{"id":262487,"date":"2021-05-29T20:46:08","date_gmt":"2021-05-29T17:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/biden-needs-merkel-macrons-help-to-avoid-another-pandemic\/"},"modified":"2021-05-29T20:46:08","modified_gmt":"2021-05-29T17:46:08","slug":"biden-needs-merkel-macrons-help-to-avoid-another-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/biden-needs-merkel-macrons-help-to-avoid-another-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"#Biden needs Merkel, Macron’s help to avoid another pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Biden needs Merkel, Macron’s help to avoid another pandemic<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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The possibility that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan research laboratory is not something from the fever dreams of conspiracy theory: No less a fixture of the establishment than Anthony Fauci himself says he is \u201cnot convinced\u201d the virus emerged naturally from contact with animals. President Joe Biden has ordered an investigation, of sorts, into the question.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The evidence is far from conclusive. And that is the problem \u2014 it\u2019s going to stay inconclusive without a real investigation, something that neither the bosses in Beijing nor the bureaucrats of the World Health Organization can promise with any credibility.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 90-day review Biden has requested from the US intelligence community is not the kind of investigation that\u2019s needed. Without access to the relevant data in China, this \u201cinvestigation\u201d will amount to a review of the intelligence that already is available. The problem is not that US authorities have not been looking into what happ<\/a>ened in Wuhan \u2014 we can safely assume that project got ample encouragement from former President Donald Trump, who loved to speak of the \u201cChina virus.\u201d The problem is that Beijing is obstructing international efforts to study the origin of COVID-19 and must be persuaded to cooperate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Biden administration likes to talk about diplomacy and multilateralism, and now would be an excellent time for some of that. But there\u2019s very little to be had.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead, the best the administration has been able to muster is having Xavier Becerra \u2014 the left-wing lawyer who, for some reason, serves as Biden\u2019s secretary of health and human services \u2014 lecture the WHO about the need to be \u201ctransparent\u201d in this matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With apologies to such titans as Michael O. Leavitt and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, secretaries of health and human services are not world-shaking figures. This is a job for heads of government \u2014 lots of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Bush
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Bush administration turned to diplomacy in a big way.<\/figcaption>
White House via CNP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Consider a counterexample.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the administration of former President George H. W. Bush put on a master class in high-speed diplomacy. The United Nations and the Arab League were brought on board. Saudi Arabia pledged billions to support the effort to free Kuwait. Arab leaders ranging from Egypt\u2019s Hosni Mubarak to Syria\u2019s Hafez al-Assad supported the effort. Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Brian Mulroney backed the effort, and Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand dispatched 18,000 troops, including the French Foreign Legion and other support.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a particularly deft bit of diplomacy, the Israelis were persuaded to sideline themselves even as threats \u2014 and then missiles \u2014 rained on them. The world rallied under US leadership.\u00a0<\/p>\n

George H. W. Bush was underappreciated in his time and is missed in ours. And his kind of diplomacy should be the template for our unfinished business in Wuhan \u2014 not a military invasion, but a shoulder-to-shoulder, worldwide effort that leaves Beijing isolated, under inescapable pressure with nowhere to turn.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t need the guy who has Donna Shalala\u2019s old job on that particular case \u2014 we need Boris Johnson, Yoshihide Suga, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, Scott Morrison, Narendra Modi, Muhammad Buhari, etc.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Wuhan
Without relevant Chinese data from Wuhan laboratories, the US investigation into COVID-19 will lack insight.<\/figcaption>
AFP via Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This will have to happen, if it happens, under US leadership \u2014 because that is the only such leadership that is, as a practical matter, available.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If Iraq had been allowed to swallow Kuwait 30 years ago, it would have been a footnote in world history. The COVID-19 epidemic, in contrast, has been a genuinely world-changing event. Understanding how it came to happen is an absolute necessity \u2014 and preventing something like it from happening again is, properly understood, the most important task on the desk of government leaders worldwide.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If this was a laboratory accident, then it is a laboratory accident that can happen again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is not as though Beijing is entitled to the benefit of the doubt here. The dishonesty of Chinese leaders in this matter is well-established, as is their incompetence and negligence in related matters: from the coverups of the Bohai Bay oil spill and the Songhua River benzene dump to the Long March 5B rocket falling out of the sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Americans sometimes think of Xi Jinping & Co. as evil geniuses, but their measures are often crude and inept. A police state is a useful instrument for keeping members of religious minorities in concentration camps, but it is not a very useful instrument for keeping viruses in safe storage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The big diplomatic item on President Biden\u2019s agenda right now is planning a lunch date with Vladimir Putin in Geneva next month. Russia surely needs attention, but the big show is China. President Biden can make time to lecture the Germans about gas pipelines or to have Secretary Whatshisname mouth a few platitudes about transparency, but he should be building a multinational coalition to get answers about Wuhan \u2014 and to reduce the likelihood of another worldwide pandemic that will kill millions or billions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerica\u2019s back,\u201d Biden said. Time to deliver.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Biden needs Merkel, Macron’s help to avoid another pandemic” The possibility that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan research laboratory is not something from the fever dreams of conspiracy theory: No less a fixture of the establishment than Anthony Fauci himself says he is \u201cnot convinced\u201d the virus emerged naturally from contact with animals. President Joe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":262488,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/05\/joe-biden-15.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[107734,1545,70409,991,83955],"class_list":["post-262487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-5-29-21","tag-coronavirus","tag-diplomacy","tag-joe-biden","tag-pandemics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}