Truth and Consequences, China and SARS-CoV-2

"We've said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outside, but I think the whole world can see now. There is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan."

"[I have] no reason to disbelieve [the intelligence community]. I've seen their analysis. I've seen the summary that you saw that was released publicly [that the COVID-19 virus was not man made or genetically modified]. I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate."
"[China] behaved like authoritarian regimes do, attempted to conceal and hide and confused and employed the World Health Organization as a tool to do the same."

"These are the kinds of things that have presented this enormous crisis and enormous loss of life and tremendous economic loss all across the globe."

"The Australians agree with that, you hear the Europeans beginning to say the same thing, and I think the whole world is united understanding that China brought this virus to the world."

"I don't have anything to say about that [whether China deliberately or accidentally released the SARS-CoV-2 virus]. I think there's a lot to know, but I can say this. We've done our best to try and answer all of those questions. We tried to get a team in there, the WHO [World Health Organization] tried to get a team in there, and they have failed. No one's been allowed to go into this lab or any of the other laboratories...this is an ongoing challenge. We still need to get in there. We still don't have the virus samples we need."
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 

"China likely cut its exports of medical supplies prior to its January WHO [World Health Organization] notification that COVID-19 is a contagion."
"In its communications, China intentionally concealed its trade activity by publicly denying it has ever imposed an export ban on masks and other medical supplies." 
Department of Homeland Security report, Source

"[The former CIA director, Mike Pompeo, had] stunned the world with groundless accusations."

"Since Pompeo said his claims are supported by 'enormous evidence,' then he should present this so-called evidence to the world, and especially to the American public who he continually tries to fool."

"The truth is that Pompeo does not have any evidence, and during Sunday's interview, he was bluffing."

"[The White House is continuing to] engage in unprecedented propaganda warfare while trying to impede global efforts in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic."

"As the U.S. presidential election campaigns are underway, the Trump administration has implemented a strategy designed to divert attention from the incompetence it has displayed in fighting the pandemic. It is clear that their goal is to blame China for the pandemic by pinpointing the country as the source of Covid-19."

Global Times newspaper editorial, China

Police tape blocks off Wuhan’s Huanan market, linked to several of China’s first coronavirus patients. Scientists are trying hard to determine how Covid-19 started, where it came from and how it spread to humans. Photograph: Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

Accusations and counter-accusations, lobbed from Washington to Beijing. In essence, nothing other than the Trump administration and Secretary of State Pompeo stated the obvious, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 came out of China. That, additionally, the Communist Party of China chose to aggressively subdue reports emanating from Wuhan, the epicentre of the epidemic that doctors there, alarmed by the presence of a strange new type of pneumonia often lethal, trying to warn their colleagues, deliberately withheld information.

Vital information; that the megacity of Wuhan was increasingly in the grip of a mysterious new virus, which authorities denied the existence of, and when they did eventually admit the presence of the virus, assuring the outside world that there was no human-to-human communication and in fact no epidemic at all. A message relayed to the World Health Organization which itself chose to repeat China's messages of assurances, impacting deleteriously on the world outside China, which, reassured, did not prepare itself for the epidemic that would overwhelm them, and leading to a delay in the WHO declaring the infectious disease a global pandemic.

Then came news that some of the people infected in Wuhan had nothing to do with the Wuhan fish market where the infections were held to have first surfaced. And then other information, of the presence of two biolaboratories in the city, one fairly close to the Wuhan market, and speculation that the virus represented one under study which had somehow managed to escape. The laboratories had a reputation of lax security and this new attribution under the circumstances appeared to make perfect sense. Such that among some members of the scientific community abroad suspicion lingers.

Even so, a report issued by U.S. intelligence agencies disputed the theory that the virus was produced in a laboratory setting. That it is highly infectious and extremely deadly, having killed roughly a quarter of a million people around the world is indisputable. That 67,000 of those victims are Americans is also indisputable, and that number is set to grow, making the U.S. a close competitor to the death count in Italy and Spain, two of Europe's hardest-hit countries.

China takes umbrage at being held to be the place where the virus originated. It is not to be termed a 'Chinese' virus. Beijing bristles with indignation, calling it a racist conclusion, and has had no trouble whatever enlisting the aid of the WHO in condemning any linkage between China and the novel coronavirus, thus allying itself with a completely irrational demand, that the international community as a whole, which has been and continues to be afflicted with a world-changing, future-threatening medical emergency simply set aside the quaint notion that China itself had anything to do with the emergence of the virus.

Aside from the Trump administration's determination to hold Beijing to account for its China-centric withholding of vital information to allow the global community to protect itself, when China insisted that to close their borders from China would amount to a racist attack on the country, U.S. officials linked with intelligence reporting and analysis have claimed their satisfaction in setting aside the theory that Chinese scientists developed the coronavirus in a government biological weapons laboratory, from whence the virus escaped to plague the world.

 

Pangolins ‘the most illegally traded mammal in the world’. Themba Hadebe/AP

While China is so vehement about its reputation, anxious to put a wide gap between itself and the emergence of this deadly new zoonotic which many hold to have resulted from human consumption of wild animals, often sold dead or alive at 'live' market venues of which the Wuhan market was one, originating in bats and passing to other animals such as pangolins, high on Chinese cultural menus, when at some point it leaped the barrier from wild animal  to tame animal in the form of humans, there is responsibility there that has never been acknowledged, despite that many other viruses held to be from like causes such as SARS and H1N1 among others, similarly crossed species to cause epidemics, originated from China.

 

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As of Sunday, over 3.44 million people globally were reported -- through a Reuters tally -- to have been infected by the novel coronavirus. Beijing, however, insists that China had nothing whatever in any form or shape or happenstance, to do with any of that. Despite that it closed its internal borders Hubei Province in which Wuhan City is located, to protect itself, while leaving the border between Hubei and its neighbours open.