Workers wearing protective gear disinfect as a precaution against the new coronavirus at the subway station in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, March 11, 2020. (Kim Sun-woong/Newsis via AP)

In an effort to try to repair its international image as a duplicitous rogue state that would happily kill millions of people in order to hide a local epidemic, China has embarked on a public relations campaign of donating medical supplies to other countries. What they are trying to do with this is a) make other countries grateful to them for the assistance, thereby, b) tamping down any international attempt to bring them to account for the disaster they inflicted upon the world, c) send the message that the epidemic is so contained that it has excess medical supplies, and d) hint that the Chinese economy didn’t suffer from Wuhan virus unlike the puny economies of the West.

But things aren’t quite going as planned. The Wuhan virus test kits donated by China have a small bug. They mostly don’t work.

A Czech news site on Monday (March 23) revealed that 80 percent of the much-touted traunch of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) rapid test kits “donated” from China are faulty, forcing healthcare workers to rely on conventional laboratory tests.
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However, Czech news site iROZHLAS on Monday revealed that local healthcare workers have discovered that up to 80 percent of the Chinese kits give false results. During a crisis staff meeting held for the Moravian-Silesian Region by regional hygienist Pavla Svrcinova, the error rate for the test kits was found to be 80 percent, prompting officials to suggest they only be used for those persons who are nearing the end of their quarantine and never previously tested positive.

The Czech Republic received 150,000 coronavirus test kits from China. About 80% of the tests give false results.
Athens Czechs have gone back to traditional tests, of which they perform 900 per day. https://t.co/xCFUmnWMq4

— Andrzej Kozlowski (@akoz33) March 24, 2020

This same problem was reported to plague the famous “WHO test kits” which the left and NeverTrumpers demanded that the US use because #OrangeManBad. No word on where they were made but China would be a fabulous guess as no one else had the virus to develop a test from when those were offered up. The Czech Republic is not alone; Spain, which is also using Chinese test kits, is having the same problem.

Hopefully, when the dust settles from this partially real and partially contrived crisis, there will be an accounting. We need to make sure that we are never again dependent upon a nation that functions very much as though it were an enemy nation because it really is. We need to bring manufacturing capacity for pharmaceuticals and medical equipment back from China, forbid certain US companies to operate there because of the theft of intellectual property that cuts against our national security interests, and we need to have a blanket embargo on certain classes of made in China products to force US companies to find other sources. Most important, we can never let the world forget what China did here and the callous way it treated the victims of its deceit.