Why has this come to pass? But first, let’s review the bidding.

China has adopted a “zero COVID” policy which means its goal is the eradication of COVID, not its management. Sane people don’t believe this is possible, as COVID has multiple “animal reservoirs” that harbor the virus. Zero COVID, in my view, is more properly viewed as a means of population control. It has expressed itself in the United States and other nations in the form of testing, mask, and vaccine mandates, along with mandatory quarantines. Still, the purpose is precisely the same as China’s zero COVID measures. (READ: Inside an Australian COVID Internment Camp, a Dystopian Hell Awaits; Australian COVID Restrictions Get More Draconian as Health Officer Mentions ‘New World Order’; and No Government Can Make as Many Mistakes and Errors About COVID as Ours Did; It Requires Intent.)

A “new variant” emerged in China last spring. China responded by locking down the massive commercial hub of Shanghai.

The virus spread, creating more lockdowns. All of this occurred in a population with a vaccination rate of about 90%. But a couple of funny things happened. First, unlike in 2019-2020, no one really cared what the Chinese did. The scare tactics that stampeded the West into a massive and self-defeating exercise in human rights violation and economic suicide did not work. Unable to repeat the tactic that crippled its primary adversary, China was now stuck with a policy that a) didn’t work and b) only harmed China.

In early December, a second, untoward series of events took place. There was “spontaneous” civil unrest in China. First, it focused on corporate COVID restrictions, but it quickly conflicted with the state.

In what was nearly an unprecedented move, the Chinese government did not respond with tanks in the street a la Tiananmen Square but by pulling back from zero COVID.

That resulted in this imagery flowing out of China.

Dec 26, a doctor in #Liaoning Province, #CCPChina fainted in the ER.
Even many law enforcement departments stopped functioning because too many officers are sick.#chinacovid #ChinaCovidCases #ChinaCovidSurge #ChinaCovidDeaths #ChinaCovidNightmare #COVID #COVID19 #ZeroCovid #CCP pic.twitter.com/sXlVeZsayy

— Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng 曾錚真言 (@jenniferzeng97) December 28, 2022

AFP in Chongqing: "Attached to a breathing tube under a pile of blankets, an old man racked with Covid-19 lay groaning on a stretcher…The old man waited half an hour to be treated…AFP saw six other people in sick beds, surrounded by harried doctors."https://t.co/yCI2q6FP5D

— Jonathan Cheng (@JChengWSJ) December 23, 2022

As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances and relatives of sick people are searching for open beds. pic.twitter.com/CqtF1R9sc5

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 24, 2022

What a scene! Somewhere in #CCPChina, patients can only receive infusions outside, in the cold wind, as hospitals are all full.#chinacovid #ChinaCovidCases #ChinaCovidSurge #ChinaCovidDeaths #ChinaCovidNightmare #COVID #COVID19 #ZeroCovid #CCPVirus #CCP #China #XiJingping pic.twitter.com/1n6fcStItX

— Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng 曾錚真言 (@jenniferzeng97) December 23, 2022

Part of that relaxation of zero COVID was that China removed travel restrictions, allowing people to enter and leave China relatively freely for the first time in several months.

Since dramatically reversing its years-old “zero-COVID” policy, which aimed to stamp out every case of the coronavirus, China has been lifting restrictions quickly. Authorities plan to remove all travel bans early next year — a move likely to trigger a flood of Chinese travelers abroad for the new year holiday after nearly three years of rolling lockdowns under the draconian zero-COVID approach.

News that international inbound travelers won’t have to go through quarantine, coupled with the lifting of a ban on passports being issued or renewed for Chinese nationals, have got people excited across the vast country.

Within 15 minutes of the policy change being announced, searches for popular international destinations had increased 10-fold, with popular Chinese travel booking site Qunar reporting a seven-fold increase in international flight searches.

And now, Joe Biden has announced travel restrictions will be imposed next week. So, it is fair to ask what those restrictions will look like.

Travelers coming directly from China or who were in the country 10 days before their departure to the US will have to show either a negative PCR or antigen test for the coronavirus, federal health officials said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity in a call with reporters. The requirement applies to all passengers regardless of nationality or vaccination status and will go into effect Jan. 5 at 12:01 a.m. New York time.

Passengers who tested positive more than 10 days before can provide documentation and recovery from Covid in lieu of a negative test result, the officials said on the call. Airlines will need to confirm the negative Covid test or documentation of recovery prior to boarding flights to the US. The requirement also applies to travelers from Hong Kong and Macau.

Unless I’m reading that wrong, it appears the Chinese are responsible for administering our restrictions.

Biden deserves no credit for anything.

He’s imposing travel restrictions nearly a year after this new COVID contagion hit China. Moreover, those travel restrictions will go into effect a month after China removed its own travel restrictions, and if they were any more ineffectual, they simply would not exist. So, he either knows the threat from China is utter bullsh** and he’s engaging in political opportunism…or he knows it is real and is deliberately putting our nation at risk for unknown reasons.

Again, to review the bidding, China imposes a lockdown that is ignored by everyone but which does damage to China. There is a period of rioting that goes away without the government resorting to the use of force or mass incarceration. China pulls back from zero COVID and allows domestic and international travel. The world sees horrendous images of emergency rooms swamped by COVID patients and dead bodies casually ricked up in hospital hallways and mortuaries. Crickets. Then a couple of weeks into this drama, Joe Biden announces some pretty flaccid travel restrictions that go into effect next week.

I’d note here that China typically doesn’t permit unflattering images of its public health system to circulate…unless there is a purpose, like in Wuhan three years ago.

While the most notable — and in a just world, criminal — Branch COVIDian — that would be Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson with his bizarre and rather stupid “projections” is absent from the scene — there is no shortage of hyperactive Yorkies wetting the kitchen floor. This is one of the most unhinged members of the COVIDian clan. Read the whole thing.

2) Summary of #CCP's current #COVID goal: “Let whoever needs to be infected infected, let whoever needs to die die. Early infections, early deaths, early peak, early resumption of production.” @jenniferzeng97

Dead bodies piled up in NE China in 1 night—pic.twitter.com/nx7DD2DJwN

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 19, 2022

And read this one, too.

2) Multiple models show #XBB15 is much worse in transmission R value and infection rate than previous variants — faster by LEAPS and BOUNDS. @JPWeiland did some the earliest models on #XBB15 watching data in NY. it has only grown worse nationwide. pic.twitter.com/b0Fys8GUJP

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 30, 2022

The New York Post has this to say about the push from some quarters to return us to the failed policies of 2020: COVID crazies are using the China virus surge to push disastrous restrictions AGAIN — ignore them.

But none of that is stopping the usual suspects here in the states.

“The Case for Wearing Masks Forever,” trumpets The New Yorker. “Should Everyone Be Masking Again?” asks The Atlantic. Woke epidemiologists on Twitter shout that people who wanted schools open have blood on their hands. Sitting US representatives spread misinformation about the virus’ danger to children. 

Here we go again?

Many of these people got a taste of untrammeled power during the pandemic, liked it and now want more — no matter how much evidence at home and abroad shows how disastrously wrong their prescriptions were.

This is not to say that the US’s newly announced policy of only allowing COVID-negative travelers from China into the country should be abandoned. Indeed, the CDC’s delay of the policy’s implementation until Jan. 5 is about as absurd as the politically motivated “science” during the pandemic that led to school shutdowns, business closures and widespread masking rules and accomplished nothing.

There is blood 🩸on the hands of those who advocating letting kids get infected / claimed kids are “practically immune” to #COVID19—kids are not. Those aged 10-19s play the biggest role in spreading #Omicron—and it’s because how we didn’t protect kids in unmitigated schools. https://t.co/T25qpG0Pp4

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 26, 2022

to be made of China’s policies. Now, almost immediately after relenting to public pressure, a massive catastrophe has begun to unfold, with many estimating millions of deaths will occur over the next three months. Without defending China’s prior policies, this shift provides 2/

— Eric Reinhart (@_Eric_Reinhart) December 28, 2022

2) When people use the term "endemic" to describe the current situation (meaning, a "constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area"), does that also mean 14,422 #COVID hospitalizations in Quebec since Sept. 1?

— Aaron Derfel (@Aaron_Derfel) December 29, 2022

I think what we’re witnessing is something a bit different from a bunch of lackwits trying to regain their place in the such. We are seeing the same pattern from early 2020 re-emerge.

In this video, China researcher Cleo Paskal discusses the Chinese concept of “comprehensive national power.”

[W]e have a tendency to silo evaluation so something’s just economic or it’s just military. With this concept of comprehensive national power, it all comes together so it’s broken down into discrete elements which have a numerical value which come together to feed into this overall comprehensive national power ranking. And the goal of the Chinese Communist Party is very overtly for China to be number one in comprehensive national power.

And that can be accomplished in two ways. One, they increase their ranking or everybody else’s ranking goes down. So again, in that context, it’s logical if you have a pandemic, you know if you have an epidemic in china, and you know that’s going to affect your economy you know that’s going to lower your comprehensive national power ranking. Then it’s logical to block your domestic flights but to turn an epidemic into a pandemic and make sure that everybody else is suffering as well.

Consider this in terms of 2020. China discovered it was the epicenter of a pandemic. It had two choices: suck it up and take the pain, or spread the virus globally to ensure everyone was hurt as badly as they were. If you recall, while China had quarantined Wuhan province to domestic travel, it still permitted international flights in and out of Wuhan.

If I’m correct, the Chinese tried to use a “new variant” of COVID to panic the West back into lockdown mode. It didn’t work, but it did harm China. Now, China has prepped the Western public with images of horror while simultaneously blaming the abandonment of zero COVID for the carnage. And they have removed all their restrictions on foreign and domestic travel. Their chorus of fellow travelers or useful idiots in the US is now sounding the alarm about the danger of this new Chinese variant and demanding that the failed regime of personal restrictions go back into effect. Given Joe Biden’s personal and family history of profiting from a relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, what are we to make of travel restrictions that seem calculated to do nothing at all beyond political posturing?

The question is, “what next?” There is no doubt that many of our self-proclaimed elites loved COVID and the excuse it gave them to control our movements, our freedom of association, and our freedom of religion. Have we, however, learned the lessons of 2020?