Last week, the U.S. began yanking protective masks out of the hands of other countries for its own use, including allegedly arranging the effective hijacking of a shipment of 3M masks from China that was originally headed for Germany and rerouting it to the States. U.S. President Donald Trump also told U.S.-based 3M it should stop shipping masks to Canada and Mexico and focus on its home country, if it knows what’s good for it.
But China did these things first. In February it commandeered foreign-owned factories that produce masks and medical equipment (while it accepted supplies donated by well-meaning countries like Canada). It began rapidly importing medical supplies while blocking exporters. Beijing just recently began re-allowing limited exports, apparently satisfied it has now properly supplied itself — although some of the N95 masks its sending to Canada and elsewhere have been found to be counterfeit or don’t work properly.
Of course it’s natural for China to put its own interests first in how it manages its medical supplies — and its coronavirus data. And, as the National Post’s Terry Glavin pointed out on Twitter the other day, Chinese authorities had already effectively acknowledged their data were flawed when they announced last week that they would now start including asymptomatic cases in their case numbers, which they hadn’t been doing before, essentially admitting they failed to report literally millions of cases. They revealed that the day before Hajdu scolded that CTV producer for questioning their data.
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