One glance at the DRUDGE REPORT today will tell us that America is obsessed with the threat of the coronavirus, or COVID-19. This epidemic is changing our lives in startling ways.

Virtually all American culture has been frozen in an attempt to stop this killer virus. All public activity has been halted or severely curtailed. That means no work or entertainment for most people who are being confined to their homes.

While these restrictions are acting like a blunt force against normal social and economic activity, stressing and angering many people, we should be concerned as well about its threat to national security. Biological, chemical, and virus-born weapons have ancient and devastating histories, from catapulting plague-infected corpses over city walls during wartime sieges, to releasing infected fleas to wipe-out whole villages.

In the 14th Century about 60 percent of Europe's population was wiped out by the Black Death, or bubonic plague. There were other waves of this epidemic, which also came from the far east. Epidemics like this have been the scourge of mankind from time immemorial. This COVID-19 that we face today is nothing new, though its structure varies from other viruses. Consider that after being released from Wuhan, China, in a matter of weeks the world was infected. If we can believe The New York Times, "After doctors in Wuhan began treating clusters of patients stricken with a mysterious pneumonia in December, the reporting was supposed to have been automatic. Instead, hospitals deferred to local health officials who, over a political aversion to sharing bad news, withheld information about cases from the national reporting system — keeping Beijing in the dark and delaying the response. The central health authorities first learned about the outbreak not from the reporting system but after unknown whistle-blowers leaked two internal documents online."

Those whistle-blowers soon disappeared, and it's not unreasonable to believe that Beijing was never "in the dark", that their experiment got away from them.

This whole disaster points to the stark reality of the effectiveness of germ warfare today. Nothing new, but in-your-face threat. The entire nation, and its defense mechanism, can be quickly disabled by this sort of weapon. It has already effectively "disabled" one US aircraft carrier. What if we were hit with other weapons of the same sort at the same time? We would be almost immediately overwhelmed, with no recourse; a much quicker and quieter attack - with no sure determination of the source.

This virus we are dealing with now should be a warning. Communist China has launched an insidious attack, intentionally or not.

“Made in USA” should quickly include all equipment needed to counter germ warfare.

Only an April fool would believe otherwise.