If you wanted to bring the US (and the rest of the world) to its knees….

Let’s play a thought game.

If you wanted to bring the United States to its knees, what might you do?

You might build a hazardous lab near a wet market to study Corona viruses.

You might know where a cave is in which a particularly virulent Corona virus is carried by bats and keep its location a closely guarded secret.

In 2004, deep in the wilderness of China’s Yunnan province, a group of scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered a cave full of wild bats carrying hundreds of SARS-related viruses.
Their work, published in a draft paper in 2005, unearthed the link between SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and bats for the first time.
Now the virologist who led that study, Shi Zhengli, has revealed one of the strains found in that cave — the exact location of which is a closely guarded secret — is almost identical to the 2019-nCoV coronavirus which has so far killed at least 1,115 people and infected more than 45,000 worldwide.

Then, somehow, the virus is leaked and there is an outbreak in your own country.

Before that outbreak explodes, you hoard masks.

The World Needs Masks. China Makes Them, but Has Been Hoarding Them.

SHANGHAI — As hospitals and governments hunt desperately for respirators and surgical masks to protect doctors and nurses from the coronavirus pandemic, they face a difficult reality: The world depends on China to make them, and the country is only beginning to share.
China made half the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and it has expanded production nearly 12-fold since then. But it has claimed mask factory output for itself. Purchases and donations also brought China a big chunk of the world’s supply from elsewhere.
Now, worries about mask supplies are rising. As the virus’s global spread escalates, governments around the world are restricting exports of protective gear, which experts say could worsen the pandemic.

China did not just stop selling masks — it also bought up much of the rest of the world’s supply. According to official data, China imported 56 million respirators and masks in the first week after the January lockdown of the city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged.
On Jan. 30, the last day for which data is available, China managed to import 20 million respirators and surgical masks in just 24 hours. Through February, civic-minded entrepreneurs and aid groups visited pharmacies in affluent countries and emerging markets alike, buying masks in bulk to send to China.

You also might  hoard all kinds of medical supplies.

Beijing authorities mobilized the Chinese diaspora to help buy up goods. “Keep on buying while sending back to China [medical supplies], and try your best to buy as much as possible,” read one article posted on the official website of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s United Front Work Department, an agency dedicated to spreading the regime’s agenda inside and outside China. In the West, United Front organizations are usually Chinese student unions at colleges and universities, Chinese chambers of commerce, and Chinese associations.
The United Front encouraged all overseas Chinese to follow in the association’s footstep.

More on hoarding

As the coronavirus took hold in Wuhan in February, staff of a Chinese government-backed global property giant were ordered to buy up vast quantities of western medicines and medical equipment to send to China.
Sources within the company told the Sydney Morning Herald that it was an international endeavour by the Greenland Group to scour the world for bulk supplies of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitisers, gloves and paracetamol for China’s health system.

Then you get your stooge at the World Health Organization to lie for you. You have him tell the world the virus is not contagious:

Your stooge might just happen to be a Communist with a history of covering up outbreaks

As The New York Times reported in 2017, a full two years before the current coronavirus pandemic even began, Tedros was accused of covering up three separate outbreaks in Ethiopia when he was the country’s health minister. The deadly cholera outbreaks were brushed off as “acute watery diarrhea” by the doctor.

Then you might continue to lie about the conditions in your country

This @NYTimes story admits China squelched reports of appalling conditions in China – "dead bodies on hospital floors, doctors crying in frustration, rows of unattended coffins outside the crematories" – but the REAL problem was squelching how they fought the virus?! https://t.co/lDW2SUqz06

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) March 27, 2020

You might fail to mention that you had a peculiar method of controlling the outbreak:

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As the World Health Organization (WHO) praises China for its “tailored approach” to handling the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, a video has surfaced of a Chinese woman vividly describing patients being bound in body bags and cremated while still alive.

You might shut the affected province off from the rest of your country, but not from the rest of the world to make sure everyone is infected:

https://twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1247494875894951936

You might furnish the rest of the world with bad information such that it causes far more damage than had you been honest :

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

And it resulted in a great many deaths and untold economic damage:

“And I think when you looked at the China data originally, and you said, ‘Oh, well there’s 80 million people,’ or 20 million people in Wuhan and 80 million people in Hubei, and they come up with a number of 50,000, you start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic …

“So I think the medical community made – interpreted the Chinese data as, that this was serious but smaller than anyone expected, because I think probably we were missing significant amount of the data, now that when we see what happened to Italy and we see what happened to Spain.”

Then as the outbreak worsened worldwide, you might force countries to buy back the medical supplies they donated to you

China reportedly forced Italy to buy back its own personal protective equipment after the communist country said it would send medical gear to the Mediterranean nation during the coronavirus pandemic.

Italy donated medical equipment to China at the onset of the coronavirus, but when the virus hit the European nation, China put a price tag on the same PPE and forced Italy to buy it back, according to an unnamed senior Trump official who spoke with the Spectator.
“Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population. China then has sent Italian PPE back to Italy — some of it, not even all of it … and charged them for it,” the Trump administration official said.

Then you might send faulty test kits to Britain, Spain and Pakistan

You might score big bucks selling the hoarded medical supplies, much of which were faulty:

In Spain, for example, Health Minister Salvador Illa announced Wednesday that the country had bought $467 million in medical supplies from China, including 950 ventilators, 5.5 million testing kits, 11 million gloves and more than half a billion protective face masks.
Soon after receiving the supplies, the Spanish government announced plans to return 9,000 “quick result” test kits to China, El Pais reported, because they were deemed substandard, specifically the sensibility of the test was around 30 percent, when it should be higher than 80 percent.
China admitted that the kits they sold to Spain were bought from Bioeasy, a Chinese company not licensed to make them.

You might find that after you’ve crippled the world economies that some of us believe you might have done this accidentally–

Ministers fear that the coronavirus pandemic might have been caused by a leak from a Chinese laboratory, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Senior Government sources say that while ‘the balance of scientific advice’ is still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, a leak from a laboratory in the Chinese city is ‘no longer being discounted’.
One member of Cobra, the emergency committee led by Boris Johnson, said last night that while the latest intelligence did not dispute the virus was ‘zoonotic’ – originating in animals – it did not rule out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory.
The member of Cobra, which receives detailed classified briefings from the security services, said: ‘There is a credible alternative view [to the zoonotic theory] based on the nature of the virus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there is that laboratory in Wuhan. It is not discounted.’

or perhaps it wasn’t an accident. It could be part of a larger plot- after all, you might already be trying to destroy the US by flooding it with fentanyl.

Behind the deadly opioid epidemic ravaging communities across the United States lies a carefully planned strategy by a hostile foreign power that experts describe as a “form of chemical warfare.”
It involves the production and trafficking of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that caused the deaths of more than 32,000 Americans in 2018 alone, and fentanyl-related substances.

China is the “largest source” of illicit fentanyl in the United States, a November 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated. That same commission said that since its 2017 report, they found no “substantive curtailment” of fentanyl flows from China to the United States. They also noted that in “large part, these flows persist due to weak regulations governing pharmaceutical and chemical production in China.”

Then you might buy off the left wing media in the US to spread your propaganda.

The New York Times published an op-ed from China’s ambassador to the U.S. on Sunday, allowing him to push propaganda about the novel coronavirus in the process.
China’s ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai’s op-ed urged America and China to “cooperate against coronavirus.” In one part of his article, Cui claimed that “China has been providing updates about the disease in a responsible manner.”

You might buy off influential colleges.

You might buy off professors at influential colleges.

Given your actions in total, some of us are inclined to believe this is a plan and Trump Derangement Syndrome is so occupying the left that they refuse to see the bigger picture:

And yet even as the current emergency has proved him right in fundamental ways—about China specifically and foreign policy more generally—many respectable people in the United States are letting their disdain for the president blind them to what is really going on in the world. Far from discrediting Trump’s point of view, the COVID-19 crisis reveals what his strategy asserted: that the world is a competitive arena in which great power rivals like China seek advantage, that the state remains the irreplaceable agent of international power and effective action, that international institutions have limited capacity to transform the behavior and preferences of states.

Why would you infect your own? Easy.

Plausible deniability. Acceptable collateral damage.

You took steps to make sure your country’s exposure was limited to a province and made sure the infection spread by not alerting the rest of the world to the realities of the situation. Now you might try to appear the hero.

https://twitter.com/BowenXiao_/status/1246882675920646153

If you were trying to bring the US and the world to its knees, this is exactly what you’d do.

DrJohn

DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.

DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.

Except for liberals being foolish.