saturday, stating that he is considering a short-term quarantine of the New York City area to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“I am now considering and will make a decision very quickly, very shortly, a quarantine because it’s such a hot area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut,” Trump said. “We’ll be announcing that very soon.”
The president traveled to Norfolk to see off the USNS Comfort hospital ship as it heads to New York City.
He said the quarantine would not affect truckers making deliveries or traveling through the areas and that it would not affect shipping to the City.
The president also discussed the issue with reporters outside the White House.
“We might not have to do it, but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine — short term, two weeks — on New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut,” Trump said.
He stated that many New Yorkers were traveling to Florida, raising the possibility of spreading the virus to the state.
“They’re having problems down in Florida. A lot of New Yorkers are going down. We don’t want that,” Trump said. “Heavily infected.”
The president said he would rather not institute a quarantine but that it might be necessary and that he was speaking with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“You know, I’d rather not do it, but we may need it,” he said.
12 operating rooms
