Before COVID hit, China hoarded protective gear. But two can play that game

COVID-19 has a proven antiviral remedy called Remdesivir, but buying up three months’ worth of the drug’s global supplies has put the United States in the crosshairs of international criticism, making America look both heartless and hypocritical.

Just a few months ago, Western nations were calling out China for actively promoting profiteers snatching up global supplies of protective PPE medical gear. China directed an army of market marauders to take big bites out of other countries’ economies and medical infrastructures in order to leave them vulnerable, if not for dead.

Masks, gowns, ventilators were bought and shipped back to the People’s Republic just before the pandemic hit the rest of the world. China then turned around either to sell PPE for enormous profit or slowly dole it out for diplomatic gain with plagued nations. READ MORE

If it’s not one thing, then it’s a swarm of Murder Hornets

Just when you thought it was safe to go outdoors again — with face coverings, of course — news of a lethal, stinging insect could scare people back inside. The Asian giant hornet has just shown up in our beehives and on our doorsteps.

Airlines are going bust, vacations getting canceled and study-abroad programs marooning college kids in other countries, but that doesn’t mean all overseas travel has stopped. Microscopic viruses and big, bad invasive species are still roaming the world, finding new homes on distant shores. 

When it comes to nature, there is no justice, only reckoning. READ MORE

A COVID-19 pause on mass protests won’t shield inept or authoritarian leaders forever

Teenagers around the country have a very specific plan for what they will do when they are released from COVID confinement: party!

Around the world, however, the decriminalization and return of mass gatherings likely will lead to something else: demonstrations!

Governments and regimes everywhere are going to face a greater test of their resilience and staying power once masses of people are freed from public-health fears and able to express their dissent. Demonstrators who were a prominent feature in the streets of Hong Kong or on France’s highways have all been forced to curtail their collective protest activities. Instead of gathering in person, they are cowering from pestilence. READ MORE

Honor the heroes of the war against coronavirus with a national monument

Vegas is surreal on any given day. A place of fake pharaonic pyramids, Imperial Roman palaces, Venetian canals, an Eiffel Tower. 

Surreal. 

In the middle of the Las Vegas Strip is the New York-New York hotel-casino complex, with a faux cityscape — a scaled-down skyline. In front of the Statue of Liberty, a faux harbor floats a replica of the New York Fire Department’s fire boat #2 that was spontaneously turned into a living monument to New York 9/11 firefighters.

First responders and citizens garlanded this model city with flowers, firefighter T-shirts, images of the fallen, loving notes. This makeshift 9/11 firefighter memorial told the world that we will never forget the bravery and sacrifice of the first responders who rushed through ash choked streets and into burning buildings to save our souls.

At this moment, we have a new set of heroes putting down their lives to save us from an invisible viral scourge: doctors and nurses. They are on the front lines fighting the coronavirus, intubating patients and working against all odds without sufficient protective gear and medical equipment. 

Naturally, we voluntarily need to stave off the illness and protect our potential saviors — wash your hands!

We also need a way to honor these individuals for their bravery and sacrifice. It’s time to design and fund a meaningful monument to the nation’s medical practitioners. READ MORE

Coronavirus failures are our bad. We’d been warned it was coming for decades

Two years ago, the stock market was on a one-way trajectory: Up. 

In 2018, we watched how bioengineering advances and a technology called CRISPR held the promise of personalized medicine and cures. People lived longer, healthier lives.

That year also was the 100-year anniversary of the globally devastating Spanish Flu pandemic. That silent viral scourge killed more people than World War I. The Spanish Flu took between 50 million and 100 million lives worldwide.

World War I’s occupations, trench warfare, shooting and bombing, and the starvation that followed, killed 20 million. The war’s casualties split nearly evenly between military and civilian deaths; Americans and Europeans. READ MORE

Pigs in China have their own deadly pandemic. Xi Jinping better beware

One little piggy went to market, one little piggy got sick, one little piggy got culled —
…and joined 40 percent of China’s little piggies that went wee-wee-wee all the way to burial pits. 

During the past 19 months, the world’s largest pork market lost almost half of its pigs to an illness that went unreported and unchecked, and is now crossing borders threatening livestock elsewhere in Asia and the world.

Global worries about the coronavirus as a global pandemic are just the latest public-health scare that took flight in China. The African Swine Fever has run rampant in the People’s Republic since 2018 and has devastated the country’s pork production and markets.

The collapse of oil prices and demand, the wildly volatile stock market, and the social disruption across America due to the Coronavirus pandemic are all serious. So is any global threat to food stocks.

Pork is a staple meat for the Chinese and a primary source of protein in the People’s Republic of China. The bad news? The hog stock has collapsed, and the pig population is decimated. There is little to do about this immediately in a country where pork production is done in conditions dominated by small farms and backyard pigsties. Industrialized production is not widespread.  READ MORE