Waldo is a cartoon character with a distinctive wardrobe of a red and white striped shirt, blue jeans, brown boots, red and white striped socks, glasses, and a red and white bobbled cap.  Dressed like that, Waldo should stand out in any crowd...but he doesn't.  The game kids play is to find Waldo in a crowd of normally dressed people in various settings like a beach, an amusement park, and so on.  It's not easy, as Waldo gets lost among the visual distractions.

Finding Waldo is comparable to what's been going on regarding China and the pandemic.  Because of the Wuhan virus, Washington and public health agencies have been subjecting the country to one affront after another.  They went from lockdowns to mask mandates to vaccine passports and now to mandates for vaccinations.

To justify this, one lie after another about the virus has been put forth. These include, but are not limited to:

1) exaggerating the lethality of the Wuhan virus

2) saying the COVID vaccines are 95-percent effective and are safe

3) claiming there are no effective treatments for COVID

4) insisting nobody knows where the virus originated

As one lie is shown to be wrong by unfolding facts on the ground, another one tumbles out without the earlier lies being retracted.  This is the confusing background in which China, like Waldo, hides.

But why?  China's role in the pandemic that has inflicted tremendous damage on the world is as conspicuous as Waldo's attire.

The ugly truth is that powerful interests in the United States have been complicit in China's gain-of-function research on viruses.  It has now been firmly documented that Dr. Anthony Fauci gave grant money to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then lied in 2012 that the benefits of what can be learned from gain-of-function research — i.e., making viruses stronger and more transmissible in humans — are worth it, even if it leads to a pandemic.  One can only imagine how dark a person's soul must be to think like that.  And yet not only is this pompous bureaucrat still walking the streets as a free man, but he holds the highest position in U.S. public health and is influencing how to fight the pandemic he helped start.

Fauci is far from alone.  More than a few U.S. scientists and universities have been involved with the Wuhan Virology lab.  And ask yourself, how far did the U.S. military go in outsourcing its virus bioweapons research to China?  Then there's Wall Street and the global-leaning corporations.  As President Trump found out, they won't let anything interfere with their lucrative trade and relationships with China.  To them, excessive profits come before U.S. national interests, not to mention common decency.

In the 2019–2020 academic year, 372,000 Chinese undergraduate and graduate students were enrolled in U.S. universities.

According to Fortune, this amounted to $16 billion in revenue, and most Chinese students pay the full sticker price on the cost of tuition without financial aid, which makes them even more important to the universities.  American universities do not want to jeopardize that cash flow by negative publicity on China.  They need money to fund their growing diversity infrastructure and to compensate for falling enrollment.

Last but not least is President Biden.  One can only guess how much dirt the Chinese have on Biden and his family due to Hunter Biden's corrupt dealings with them.  Given his compromised situation, Biden can't do anything significant to address China except voice some empty words for show.  All the while, China is benefiting from Biden policies like the vaccine mandate, which will hobble the economy, and the abandonment of $83 billion in advanced military equipment in Afghanistan.  While America twists itself into a pretzel over the virus, China sits and smiles.

Those are the reasons why the virus is never referred to as the Wuhan virus in the media.  It's also why President Trump was roundly excoriated for calling it such.  And so, China has been all but erased from the COVID discussion.  Everyone in Washington knows about China's role in the pandemic.  Nothing is done because powerful people and groups have a vested interest in not ruffling the Red Dragon's feathers.  The only ones whose interests are ignored in all this are the American people.  But the fact remains: both Waldo and China are both hiding in plain sight.

Image: Ian Aberle via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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