In this special episode of the John Henry Weston Show, we will be discussing the coronavirus, or COVID-19, with one of the USA s foremost experts on China. Steve Mosher is President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia, Why China s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order. He studied Human Biology at Stanford University and holds advanced degrees in biological oceanography, East Asian studies, and cultural anthropology. He was selected in 1979 by the National Science Foundation to be the first U.S. social scientist to do field research in China.
00:00:00.360Welcome to this special episode of the John Henry Weston Show, where we'll be discussing the coronavirus, or COVID-19, with one of the USA's foremost experts on China.
00:00:12.260Wouldn't you want to verify that those viral videos of the Chinese people talking about the virus are actually accurate?
00:00:18.200Are those words that they're playing on the bottom of the screen actually what they're saying, or is it just something used to instill panic?
00:00:24.060What's actually really going on in China with the virus, and what threats do we face from it in the West?
00:00:55.200Now, most of you will know Stephen Mosher as president of the Population Research Institute, the one who first alerted the world to the forced abortion practice in China.
00:01:04.080He's the author of Bully of Asia, Why China's Dream is the New Threat to World Order, and he's a former National Science Foundation fellow.
00:01:13.280He studied human biology at Stanford University, and he holds advanced degrees in biological oceanography, East Asian studies, and cultural anthropology.
00:01:23.580One of America's leading China watchers, he was selected in 1979 by the National Science Foundation to be the first U.S. social scientist to do field research in China.
00:01:35.080So, Steve, we're really happy to be talking to you about this, and let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
00:01:41.640In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
00:02:55.100Now, do we know how the virus is spread?
00:02:59.020Well, the virus is spread by three means, basically.
00:03:03.340It's spread by touching a surface on which there are live viruses that have been left there by someone touching the surface who has the disease.
00:03:12.660It can be spread, of course, by coughing through the air if you're within a few feet of someone who has coronavirus.
00:03:19.440And it can also be spread, apparently, by aerosol transmission, which is to say that tiny droplets of water in the air containing the virus packets can stay in the air for a while and infect people who walk by.
00:03:33.580I think that's the most worrying thing about the infection possibilities.
00:03:40.600But the problem is, John Henry, that the Chinese government, which is, of course, run by the Chinese Communist Party, has been completely opaque about the coronavirus epidemic in China from the beginning.
00:03:55.920We believe that the first cases were discovered back in November.
00:03:59.200However, the Chinese government did not admit it had a problem until January 20th, by which time the virus epidemic had already reached epidemic proportions in China.
00:04:11.300So basically, it did what the Chinese Communist Party always does.
00:04:16.920It lied, it covered up, it deceived its own people and the world about the dangerous epidemic that was raging inside of China, unnecessarily costing many, many lives in China and potentially many lives outside of China.
00:04:33.160So once again, this is this is the Chinese Communist Party has over the years succeeded in killing hundreds of millions of its own people in famines and political purges in the one child policy.
00:04:46.520But now it's found a new way, a novel way, one might say, after the novel coronavirus, a novel way to kill even more of the poor Chinese people who suffer under its misrule.
00:04:58.240Right now. So they've been hiding their numbers, lying about their numbers.
00:05:04.640What are the actual numbers, A, that they're putting out there right now and B, that you believe they would be based on what they're what the numbers are more like, actually like rather than what they're foisting, trying to foist on the public?
00:05:16.880Well, as I mentioned, the first deaths and the first infections were reported on January 20th, just about a month ago.
00:05:27.960But in fact, we know that there was an emergency meeting of the standing committee of the Politburo, that is to say, President for Life Xi Jinping, who's the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the other Politburo members, standing committee members who actually run China.
00:05:47.780We know there was an emergency meeting of the Politburo on back in early January.
00:05:54.220And we know even before that, there were universities in Hong Kong, in Shanghai, which is 200 miles east of Wuhan, the center of the epidemic.
00:06:05.780Universities in Shanghai, which were saying, do not allow any strangers on campus because there is a new epidemic raging.
00:06:14.240So already by January 2nd, by January 3rd, we had evidence that there was an epidemic of major proportions in China, that it had already reached the city of Shanghai, 200 miles to the east.
00:06:31.060And the local units, what we call in Chinese local institutions, local factories, were already taking precautions against the spread of the disease.
00:06:41.520And yet three more weeks went by before the Chinese government even admitted that it had a single death.
00:06:48.440So obviously, the numbers that they give us of roughly now 2,000 dead and 70,000 infected are a vast underestimate of the actual scale of the epidemic.
00:07:00.780Let's say, for purposes of discussion, that the epidemic really began not on January 20th, but on December 20th, a month before, but followed the same pattern of expansion that we see in Wuhan from the official numbers.
00:07:17.700By now, if it had started in December 20th, which is a very reasonable supposition, we would have seen a million and a half people infected in China and probably 30,000 deaths.
00:07:28.480Now, if it started before then and spread at the same rate, the numbers would be even larger.
00:07:33.000So I believe that the epidemic is many times worse than it's being reported.
00:07:38.880I believe the Chinese Communist Party deliberately covered up the epidemic for probably two months.
00:07:46.080And now the Chinese people once again are paying the price for the incompetence and sheer evil of the people who ruled them.
00:07:57.180Well, there's something very, very interesting going on.
00:08:00.060Speaking on Fox News, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, he raised the possibility that the virus had originated in a high security biomedical lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city that the center is the center of the outbreak.
00:08:13.580I want to talk about the biggest and the most important story in the world, the Wuhan coronavirus.
00:08:19.840This coronavirus is a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China.
00:08:25.140But actually, it's probably worse than Chernobyl, which was localized in its effect.
00:08:31.980The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic.
00:08:36.000While you are all sleeping overnight, the number of diagnosed cases in China increased by 30 percent.
00:08:50.100It is probably several orders of magnitude higher than that.
00:08:57.280Also, while you are sleeping, China now has its entire border with Russia closed.
00:09:03.5202,600 miles, Russia has closed that border.
00:09:08.500El Al has shut down travel between Israel and China.
00:09:12.040Air France has shut down travel between China and France.
00:09:15.820And that's in addition to all the other countries that have already shut down travel.
00:09:21.200From what we know so far, and there are still many unknowns, this virus could have both a long incubation period, as much as 14 days, and individuals could be contagious while asymptomatic, which was not the case with SARS in 2003.
00:09:37.040Furthermore, from some cases, it appears the virus could be aerosolized, which means it doesn't require the kind of contact that you have with, say, a married couple kissing each other or a family living in close quarters in a hotel or apartment, but rather the distances we are all sitting apart right now.
00:09:55.860Yet China is still lying about all of this.
00:09:59.140They've been lying about it from the very beginning, and you don't need their history of lying about SARS in 2003, though it is relevant here.
00:10:07.320You just have to see what's happened over the last two months.
00:10:10.580We now know that the first case manifested no later than, no later than December 1, even though China didn't reveal it to the WHO until a month later on December 31st.
00:10:21.140When they continued to hide it from their own citizens, and they continued to say that it had been contained inside Wuhan, today it is in every single province in China.
00:10:34.140They also claimed for almost two months, until earlier this week, that it had originated in a seafood market in Wuhan, that locals had contracted it from animals in, say, bat soup or snake tartare.
00:10:51.040The Lancet published a study last weekend demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including patient zero.
00:11:01.560As one epidemiologist said, that virus went into the seafood market before it came out of the seafood market.
00:11:07.560We still don't know where it originated.
00:11:09.320Could have been another seafood market.
00:11:12.180Could have been a food processing company.
00:11:13.640I would note that China, that Wuhan also has China's only biosafety level four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.
00:11:27.580Do you think that this is a possibility or is it just some kind of conspiracy theory?
00:11:31.220No, I think that we can be fairly certain that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is located, of course, in the city of Wuhan, which is the epicenter of the epidemic.
00:11:48.500And I think we can be certain that it escaped from the lab for two reasons.
00:11:52.220The first reason is China's bioweapons program is an open secret in the United States in intelligence circles.
00:12:04.340We know they're working on reengineering, genetically reengineering viruses and bacteria to make them more lethal and to be used as weapons of war.
00:12:14.340We know that because they've said that openly.
00:12:17.180They've written books, the former head of the National Defense University of the People's Liberation Army of China wrote a book in which he said the new high ground is the development of bioweapons that target specific ethnicities.
00:13:19.840On February 14th, General Secretary Xi Jinping, who heads the Chinese Communist Party and is as close to an absolute dictator that we have seen in China since the days of Mao Zedong, held a meeting in which he said that lab biosafety should be treated as a national security issue.
00:13:43.080He hosted a meeting in February 14th saying that he spoke about the outbreak of the COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that we've been talking about.
00:13:56.380And he said the government must stop the epidemic and set up a system to prevent similar outbreaks in the future.
00:14:03.600Now, if that is not an admission, John Henry, that the coronavirus escaped from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, I don't know what is.
00:14:16.340And the very following day, the meeting was on February 14th.
00:14:20.540The following day, February 15th, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China rolled out new regulations, which are called Strengthening Biosecurity Management in Microbiology Labs that Handle Advanced Viruses at the Same Level as the New Coronavirus.
00:14:40.800So I think that they've let the cat out of the bag.
00:14:43.600I think that they've revealed exactly what happened, that the virus escaped from the laboratory and infected large numbers of people.
00:14:54.520The officials at all levels probably tried to cover up their crime, beginning with the people who work in the Institute of Virology themselves and then moving to the city government of Wuhan, then the Hubei provincial government and then to the national level.
00:15:09.820And the result of all these levels of cover up has been a two month delay in reporting the actual scope of the disease and continuing to lie about how it's spreading in China and what the mortality rate is.
00:15:23.960You see, the way to handle a potential epidemic like this is to identify the new virus threat as quickly as possible, track where it came from, how it spread, what the mortality rate is, and get a handle on how to contain it very, very quickly.
00:15:42.340In China, they did exactly the opposite.
00:15:53.140It is a result of the total incompetence of the labs in China and the sheer duplicity of the Chinese leadership in hiding this from the world.
00:16:04.860And by the way, John Henry, the World Health Organization has done us no favors because the World Health Organization, of course, which works for the United Nations, reports to the major countries on the National Security Council, including China.
00:16:20.420And I think the World Health Organization was anxious not to offend China.
00:16:25.240So even after the Chinese government admitted it had a problem, the World Health Organization delayed calling for a quarantine of areas in China, delayed calling for a ban on direct flights to and from China, delayed telling us about the seriousness of the epidemic because they didn't want to upset the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:16:48.160So they finally were able, two weeks into the epidemic, as reported by China, were finally able to send a delegation to China that should have been on the ground again two and a half months ago.
00:17:21.060Well, last March, there were shipments of viruses intercepted by Canada Post that were being sent from Canada to China.
00:17:34.480And in June of last year, two Chinese researchers were escorted out of Canada's only level four viral research laboratory under guard by the rural Canadian mounted police.
00:17:54.120And there is an ongoing investigation as to what they were doing in the level four laboratory and about the shipment of these viruses to China.
00:18:05.140The two Chinese researchers who were arrested, by the way, had made multiple trips to, you guessed it, to Wuhan, to the Institute of Virology there.
00:18:16.580So we know that China has been collecting dangerous viruses, including coronaviruses, from different parts of the world in order to do research on them.
00:18:28.360We also know that they're trying an effort to develop, they're making an effort to develop bioweapons.
00:18:35.300Now, I'm not saying that the coronavirus is a bioweapon.
00:18:43.840Whether or not it has been genetically engineered to make it more lethal is an open question.
00:18:49.660But the truth of the matter is that it's fairly clear, I would give you pretty good odds, that this coronavirus escaped from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan,
00:19:01.900which is located just a couple miles from the seafood market, which was blamed for as being the origin of the virus.
00:19:14.700Remember, a few weeks ago, we were hearing about the seafood market in Wuhan City being the source of the virus.
00:19:22.480We were told that it came from live snakes that were being sold in the seafood market.
00:19:28.160It turns out, John Henry, snakes do not carry any coronaviruses.
00:19:34.120We were then told that it came from bats, that bat soup and other bat delicacies that were being sold in the seafood market in Wuhan was the source of the coronavirus.
00:19:46.460Well, bats are in hibernation in November and December.
00:19:50.820Bat soup is not sold at the seafood market.
00:19:53.140And genetic analysis shows that bats do not carry any coronavirus like the one that's causing the epidemic.
00:20:00.800So, again, we've seen a whole series of excuses for the origin of the coronavirus when I think it's increasingly apparent that the coronavirus was being experimented on in the laboratory in Wuhan and escaped from the lab.
00:20:19.440Now, here's another little bit of evidence.
00:20:22.620Some people may remember in 2003, we had a SARS epidemic in China that spread to other countries around the world.
00:20:31.060SARS stands for Sudden Extreme Respiratory Syndrome.
00:20:38.080It killed less than 1,000 people in China, but, you know, it was very dangerous.
00:20:44.020It killed 10% of the people that it infected.
00:20:46.420There was a laboratory in Beijing, which twice in 2004, the year after the epidemic, while doing research on the SARS virus, knowing how dangerous it was, let it escape from the lab twice, causing additional deaths and infections.
00:21:06.060So, we know that laboratory protocol in China has been very lax in the past.
00:21:11.920We know that viruses, lethal viruses, have escaped from labs in the past.
00:21:16.500So, they have a history of careless handling of these things.
00:21:21.320We also know that a number of researchers in China have been charged with the crime of selling research animals on the open market.
00:21:31.980That is to say, you take a cow or a pig or a bat or a snake or whatever animal or a rat or a monkey that you're experimenting on that you're injecting viruses into to see how their systems respond.
00:21:47.620And once you're done experimenting on the animal, you then take the animal to earn extra money, you sell it on the local live animal market.
00:22:00.120Because it may be very dangerous viruses that you've been experimenting upon.
00:22:05.120But that doesn't always happen in China.
00:22:07.740You know, what sometimes happens in China is these experimental animals, which are purchased with research funds from the central government, are taken, if they're still alive, and sold to a butcher at the live animal market, and sold as an exotic food in China for a great deal of money.
00:22:31.860What do you think we can expect to see on this?
00:22:36.440And what do you think we can do, if anything, to help stop this or stop it in the future?
00:22:47.300Well, I think there are several things we can do.
00:22:50.000And the good news is that we have in place in North America and now in Europe, we have fairly strict quarantine protocols in place.
00:23:00.540We're improving our testing methods for testing for the coronavirus infections almost on a daily basis.
00:23:09.900And I think we're going to be able to contain the spread of the disease here.
00:23:15.920I do not think that we need to be worried about a coronavirus epidemic in North America.
00:23:23.720We are working as fast as we can to develop a way of immunizing people against the new coronavirus.
00:23:36.620That research takes some time, of course.
00:23:39.540It's not something you can do overnight.
00:23:41.900In order to develop a vaccine, you have to, first of all, identify something on the coronavirus that you can attach to what you inject into the human body to generate an antibody to the pathogen.
00:24:06.100I mean, we can start testing the vaccine within six months.
00:24:10.260We will probably have a vaccine within a year.
00:24:12.880So if we can keep the coronavirus from reaching, from becoming serious in the United States until the end of the year, like other viruses, we will have the ability to immunize people against it.
00:24:24.120And I would say this, whereas the SARS virus had a morbidity rate of 10 percent, that is, one in 10 people who contracted the SARS virus died, the mortality rate of the coronavirus seems to be around 2 percent.
00:24:41.760We would know more precisely if the Chinese government would simply stop deceiving us about the numbers.
00:24:49.620But so it's less lethal than the SARS virus.
00:25:21.020The first part of the health threat is that many of the medications that we consume in North America are made now in China because a Chinese consortium of drug manufacturers has driven North American manufacturers out of business in the early 2000s
00:25:39.280and now have a virtual monopoly on many of the common generic medications that we use in the United States.
00:25:48.520Many of those factories are located in Wuhan City.
00:25:52.080Many of them are located in Hubei province.
00:25:55.640If China shuts down Hubei for another month or two, we're going to start running short on vital medications that many Americans need to stay alive.
00:26:07.040Part two is we now see a more general health threat from China.
00:26:11.840We see that these dangerous pathogens seem to emanate from China, seem to come from China on a regular basis, not only because they're violating the biological weapons protocol that they signed in 1972
00:26:25.700and are developing bioweapons, but also because they're so careless in their handling of lab animals and handling of live viruses.