Reality on Covid-19 and world's politics

The great reality about Covid-19 is that it wasn't a conspiracy theory for the Chinese economic war and disrupture of world's economy, but for sure China benefit of that while the fall of the financial actions and hedge funds world wide. With the fall of actions, Chinese financial warfare use it to buy cheap actions of companies and be surplus of world banks' finances, and with this the Chinese capital presence will be constant, with their money devalued and the Dollar's rise everywhere.

In 90's in the White Book of Chinese Defense, they raised a banner for economic warfare and constantly rising for 20 to 40 years to be the surplus of the world's capital, and it matched with the raising constantly exporation of Chinese products by internet channels, as Alibaba and other, as DHGate. 

For sure Chine will benefit of the world's pandemic situation to 'invade' Europe and America.

Let's just remember 2007 and three years before the H5N1 and H1N1 viruses when world wide population were claiming about bioterrorism, still close to 2001 and War on Terror blamming on Biochemichal Warfare accusings on Sadam and other Islamist governments. Same problematic of conspiratorial personnel.

Lethality of H1N1 or other kinds of flu are bigger than the lethality of Covid-19.

At this time we like under bankrupt and economical collapse and for sure governments and local militias will take it for their advantages, promoting their policy. The skeptical believes that it is a normal course for the society. At this time, christian organizations, evoking the second comming of Christ. Neoliberal and Neocon personnel tries to promote a mediatic war against China and the population is with no real information about the situation, as each media vehicle follows their own ideologial bias, that spread news according to their own interests.

H1N1 was another world's healthy problem that was solved with the means necessary to put an end to the exponential growing cases. Same of the Covid-19, population need to calm down and wait and not live like it was Walking Dead, stocking food and alchool and living with fear, preaching about the Egypt plagues and end of the World.

Each new flu that rises they need time to study the DNA of virus and also need time to population acquire antibodies and absorb the genetic of virus, getting immune to it.

H1N1, for me, was a much more serious virus, not with the power of transmission, but with the strenght of virus, as Covid-19 is an easy virus to get weak and murdered.

The real terrorism is the psychological terrorism that media spread, governments sprading all the time blaming China of a communist action against the America and Europe, raising xenophobia. Governments that use the internet to self promotion keep spreading hate speech. And the exponential growing of idiocy in society, make people belive every gossip new they read at social medias, promoting a psychological warfare and terrorism in society, that governments take advantage on it.

HIV virus is much more lethal and governments pretend to forget it and let society die sick for crowd control and political operations. The focus on flu make other points on sexual diseases are being sided.

Now, the politics go global, for sure, to close borders between countries and restrict the migration, than the virus can be contained for a while before the immunization process can be really effective.

Countries polices are receiving order to use the progressive force to society, obligating citizens to be home or force them to go to quarantine. Common methoods between social calamities and social chaos. Not an indivudial right, but the communities rights are have to be taken as priority.

Coronavirus Is Putting the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile to the Test. Here’s the Surprising Story Behind the Stash

https://time.com/5800393/coronavirus-national-stockpile-history/

Amid questions about whether the U.S. has enough medical supplies to confront the spread of COVID-19, the Strategic National Stockpile — the nation’s emergency pharmacy and medical supplies stash — is further stocking up, recently ordering 500 million N95 respirator masks.

If that news is starting to sound like something out of science fiction to you, well, you wouldn’t be far off.

As Ali S. Khan, a former head of the agency that oversees the stockpile, points out to TIME, it was a novel about a virus that, two decades ago, helped guide President Bill Clinton’s thinking about how prepared the U.S. was, in real life, for an infectious disease outbreak. The result of that thinking was the Strategic National Stockpile.

In the novel — Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event, published Oct. 21, 1997 — a 29-year-old Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pathologist hunts for the cause of a virus, nicknamed Cobra, that was manufactured by a mad scientist-cum-terrorist and is spreading throughout New York City. Victims first come down with common cold symptoms that morph into a “brainpox” in which “otherwise decorous human beings to gobble their bottom lips, bite off their own fingers, and in extreme cases to ‘enucleate’ themselves (remove one’s own eyeball) spontaneously,” per the New York Times review back then.

Preston’s 1994 nonfiction book The Hot Zone, and the 1995 Dustin Hoffman movie it inspired, Outbreak, had already raised public awareness of Ebola. Now, Preston was doing the same for bioterrorism. While the plausibility of a virus like Cobra existing was swiftly debunked, fears about national emergency preparedness were very real.

“In April 1998, as a result of having read the Richard Preston novel, The Cobra Event, the president held a meeting with a group of scientists and Cabinet members to discuss the threat of bioterrorism,” the scholar Martha Crenshaw wrote in a 2006 terrorism-studies anthology. “The briefing impressed Clinton so much that he asked the experts to brief senior officials in DOD and HHS.”

Crenshaw cites a May 21, 1998, Washington Post article noting that, while the U.S. had stockpiles of antibiotics for military troops, there was no such stash for civilians — and that some Washington officials “expressed surprise at how fast the president and his National Security Council staff had moved” to change that.

By Oct. 21, 1998, Clinton signed into law a roughly $51 million budget for “for pharmaceutical and vaccine stockpiling activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” Its first order of business was to prepare for Y2K, in the event a computer glitch disrupted medical supply chains.

In a Jan. 21, 1999, Oval Office interview with the New York Times, two days after highlighting bioterrorism prep in his State of the Union address, Clinton said that germ warfare “keeps me awake at night,” and noted that it wasn’t just a novel that got him thinking about preparedness. Several real-world incidents in the ’90s had also made him aware of the need to boost the nation’s emergency preparedness programs. Those incidents ranged from terrorist attacks on American embassies in Africa and the Middle East and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 to the Oklahoma City bombing and the sarin attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995.

And yet Preston’s novel proved a valuable lens through which Clinton Cabinet members could discuss the administration’s ramped up emergency preparedness efforts. In a February 1999 article for the first National Symposium on Medical and Public Health Response to Bioterrorism, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala led off with the book, arguing that it “raises a logical question: How do we successfully contain and combat the threat of bioterrorism?” One answer, she said, is “We are creating, and will be maintaining, an unprecedented national stockpile of drugs and vaccines for civilian use in case of a bioterrorist attack.”

But in TIME’s Nov. 8, 1999, special issue on “questions for the new century”, Richard Preston himself noted that bioterrorism wasn’t the only reason to worry about preparedness for a virus. After all, a virus could do the terrorizing on its own, he noted.

“Viruses are moving into the human species because there are more of us all the time. From a virus’ point of view, we look like a free lunch that’s getting bigger….” he wrote. “Now wire the bombs together. People travel rapidly by air plane, carrying diseases with them as they fly. The human species has become a biological Internet with fast connections. The bionet will will get faster in the next century — that is, more people will travel by air more often, increasing the speed at which diseases move. If a tropical megacity gets hit with a new virus, New York City and Los Angeles will see it days or weeks later.”

As the nation and the world face COVID-19, the warnings of two decades ago seem timelier than ever.

The coronavirus: Blueprint for bioterrorism

BY GRADY MEANS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 03/09/20 12:01 PM EDT  161THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/485921-the-coronavirus-blueprint-for-bioterrorismRegardless of the source of the coronavirus, it is now a roadmap for future bioterrorism. The damage has been quick and enormous — much greater than 9/11 — and worldwide. The responses have been predictable and ineffective. And the cost of a potential weapon such as this is close to zero. It represents the perfect asymmetric warfare strategy, and there should be little doubt these lessons are being studied carefully by military planners in North Korea, Tehran, Moscow, Beijing and desert caves throughout the Middle East.   

The conventional, and most likely, view of the COVID-19 outbreak is that it originated in Wuhan, China, near the most sophisticated Chinese bioweapons lab and then proceeded into the world from there, leaving people to guess whether it originated in the lab and leaked, came from wild bats or snakes, or came from an exotic meat market.

But now, or in the future, there is another possibility: an intentional bioweapons attack from a non-state (or, perhaps, hidden, state) actor, and that represents a serious threat that America must take seriously.

ISIS and other terrorist groups long have sought effective bioweapons as the “poor man’s nuclear weapon.” The most extreme terrorists have developed a military doctrine that a deadly global pandemic could kill a large portion of the world’s population but, most importantly, destroy the economies, governments and technical infrastructures of the world’s most advanced economies, and create a huge advantage for surviving cultures with large populations capable of living, or even thriving, at a primitive economic and cultural level.

These non-state (and many rogue-state) groups have access to bioweapon technology; could, relatively easily and cheaply obtain MERS or SARS or other virulent strains; and figure out human subject-based experiment/refine/distribute systems to launch an attack.

A clever terrorist strategy — and our enemies are extremely clever — to launch the current crisis would have been to send an infected radical Chinese citizen to carry the virus to Wuhan and launch it secretly. Predictably, the People’s Republic of China bureaucracy would move slowly to deal with it and then cover it up. It could reach critical mass in Wuhan and spread across China and internationally before there was any serious response. 

Terrorists could, and would, go on to plant the virus randomly across the world with additional infected agents. These would be done in small, random patches (i.e., Italy, Iran, the U.S. West Coast, and so forth). It would leave everyone confused and guessing. “Experts” and media speculation would add to the confusion and panic.

All of this could be done with limited funding (less than $100,000 and fewer than 50 people — the fewer, the better for secrecy). The results would be predictable:

Economic mayhem: A little effort leading to immediate, multitrillion-dollar losses for the American market, far exceeding the entire economic impact of 9/11 in one week, as well as economic crises in China and elsewhere.

Political mayhem: President Trump would try to maintain order and reduce panic while the media and his opposition would diminish administration efforts and stoke uncertainty. The Chinese especially would be off-balance because of the huge hit to their economy and the potential political instability, not to mention quiet worldwide suspicion that an accidental leak from the Chinese lab might be responsible, and they would respond with more secrecy and suppression.

Social mayhem: Distrust of “foreigners,” hoarding, etc.

Even if the “threat” did little real public health damage, the economic and political impact would be substantial.

It also could be a huge money-maker for terrorists or other bad actors to pay for future attacks. Anyone controlling the pace, location and impact of the virus could short the markets in advance, and, literally, could have made trillions of dollars over the past few weeks. It raises an interesting question: Did any experienced, large-scale, short-sellers (e.g., China, Russia, North Korea) take a huge position over these past few weeks, probably clandestinely? Has the NCTC looked into it?

A coronavirus attack also could be a strategic distraction for a larger military or political play. For example, no terror group would take credit for an initial attack if, for example, they planned to release a similar, more deadly strain to create real panic and social collapse. “Experts” and the mainstream media would be lost and might suggest the original virus had “mutated,” again slowing effective response.

The above outline has been discussed for a couple of decades; intelligence and security services are well aware of this scenario. Today’s coronavirus provides a blueprint for how effective a planned attack might be. Our enemies are studying it. America needs to learn from it. Of course, it’s hard for normal Americans to even believe this could happen, which just shows how hard it may be to identify a real attack and react quickly if and when it actually happens. 

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But consider this: If the coronavirus were a terrorist attack, it already would be, by far, the most effective act of non-state terrorism in the history of the world. 

Grady Means is a writer (GradyMeans.com) and former corporate strategy consultant. He served in the White House as a policy assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Follow him on Twitter @gradymeans1.