Biden’s China syndrome

Matt Ridley is the co-author of Viral: The Search For the Origin of Covid-19. It has just been published in an updated paperback edition (in the UK, anyway). He summarizes “The case for the lab-leak theory” in a timely column for Spiked. It seems to me that Ridley makes a powerful case.

China has suppressed access to all information bearing on the lab-leak theory. Given that the CCP knows every jot and tittle of the evidence, its suppression is itself powerful circumstantial evidence in support of the lab-leak theory. Ridley confines this point to a glancing discussion in the penultimate paragraph:

In a court of law, a prosecutor would regard all this -available scientific evidence] as a strong case. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” he would probably say, quoting Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And then he would start going through the extraordinary litany of unhelpful obstacles that the Chinese government has put in the way of the World Health Organisation and everybody else who tries to get information on the early patients and what happened in the lab. When WHO investigators went to Wuhan in early 2021 they spent just three hours in the institute and visited the wrong lab (with the wrong biosafety level) on the wrong campus (in Jiangxia instead of Wuchang). As far as we know the WHO investigators were not shown the lower biosafety labs where the SARS-like virus work had been conducted.

This all goes to China’s responsibility for the spread of the virus around the world and the related enormities it has caused. For some reason, however, this is an issue that has dropped from the public view of the Biden administration. President Biden himself has directed his ire on these enormities to the guy who preceded him. It is, shall we say, disgusting.

I say Ridley’s column is timely because it arrives coincidentally with the revelation that, contrary to his public denials, Biden discussed Hunter Biden’s Chinese connections with Hunter. Josh Boswell reports on the voicemail message the Daily found from Joe Biden on Hunter’s cell phone in the excellent Daily Mail story “VOICEMAIL from Joe Biden to Hunter about NY Times report on his Chinese business dealings proves he DID speak to his son about his relationship with criminal dubbed the ‘spy chief of China.'” Boswell explains that the voicemail message comes from a backup of Hunter’s iPhone XS stored on his abandoned laptop.

The Daily Mail provides these handy bullet points for the story:

• Joe Biden called Hunter in December 2018 saying he wanted to talk to him after reading a New York Times story about Hunter’s dealings with the Chinese oil giant CEFC.

• Files on Hunter’s abandoned laptop previously disclosed by DailyMail.com show that he struck a deal with the Chinese company worth millions of dollars.

• The Times’ 2018 story pointed out CEFC’s chairman Ye Jianming had been arrested in China and his lieutenant Patrick Ho had been convicted of bribery.

• Hunter accidentally recorded himself referring to Ho as the “spy chief of China”

• After seeing the story online, Joe called Hunter and left a voicemail

• “I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear,” Joe said in the voicemail. [Miranda Devine explains that Biden was referring to a New York Times story about the arrest of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partner Patrick Ho on bribery charges.]

• The message flies in the face of the president’s repeated denials that he ever discussed Hunter’s overseas business dealings with his son

Miranda Devine follows up in the New York Post column “Why Hunter’s dealings with China aren’t a ‘big fat nothing’ for his President father.” Tucker Carlson featured Devine in a segment whose video is posted in Geoffrey Dickens’s Media Research Center story “Networks CENSOR Joe Biden’s ‘I Think You’re Clear’ Voicemail to Hunter.” The Post has more here today. I have posted the MRC video below.

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