In mid-April, a senior FBI official warned that cyber spies were attacking U.S. and allied medical research institutions developing coronavirus vaccines. The U.S. Department of Justice later pegged China as the chief witch doctor of medical espionage and suggested a crash American COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine project nicknamed Operation Warp Speed is Beijing's major target.
During World War II, American leaders feared Nazi Germany sought a nuclear weapons program. So at warp speed, the Manhattan Project split atoms in an experimental reactor and then developed and deployed operational atomic bombs.
The "crash" Manhattan Project gave the U.S. and its allies a decisive strategic-warfare edge. A-bombs ended the conflict and saved lives by avoiding a bloody, Okinawa-type invasion of Japan.
My opinion: Nuclear proliferation remains the sane world's major security threat. However, the COVID-19/Wuhan virus' global proliferation (attention: it originated in Wuhan) has demonstrated (once again) that pandemics are an international security threat to human life. They also savage 21st-century economies.
That means the nation that develops and deploys the first safe and clinically effective vaccine will be able to do many things. Protecting your nation's population is more than a material medical advantage. A vaccinated population has an economic advantage over adversaries.
Developing an effective vaccine enhances diplomatic power. Obviously, the discoverer's allies are in line to benefit. But don't underestimate prestige power of an effective vaccine's quick discovery and rapid employment. Effectiveness is primary. However, speed demonstrates a society's ability to rapidly face new, threatening conditions and produce a response that benefits the world.
A Nobel Prize isn't the only measure of a nation's creative scientific vitality, but it is a measure even television gab shows understand. Hence this column's side bet: An effective COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine developed by fall 2020 will warrant a Nobel Prize in Medicine.
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I repeat from last week's column, for the sake of Chinese communist propagandist idiots, that Wuhan is a place, just like the Rocky Mountains (Rocky Mountain spotted fever), Uganda's West Nile province (West Nile virus), Old Lyme, Connecticut (Lyme disease), and Congo's Ebola River (Ebola virus).
Why hammer that fact? Because attempting to disconnect the virus from its country of origin -- China -- is a Chinese Communist Party propaganda ploy to shield CCP leaders from taking responsibility for having spread the virus.
The agitprop campaign has failed. In fact, the pandemic has focused attention on communist China's global depredations and in particular its "unrestricted warfare" attack on the U.S.
"Unrestricted Warfare" (also known as "Warfare Without Limits") is the title of a book authored by two People's Liberation Army Air Force colonels. Published in 1999, the colonels propose weakening and then defeating an adversary using an array of operations -- for example, theft, bribery, economic gimmicks, disinformation, spying, co-optation of an adversary's media and educational institutions.
Who do the authors seek to defeat? The U.S.A.
In May 2019, I wrote a column noting spies have always sought more than military secrets. Gathering political intelligence and economic information aren't new, though global competition has enhanced the value of "proprietary knowledge," particularly when the intellectual property involves technology or techniques with national security application.
Intellectual property originally indicated that a creative intellect owned it, which led to that column's central point: China targets American creativity because its system retards creativity. Dictatorships fear creativity, but Beijing's dictators covet American creativity's economic, military and cultural benefits.
An April 2019 Houston Chronicle and Science magazine investigative report detailing pervasive Chinese espionage at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center spurred that column. Why target a medical institution? My take: "China's communist elites seek to steal the creative genius, decades of training and years of cancer research of some of the world's finest specialists and most brilliant doctors."
Targeting America's COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine project is just the latest vicious attempt by the CCP to steal the genius of American medicine.
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