Writing  about the coronavirus that is killing thousands of people all over the world, Conrad Black says:

China now purports—with what must be acknowledged as majestic (though not simply admirable) aplomb—to be laying out a “silk road” of medical assistance to late-coming sufferer-nations. Of course, these nations are all victims of China’s official lies about the medical dangers it had inadvertently fostered and negligently transmitted. Having inflicted this pestilence on the world, China now claims to be the indispensable world leader in mastering the problem.

But was the virus “inadvertently fostered”? Is it not at least possible that an inhumane power, antagonistic to most of the rest of the world, would foster a biological weapon such as the coronavirus in a laboratory? 

Of course, the Chinese must not be allowed to get away with this colossal rodomontade. The United States must take the lead in repatriating pharmaceutical production from China, demanding the World Health Organization cease to be a shill-and-whitewash operation for the Peoples’ Republic, and render a truthful and objective account of how this virus got started and how it got so completely out of control.

Is it not at least possible that it was deliberately let out of captivity?  Not “negligently transmitted” but malevolently released? 

Sure it killed a lot of the regime’s own subject people, but when was that ever a problem to the regime? To use a popular turn of phrase, it is “not a bug but a feature” of Communism. The Chinese Communist dictatorship has required untold number of infants to be left to die. It kills people in order to harvest their organs for sale. And – Conrad Black points out – it has trampled millions underfoot, “oppressed and traduced” millions, “from the long Civil War (1920s-1949) through the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and the occupation of Tibet”, to its enlarging concentration camps and recent violent suppression of protestors in Hong Kong.

All of which is a matter of “praxis”, the implementation of Communist orthodoxy, which states: it is the collective that matters, not the individual. That is the core, the hub, the nitty-gritty of Communism.

As if the collective can feel pain or fear death! 

The Chinese role must be exposed in effectively assuring the exportation of the coronavirus to the whole world, including through the large concentrations of Chinese workers building the self-important “Belt and Road” with which the Middle Kingdom will assert itself across the Eurasian land-mass, and through its failure to give advisory warnings to international travelers. China deliberately ignored the universally recognized responsibilities of all countries to report outbreaks of communicable diseases promptly and accurately. …

This attempt of the Chinese government, as it blames the United States for this debacle and threatens to be sluggish about the transmission to the United States of medical supplies produced in China by American companies it had induced to invest there, requires a sharp rejoinder.

Where this creates a conundrum for the United States is that although all Chinese comments on the coronavirus have to be somewhat, or even substantially, discounted, China’s partially plausible claim that it has turned the corner and that the virus is now in retreat, is extremely useful in combating the profound panic which is sweeping the United States and the entire Western world. In democratic countries, the media are free to hype any version of events, no matter how terrifying, and the temptation to do so in the United States is aggravated by the possibility presented to the anti-Trump media to hammer the president for incompetence and deception in an election year, and destroy the benefits of his skillful management of the economy.

This is going to require the administration to execute the sophisticated maneuver of exposing China’s duplicity and negligence, while citing the fact that even despite the Beijing regime’s blunders and disinformation, the incidence and impact of the coronavirus are clearly now declining in China.

But is the epidemic declining in China? Should we trust that claim while distrusting others made by the regime – simply because it is useful to us? Or should we pretend to believe it simply because it is useful to us? That seems to be what Conrad Black is advocating:

The remit of the scientists is to end the medical crisis, but the administration has the challenge of imposing total risk-avoidance measures on the susceptible elements of the population (the infirm and elderly), and urging those with minimal chance of serious, much less, mortal illness, to pursue their occupations as best they can …

On the premise of a plausible lie?

These are delicate balances the administration will have to sort out. …

Indeed they are.

I predict that the administration will thread this needle and that the coronavirus crisis will be seen to be receding before the end of May.

That would be good, but it is only wishful thinking. A penchant for substituting words for reality is an oriental characteristic that the global Left has adopted, and is unexpected from a conservative commentator. It is not a useful device. It doesn’t work. Reality goes on accruing its consequences.

We do not know, we cannot know, when this Chinese Communist killer stalking the earth will stop or be stopped.