The Suspect French Lab in Wuhan
China got the P4 it wanted from France. The world got a pandemic.
by Joseph A. Harriss
May 4, 2020, 4:01 PM
by Doug Bandow
Chestnuts are in blossom, but there are no holiday tables under the trees this spring as Paris struggles with the coronavirus. For the past seven weeks, its citizens have been confined to their homes, sans sidewalk cafes, sans restaurants, sans museums and everything else that makes the city a delight. The economy is on the ropes, with unemployment soaring and a drop of 6 percent in GDP in the first quarter. Among the tens of billions of euros the government of President Emmanuel Macron has spent to prop up businesses has been $8 billion to Air France — a virtual nationalization of the airline — with another $5 billion for that other national champion, Renault. Urgently needed restoration on fire-damaged Notre Dame cathedral has been neglected as locked-down workers are only now beginning to return to work.
Some 25,000 French have died from COVID-19, the fourth-highest number of deaths in the world and, incredibly, nearly four times the figure for neighboring Germany. Increasingly, French citizens are blaming the government for its hesitant, vacillating, often contradictory management of the crisis, especially its woeful lack of protective masks and testing kits, which led to the high mortality rate. Polls show a majority no longer have confidence in the Macron administration, convinced that it lied to them about the virus.
https://spectator.org/the-suspect-french-lab-in-wuhan/
