I really do not want to answer all these China coronavirus conspiracy theories… but I’m getting inundated with crazy conspiracy posts on social media, in conversation with friends and in the news. I feel I have a unique opportunity to give me take on things… so here we go.
First off, context. For those who do not know me, I am a 40-year-old America who has spent the better part of 10 years living in China. Most of that 10 years has been in a city of 8 million called Ningbo, to the east of Wuhan by 700km and south of Shanghai by a few high-speed train hours. I have traveled around China from north to south, east to west. I have been to rural villages in Xinjiang, cycling thru little mountain towns in Anhui and stayed in some of the tallest skyscrapers in the biggest cities. The same far reaching travel can be said of my time in USA, as I have logged 30 years there before moving from my hometown of Detroit to China.
In context to this virus, I first learned of the coronavirus just before Chinese New Year and witnessed the initial lockdown, enforcement and battle on the ground from Ningbo. My family and I left China on February 2nd just before the USA travel ban was instituted, as we were unsure of how the situation was going to evolve in China and I have family in Detroit. Upon arrival to O’Hare Airport Chicago we decided to voluntarily quarantine there for 14 days on our own in order to make sure we were healthy before continuing on to Detroit where we laid low for over a month as the virus spread around the world. I returned to China from the USA with my family in tow on March 16th and were officially quarantined by the Chinese government upon our arrival. For 14 days, under strict isolation guidelines, we were tended too and tested by people in full hazmat protective gear on a daily basis, while being locked in our prospective hotel rooms isolated from even each other, as my wife and child were given their own room away from mine for the 2 week period. I have seen both systems and I have been witnessing how both countries are handling this pandemic. I am a traveling youtuber myself and have covered all of these travels on my channel. If you are interested to follow along in my crazy coronavirus journey first hand, you can see for yourself by going to https://www.youtube.com/JaYoeNation.
I am not a CCP shill, as many may assume. I am not Pro-China or Pro-America. I am instead pro-research, and pro-perspective. The world is rarely black or white, and so I have always tried to see the gray in things.
The following is a long post I have received on Facebook, that goes thru many of the conspiratorial arguments regarding the COVID19 SARS2 Coronavirus. The original arguments made in the post are repeated in quotations and my rebuttals to them are written to each below.
Please try to read thru this with an open mind. I know we all want to jump to conclusions and start hating, but I think we can all be headed in a really disastrous direction at a time when we should all be coming together. So here we go.
The coronavirus traveled all over the world from Wuhan China, but it did not reach Beijing or Shanghai or other major cities in China. Can anyone explain how is that possible?
FAKE NEWS: As of my writing this, Beijing (587 reported cases and 8 deaths) and Shanghai (536 reported cases and 6 deaths) both had cases and deaths related to Coronavirus. These are both tier one cities and important hubs where the lockdown was enforced rigidly. Citizens in these cities understood what was happening in Wuhan and so understood the severity of what could be brought to their cities and followed lockdown orders when they came. People also immediately stepped up their already regular facemask use to basically constant. Also, a note has to be made that the main outbreak happened around Chinese New Year, and so people were not going to work and were pretty much staying put.
There are so many questions, after all, where it all started, in China, the Chinese stock market did not collapse, but the American and European markets did, and when those markets collapsed, the Chinese bought a lot.
China put a huge stimulus package into their economy to artificially support them just like USA and Europe did… but on top of that they implemented a MASSIVE quarantine and lockdown process very early and most everyone listened and wore masks and followed isolation orders. China is not out of the woods yet, but their management of this after it got completely out of hand in Wuhan was balls to the wall serious and everyone got in line. Lack of preparedness and bad management is causing other countries to collapse under their own disarray.
There of course was a lot of missteps in the beginning of the outbreak, which I will get into later, but once the wheels were in motion to squash the virus, everyone and everything fell into lockstep, with a few exceptions. This led to overall stability and the ability for China’s economy not to collapse and even restart for the most part…. so far.
Side Note: Wuhan has population of 11 million people, inside of the Hubei province (58.5 million) that was completely locked down in a country with 1.4 billion scared, paranoid people from all social classes. From impoverished to white collar, government officials to the local market owner, everyone was dealing with this together at the same time. Inside this population, some brutal and despicable things were done out of ignorance and anger. These acts were blazoned on social media for all to see. I do not condone these stories out of Wuhan or around China during that time. You will find me in agreement with any atrocity in any country, but I digress.
All roads lead back to China.
Honestly this is sort of humorous as China is in fact trying to build a road and sea network to link Europe to Africa to Asia. So they sort of are trying to build a single “road” that leads back to China. I don’t think the original poster was considering this. But it was prescient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
1. They created a virus for which they already had an antidote.
This is asinine for the simple fact that thousands of people died in China just like in other countries. People’s lives were destroyed, just like other countries. So far, I have seen no definitive evidence that this is more than a cruel coincidence brought on by poor health standards in a wet market selling exotic and ill kept wild animals. (which I do not agree with in the slightest. If you want to have a conversation about that, I would be more than welcome.)
Another Quick Note: Remember the population of China I talked about earlier? Well, out of those billion plus people, VERY FEW patronize exotic animal markets. Many do, but the vast majority of people in rural and urban China patronize more standard wet markets for their staple foods. Things in China are generally not preserved for sale in markets as much as they are in the West. The chicken you eat was killed moments earlier. The vegetables you eat were cultivated at a local farm near the market and sold together with the chicken, beef, pork, seafood and all manner of typical grocery items. Culture in China is about freshness and not about letting anything sit in the fridge too long, if you even have a fridge to begin with. I have been to MANY wet markets throughout Asia. Some of the poorer areas have lackluster hygiene, and others are organized marvels of food delivery. But I can most certainly see an instance of “wrong place at the wrong time” create a recipe for disaster, just as in the west improper food care can result in a surprise E. coli spread or the H1N1 swine flu. So, the idea that this was a manufactured virus seem to be a stretch considering other viruses, bacterial epidemics and even coronaviruses have emerged in similar ways in the past.
If there was an “antidote”, maybe that could be explained to the 3,337 people that died in China (and most likely many multiples of the official number that went unreported). Tell that to the workers in fu.l HAZMAT gear who fearfully tended to me while I sat in quarantine after arriving in China a few weeks ago.
2. They purposely spread the virus for financial gain.
This is an assumption, presented as fact, based on conjecture. China does best when they supply a thriving economy. This has been their bread and butter for the last 50+ years. Industry all over China have built long term contracts with major global businesses all over the world to whom they supply a steady stream of products and services. This strategy has lifted a HUGE amount of people out of abject poverty and generated an enormous amount of wealth for the country. Why would they upend it all in a risky pandemic conspiracy strategy? China had to dig into currency reserves and put themselves into a risky situation just like all the other countries.
And how does this logically work?
First, China introduces a deadly new coronavirus into their own country. They take a chance on the health of their citizens first before it trickles out and they can watch all the world burn! All with the added benefit of China getting the blame for being the virus’s epicenter of the whole thing! It’s ruthlessly and ignorantly diabolical. This is a country with a 100-year plan for the future of their country. They calculate every move out ten steps. This pandemic is like throwing a hand grenade into pool of jet-fuel next to an elementary school.
3. There is a clear demonstration of efficiency to such an extent that they built hospitals in a few days. To build so many hospitals they had to be prepared with organized projects, for example, with the ordering of equipment, the hiring of labor, the water and sewerage network, the prefabricated building materials and the storage in an impressive volume. Everything happened so fast that everyone was speechless.
Did you see these buildings? Do you know how many of these similar prefab projects go up all the time in China? This was not a brick building with water fountains, chandeliers, expensive marble lobbies and mirrored elevators. This was a temporary building designed to try to cordon off patients into rooms with the bare necessities and 4 walls. Do you know in 2003 the Chinese built the Xiaotangshan Hospital in Beijing in 7 days for the SARS outbreak? They certainly didn’t forget building that one, and put the same strategies into building the one’s in Wuhan. The bottom line is, they know how to build shit quick. I look out my window here in China and I can see over 100 sky cranes at this very moment! Each of those cluster of sky cranes is building a massive 15 plus story apartment complex, complete with materials, workers, engineers, infrastructure and construction equipment. In fact, I have seen the same prefab construction methods go into building the temporary worker housing at many of these big Chinese construction projects. Walls and roofs linked together to form quick and simplistic living quarters, like the old constructs sets I used to play with as a child, only on a much grander scale. At that time of the outbreak in Wuhan, all construction projects ground to a screeching halt. So, it was a relatively simple task to coordinate and repurpose manpower and materials from all over Wuhan to fill an urgent need. The motivation was dire, and the people pulled together in the worst of times to try to help each other. No conspiracy. just filling a need. It should be commended, not questioned.
Side Note: I see stadiums in NY and around the world getting repurposed and makeshift hospitals being built in similar fashion. Humans are pretty smart, when their backs are against the wall and their family’s health is as stake.
4. They caused chaos in the world, beginning with Europe and the rest of the western worlds.
Chaos in the world is certainly not what China wants. They sell goods to all these countries. And they are making bank doing it. Why would they want to interrupt it by inserting a free radical like a pandemic? It makes no sense.
5. Quickly decimating the economies of dozens of countries.
Same answer as #4
6. Stop(ped) production and manufacturing lines in factories and primary production in dozens of countries. (on purpose)
Do you know how many of those production lines in other countries integrate parts from China? The majority of products “Made in (fill in the blank)” are produced with elements that originated in China. That hurts China like everyone else. Like it or not, we live in a global connected network, for far greater “betters” than “worsers”. (yea.. I know that worsers is not a word) When the virus was breaking out in China, for months their entire manufacturing center was disrupted, and worry was spreading that the rest of the world was going to move on and find alternate sources while China dealt with COVID19. I know, my wife’s family is involved in manufacturing and I have been in sourcing and product development for the better part of my life. We had quite a few discussions about the effects this epidemic could have on the future of business in China if they cannot get back up and running. Unfortunately, the virus spread, and we are all dealing with it on a global scale. By no means was this a conspiracy created to somehow benefit China. China is a big piece in many countries puzzle, and they like it that way. China really deal in shock-value-quick-world-altering moves like this. Slow and steady. Look up the Belt and Road initiative I mentioned earlier, this is the true China takeover of the world. If you want to look somewhere with an eye for a global power grab… look there. Throughout the world China has been moving, with calculated precision, on a plan to slowly build a network of China reliant transportation and power around the world. Destabilizing economies, stopping production and putting the brakes on manufacturing does not serve their end.
7. China caused the stock markets to crash and then they bought stocks, bonds and companies at bargain prices.
I could name a shit ton of American and western politicians that did the same. Politicians in America were seizing on opportunities while they were lying to their own constituents and downplaying the severity of the virus. That to me makes the politicians motivations much more egregious. China was just seizing on an opportunity. Opportunist exist everywhere. To my knowledge it’s not illegal for them to invest thru the buying of stocks. If they did do something illegal, by all means, let’s get to the bottom of it. But “Don’t hate the playa hate the game.” And if you want to hate the game… I think you should start by voting out the dicks that keep trying to knock down regulations that allow for the game to exist in the first place.
Didn’t Gordon Gekko say “greed is good”…?
8. Chinese then quickly gained control of the epidemic in their country. After all, they were ready, and the virus was never really out of control.
Huh?????? WHAT???!?! Do you know what China went thru to control the virus? Remember, this virus is NOVEL, meaning it has never been seen in humans before. So, China was working from literal zero in their fight against this. During the largest migration of humans in the world in the biggest holiday of the year (*Chinese New Year is like Christmas plus New Years and Thanksgiving combined) China locked down everyone and everything. Every restaurant, business, checkpoint, province, district and city was locked up tight. Everyone gave up their personal freedom to stay inside. People were barricaded into their communities in fear. Hospitals were overrun. Big steps were taken to control the situation instead of grandstanding and bickering. Doctors were sent from all over China to assist in the hot spots. Doctors died, grandparents died, entire familied died. Mortuaries were filled to capacity and crematoriums were working 24/7 to deal with the dead as quickly as possible to contain the spread. Codes were developed to monitor and perform contact tracing of infected and healthy alike. Checkpoints still exist everywhere, where you need to get your temperature read immediately in order to enter. Even now I have to present a “green code” at Starbucks and get my temp taken to make sure I am not feverish before I get my Americano. If it is not green and I present a fever, a car comes to take me immediately to get tested or quarantined, and my friends, contacts and their contacts are also investigated and/or quarantined. So yea… they “quickly” gained control after months of this type of lockdown.
Quick note: It is my opinions that inside Wuhan it most certainly got “out of control”. I believe that the numbers of dead inside the city were grossly underestimated. There is nothing I can do about that. I imagine there are only a few that know the truth, and most certainly I will not find out myself. But that just goes to discredit this point even further, that in order to get on top of this virus, some unspeakable and egregious things had to be done and most likely were done in order to “quickly gain control of the epidemic.”
9. In all this, they managed to lower the price of basic products, including the price of oil.
I’m not sure what the original poster of this meant. From what I understand Saudi Arabia made a huge power grab against Russia’s incompliance to OPEC recommendations to fix prices coinciding with the time of the pandemic. The Saudis basically said, “go for it”, and flooded the world in a huge oversupply of cheap oil, globally lowering the prices. Just big business making big business moves in a time of crisis.
As for Chinas overall management of this thing, I saw a dip in available foods and commodities in the onset of the virus spread, but overall I think China did a good job maintaining a flow of goods to the population. This is not China’s first rodeo. Other viruses, earthquakes and major storms have ravaged China in the past. They have learned good management and how to invest in times of strive to balance the scales. They tend not to forget the past in hopes that they do not repeat it.
Have they been perfect every step of the way… of course not.
Will their economic balancing strategies last?…. only time will tell.
10. Now China is going back to mass production while the rest of the world is stopped.
You do realize China had the outbreak hit them hard in January-February, don’t you? They followed the curve like everyone else, instituted strict new policies to control the population and squash it, and here they are. Many countries in the west could be on top of this thing much better than China or South Korea, had they prepared aggressively as China was imploding. You can’t criticize China for what other countries are failing to do.
Should China wait to restart their production lines until the rest of the class gets back from recess? That would be a self-defeating proposition, as they have the ability to supply the world with a lot of the PPE many countries so desperately need right now. You shouldn’t be angry for them starting up and then demanding you get your masks and goggles at the same time. I personally hope they get started supplying the world with essential products ASAP.
Also note how quickly Chinese unions activated to “hoard” purchases of bus cargo to regional shopping centers across Australia, stripping our shelves of toilet paper and staple foods.
I have strong feelings about this one. Opportunists exist everywhere. Just go to a store on black Friday and you can see a prime example of this in the States. In the case of the buying of PPE to send to China during the epidemic turned pandemic, it’s actually potentially life threatening.
To give some context, I saw many non-Chinese people doing the same in the states. Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart and Target, devoid of goods due to panic buying and or ruthless desire to make a buck upselling online. I saw a lot of this with my own eyes. If what they were doing was illegal, then throw them in jail. But in many if not all of those circumstances, they bought items at cost fair and square. It was not theft; it was the purchase of an available product at market value. If it was a “over limit” purchase, then prosecute as such, but I am not sure how to litigate against a store policy.
There were a few individual cases that rose in prominence and became viral in their universal disgust and condemnation that I would like to touch on. One was a popular video of a crazed Asian woman in Florida loading up her pickup with masks, gleefully noting in Chinese that she was looking all over for masks and drove 1.5 hours to clear out hardware stores. Inside she noted that she was able to take all the masks they had and remarked that people in the store were not even concerned or aware of why she was so excited to get them. She also posted in Chinese that she “left nothing for the Americans”, which was extremely dark.
Inconsiderate, most certainly.
Opportunistic? Yea.
Prosecutable? That is debatable.
She bought the masks at cost and there is no evidence that she stole any of them. From what I could tell, she is a buyer/upseller, and as her “profession”, she buys up stuff when she sees a need in China and upsells the items on online outlets to China. Basically the physical manifestation of the idea of supply and demand personified. I can imagine that people like her exist all over the world, snatching up “deals” to upsell for profit somewhere else. To them, this virus was an opportunity. Ordinarily it was hording beanie babies or the latest barbie around Christmas time. Most certainly annoying, but PPE takes it to a new dark level. I don’t want to get inside her head any more than that. It was callous considering the coming pandemic. But I am pretty sure her motivation was an exception rather than the rule.
The next case in point is the Australia 60 Minutes PPE story. The story revolves about a Chinese owned company scraping together as much protective equipment they could find in the Australian city they were based in and sending it back to those needing it in China. It transpired in January and February during the height of the crisis in China and is in my opinion a little different. China was in the thick of it at the time and everyone was desperate to get their hands on anything that could save lives back home. In fact, I was in China around that time and there was real concern that we could run out of masks ourselves. Luckily my wife bought masks extremely early, but in our neighborhood, supplies were running low. If we felt dire enough, I might have called on family in the states myself and ask for masks to be sent to us in China. Fortunately, it never got to that point for us personally. In Australia, Chinese companies were requesting their Australian divisions find and send back as much PPE as possible to resupply the efforts going on there. They did not steal the product, to my knowledge, and bought everything for the cost or in bulk. All those store and distributors I’m sure were happy to make a sale at the time.
But put it in context. If your family was in dire straits back home, and you were in a place that was seemingly handling the situation with confidence and laze fare attitude, would you think that it would be safe to try to do your part to help in a disaster on the home front? Would you send grandma a box of masks? The urgency at the time was in China. And if this thing could be beat there, it would be much better than spreading around the world in the first place. And what if it was contained in China? I can imagine if it was stopped in China, the narrative would have shifted to one of pride in helping China keep it on their doorstep. The same people you are calling thieves might have been hailed as heroes for acting quickly to keep it from spreading. It’s relatively easy to paint a sinister narrative in hindsight.
I think much of the blame resides on the country’s own mismanagement of a KNOWN epidemic turning into a PANDEMIC. Any well-prepared administration should have seen the red flags and mobilized to prepare for the worst in a situation like this. South Korea did. Taiwan did. Hong Kong did. Countries should have been stockpiling and replenishing in preparation for themselves and alerted the population to the potential coming epidemic so they would not allow their stores to be cleaned out under their noses. Many countries emergency stockpiles were depleted even before the emergence of the virus! It’s a job of a competent and empathetic government to prepare their citizens for what might be coming. In a lot of these cases, this was not possible because even the government themselves were not seeing the writing on the wall being presented on the ground in Wuhan. Their lack of foresight and warning left their available goods vulnerable to purchase, and so China took the opportunity.
Do you know that US government is running low on supplies and their reserves of critical PPE depleted to a lackluster level even before this even got started? A dwindling supply of PPE being thrown into a pool of states and governments all bidding together, making a windfall for the few distributors that have stock, to the detriment of all Americans. In this kind of an environment, what should be a nuisance story of opportunistic upsellers buying up hardware stores now becomes a mad max style life or death story or greed and corruption. It should not be this way.
There is a military adage called the 7P’s. Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. I have tried to live up to this mantra but in an abundance of cases have failed miserably on a personal level. Many countries failed that test on a national level… miserably. And to add insult to injury, China had to figure this thing out from 0. Other countries had the genome given by China on January 9th, understood the severity coming their way, and STILL DIDN’T PREPARE!
Do you know that now China is sending as much supplies as they can spare to countries all over the world and have been since they have been able to get this thing under control? They don’t want a crippled world economy… they want paying customers.
In fact, just the other day my wife and I sent thousands of masks to my friends and family in USA and Japan to distribute to those who need them. My family in America is full of medical professionals and front line workers and we hope they will go to good use. It is all we can do to reciprocate the generosity given to us in the thick of the outbreak in China. While I was in the USA, my friends, YouTube subscribers and family were able to put together a package of a few hundred masks to send to my home in Ningbo to distribute to the community I need. You help who you can, when you can, in times of emergency.
It happened before most of us knew what was happening, even before we knew what the Coronavirus was.
Then you weren’t listening….. or watching the news coming from China…. or referencing the January 9th map release of the coronavirus genome.
Look, China messed up in the beginning. In January, officials in Wuhan were scrambling to cover up a new virus set to disrupt the upcoming CNY holiday. Many in Wuhan’s government and most probably higher up hid information about the virus as it started to spread. Doctors were reprimanded, silenced, and a cover up began.
There is a great article about it here:
https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-outbreak-and-cover-up-ee65211a-afb6-4641-97b8-353718a5faab.html
I encourage you to look at it.
At worst it was a bureaucratic fuck up of the highest order. Not a global repopulation agenda. Not a deep state democratic plan to sink Trump. Not an economic atomic bomb.
It was a group of self-entitled politicians thinking they knew more than the scientists trying downplay this thing and keep it from getting out of hand for sake of their own reputation, putting their own interests above the people they are entrusted to preserve.
Sound familiar?
JAN 22
“We have it totally under control. … It’s going to be just fine.”
— Donald Trump
FEB 26
“And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
— Donald Trump
At the time of the second quote, Wuhan was burning bodies in one of the biggest cities in the world, with a virus that was spreading asymptomatically out of control, and hundreds of millions of China were under full lockdown. Also at this time, USA national stockpile of PPE was already severely deficient. A false sense of security promoted from the top left people unprepared and unaware of what was coming.
My Virus Series of Videos
Below are my videos relating to the Coronavirus, from my time in China, quarantining in Chicago, return to China and quarantining there again.
