The damning case against China over Covid-19 deserves proper attention
As John Stuart Mill so eloquently wrote: “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”
Fortified by this moral admonition, I went on to write an April 2020 piece in CapX, charging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with direct culpability in the spread of the Coronavirus to the rest of the world.
Now, fully 14 months on, the case against Beijing is (shamefully) finally being looked into with seriousness. President Joe Biden has announced a 90-day inquiry to be undertaken by his intelligence staff to investigate the origins of the virus. UK spies have told media that it is “feasible” Covid-19 emerged in a lab leak.
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As the circumstantial evidence grows, I am confident that I am correct about this most explosive geopolitical question of the century.
If I am correct, the CCP bears direct criminal responsibility for the deaths of over 3.5 million people worldwide, allowing the spread of the coronavirus from its shores, after covering up the scale and the danger of the pandemic. As I wrote at the time: “If the Chinese government were a person, it would surely be guilty of manslaughter.”
Given all the new evidence, a re-cap is necessary here, outlining the present circumstantial, but damning, case against the CCP leadership.
First, the infected bats that the CCP claim are responsible for propagating Covid-19 live almost 1000 miles away from Wuhan, the pandemic’s early epicenter. Does this make any sense?
Second, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located in the city itself, is one of China’s biggest virology testing labs, where it is known experiments on coronaviruses were carried out.
Third, it is now accepted that hygiene security at the lab was terrible. As Nicholas Wade, former science editor of The New York Times, put it, the protocols were little better than at a western dental clinic.
Fourth, a lack of cell phone activity in the WIV’s most high security area, from October 7-24th, 2019, suggests that the lab was shut down for some reason, possibly due to a lab accident.
Fifth, in November 2019, The Wall Street Journal reports that three researchers at the WIV were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms that could have been early Covid-19 cases.
Sixth, in February 2021, the all-too-gullible (to put it kindly) World Health Organization (WHO) team visited Wuhan to investigate the origins of the crisis. The WIV staff refused to show them the relevant data, safety logs, or lab records. Curiously incurious, the WHO team still submitted a report, saying a lab accident cause for the outbreak was highly unlikely.
Seventh, all this obfuscation is the most damning circumstantial evidence of all of the CCP’s culpability. As an unnamed US official aptly put it, “If there was a smoking gun, the CCP buried it along with anyone who would dare speak up about it. We’ll probably never be able to prove it one way or the other, which was Beijing’s goal all along”.
In addition to all of this new evidence, there is what we already knew before, at the time of my first article. In early December 2019, Dr Li Wenliang and his colleagues raised the alarm about a strange Covid virus spreading in Wuhan, only to be censored, slapped down and even forced to “confess” to anti-social behavior. In doing so the regime wasted a precious six weeks when they could have alerted the world to the impending danger.
The leadership in Beijing were no more forthcoming with their own people than they were with the outside world. On January 18, despite the obvious danger, they allowed a large public festival in Wuhan to go ahead, with tens of thousands of people attending, amounting to a super-spreader event.
Perhaps worst of all, after finally admitting the extent of the virus to the world on January 20, the CCP now used it as a biological weapon.
On January 23rd, the regime locked down all traffic in Hubei province, the center of the plague, to the rest of the country, even as planes were still allowed to fly to the rest of the world, spreading the infection. After this, a global pandemic was inevitable.
Knowing that the virus was dangerous and virulent, the CCP allowed travel from infected areas to continue to other countries. A study by the University of Southampton estimates that an astonishing 95 percent of all global Covid-19 cases were avoidable had China alerted the world to the danger just three weeks earlier than it did on January 20.
It is time to face facts. What happened here is evil. It is past time enough good men cease doing nothing.
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