In a recent article on the number of visitors and returnees that flew into the United States in the months leading up to the outbreak of CCP Virus here, ABC News counts noses, points fingers, and makes suggestions. But they didn’t examine their premises.
Travel data of passengers arriving in the United States from China during the critical period in December, January and February, when the disease took hold in that country, shows a stunning 759,493 people entered the U.S.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/disaster-motion-34-million-travelers-poured-us-coronavirus/story?id=69933625&utm
… 343,402 arrived from Italy, 418,848 from Spain and about 1.9 million more came from Britain.
ibid.
Combined with those from China, that’s more than 3.4 million people from just four countries — nearly half, about 1.5 million, Americans returning home.
ibid.
About 1.9 million visitors from countries already struggling with CCP Virus entered the U.S. between December 2019 and February 2020.
Next, ABC news points fingers:
“This is an astonishing number in a short period of time, illustrating how globalized our world has become. Just as people can hop continents with amazing ease, the infections they carry can too,” said Dr. Vinayak Kumar, an internal medicine resident at the Mayo Clinic …
ibid. (emphasis added)
“The numbers are clearly alarming,” Dr. Simone Wildes, an infectious disease specialist at South Shore Health, told ABC News. “It shows that globalization is here, …”
ibid. (emphasis added)
The story so far: lots of travelers, some of whom probably had CCP Virus, entered the U.S. and brought the nasty bug here, and we have globalization to thank for that. What to do?
“… we have to be better prepared to deal with the impact this will have on all our lives in so many ways.” [Dr. Wildes – ed.]
ibid.
“This is not new,” said John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News Consultant. “We’ve seen this with H1N1, SARS, Zika. We should have had the infrastructure to prepare for this. And we didn’t.”
ibid.
There’s plenty more, along the lines of: globalism is here, so we have to build a More Robust Global System! which will only succeed if nations are transparent and cooperative. This high-minded word salad is the right thing to say at all the important cocktail parties, because it’s a verbal kowtow to monied prejudices. This calls for more organizations, travel, government programs, and such. Despite these issues, it might be a halfway decent idea, except for the giant Panda in the room.
The effectiveness of an upgraded global pandemic system will fall to the level of the most dishonest participant. We’re looking at you, China. The CCP doesn’t care about transparency or cooperation but holding on to power. It made everything worse around the world because of its dishonesty and insularity. A call for a tighter global response system is really a call for the CCP to become a liberal representative republic (when I say “liberal” I don’t mean the American Left distortion of that word). Sure!
Instead of waiting for a better CCP, Americans have become extremely angry at them. Ordinary people now realize that China makes most of our pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. They did not like that the CCP blamed the U.S. for the viral outbreak that started in their country and threatened to withhold needed medical equipment from us.
Worse, existing extra-national bodies failed utterly when the chips were down. Italians are furious that their EU buddies turned their backs on them with – of all things – export restrictions on medical supplies. Let us stop for a moment and admire the towering hypocrisy of this – the EU was originally conceived as a common market, not a military alliance or federal union. Sure, it’s become an overbearing bureaucracy, but the original intent of the EU was to create continent-wide fraternal bonds through free trade. But once an existential threat hit that system, jeder fur sich.
So, – no. Globalism is a conceptual overextended empire, promising too much, delivering too little, and weaker than it looks.
So what then? Any country that wants to trade with the U.S. should agree to minimum labor standards, environmental standards, and health reporting standards. The trade deal with China should be renegotiated and such things demanded of them, with American government officials, American independent journalists and American epidemiological experts permanently stationed around their country for the privilege of continuing to trade with us.
Further bilateral trade deals with other countries (like the UK, Japan, or Korea) would not require such intense oversight because these countries have better track records of transparency and protecting their workers and environments.
The U.S. should self-supply anything strategic; pharmaceuticals and medical supplies should be added to steel, aluminum, and defense equipment. Nothing unique to the U.S. (like Boeing transport aircraft) should be outsourced to any foreign manufacturer.
Nobody should be allowed into the country who comes from any region or locality with poor medical and cleanliness standards. That means you, third world (a small number of political refugees excepted), and we should lump China into that group because of its dishonesty and rotten cleanliness standards.
These suggestions are a step back from globalism that yet don’t amount to isolationism or suggest a comprehensive immigration plan.