We’re Not the only Ones

There’s this bit, via The Independent, a British online news publication, regarding the reliability of (medical) products from the People’s Republic of China:

The UK government’s new testing chief has admitted that none of the 3.5 million antibody tests ordered from [the People’s Republic of China] are fit for widespread use.
Professor John Newton, who was appointed by health secretary Matt Hancock to oversee testing, reportedly said the tests were only able to identify immunity in people who had been severely sick with coronavirus.
The tests did not pass the evaluation stage, and he was quoted by The Times as saying they were “not good enough to be worth rolling out in very large scale”.

The Brits, too—along with, I strongly suspect, all of Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, and on and on—need to adjust the supply chains of their nationally critical items so as to eliminate the PRC from them.

It’s generally appropriate not to ascribe to malevolence what incompetence can adequately explain. However, sometimes it really is malevolence, when it’s on the scale the PRC is perpetrating.

Critical Supplies

I’ve written earlier about the need to recreate a core ability to produce certain items critical to our national security entirely domestically, from dirt in the ground to final product.

The need isn’t only driven by our enemies having critical places in our supply chains.  Our friends and would-be friends have similarly critical places, and they act as enthusiastically for their own self interest as we do. And those self interests can conflict.

Take India and hydroxychloroquine. India has decided to ban the export of any of its production of the drug. Worldwide demand is expanding greatly in response to its apparent (though not yet clearly demonstrated) effectiveness in treating Wuhan Virus infections, while production capacity has not—cannot—expand as rapidly to meet that demand. India has a very large population with diseases for which on-label use is wholly warranted.  India’s ban is not borne of enmity toward us but of national need and so self interest.

We can retaliate against India and its ban, as President Donald Trump has threatened to do, but that sort of response doesn’t address the underlying problem (it should be noted that retaliations prove unnecessary; India has enacted an exception to its ban that allows export to us). We need to be able to produce our own hydroxychloroquine from scratch, entirely domestically. We still should get the drug, and intermediate production chemicals, from the most efficiently done sources, including internationally, but we absolutely need to have an ability to produce at least some entirely domestically. That would give us a core capability from which to expand, should a need arise, rather than leave us to do without or vulnerable to extortion, as our enemies will apply.

Propaganda and the Press

At the Monday President Donald Trump-hosted daily press conference about the status of the Wuhan Virus situation in the US, a reporter representing Hong Kong Phoenix TV asked a question prefaced with a long tout of the People’s Republic of China shipping medical supplies to the US (coincidentally omitting to mention how defective PRC-originated medical supplies tend to be).

Trump called her on her affiliation; she mumbled about representing Hong Kong Phoenix TV, but weasel-worded her employer’s association with the PRC government.

However. According to an ex-Phoenix TV news director,

Phoenix TV’s content is subject to the dictates of the leadership of the Central Communist Propaganda Department, Central Communist Overseas Propaganda Office, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which often directly sent instructions to Phoenix Satellite TV.

As Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) put it,

So to recap, the WH Correspondents Assoc gave a seat at the WH press briefing to an employee of the Chinese Communist govt, to ask globally televised Qs to POTUS, at the same time China is waging a propaganda campaign to hide their culpability & coverup of the Wuhan virus?!?

Meanwhile, this same White House Correspondence Association has barred the One America News Network from these briefings, necessitating Trump’s invitations to the news outlet in order for its reporters to gain entrance—standing at the back of the bus press room.

This is what we have, then: American journalists actively suppressing a right-leaning news outlet while equally actively promoting a propaganda arm of the PRC government.

Think about that.

Economic Extortion

The Wuhan Virus, which originated from the city of that name, in the province of Hubei, in the heartland of the People’s Republic of China, may not have been released on the world deliberately, but the situation is certainly being taken advantage of by the PRC.

Congressman Mark Green (R, TN) has advised us all that French President Emmanuel Macron was talking to PRC President Xi Jinping and asked him for a billion masks.

Xi readily agreed—on condition that France implement its 5G wireless communications network with Huawei equipment.  No Huawei, no masks; French medical personnel, French patients can just die.

This comes against the backdrop our own health care companies having to recall surgical gowns made in the PRC because they might have been tainted—they were manufactured in facilities that hadn’t met standards for manufacture since 2018.  Netherlands has had to recall masks manufactured and delivered by the PRC because those masks were defective and provided none of the protections they were supposed to provide. Spain and Turkey also have had defective medical equipment foisted off on them by the PRC. Czech Republic is the recipient of PRC-made Wuhan Virus test kits with an 80% failure rate (Bing Translator is friendly enough).

Macron might want to pay more attention to what his neighbors in the EU are being cheated with, as well as who’s doing the cheating, along with studying the nature of extortion.

Simplified So What

Oversimplified, really, and beginning with the time frames I use below.

Let’s say the Wuhan Virus situation and the associated stay-at-home moves the several States apply—particularly the latter—lead to a drop in our GDP of 30% (a drop I pulled out of rectal storage and that is a drop being bandied about as the economic cost of Germany’s and the EU’s moves in response to their Wuhan Virus situation).

Let’s say further, that the stay-at-home response lasts for one month and for two months. What’s the so what for these alternatives?

A 30% drop in GDP means that our total national output of goods and services—the aggregation of us individual citizens’ spending and earning along with those of our businesses—would drop by 30%.  Keep in mind, too, that private spending accounts for roughly 70% of our GDP.

Were the stay-at-home policy to last one month, and then we’re back on the streets and at work, that 30% drop—the vacation trips we didn’t take; the cars we didn’t buy; the groceries we didn’t buy; the rent or mortgage payments we didn’t make; the jobs we didn’t work, the products our employers didn’t produce; the income the banks, dealerships, and travel facilities didn’t take in—all of these would hurt, a lot, but these are things all of us can last through.  That includes the businesses that employ us so we have jobs to go back to, earning income to spend and save, and the businesses can start getting their own income stream going again.

This won’t happen all at once; the recovery will ripple. We spend and businesses reemploy so we have income to spend. That initial pairing is the key; both have to happen roughly together at the outset, and so they will happen only with what I’ll call the primary pairing: goods and services that we as individuals must have to survive: groceries, fuel for our transportation to get to the stores and our jobs; and that our “primary” businesses need: our rent/mortgage payments, income from our necessities buying.

As those get going again (grocers, for instance, are on bare bones manning during the present situation), farmers and other food producers can produce, food processors can process, other necessities producers and processors can get going again and so hire again—and reemployment and income production, and spending, expands.  Probably pretty quickly, too, as actual income won’t be needed universally to feed this growth: we’re a debt-driven economy, and (nearly) everyone’s credit will still be good.

The problem arises if the broad-based stay-at-home reaction lasts for two months. Aside from that resulting in an additional 30% drop in GDP—in our spending and earning along with those of our businesses—it would result in a more critical outcome: bankruptcy and businesses disappearing.

The most vulnerable are tiny-margin businesses—grocers, for instance—and the mom-and-pop and other small businesses, entities that have the bulk of our nation’s jobs. These businesses, aside from the thin profit margins on which they inherently operate, also operate on thin lines of credit. And us individuals operate on thin savings.

Two months may be longer than we—especially those businesses—can last. The businesses, in widespread fashion, are likely to go bankrupt and associated jobs disappear.  That breaks that essential first-step pairing of our spending and our returning to our jobs to earn income to spend (and save).

That’s a much harder state from which to restart our economy, and that likely would take much vaster Government intervention to effect. And that’s something we don’t want to have happen.