RED SWAN: The Story of a Secret Cable and the Crisis We Could Have Seen Coming

COVID-19: It’s all we talk about, on the cable news, and in our 6-foot socially-distanced prison walks around our silent neighborhoods. And in nearly every conversation comes the intellectual shrug, “who could have seen this coming?” A single phrase that neatly absolves governments and experts alike of any responsibility of predicting the pandemic and, if not being able to stop it, at least cushioning its blow........

But is it unfair to engage in so much 20-20 hindsight? After all, who could see COVID coming?

Well, we did. We — as in nodes within the U.S. Government tasked with tracking critical infrastructure on a global scale, literally maintaining a list of critical materials and capabilities, wherever they may be around the globe......

While the document’s State Department senders designated the cable “SECRET/NOFORN” (no foreign nationals) and marked it for de-classification in 2019. Wikileaks made it public a decade ahead of schedule, revealing an intriguing list of “Critical Infrastructure/Key Resources” outside of the U.S. “whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States.”

Under the heading for China: “Polypropylene Filter Material for N-95 Masks”

…Precisely the ones the federal government and states are scrambling to source right now. That’s right: The U.S. Government knew in 2009 that N-95 masks were critical, came from China… And did nothing about it.

But there’s more – and it goes to the broader supply-chain dependence on China that has only deepened in the past decade. The classified list includes a series of Chinese mines deemed critical:

The U.S. remains 100% dependent for fluorspar, graphite and rare earths. China remains the world’s top supplier. And while the dependency has eased a bit for germanium, tin and tungsten, the U.S. remains more than 50% import dependent for each, while China’s role as global provider stands unchanged.
And this, despite the fact that the U.S. hosts known resources for all six, but simply fails to make mining, refining and recovering them a policy priority....
In any case, the warning could hardly be more clear. The U.S. has a choice: It can take immediate steps to reduce its dangerous dependency on a Chinese supply chain for critical technology metals.
Or we can hope COVID 2.0 will not disrupt supply in a second global shut-down – or that Beijing won’t one day decide to curtail access to these critical materials in time of crisis."

"Beijing ~~won’t~~ WILL one day decide to curtail access to these critical materials in time of crisis."

We are in that crisis now and China is doing just that.

If we cannot mine the material we need on our land, we must get them from friendly countries that have them.

I push comes to shove, we must go into China and commandeer what ever we need.

And we need to keep our knowledge that if China sends us any PPE at all that it may be defective or corrupted with a Chinese virus, if not the present Wuhan virus, but a different one.

China had more viruses than the Codid-19 in labs including the one in Wuhan.

The threats from China are the most dangerous we have ever encountered.

To fail to close the borders by February 1 was criminally irresponsible (and they’re still not closed, although it no longer matters). None of this needed to happen.

That the Senate would have removed Trump on February 5 had he done so is an excuse.

I had a teacher in ninth grade whose favorite phrase was “that is not an excuse, that is a reason for failure”.

What Hillary would have done is irrelevant. She’s not the President.

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