@ovals49

Happenstance or plan? Looking up from the bottom, it appears to be the former. Looking down from the top, the view is altogether different.

It's going to yield important information, although there are too many moving parts to grasp the whole thing. I really don't see it as someone's master plan. There's hardly any original action in the world these days. Everyone is caught in a constant state of re-action now.

To your point about exploiting the events for cash, that happens. You know what the ancient Chinese said about those times when you look up and find yourself surrounded by danger and chaos? They say a time of great danger is a time of great opportunity and luck for those who keep their wits about them.

#11.1
Even basic information about the virus is already behind paywalls.

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Capitalism and the tenets of the Hippocratic Oath are fundamentally at cross purposes in our world. Unnaturally virulent pathogens suddenly appear.....hideously expensive treatments create remarkable investment opportunities....the rich survive and prosper....and the excess population is reduced.

Happenstance or plan? Looking up from the bottom, it appears to be the former. Looking down from the top, the view is altogether different.

@wendy davis

...together rapidly a provocative backstory on just about any controversy. What's spooky is that the examples you casually pluck from the billowing cloud of emerging data and use to make your point, invariably become the main triggers that disrupt the official narratives. Some people have a 'nose' for the news. You have a heat-seeking missile.

I've been following the news as reported by China and neighboring countries, and monitoring China's communications with the CDC and WHO. I've never seen undistorted news about China produced by the US media, except in scientific publications, so I've learned to skip the 'round eye' feeds on things Chinese. So, we start with different assumptions that produce different realities. But your link to Benjamin Mateus at WSWS helped me recalibrate a bit. Here's an example. Mateus begins:

...the [Chinese] government has partially or fully locked down 13 major population centers, encompassing nearly 60 million people.

This is what China "hopes" to accomplish, but I don't believe this strategy is in place yet. It is an aspiration, the fulfillment of which happens to be 'best practice' in a nation at this stage of a potential pandemic. Both both WHO and the CDC are praising China for attempting the ideal because successes in early containment controls in China will save lIves in the US and Europe, according to the infection models. China's neighbors, too, have also expressed appreciation for the sacrifice. China is further praised for facing the challenge while so many Chinese are mobilized for vacations. The last thing China's government wants to do is to aggravate the people, which is the First Principle of government policy. It's late afternoon in China as I write this. I saw last night that millions of young Chinese in the domestic guard and medical corp were deployed to China's busiest travel hubs and portals to aid in containment and provide health checks to travelers. Maybe by tonight there will be meaningful progress.

That is not how most Westerners, who read that statement, above, will interpret it. Americans have been programmed to respond to these facts — not with appreciation and admiration for the sacrifices that the Chinese will make on their behalf — but with hatred and rage toward the Chinese Government. Thus, they will reinforce their willingness to go to war with China, and to crush China's economy in order to force them into the familiar horrors of regime change.

"In Wuhan, citizens are calling for their local leaders to be held accountable."

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That's not what the citizen movies show that I saw posted earlier.

"Doctors on the front line of treating victims of the coronavirus infection are leading this call by bluntly declaring, 'The city’s leaders should be removed immediately.'"

LOL.

"These tensions have begun to spread to Shanghai, one of China’s major commercial centers and one of its most populous cities, where an 88-year-old man died as a result of the virus, sparking concerns about the complex spread of the disease and its ramifications on an international scale."

.

That's a preposterous statement. Because an 88 year old man died of pneumonia Shanghai ... international concerns have been sparked? I wonder what drives such verbal desperation?

In response, Chinese President Xi Jinping was forced to state, “Confronted with the grave situation of this accelerating spread of pneumonia from infections with the novel coronavirus, we must step up the centralized and united leadership under the party central.

.

Is this a communist alert that needs an American intervention?

::

Actually, I'm sensitive to subversive innuendo toward the Chinese. As a lifelong sinophile, I've observed it for many years. The fact is, the WSWS article was very good on the state of health care, globally. The author identifies a few surprising trends and rightly warns that the world's public health care systems that currently work well for the people are at risk of becoming inaccessible for many. Parts of government-funded health care systems, around the world, are being privatized by neoliberals and sold off to predatory capitalists seeking unlimited profits. Who exactly is going to stockpile medical supplies for the people, after the government no longer protects the health and education of its citizens? I'll chalk those results up to the Great Depopulation.

If you want to see this in action, try to buy a face mask that blocks viruses. Right now. Go to google and give it your best shot. The only protective mask I could for sale in the United States tonight is selling for $47,000 on Amazon.

This is what we have become.

#11.1

of your free ranging comment to respond to, given that i)the bias against china; ii) not enough information on coronoavirus, and iii) the vast speculation on what the various inoculations may be, what efficacy, and what dangers.

as a side note, this ain't my issue, especially as i'm watching for the white house to release the official version of the I/P 'deal of the century' today.

yesterday i'd read 'Rising concerns over spread of the Wuhan coronavirus', Benjamin Mateus, 27 January 2020 and you can read the tenor of his coverage, not that i know where he'd gotten all his information, of course.

but he does seem pissed at the chinese government, but a few squibs:

In China itself, the emergency is being exacerbated by the lack of supplies. According to local medical personnel and staff, masks are running short and sanitary equipment is being quickly exhausted. Physicians, nurses and aides are on 24-hour standby, even as the travel ban within the affected cities makes commuting to hospitals difficult. This has created the added problem of making routine tasks, such as other forms of medical care and even getting groceries, much more difficult in population centers as large or larger than New York City and Los Angeles. Local hospitals have been forced to appeal on social media for donations of supplies and funds to stock and run their services.

Dr. Xu Wenbo, the director of the Chinese National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention under the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Beijing, announced to reporters on Sunday that researchers had isolated viruses and were selecting strains to use in developing a vaccine against the coronavirus. The US National Institutes of Health has also stated that it can potentially develop a vaccine for human trials in a few months. It remains unclear if these efforts are being jointly coordinated.
.............................
Meanwhile, three Beijing hospitals—Beijing Ditan Hospital, Beijing Youan Hospital and No. 5 Medical Center of PLA General Hospital—have turned to administering the anti-HIV retroviral drugs Lopinavir and Ritonavir to treat patients. This ad-hoc treatment is being used with limited data to support or refute its efficacy. The medical journal Lancet has announced that it has commenced a clinical trial using these agents to treat new cases of coronavirus.
.......................
This state of affairs is not the result of new viruses evolving more quickly or a lack of advances in medical technology, but of the subordination of modern medicine to private profit. In one revealing episode, China’s vice minister of industry and information technology, Wang Jiangping, told news outlets that Hubei Province is going through more than 100,000 protective suits each day, while their manufacture lags by 30,000 per day. The sheer material needs are overwhelming the capacity to address these demands. Yet Chinese companies manufacture more than 50,000 such suits per day for export.

now from commenter Maxwell below his piece mirrors Politiké's above:

Please stop- this is the most debased fear mongering. Remember the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Gulf War Syndrome, ZIKA and on and on.

All of this should be treated with the greatest skepticism at the very least. Consider for example that the first reported death in Hubei province was a 61-year-old man who'd frequented the Wuhan market and had chronic liver disease and abdominal tumors. The second was a 69-year-old man who went to a hospital with severe damage to multiple organs.

At present it is understood that the vast majority of those who have died from the disease in Wuhan and other cities have been of elderly people who had been suffering serious prior medical conditions with compromised immune systems. Local environmental factors that may also have made their illnesses worse.

Meanwhile Philadelphia-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals has received a grant of $9 million to combat the Wuhan outbreak. Inovio previously hit the headlines a few years ago, when they received a grant to create an anti-Zika vaccine (something they managed to do in less than six months).

The grants were distributed by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an NGO that promotes global vaccination. Take a look at who funds that outfit.

Co-Diagnostic Inc. has also received a grant to develop a coronavirus “screening test." Co-Diagnostics Inc.’s stock nearly doubled (up 80%) to a one-year high. Trading volume shot up to 36.1 million shares, compared with the full-day average of about 161,000 shares. Chief Executive Dwight Egan said in a statement that if the WHO declares the illness a global health emergency, he believes Co-Diagnostics would be in position to “quickly assist” in providing its test to the affected countries.

Much more could be examined here- to call this an "epidemic" at this point is a knee-jerk reaction expected from the heavily funded MSM but not here.

And BTW anyone who trusts the CDC, the WHO and any of these thoroughly bought off alphabet soup national and international "health" agencies is not paying attention.

wish i had time to bring excerpts from my march 2018 of jacob levitch's ‘The Real Agenda of the Gates Foundation’, but i'd at least refer you to:

III.Gates and Big Pharma

“Guinea pigs for the drugmakers”

Despite annual revenues approaching $1 trillion, the global pharmaceutical industry has lately experienced a critical decline in the rate of profit, for which it lays most of the blame on regulatory requirements. A US think tank has estimated the cost of new drug development at $5.8 billion per drug, of which 90 per cent is incurred in Phase III clinical trials mandated by the US Food and Drug Administration and similar agencies in Europe.41 (These are tests administered to large groups of human subjects in order to confirm the effectiveness and monitor the side effects of new vaccines and other medicines.) The international business consulting firm McKinsey & Company called the situation “dramatic” and urged Big Pharma executives to “envision responses that go well beyond simply tinkering with the cost base” – primarily the relocation of clinical trials to emerging markets, where drug safety testing is seen as relatively cheap, speedy, and lax.42

It is in this specific context that BMGF’s intervention in the distribution of certain vaccines and contraceptives must be seen. Heavily invested in Big Pharma,43 the Foundation is well positioned to facilitate pharmaceutical R&D strategies tailored to the realities of the developing world, where “[t]o speed the translation of scientific discovery into implementable solutions, we seek better ways to evaluate and refine potential interventions—such as vaccine candidates—before they enter costly and time-consuming clinical trials.”44 In plain language, BMGF promises to assist Big Pharma in its efforts to circumvent Western regulatory regimes by sponsoring cut-rate drug trials in the periphery.”