The Chinese Communist Party is good at hiding mass killings. There are no monuments in China to the millions who were starved during the Great Leap Forward under Mao in the 1960s or to the throngs mowed down at Tiananmen Square. Now, the CCP is covering up the origins of COVID-19, which has killed 2.7 million so far.
The CCP’s fingerprints are all over the joint World Health Organization-China report on the virus’s origins leaked Monday. China barred international scientists from collecting data, inspecting labs, scrutinizing medical records, or even having unmonitored talks with Chinese scientists. WHO even gave China veto power over the report’s contents. It’s a coverup.
The report argues that the virus probably spread from bats to another animal species (yet to be identified, despite testing thousands of species) and then leaped to humans in the city of Wuhan.
A tragic fluke of nature that coincidentally unfolded in the only city in China with a maximum security research lab investigating viruses.
Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doesn’t buy it. The most likely scenario, he says, is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. A mountain of circumstantial evidence supports that idea, though international investigators are being blocked from confirming it.
Wuhan Institute scientists collected viral samples from bat caves, including the virus most closely resembling the cause of COVID-19. At the lab, scientists used mice genetically engineered to have lungs like humans and infected these mice with the virus.
In the fall of 2019, just before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute took its virus data offline, according to the MIT Technology Review. The Institute is stonewalling.
The WHO-China report argues that a lab leak is an “extremely unlikely” explanation for the pandemic because lab accidents are “rare.” That’s laughable. They’re not rare. Viruses can leak out of high security labs on workers’ clothing or accidentally infect a worker. In 2018, U.S. embassy personnel in Beijing alerted the State Department of the low safety standards at the Wuhan Institute, but China resisted international monitoring.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cautions that “most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of COVID-19.”
Though Pompeo is suggesting an accident, Chinese researchers admit their research goal is biological weapons, including viruses that “target specific ethnicities.” That’s horrifying.
The United States must prepare for this threat. Biological warfare is a top priority of China’s President Xi Jinping. Defending against it has to be a top U.S. priority.
Yet, Washington pols are complacent. The United States lacks an extensive system of surveillance testing. When commercial and government labs test specimens for routine medical reasons, they should also be randomly sampling for new viruses and bacteria invisibly invading the country. That will alert the nation early, instead of being caught off guard when emergency rooms are suddenly flooded with patients sickened by an unknown disease.
The CARES Act, passed last March, provides only $500 million for surveillance testing, a token 1/60th of 1 percent of the trillions spent in response to COVID this past year. Washington pols have used the pandemic as a pretext to ramp up spending on their favorite causes—from teachers unions and performing arts centers to high-spending Democratic-run state and city governments—instead of preparing the nation to defend against future viral attacks.
There will be future pandemics. But information about China’s bioweaponry research is a valuable wake-up call. Now politicians must heed it.
Instead, Democrats in Maryland attacked Redfield on Monday, insisting that blaming China for the pandemic “put a big bull’s-eye” on people of Asian descent. That’s nonsense. Hate crimes against Asian Americans are deplorable, but the U.S. government must not be deterred from seeking the truth about the pandemic or China’s biological weaponry.
Most Chinese Americans understand that China is a rogue nation with no respect for human life. That’s why they choose to live here.
