China must pay the price for unleashing COVID-19
For four long years, an Anthony Fauci-led cabal sought to keep COVID’s origins in a Chinese lab hidden from the public.
With Beijing’s active assistance, they were largely successful.
Skeptics like myself, who suggested that Americans shouldn’t buy China’s bat-guano-crazy story about the virus coming from a wet market, were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” in the United States and attacked as “racists” by China.
My New York Post article exposing the lab was censored on Facebook by Fauci’s good friend Mark Zuckerberg.
Now, of course, the truth has finally come out — or, as the Chinese would say, “The water has receded and the rocks have emerged.”
Even The New York Times, which once mocked Sen. Tom Cotton for wondering if a lab leak was responsible for the pandemic, has now capitulated.
What it once dismissed as a “fringe theory” it now allows may be scientific fact.
And the scientific facts — as described by Prof. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University last week before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security — are these: There is “zero” evidence that the COVID virus originated in nature, and “multiple lines of secure evidence point to a research origin.”
Now that we’ve pieced together the puzzle of the origin of COVID-19, there has to be accountability.
The good news is that Fauci and his bought-and-paid-for viral acolytes are slowly being exposed for their role in funding the dangerous research in the Wuhan lab — then trying to cover it up.
The bad news is that one very bad actor has to date largely escaped scrutiny for its role in creating and releasing COVID upon the world.
China is directly responsible for killing up to 20 million people, crashing the global economy and destroying our children’s mental health and education.
Simple justice requires that the leaders of China be called to account for their crimes against humanity, and that China should pay an indemnity of trillions for the damage inflicted.
In an ideal world, the international community would be speaking with one voice to demand precisely this.
But the world has been silent.
The United Nations has not uttered the slightest criticism of China and its leaders, much less condemned their actions.
Don’t look to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to take action either, even though it exists to try individuals for crimes against humanity.
The ICC these days is much more interested in charging Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu with “war crimes” than in taking notice of the fact that Xi Jinping’s China is responsible for as many deaths as World War I.
If it is impossible to bring those responsible for unleashing a pandemic upon the world to justice, can we at least make the country responsible pay damages?
After all, the blow to the global economy over the three years of the pandemic is in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Through 2023, the US alone lost an estimated $14 trillion — more than half its annual GDP — to the pandemic.
I am under no illusion that we will ever see one penny from China as long as Joe Biden is president, since he regards Beijing as a mere competitor instead of the dangerous adversary that it in fact is.
During his last meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in San Francisco, Biden passed over the entire COVID pandemic in silence.
He neither demanded an investigation into the Wuhan lab, nor insisted on reparations for the havoc its engineered virus has wreaked all over the world. Instead, he simply ignored the issue.
The meta-message of Biden’s continued silence is this: Don’t blame China.
Don’t demand reparations, don’t decouple our economies, don’t upset the geopolitical order in which China marches relentlessly on, despite unleashing a devastating virus on the world.
Biden is not the only one who is afraid to beard the dragon, of course: We haven’t heard any of our allies demanding reparations either.
About the only one who has spoken out is the same guy who, early on, dared to label the virus by its country of origin, proclaiming that it came from “Chy-na.”
Donald Trump is also the only leader who has a plan to recover America’s losses from China’s misdeeds, and the strength of will to carry out that plan.
In lieu of reparations — which Beijing will almost certainly refuse to pay — Trump has pledged to impose steep, across-the-board tariffs.
Tariffs will hurt China far more than they will harm the United States.
In part due to Trump’s earlier round of tariffs — still in place today — we are less dependent upon China than we once were.
The Chinese economy, on the other hand, remains a one-trick pony, based heavily on an export sector that all too often relies on forced and even slave labor to keep costs down.
If America leads in this fashion, some of Europe’s up-and-coming populist leaders will surely follow.
None of this will bring gramma or abuela or nani back, but making China face harsh consequences will force Beijing to recalculate the costs of its reckless bioweapons program.
And maybe, just maybe, it will help forestall the next pandemic.
Steven W. Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “The Devil and Communist China: From Mao Down to Xi”.
