SNAKE OIL: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World #1 Best Seller in Brain Diseases About In March 2020, liberal democracy ground to a sudden stop. Like the Reichstag Fire of 1933, historians may never know how SARS-CoV-2 came about. For scientists, exploring its origins would be a rewarding endeavor if it weren’t precluded by an immovable force—the jackboot of Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party. But while intelligence agencies spent months investigating the virus’s origins, the world employed an unprecedented response that proved far more devastating than the virus itself, leading to the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, widespread hunger, and the disappearance of countless lives and livelihoods. Across the world, governments implemented measures modeled on the mass quarantines imposed in China, commonly referred to as “lockdowns.” It was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe since the Second World War, and the largest man-made famine since the Great Leap Forward.