Antony Blinken’s defense meeting with China ignores COVID-19

Secretary Blinken recently went to Beijing and had a number of talks about how to improve relations between the US and China. The cat old catch word was decoupling. 

We can’t decouple the US and the Chinese economy. And indeed, the entire global economy is much too intertwined to simply stop dealing with each other. No, that’s, that’s implausible. Instead, they buzzword is derisking, we’re going to continue to interact, but in a less risky way. 

So Secretary Blinken went to China with a big ask. In the last two years, there have been almost two dozen attempts by US Department of Defense officials to make contact with their Chinese counterparts. Now, this is a pretty standard practice. If you think something weird is happening, you want to make sure that it’s an accident and not on purpose. So who do you call? Oh, I saw your missiles just went to, you know, online, call up the general on the other side and say, why did your missiles just go online? Right, that minimizes the chance of nuclear war. This is why you have defense to defense contracts. Seemed like a reasonable request, the Chinese turned him down flat. 

Instead, Wang Yi, who is the Communist Party’s chief, international thinker on these things, said this was all America’s fault. We were creating a China threat narrative that simply wasn’t true. That we were imposing illegal sanctions on them — we were trying to suppress their technology. And we were interfering with their internal affairs, meaning things like Uyghur slave labor camps and their attempts to conquer Taiwan. Well, it shows things didn’t go too well. Everyone tried to put a big face on it. And the end, there was a 35 minute meeting between Blinken and President Xi. And everyone said a few things have stopped going down hill. 

And then 24 hours elapsed, and President Biden called Xi a dictator in a fundraising speech, which, of course, the Chinese had to respond to. There was also these little problems like spy balloons and the efforts by the Chinese to establish a base in Cuba. This went nowhere. Despite all the talks, though, there was one topic that wasn’t discussed at all. And that’s the origins of COVID. 

Interestingly, just before Blinken left, there were numerous reports that the US government had determined by name, the first three victims of COVID. They were Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu. Now, these gentlemen all checked into hospitals in November 2019. You might remember that COVID story actually began the wet market story that we all know in January 2020. So this is two months before that, at least. Well, it turns out that Ben Hu was the director of the investigation of trying to make viruses more lethal, at, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

So were Yu Ping and Yan Zhu. In fact, some of them had written papers together on the subject — and again, they were hospitalized in November of 2019. In December, in fact, December 30, to be precise, a gentleman named Li Wenliang, who was one of the head doctors in the city, was arrested and brought in and forced to recant warnings he had said by internet throughout the city, that a new virus was spreading and was very, very dangerous and should be watched. Well, he was arrested, was forced to recant saying he was spreading malicious rumors. Well, Li Wenliang died on February 4, and then there’s a strange case of Zhou Yusen, who filed a patent for a virus suppressor for COVID and he filed it on February 24. Well, we’ve only known about the virus for about a month. So in fact, his investigation had to have been done way, way before it became public. In short, there’s a mountain of evidence that the lab theory is probably correct, that’s these people are associated with the lab and not with the wet market, natural origin story. 

Oh, I forgot to mention Mr. Li, who invented the patent? Well, three months after the patent was approved, he died under mysterious circumstances. The Chinese press reports he fell off the top of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s the story. Now. That was something that was never brought up on Blinken’s visit. We’re said we’re derisking, but one of the greatest risks China has exposed the world to was the origins of COVID. And if discussing those origins are on the taboo list for summit talks, is there any derisking it all going on? This is Larry Lindsey for Straight Arrow News.