Political Correctness Can Kill

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Democrats and mainstream media will give no credit to President Trump for saving lives by cutting off travel from China on Jan. 31.

No, they said it was premature, xenophobic, racist, not based on science. So said former Vice President Joe Biden on Jan. 31, reacting — as usual — impulsively and according to the norms of political correctness before the words were even out of the president's mouth.

The Washington Post's self-proclaimed "fact-checker," Glenn Kessler, argued on April 12 in "On Trump's Claim That He Imposed First 'China Ban,'" that the travel ban was not effective because the deaths per million as of April 6 in G-20 countries that did not impose travel restrictions show no pattern of efficacy. Kessler didn't mention the variations in domestic controls in those countries and the United States.

If you read or listen to certain sources of information, you will learn that President Trump's travel ban on Jan. 31 did, in fact, save American lives. Though I am not aware of any projection of the range of numbers of lives saved, I fear we have forgotten how many travelers from China were stopped in their tracks from entering this country.

Let's look at the numbers:

• Tourists from China were about 2 million yearly
• Students from China totaled 369,000 (2018–2019) and
• Business travelers from China numbered in the hundreds of thousands (2018)

The Presidential Proclamation of Jan. 31 imposing the travel ban (effective Feb. 2) summarized the numbers this way: "During [Federal Government] Fiscal Year 2019, an average of more than 14,000 people traveled to the United States from China each day, via both direct and indirect flights."

What President Trump and the American government did not know on Jan. 31 was that asymptomatic people carried the virus — that wasn't known until Feb. 21.

But even after the Feb. 21 revelation of asymptomatic transmission, Biden doubled down on his opposition to the travel ban. On March 12 — fully 20 days later — Biden tweeted his opposition to the president's expansion of the ban to Europe, declaring "A wall will not stop the coronavirus."

Talk about fiddling! Biden did not change his mind about the effectiveness of a travel ban until April 3, 63 days after the president announced the travel ban on China.

How many travelers from China would Joe Biden have allowed in? We can do the math: 63 days times 14,000 daily equals 882,000 entrants!

And where would these travelers from China have gone for their first stop in the United States? According to the New York Times, among the top 10 would-have-been destinations, Los Angeles and San Francisco ranked first and second, respectively (Los Angeles having twice as many entrants as San Francisco). New York ranked third, and nearby Newark, sixth. So the geographic areas most impacted would have been California and New York — already among the states worst affected by the outbreak.

All this was ignored by establishment media. The New York Times, for example, has instead trounced Trump for not going far enough to protect the nation against foreign carriers of disease. "430,000 People Have Traveled from China to U.S. Since Coronavirus Surfaced," read an April 4 headline, leading readers to believe the president acted too slowly "after the coronavirus surfaced," or that there was a gaping hole in his ban. Neither is true.

Again, the president issued the travel ban 13 days before anyone knew that asymptomatic people could carry the virus. And the small print in the article reveals that, between the time the entire world learned of a pneumonia-like outbreak in China on Dec. 31 and the effective date of the ban on Feb. 2, there were 390,000 travelers from China to the United States. After Feb. 2, however, there were only 40,000, and almost all of these were American citizens and legal residents exempt from the ban.

Nancy Pelosi is wrong, dead wrong. President Trump didn't kill people. He saved people. And it was Biden, not Trump, who fiddled. Political correctness can kill us.

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