“When I tested positive, I was in a rage, I really was,” Sara Flounders, a New Jersey-based writer and political activist said, explaining even she took three shots of vaccines and had been following all prevention measures, she was still infected with COVID-19 as cases are surging dramatically in the U.S. this winter.
The U.S. keeps shattering records of daily reported cases, with the number at 1.5 million cases on Wednesday.
Flounders had been criticizing the U.S. chaotic response to prevent the spread of the disease since the pandemic started. She wrote a number of articles as the co-editor of Workers World newspaper and co-authored the book “Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of COVID-19 in China and the U.S.” A political activist, Flounders also criticizes U.S. foreign policies heavily and organized solidarities delegations to countries that were devastated by U.S. wars and sanctions, such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and Cuba.
Even though the virus is not as deadly after the booster shot, Flounders said she still experienced severe symptoms like body aches and vertigo for weeks. She believes the emergence of new variants that are already breaking vaccines is a dreadful result of the failed response to COVID-19.
Uncoordinated response
“There’s no public health system in the United States today,” Flounders said. She complained that the government of the U.S. failed at dealing with the pandemic, pointing out different counties, cities and states are following different rules which led to a chaotic response.
The lack of any measures of coordination and at the same time, an insistence that the solutions be in the hands of private corporations in areas where they could make a profit.”
Another fact Flounders pointed out is that even though the daily reported cases are at a record high in the U.S now, it’s still underreporting as many who did rapid test at home like her were not included in the official numbers.
“I first did take a rapid test at home, tested positive, knew I was sick, I know, family knows, but there’s no government collection of that data.”
Video: Chinese Ambassador to US handouts Years of the Tiger gifts during the Hockey Game at Capital One Arena in Washington DC on Jan 10 2022 中國駐美國大使於 2022 年 1 月 10 日在華盛頓特區首都一號體育館的曲棍球比賽中分發虎年禮物 Why not doing the same in San Francisco and Honolulu Hawaii? 為什麼不能在加州三藩市和夏威夷做同一樣的推廣, 為本地華人增光呢? https://vimeo.com/665826434 https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/638596154030380/?d=n
A recent report in The Nation magazine accomplishes both by inducing readers with a steady dose of Cold War leftism and condemnation of those critical of the Empire’s narrative
International movement against new cold war is growing – CGTN Many on the so-called “left” view China and the U.S. as equally oppressive and imperialist in character. This is a historic trend dating back to the Cold War which divided the Western left into a variety of camps. One of these camps was the “Neither Washington nor Moscow” consortium of social democrats and liberals who saw the Soviet Union as an imperialist force unworthy of defense from U.S. aggression. Such a position fit neatly into Washington’s larger imperialist designs and provided cover for the ideological onslaught of anti-communism.
A recent report in The Nation demonstrates how the slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow” has been replaced with “Neither Washington nor Beijing.” The author, David Klion, concludes that leftists are currently divided into two camps on the question of China: those “apologists” who prioritize peace and critics of China who prioritize “human rights.” Klion closes with a citation from Lausan, a collective that supposedly supports a “decolonial” framework on Hong Kong yet has routinely characterized any leftist opposition to the Western narrative on China as “fascist” or “tankie.”
Klion’s pro-Empire bias is in keeping with his affiliations and body of work. Klion is the newsletter editor for Jewish Currents, a so-called left magazine which has published multiple screeds in support of U.S. intervention in Syria. The publication has compared the war in Syria to the Holocaust (with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad playing the role of Hitler) and demanded that the Obama administration set up a no-fly zone to bomb the Syrian government out of power. In 2018, Klion penned an article in The Nation arguing that progressives should embrace normalization as a mechanism for internal interference in Russia’s affairs on the basis of “human rights” concerns. Klion has since deleted several tweets expressing his loyalty to the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory.
Klion’s article on China misses the mark from the title onward. He begins by asking “what should the left should do about China?” only to pivot to Lausan’s amateurish rant about “tankies” and disagreements with the DSA about how to address U.S. tensions with China. The article argues that one can legitimately criticize the Chinese government (“do something about China) and curtail war too. Klion attempts to build credibility for this argument through quotes from the Soros and Koch-funded Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor Matt Duss, and the academic-driven Justice is Global movement. Justice is Global has produced an entire report instructing activists on how to oppose anti-Asian racism while engaging in “legitimate” criticisms of China. The report (surprise, surprise) was written in consultation with prominent members of Lausan.
Klion then engages in a lengthy smear campaign of the Qiao Collective, a group of Chinese diaspora activists who publish educational material that counters New Cold War propaganda against China. Again, Lausan is quoted at length to give the impression that the Qiao Collective is sowing discord on the Left. Only criticisms and condemnations of the Qiao Collective are given attention in the piece while the breadth of the group’s work is reduced to a singular position on Hong Kong protests taken from the organization’s website.
Klion’s intellectual laziness continues on the question of “human rights” in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. He dismisses the content of Qiao Collective’s report on Xinjiang and has been accused of misrepresenting scholar and activist Vijay Prashad’s quote to the article. Prashad, who is currently the director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and an organizer in the anti-war and anti-colonial movement, spoke out about the issue on Twitter.
He also provided the Chronicles of Haiphong with the following statement:
Any project of a people must have the right to advance its own understanding of their struggles. We have to ask the question: is it acceptable in China to advance the wellbeing of people and eliminate poverty? Furthermore, the article accepts that Chinese colonialism is a reality in Xinjiang. That’s a debatable premise in my opinion. I would like to see David speak out on these issues.
However, Klion does nothing of the sort. Instead, he counters the Qiao Collective and Vijay Prashad’s position on the Xinjiang issue by citing Rayhat Asan, a “human rights lawyer” and senior non-resident fellow for the Strategic Litigation Center at NATO’s think-tank, the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council receives funding from the largest Wall Street banks and corrupt governments, including Goldman Sachs and the United Arab Emirates.
Klion’s article concludes with a shallow analysis of the possible effectiveness of sanctions in addressing “human rights” in China and what the DSA’s internal debate on how to approach human rights claims against China without supporting a pro-interventionist position reveals about the Left. The question of what position the Left should take on China is reduced to how the U.S. should confront China. The dangers of the U.S.’s imperialist aggression and the questionable claims made about China are marginalized or ignored entirely. Klion’s position is clear: if the U.S. left does not lead the way in condemning China, Mike Pompeo and the far right will.
It makes sense, then, that Klion would give a public relations boost to so-called leftists who support the ideological propaganda of the New Cold War. The logic is simple. If you say anything positive about China, then you are a “tankie.” If you question the U.S. and Western narrative about Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or any other “human rights issue,” then you are also a “tankie.” Furthermore, if you oppose U.S. sanctions that threaten to harm the livelihoods of people in Xinjiang, for example, congratulations — you too are nothing but a “tankie.” Klion’s article refers to the word “tankie” six times.
Such immature political analysis has no place in a genuine, anti-imperialist movement or investigative journalism. The truth is that any concession to anti-China propaganda is a gift to the American Empire. These concessions come in a myriad of forms. They include the omission of U.S. aggression against China, the slander of those critical of humanitarian interventionism and claims of “genocide” in China made by dubious sources, and a total rejection of China’s political and social processes as “authoritarian.” Klion’s article subscribes to all of them.
The article avoids discussion of U.S. militarism in the Asia Pacific such as the occupation of Okinawa or the 400 U.S. military bases that surround China. The policy manifestations of the U.S. propaganda war on China receive no attention in Klion’s article, either. Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor Matt Duss specifically advocates for Magnitsky sanctions to weaken the Chinese economy but ignores the fact sanctions on China already exist. The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act possesses a clause that mandates the President of the United States place sanctions on Hong Kong should the city violate existing U.S. sanctions on Iran and the DPRK. Klion’s minimization of U.S. policy creates a false equivalency between the U.S. and China, a symptom of the pro-imperialist, Cold War attitudes that continue to plague much of what calls itself the “left” in the U.S. and West.
Real leftists oppose their own government’s warmongering policies, uphold international law, and pay proper attention to achievements of countries targeted by U.S. imperialism such as China’s elimination of extreme poverty. Real leftists investigate claims made by dubious sources backed by U.S. intelligence cutouts such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) rather than embrace them wholesale. Real leftists understand that the American Empire is the biggest obstacle in the way of human progress. They don’t ask, “what should the Left do about China?” Rather, they pose the question, “How can the Left develop solidarity with China and the Chinese people in the global struggle against imperialism and oppression of all kinds?”
On the date of publication, Klion tweeted that he was “the furthest thing from a China expert.” It showed. His article contains little to no substance on the facts and criticisms that undergird left divisions on China. It was clear from the beginning that the purpose of the piece was to manufacture consent for a “Neither Washington nor Beijing” position amongst the Left. Champions of this formulation are generally more concerned with winning leftists over to an anti-China position rather than to a pro-peace position.
Klion uses human rights as a cudgel to smear leftists and satisfy the powerful forces in charge of the American Empire. His article offers little more than an assortment of Cold War talking points that masquerade as “objective” investigation. A political agenda was pursued from the start, and Left challengers to the Empire’s narrative were demonized and dismissed. This is completely in line with the U.S.’s New Cold War against China and is reflective of the pro-Empire mentality that continues to render the Western Left an ineffective and counterproductive force in the global struggle for peace and socialism.
Professor John V Walsh, MD in San Francisco: Quotes: “For the Chinese officials, virus control comes first. The people’s lives, well-being and dignity come much later.”
She is referring here to a Zero covid policy that is saving peoples lives by the hundreds of thousands. How can one have well being and dignity if one is dead? jw
“The government has the help of a vast army of community workers who carry out the policy with zeal and hordes of online nationalists who attack anyone raising grievances or concerns. The tragedies in Xi’an have prompted some Chinese people to question how those enforcing the quarantine rules can behave like this and to ask who holds ultimate responsibility.”
‘“It’s very easy to blame the individuals who committed the banality of evil,” a user called @IWillNotResistIt wrote on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. “If you and I become the screws in this gigantic machine, we might not be able to resist its powerful pull either.”
““The banality of evil” is a concept Chinese intellectuals often invoke in moments like Xi’an. It was coined by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote that Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, was an ordinary man who was motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.””
How shall we respond? The article is a complete inversion of the truth.
Despicable. (On top of everything else it demeans and cheapens the lessons of the Holocaust.)
US not a member of UNCLOS plays magistrate of UN convention to sow discord in South China Sea: Chinese FM 美國並非聯合國海洋法公約成員國卻扮演聯合國公約裁判官在南海挑撥離間：中國外交部長by Fan Anqi Jan 13 2022
Beijing has been accused of lying or manipulating Covid death statistics; the same can be said about some of its fiercest critics, however impressive their academic or scientific credentials.
SCMP: Alex Lo, January 13 2022
In recent weeks, several mainstream British publications have resurrected the old lab leak theory about the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. But what I find most interesting is another allegation that periodically resurfaces about China having vastly under-reported its Covid death toll.
The current interest starts with The Economist news magazine, which has released an intriguing machine learning program using big data and artificial intelligence to estimate excess deaths on top of the official death tolls from more than 110 countries and territories. The data, at least as it is currently presented on the publication’s webpage, doesn’t include China and Vietnam any more, two communist countries that do not release weekly and monthly statistics, but claim successes in containing the pandemic since the early stages of the outbreak in contrast to many Western countries.
Using the magazine’s estimates, researchers at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) claimed in an October article that the actual death toll in China is in excess of 600,000. Beijing currently claims a figure of 4,600-plus deaths.
Writing a three-part series in Forbes this month, George Calhoun, a professor specialising in quantitative finance at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New York, does even better by claiming the actual death toll is 1.7 million.
“The 800-to-1 ratio of US-to-Chinese mortality rates is a statistical, medical, biological, political and economic impossibility,” he wrote in the article, titled “Beijing Is Intentionally under-reporting China’s Covid Death Rate”, in which he equates under-reporting with lying.
But why was it impossible, when Americans had Donald Trump as president who denied the outbreak was a threat and pronounced it would disappear quickly on its own in the early months of its wildfire spread across the United States in 2020?
Calhoun continued: “China is another story. Its official statistics understate the Chinese Covid death rate by 17,000 per cent (according to The Economist model).
“In fact, based on excess mortality calculations, The Economist estimates that the true number of Covid deaths in China is not 4,636 – but something like 1.7 million. That is, China’s cumulative death toll is likely at least double that of the United States.”
I love the words “in fact”; it must be a slip of the pen. After all, we are dealing with estimates here.
In my line of work as a reporter, it’s usually think tank fellows and university professors who develop computer models to make new, preferably interesting findings, which are then reported in the media. In this case, it’s the academics who are borrowing from the computer model of a news publication. Interesting, to say the least!
In fact, a number of statistics specialists have since pointed out the dangers of extrapolating death toll estimates for countries whose data are not included in The Economist model. And that is exactly what Calhoun and the CSIS researchers have done. The CSIS piece, “Is China succeeding in shaping global narratives about Covid-19?” was updated last month, and references to the modelling of excess deaths in China from the magazine have been removed. Calhoun also moderated his claim somewhat in the last of this three-part series this week.
The Economist model uses a machine learning technique called gradient boosting, which assembles weaker prediction models to try to boost predictive outperformance using massive data regressively. In a series of online posts, Stuart Gilmour, a professor of biostatistics at St Luke’s International University in Tokyo, has cautioned against extending the magazine’s AI model to countries such as China and Vietnam.
“Let’s talk about the dangers of using machine learning for analysis when you don’t have data,” he wrote.
“The Economist [models] have limited data sources – they use complete mortality data from the human mortality database and the world mortality database, but these only cover about 110 countries. They don’t have anything for China or Vietnam, for example. They predict deaths in other countries based on the countries with data.”
Then, Gilmour goes in for the kill.
“This has a huge and simple problem: you can’t apply relations that exist in countries with full pandemics to countries where Covid is contained,” he wrote. “A model can’t tell that the low testing rate in China is because of no cases – it will assume under-testing.
“China does not have half a million excess Covid deaths, Vietnam doesn’t have 100k, lots of Asian countries are doing better than the USA, and fancy models that serve to reinforce Western wishful thinking don’t help.”
The latest offering from Calhoun is titled: “Anomalies In The Chinese Covid Data – Evidence Of Manipulation?” Note the question mark. Gone is that old certainty about “in fact, there has been X million of excess deaths”.
He no longer relies on The Economist model, which he says “has attracted much attention”. Instead, he now cites data on “crude death rates” from the World Bank and the United Nations between 2018 and 2021. But even he admits the UN data for 2020 and thereafter are projections that do not include any impacts from the Covid-19 pandemic. That adds another layer of uncertainty to Calhoun’s previous claim about a million or two of excess deaths in China.
Now his mistrust of official Chinese statistics is not entirely unjustified. He wrote: “It would be nice if we had similar data from China, where the virus originated. Beijing refuses to provide it.”
Of course, it would be nice. But it’s doubtful any level of disclosure and transparency from China would satisfy critics out to pick a fight. Be that as it may, Calhoun wrote: [The] effectiveness of China’s extreme public health countermeasures in slowing the spread of the disease … cannot account for the absence of mortality outcomes in people who do contract Covid. Once a person is infected, lockdowns and masks have no further effects on the medical prognosis.
“So how to account for this anomaly? The most likely explanation – really the only one that can explain this claim of perfect success in the midst of a chaotic public health crisis – the only explanation is the political explanation: Beijing ordered the mortality number to become 0.0 per cent.”
For the sake of argument, let’s accept Calhoun’s point about 0.0 per cent mortality rate being impossible after a certain official cut-off date. We still don’t know how much China has been “under-reporting”; The Economist model and UN data are no help. At most, they raise some questions about China’s data anomalies.
Well, I can go with that, but that doesn’t take us very far, if not back to square one.
Professor Kenneth Hammond: This kind of phoney statistical fantasizing has long been directed at China. The wildly exaggerated figures for the morality associated with the Great Leap Forward, the gross overstatement of deaths during the June 4th, 1989 events in Beijing, the claims of millions killed during the Cultural Revolution, are all based on elaborate distortions and willful manipulation of data. My own sources in China have no doubts about the validity of the official statistics on Covid mortality. The almost universal ignorance among even well-educated people in the West about the realities of life in China allow this kind of ridiculous mendacity to be propagated at will.
Professor John V Walsh, MD:
There is a study of excess deaths published in the highly respected BMJ (British Medical Journal) and carried out by a joint team at Oxford and China’s CDC. It shows that China’s death counts have been extraordinarily accurate.Here is the link to my article in which the BMJ study is summarized and a link to it provided. https://dissidentvoice.org/2021/08/learn-from-the-east-a-major-lesson-of-the-pandemic/ (It also appeared in Unz Review – and in CounterPunch with a different and ambiguous headline.)
Johnson Choi Biz 