The Pandemic Cover-Up by Chinese Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party and its leader mishandled the coronavirus outbreak and millions died

In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state. In breaking with the lie we are performing a moral act, not a political one, not one that can be punished by criminal law, but one that would immediately have an effect on our way of life.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, January 1974

Last updated May 16, 2024

In January 2021, the State Department published declassified intelligence findings that ended months of lies and disinformation that had been propagated by pro-China scientists in the United States and the world about the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. Until the report was released, prominent science journals had banded together to attack any news organization or person who dared to say that the deadly virus behind the pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s sole high-security laboratory that the new intelligence showed was not only culpable in the pandemic but was linked to the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, and its secret biological warfare program.

Evidence in the report revealed that several workers at the Wuhan institute, where research on deadly bat coronaviruses is conducted, were sickened in the autumn of 2019 with COVID-19-like symptoms.

As for the PLA, their work at the lab was carried out as part of a covert biological warfare program. The report debunked repeated lies by Chinese officials who have denined any link existed between the lab and disease outbreak. Worse, the Chinese launched another disinformation campaign, this time falsely alleging that it was the United States that brought the COVID virus to China, a charge denied by the U.S. government.

“Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one,” the report states.

“This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”

Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence the pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for months until the State Department report was published the prevailing view was that COVID came from an infected wild animal that passed the virus to humans.

“Based on my experience and understanding of the science, it’s hard to believe this is a naturally occurring phenomenon,” said Robert G. Darling, a medical doctor and expert on biological weapons formerly with the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

“I think somebody [in Wuhan] caught their experiment,” said Dr. Darling, now chief medical officer for Patronus Medical.

William Lan, a former associate chief medical officer at the Homeland Security Department, noted that the State Department report does not accuse China’s communist leadership of releasing the virus intentionally.

“But the circumstantial — and more than circumstantial — evidence of some relation to WIV is very strong,” said Dr. Lang now with the health service WorldClinic.

Ms. Shi, the WIV scientist dubbed the “Bat Woman of China” for her work on bat coronaviruses similar to the one that causes COVID-19, co-authored a scientific study in 2015 that mentions the laboratory manipulation of bat viruses as part of studying how they infect humans.

The U.S. intelligence report said Chinese authorities for more than a year systematically prevented a thorough investigation into the origins of the pandemic and instead devoted “enormous resources to deceit and disinformation.”

A World Health Organization delegation to China was blocked from entering the country first in the spring of 2020 and again in January 2021. Beijing then relented and permitted a team to visit.

The visit was sabotaged from the very beginning by the inclusion of Peter Daszak, president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, who is would be revealed was paid by the U.S. government to conduct bat virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, working closely with Shi.

Daszak would not be called to account until May 2024 when a special House select subcommittee charged with investigating failed efforts to determine the origin of the virus heard testimony from the virus researcher.

EcoHealth Alliance engaged in dangerous experimental virus work in China that was funded by the federal government, a report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded.

“EcoHealth used taxpayer dollars to facilitate gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology], contrary to previous public statements, including those by [former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] Dr. Anthony Fauci,” the report says.

Despite conducting the dangerous virus work, EcoHealth Alliance continued to receive federal funds of about $16 million annually.

The federal government halted the payments days after the May hearing. The Department of Health and Human Services agreed with the Select Subcommittee that EcoHealth Alliance be banned from receiving any funds.

Daszak emerged early in the pandemic as an activist denying that the COVID virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was leaked to the general public. EcoHealth had extensive ties to the laboratory for years before the pandemic outbreak and was involved in extensive risky research on potentially deadly virus strains.

“Dr. Daszak and his organization conducted dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV, willfully violated the terms of a multimillion-dollar NIH grant, and placed U.S. national security at risk,” said Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, Ohio Republican,  “This blatant contempt for the American people is reprehensible. It is imperative to establish higher standards of oversight at the NIH.”

EcoHealth used taxpayer dollars to facilitate gain of function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, contrary to previous public statements denying such work, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIIAD.

Daszak testified that he worked with Wuhan virologist Shi Zhengli, dubbed the “bat woman of China” for her role in researching bat coronaviruses. He said the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have conducted bat virus research that was not made public, but continued to insist COVID virus did not leak from the laboratory.

The virus, SARS-CoV-2, is a bat coronavirus that FBI and Energy Department intelligence units believe emerged from the Wuhan laboratory. Four other American intelligence agencies said they could not determine the origin of the virus after President Biden ordered a review of what was known.

China has failed to provide information on the virus’ origin, including early COVID samples. The communist government instead has accused the United States of causing the pandemic.

Gain-of-function research is modifying a biological agent to have new or enhanced activity. Daszak said the term as he defines it relates only to an enhanced ability of a virus to infect humans.

The subcommittee report concluded that the federal government process for research grants has “serious and systemic weaknesses.”

“The weaknesses identified by the committees not only place United States taxpayer dollars at risk of waste, fraud and abuse but also risk the national security of the United States,” the report said. “These weaknesses can only be remedied through both executive and legislative action.”

The report accused the Department of Health and Human Services and EcoHealth of obstructing the subcommittee’s investigation.

The State Department report acknowledged that the U.S. government has been unable to determine “exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus — known as SARS-CoV-2 — was transmitted initially to humans.”

The two most likely sources are contact with infected animals or “an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”

The confusion by U.S. intelligence agencies persisted. In March 2022, Office of Director of National Intelligence released its annual world threat assessment that included a section stating that China had continued to block investigations into the origin of the COVID virus

“Beijing continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information, and blame other countries, including the United States” for the pandemic that has now killed 6 million people worldwide, according to the unclassified threat assessment report. 

Intelligence agencies divided

The report said American intelligence agencies remain divided on the issue. The report also failed to identify the origin of the disease outbreak as Wuhan, China, highlighting the growing retrenchment by the administration of President Joe Biden to revert to the failed U.S. policies of the past toward China that sought to avoid all criticism of the communist regime.

“The [intelligence community] assesses that the virus probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019,” the report said.

All U.S. intelligence agencies believe the virus likely emerged from either natural exposure to an infected animal or a “laboratory-associated incident,” the report said.

Four intelligence agencies not identified by name and the DNI’s National Intelligence Council reported “with low confidence” that the first infection of a person with the COVID-19 disease, caused by SARS-CoV-2, most likely began with natural exposure to an animal “infected with it or a close progenitor virus — a virus that probably would be more than 99% similar to SARS-CoV-2.”

By contrast, one intelligence agency reported with moderate confidence that “the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” located in the Chinese city.

Defense officials said the agency leaning toward the laboratory leak theory is the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has conducted ground-breaking research on the virus at the little-known National Center for Medical Intelligence. The center is based at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. government conducts research into biological weapons.

Three other intelligence agencies are unable to “coalesce” on a conclusion on whether the virus came from an animal or the Wuhan lab without additional information, the report said.

The report warned that global shortfalls in preparedness for the pandemic and questions about COVID-19 origins and biosecurity at laboratories could lead U.S. adversaries to “consider options related to biological weapons developments,” the report said.

“As China, Iran, and Russia continue to publicly tout individual or collaborative efforts to improve biosecurity, they have pushed narratives that further drive threat perceptions, including linking U.S. laboratories abroad to COVID-19 origins, breaches in biosafety, untrustworthy vaccines and biological weapons,” the report said. 

Intelligence agencies expect that propaganda message to be amplified by the three nations at the five-yearly Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention that was to be held in the middle of 2022 

“Rapid advances in dual-use technology, including bioinformatics, synthetic biology and genomic editing, could enable development of novel biological weapons that complicate detection, attribution and treatment,” the report said. 

U.S. officials have said China is suspected of working secretly on biological weapons genetically designed to attack specific ethnic groups. Beijing refused to provide initial samples of COVID-19 and also has not provided records of dangerous virus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

“The origins study of the novel coronavirus is a serious and complex scientific issue which should and can only be carried out by global scientists in cooperation,” he added. “The use of intelligence agencies to trace the origins is in itself an iron-clad proof of politicization.”

The Chinese government China initially said the virus began at a wild animal “wet market” in Wuhan, but Beijing authorities have been unable to identify an animal host that transmitted the pathogen to humans.

The failure to find the host has led many virus experts and intelligence analysts to examine more closely the idea that the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory. Skeptics of China’s official version say Beijing authorities have actively tried to keep the world from knowing what happened.

“The Chinese government has destroyed all the evidence from the outbreak because they want to avoid saying it began from a laboratory leak,” said a U.S. official familiar with intelligence reports. “China is trying to sell a story to the world that it began as a naturally occurring event from a wet market in Wuhan.”

Chinese authorities have tried to get WHO investigators to identify a credible animal source during their inquiry.

“Instead of focusing on an animal host that probably doesn’t exist, the WHO team should be focusing on the labs and biosafety,” the official said.

The official said, “It is very likely this was PLA secret work that went awry.”

U.S. intelligence analysts noted that China’s military is engaged in covert development of biological weapons and initial research on such arms would include developing vaccines. At least 2,016 Wuhan lab researchers experimented with a virus called RaTG13, a bat coronavirus similar to the SARS-CoV-2, the report said.

“The WIV has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses,” the report said, using the term for synthetic viruses.

“But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including RaTG13, which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.”

According to the report, a laboratory accident could appear as a natural outbreak if those initially exposed were limited to a few people and spread more easily by those with a lack of initial symptoms.

“Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure,” the report said.

The report also revealed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has links to the People’s Liberation Army and has conducted secret lab research at the institute since 2017.

American virus experts who have conducted research at the institute denied those claims as a conspiracy theory. Many private virus experts originally dismissed reports that the institute was linked to China’s covert biological weapons program.

“Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military,” the report said. “The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

The report said the U.S. government “for many years” has publicly voiced concerns about China’s biological weapons work that Beijing has failed to fully document and has not shown that it had eliminated, despite the requirement to do so under the Biological Weapons Convention.

The report said the intelligence disclosures about the WIV “scratch the surface of what is still hidden about COVID-19’s origin in China.”

“Any credible investigation into the origin of COVID-19 demands complete, transparent access to the research labs in Wuhan, including their facilities, samples, personnel, and records,” the report said, as well as interviews with Wuhan researchers and access to worker health records.

China’s government blocked all efforts to interview researchers at the WIV, including those who became ill in the fall of 2019.

The detailed State Department report concluded that excessive Chinese government secrecy prevented international investigators from determining the origin of the pandemic.

Outside experts critical of China say the findings in the January 2021 report only increase the skepticism of Beijing’s denials that the virus leaked from the laboratory through an infection of a worker or through a research animal that was sold illicitly to a wild animal market.

“That was a lie. And the Chinese government knew very early on that that was a lie,” said Jamie Metzl, a WHO adviser and a former Senate aide to President Biden.

“And so in the face of overwhelming evidence in May of last year, the Chinese government shifted its position,” he told the Toronto Sun last week.

China’s government instead sought to promote conspiracy theories. Beijing officials even floated the idea that the virus was first introduced to China by the U.S. Army. The false narrative began standard fare for Chinese government spokesmen who continue to repeat the lie often.

The Chinese government later cited what it said were reports of an outbreak in southern Europe before it appeared in Wuhan at the end of 2019.

A more recent theory pushed by Chinese officials is that the virus was introduced into the country on frozen food packaging. Virus experts have dismissed that theory as highly unlikely.

Mr. Metzl, the WHO adviser, said  U.S. intelligence findings “suggest the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was conducting secret animal research with highly contagious viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, without notifying the World Health Organization even after the pandemic began.”

WHO investigators must be given full access to the workers and labs at WIV, including notes, a list of all viruses studied both past and present, and all records, he said.

“If the Chinese government fails to immediately change course, however, the Biden administration should bring allies and partners around the world together to demand an impartial and unrestricted international forensic investigation into the origins of COVID-19, with full access to all necessary records, databases, biological samples and key personnel,” he said.

WorldClinic’s Dr. Lang said the goal of the international community, including China, “should be to get to the root cause” of the pandemic.

“If it turns out that the root cause does lead to WIV, that means that the international community and [China] need to know that and then work collaboratively to make sure that nothing like this, which has had mortality and economic impact of a scale unseen outside of wartime, ever happens again.”

On December 1, 2019, a man in Wuhan, China suffering from flu-like symptoms for several days was admitted to a hospital for what would be diagnosed as a severe form of pneumonia. His fate is unknown.

For 30 days the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took no action to alert the world of the impending danger of a deadly new disease. It was thirty days that shook the world.

A Marxist-Leninist regime that was built on the bodies of 60 million Chinese since its founding in 1949 lied to the world and repressed medical doctors who tried to warn of a new highly contagious virus.

In the days ahead, tens of thousands of people would die and the entire world was thrown into economic chaos.

This is nothing less and a crime against humanity and was facilitated by Party influence within the World Health Organization, a United Nations agency with the primary mission of preparing to fight just the kind of disease outbreak that took place. The WHO and its leadership turned out to be worse than useless in the single crisis for which the agency existed. Instead, the WHO served as an agent for spreading dangerously false information by the CCP.

President Trump at the time vowed to cut off the United States’ annual $400 million in funding for the WHO as the epidemic forced the shutdown of the U.S. and global economy in a bid to mitigate the spread of the disease. He would eventually be overruled by government bureaucrats.

“The world is shut down. Nobody has ever seen anything like this. The entire world is shut down,” the president said.

Only Information Age communications that emerged within the near totalitarian information control system in China prevented the CCP from completely covering up the epidemic and perhaps inflicting even greater global damage.

Social media posts by Wuhan doctors sounded the alarm earlier on in the crisis. The clues allowed western intelligence agencies to pick up the first signs of the coming crisis. A brief period of time during the earliest days of the outbreak also allowed official and unofficial media to reveal what was going on. That was abruptly shut down in January when the Party imposed harsh censorship and restrictions, including jailing unofficial bloggers in Wuhan who were telling the world of the horrors inflicted upon a city of 11 million people.

The Party under Xi and his functionaries from the highest levels in Beijing down to local officials in Wuhan lied and deceived their own people. They then launched a campaign of deception and disinformation. They failed to inform the world of the outbreak of a deadly new disease caused by a new pathogen derived from bats – animals that were the subject of extensive research after the first outbreak in 2003 of the disease called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) – that came from a bat coronavirus. The new virus is called SARS-Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and also originated in bats in China.

After first covering up the outbreak by attributing it to poor sanitary conditions at a wild animal market in Wuhan, Chinese authorities launched a disinformation campaign asserting the virus originated outside China. Official propaganda mouthpieces said the virus was created in the United States and spread by U.S. Army soldiers who attended a military sporting competition in Wuhan in October 2019.

The lies were denied by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo but the action was never condemned over fears China was spreading the lies in preparation for pulling out of a landmark trade agreement with the United States that requires China to purchase $250 billion in American goods. The president and senior officials exposed the campaign as a desperate effort by Beijing to deflect international attention from the crimes in mishandling the virus outbreak.

Among its most dangerous actions was the silencing of a number of medical doctors who were the first to announce on Chinese social media that a new and deadly pathogen was in their midst.

Their calls were censored and blocked and the doctors themselves were repressed. The result has been an international crisis not seen since World War II.

The People’s Republic of China government and CCP that has ruled it with an iron fist since 1949 carried out the coverup in a premeditated fashion. Like the Soviet Union that spawned it, the Chinese Communist Party was built, as the Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn said of the Soviet Union on lies and deception, thrived on those lies and has held on to power with lies.

The egregious mishandling of the deadly disease outbreak exposed the ruling Communist Party of China as a foul and malevolent force. Communist leaders constantly harp on bogus assertions that China is mistreated by the international community and not recognized as a great nation. The reality is that the damage the Party inflicted upon the world proves without doubt that the institution is a force for evil that must be eradicated and replaced with a new and open system of government not based on lies and deception.

For the United States, the CCP has shown through its missteps in making the world sick and damaging the global economy that anything related to the Chinese Communist Party — its representatives, its controlled businesses, its fellow travelers and apologists are no long welcome inside free western institutions built on trust.

The beginning point for holding the CCP accountable is the point when the Party began spreading verifiable, actionable and ultimately lethal lies to the international community.

This is the story outlining the unconscionable actions regarding the virus outbreak in China of the Communist Party of China. It has produced a calamity of Biblical scale causing mass death, economic privation and a fundamental disruption of the world order. That in turn likely will be exploited by the CCP as the regime in Beijing  continues its drive to achieve global supremacy while seeking the ultimate destruction of the United States of America that it views as the main obstacle in reaching that objective.

The Outbreak

The Wuhan Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention is located about three miles from the epicenter of what many Chinese and American scientists believe is the epicenter of the virus outbreak – one of the many notorious wild animal markets. The Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market is a source of exotic fresh meat from animals such as civet cats and pangolins, scaly anti-eaters considered delicacies by China’s ruling elites.

The Wuhan CDC is home to a laboratory staffed by a researcher named Tian Junhua. Tian burst into prominence in China in December 2019 just as the deadly coronavirus was attacking its first victims. State-controlled propaganda outlets, both print and video, lionized Tian as a dedicated researcher committed to finding vaccines for deadly bat coronaviruses. He was shown wearing protective gear inside caves in China, catching bats and taking swabs from their mouths.

The documentary revealed that Tian at one point in his field research was exposed to bat urine inside a cave f because he had failed to wear protective gear. To avoid contracting a disease, the researcher self-quarantined for 14 days – the same time period now being used around the world to protect people exposed to the new Wuhan coronavirus. How did Tian know that the possible incubation period for a SARS-like bat virus to infect a person was 14 days? What kind of research was he doing on deadly bat coronaviruses at the CDC’s Level 2 security laboratory, a facility lacking the kind of equipment needed for handling deadly pathogens? Was he working on a recently discovered bat coronavirus now dubbed SARS-CoV-2 for SARS coronavirus-2?

These and other questions remain unanswered by the CCP. And many in the international scientific community appear to be running interference for the Party by dismissing all public discussion about Chinese laboratory  research on bat coronavirus as a conspiracy theory.

The origin of the virus remains couched in CCP secrecy. Chinese government spokesmen sidestep question about the virus origin by stating the question is matter for scientists to investigate. Why then has no action been taken by Chinese authorities? And why have American scientists been silent in demanding a full accounting from Beijing for its bat coronavirus research. The silence has raised suspicions that the CCP has had a malevolent role in the crisis.

For several weeks in early 2020, the disease was called Wuhan pneumonia throughout China. Then in March 2020 Chinese Communist Party authorities realized the use of the city name was fueling the growing international outrage and resentment toward the People’s Republic of China that for a second time since 2003 was inflicting a deadly global disease outbreak on the world.

Using its political influence on the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO), the disease was given the more technically neutral name “Covid-19” for coronavirus 2019, and the virus causing the affliction was dubbed SARS-CoV-2, for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2.

SARS created the first Chinese pandemic in 2003 as a result of a bat coronavirus. Although the origins of that virus also remain murky, the official explanation for that outbreak was that somehow the microbe made the leap from cave-hanging nocturnal mammals into humans, possibly through a civet cat, one of the wild animal meat market delicacies.

The pandemic in 2003 would be less devastating the Wuhan virus crisis now spreading throughout the globe. It turns out the new virus has a new and unique feature: Those infected with the virus can easily spread it for a period up to 14 days with no symptoms of the disease.

The new coronavirus outbreak that began in Wuhan mushroomed into first a deadly epidemic throughout China and then to the United States and the rest of the world. It struck with a vengeance unlike earlier disease outbreaks not seen since the influenza pandemic in 1918 that claimed the lives of at least 50 million people.

By April 10, 2020, at total of more than 1.6 million people had been infected with a death count of nearly 100,000 people.

It is important that blame for the current crisis be placed squarely at the feet of ruling Chinese Communist Party, an institution that has perpetuated its reviled rule for decades through a combination of raw power and repression, backed by the connivance of foreign politicians, business leaders and journalists who refused to recognize the inherent evil of the Chinese communist system. The fawning over this revolutionary anti-American regime is similar to the actions of liberal progressives that for decades praised and supported the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991.

If there could be a single bright spot amid the death and disruption caused by the Wuhan virus pandemic it  is that incident has laid bare the dangers of continued economic and political engagement with the Chinese Communist Party-ruled People’s Republic of China.

It is now clear the United States must shake off any past self-delusions about the so-called Chinese economic miracle – a success story built largely on the massive theft of American technology. America must clearly recognize that Communist China today poses the most significant threat to world peace, freedom and stability. Further, now is the time to declare that the only solution to the problem is for the Chinese Communist Party, like its progenitor the Soviet Union, be quickly dispatched to the dustbin of history, as the great American President Ronald Reagan once said of that earlier evil empire.

       Dec. 1, 2020 marked the day the first known case of Wuhan flu was discovered. It was revealed by a group of 29 Chinese scientists writing in the British medical journal The Lancet. Another news outlet, the Chinese government-controlled economic news outlet Caixin, dates the first case to Dec. 15. The Wall Street Journal, before its cadre of reporters was ousted from China, provided further details and linked the first known case to Dec. 10.

       Around the same time as that first reported case of Wuhan pneumonia, another man also presented at a Wuhan hospital with pneumonia-like symptoms. The man would be the first of several cases linked by authorities to the Huanan Seafood market. Five days later, his wife caught the disease – a clear and early sign that the deadly disease was not caused by people who came in contact with animals at the market. More importantly, the couple provided the first clue that the highly-contagious virus could be transmitted between people.

       This vitally important clue is one of the most important reasons the pandemic is directly caused by the Chinese Communist Party. It was the most important piece of information that could have prevented global devastation.

       On January 24, 2020, the 29 Chinese scientists published one of the first scientific studies on the new virus. Their findings appeared in The Lancet and examined what were suggested as the first 41 victims of the coronavirus, including the first patient who became ill Dec. 1. The paper notes that the research was funded by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission. The authors were doctors from Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan that handled the 41 cases.

       The study would become a key part of the CCP’s initial disinformation campaign about the virus outbreak – that the disease began at the market. Yet, the study also contained the seeds that would eventually unravel the market origin of the virus.

According to the study, most of the first patients stricken with the disease had a “shared history

of exposure to Huanan seafood market” – the wet market that trafficked in exotic animals. Thus, the scientists were pointing to the food market as the problem and away from the nearby Wuhan Municipal CDC where bat coronaviruses were being worked on in a laboratory ill-prepared to prevent an inadvertent leak or infection.

       That propaganda theme of the market as the source became the main explanation at first early public statements by Chinese officials. Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-controlled media initial signs indicated the virus originated from wild animals sold at a seafood market.

       Yet the January study proved one thing: The virus source was not limited to the wild animal market. In fact, of the first four known patients studied who became ill between Dec. 1 and Dec. 10, three of them had no contact with the market including the first patient. In fact, the first patient linked to the market was not detected until Dec. 10, further raising doubts about the market origin theory.

       From Dec. 10 to Dec. 14 no patients were infected until the Dec. 15 when two people became sick. In the following five days, a total of 10 people — all linked to the market became ill. In all, 14 of the 41 patients studied had no connection to the market. It is possible they were infected by people at the market. But without more information from the Chinese scientists, skepticism is called for regarding the market origin of the disease.

       “It is imperative that we identify the origin of the SARS CoV-2 virus,” said Robert G. Darling, a medical doctor and expert on biological weapons formerly with the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

       “The Chinese almost certainly know but they have not shared it. By learning its origin it will better help us understand the biology of the virus and how it behaves,” said Darling, now chief medical officer for Patronus Medical.

       The Lancet report noted the Dec. 1 the first documented case of a patient getting sick from the new virus. “None of his family members developed fever or any respiratory symptoms. No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases. The first fatal case, who had continuous exposure to the market, was admitted to hospital because of a 7-day history of fever, cough, and dyspnea [breathing difficulty]. Five days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.”

       Curiously, the Chinese study did not list the date when the information was known and the Lancet said the report was “corrected” but did not identify the correction.

       The Dec. 1 patient was an elderly man who suffered from dementia. “He [the patient] lived four or five buses [stops] from the seafood market, and because he was sick he basically didn’t go out,” Wu Wenjuan a senior doctor at Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital and one of the authors of the study, told the BBC.

       Wu told a slightly different story to the Wall Street Journal telling the newspaper that the first case appeared Dec. 12 when a 49-year-old vendor at the market fell ill and seven days later his father in law became sick.

       Did the CCP change their story because the first patient was not linked to the market?

The Wuhan government provided still another date. Communist authorities said the first patient infected showed symptoms on Dec. 8 along with a relative who fell ill several days later.

A chart in the Lancet study, however, shows no cases of the disease surfacing between Dec. 10 and December 15, further confusing just when the first cases surfaced.

The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper owned by the Chinese government-controlled Alibaba technology company, reported seeing documents listing the first patient infection as November 17 – two weeks before the official fist case. That report has not been confirmed.

None of the early cases are believed to have been the elusive a Patient Zero, the first person infected by the disease that virus investigators must identify and location if the precise origin point of the coronavirus is to be determined. The CCP must be pressured by the international community into revealing what it knows about the origin of the virus.

The Virus

       As noted, the incubation period of the virus is seven and fourteen days. That is the time period when a person can be infected by the microbe that successfully penetrates enough human cells lining the respiratory system, and when the first symptoms appear. Victims who become ill start out with aches and pains in legs, arms and backs together with a fever around 101 decrees. Other key characteristics are a dry cough and difficulty breathing. If the first people infected showed up at Wuhan hospitals between Dec. 1 and 15, that places the first infection –Patient Zero– at some time between November 15 to December 1.

On January 2, the Wuhan Institute of Virology completed its mapping of the genome for the deadly virus but the breakthrough was not made public by the CCP.

       The virus is believed to have been living quietly among China’s Horseshoe bat population for thousands of years until suddenly, mysteriously, it mutated.

       No one at this point knows how the virus transferred from bats to a new host, whether human or animal. Like its brother the SARS virus that is believed to have been transferred from bats to civets, the new virus may have been passed on from a bat to a pangolin, a scaly ant-eater often sold in wet markets. However, Chinese authorities have produce no evidence that pangolins were sold at the Huanan Seafood Market. Thus a laboratory leak through an infected worker, or a corrupt lab employee who may have sold an infected animal to the market must be considered.

       Jonathan Epstein, an epidemiologist at the EcoHealth Alliance in New York, has studied bat coronaviruses in China linked to SARS. He told the New Yorker magazine he was part of a team in China that discovered four species of bats that carried coronaviruses similar to SARS, including one that was more than a 90 percent match with the original SARS. Epstein said tests conducted by the Chinese health authorities on animals at the Huanan Market showed no signs of the new Wuhan SARS virus. The exact animals tested at the market, however, were not specified. Later, authorities claimed to have found the new virus in samples obtained from the market’s tables and gutters.

       One of the most important figures in the mystery surrounding the deadly pandemic is a colleague of Epstein’s – a medical researcher known Shi Zheng-Li who has come to be known in China as “the Bat Woman of Wuhan” for her research on bat viruses.

       Shi a scientist at the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety at Wuhan Institute of Virology remains a key figure in the ongoing viral disease outbreak and questions about her role in it have circulated among millions of people in China.

       The social media scrutiny prompted Shi, who works at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to go public with an unusual comment denying her laboratory had anything to do with the outbreak. “The 2019 novel coronavirus is a punishment by nature to humans’ unsanitary lifestyle,” she said on her WeChat account Feb 2. “ I promise with my life that the virus has nothing to do with the lab.’

       In 2015, Shi joined nine other scientists in publishing a paper on laboratory work related to SARS and the danger that bat coronaviruses could infect humans. The paper published in Nature revealed that “we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein… isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats.”

“The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone,” Shi and the others wrote.

The statement is a clear indication that scientists had been engaged in laboratory manipulation of bat coronaviruses to determine how the microbes use special receptor cells that permit them to latch on to human cells and cause infections.

That research paper was published under the ominous headline, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”

The potential became a reality reached in December 2019 with the emergence of the Wuhan coronavirus.

An even more alarming piece of evidence on the origin of the virus was produced by Shi and a co-author Zhou Peng in a paper submitted to the journal “Viruses” on January 29, 2020 and published two months later. The paper predicted that “it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.” MERS is the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome that afflicted the Middle East beginning in 2012 and is caused by a bat coronavirus.

       By March 2020, global research underway around the world on the new virus produced other startling results. In particular, a team of researchers writing in Nature stated that the new virus did not need to pass first to an animal host, unlike the 2003 SARS pandemic that is believed to have started with bat contact with a civet, a small cat-like mammal, that jumped to a human – at a wet market.

       “Are intermediate hosts involved in the potential bat-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2?” the researchers asked. Their answer: Because another bat coronavirus closely related to the new virus can directly infect humans, “one possibility is that there is not an intermediate host.”

       Epstein noted on Twitter that the study provided important insights about direct bat-to-human transmission. The authors also studied the possible jump from bats to pangolins to humans, but their main conclusion was “an intermediate host for #SARSCoV2 is not necessary.  This underscores importance of continued research to identify a #bat reservoir,” he stated.

       According to authorities in China and people who worked there, no bats were sold at the Huanan Seafood Market, thus further raising doubts about the official story that the virus started at the market.

       Additionally, there are no caves containing Horseshoe bats within 500 miles of Wuhan.

The Cover Up

The market China claimed was the source of the outbreak remained open throughout December despite doctors in Wuhan having information linking the disease outbreak to the market. The market was closed Jan. 1 – 31 days after the first patient was diagnosed.

The CCP system regards even the most innocuous information to be state secrets that much be protected at all costs. That was the case with information about the Wuhan coronavirus that was kept secret by China’s National Health Commission, the Party-controlled group in charge of covering up the virus outbreak. 

       One of the first patients to be infected was a 65-year-old man who made deliveries to the Wuhan market. He first became sick Dec. 15 and was admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital three days later. His case would finally set in motion China first public notification of the disease outbreak.

       On Dec. 24 a bronchial sample from the patient was sent to the Guangzhou Weiyuan Gene Technology Co., Ltd., a medical testing firm. The test results were phoned to the hospital four days later. The results showed the pathogen from the patient was previously unknown coronavirus.

       An anonymous employee of the testing firm who received the sample posted a detailed assessment of it on WeChat. The employee was identified by the economic newspaper Caixin writing under the social media handle “Small Dog.” The Caixin report censored and removed by CCP censors but copies survived through a digital archiving website.

Small Dog recognized immediately that the sample he assessed involved the discovery of the new virus. On Dec. 27,  the complete genome was sequenced. “The information obtained at the time was that this patient had returned to his hometown and did not rule out contact with bats,” the report stated. The writer immediately recognized the potential severity of the discovery. To prevent infections, the laboratory was completely cleaned and disinfected. Virus samples were destroyed. Personnel involved in the testing were put on health monitoring and the doctor in Wuhan who was dealing with the patient put the patient in quarantine. The genome firm sent officials to Wuhan to notify the hospital and the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control on December 29 and 30. The patient did not survive the disease.

Simultaneously, other test results from other patients being treated for the strange and deadly pneumonia also began arriving at hospitals in Wuhan from several other testing labs.

       It was at this point, the CCP began entering full cover up mode. The objective was not to so much to protect the people who were being sickened. The strategic objective was to limit potential damage to the ruling CCP and most importantly its supreme leader, Xi Jinping.

 “Everything is under intense, confidential and strict investigation. At this time, the hospital and the disease control people already know that there are many similar patients. Emergency treatment has been started,” the post by Small Dog stated.

       Aligned with the attempts by the CCP to cover up the disease outbreak, an explosion of postings about the new SARS coronavirus detonated in Chinese social media.

       For a brief period, until CCP censors cracked down, social media provided the first public glimmer of the horror that was to come.

       Shortly after a test report on the new coronavirus from by the Beijing Boao Medical Laboratory appeared on the WeChat Dec. 30, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmology doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, sent a message Dec. 30 to an online group of friends and medical doctors.

       “7 cases of SARS were diagnosed in the South China Fruit and Seafood Market and were isolated in the emergency department of our hospital.” Two hours later,  Liu Wen, a neurologist sent a WeChat message two a group of colleagues: “Just after the Second Hospital [Wuhan Central Hospital], a case of coronary infectious viral pneumonia was diagnosed in the Houhu district. SARS has been basically confirmed.” The post included a warning to medical workers to adopt protective measures to avoid infection.

Around the same time, Xie Linka, a doctor at the Cancer Center of Wuhan Union Medical College Hospital, posted a WeChat message to an online group of doctors. “Many people have unexplained pneumonia (similar to SARS). Today, our hospital admitted many cases of pneumonia from the Huanan Seafood Market. Everyone should pay attention to wearing masks and ventilation.”

A day later, the CCP began censoring all media and social media for numerous terms the regime feared were being used to criticize the Party, including “Wuhan unknown pneumonia,” “SARS variation,” “Wuhan Seafood Market,” and any other keywords that would signal criticism of the CCP and the government’s mishandling of the outbreak.

The reaction by the CCP to the doctors’ online warnings was swift. On January 1, eight medical doctors in Wuhan who warned about the new virus outbreak, including Li Wenliang, were detained by security police and interrogated. All were charged with “making false statements on the Internet,” a crime in China punishable by prison.

Li was forced to a write what the CCP calls a “self-criticism,” a tool used by Mao Zedong during his reign as all-powerful dictator for eliminating all vestiges of the opposition of the CCP. The doctor was forced to say that his warnings were wrong because they had “a negative impact” on society.

Li, 34, would contract the deadly disease and die on Feb. 7, leaving a pregnant wife and child, who also tested positive for the disease.

Li began an instant hero in China for standing up to the Party on behalf of the health of its people. His persecution and death set off a wave of anger throughout the population of 1.4 billion people that was not seen since the bloody Tiananmen massacre in June 1989. That’s when People’s Liberation Army tanks were called in by the CCP to crush a growing democratic revolt. How could a medical doctor who tried to warn of the impending calamity be so mistreated by a callous and uncaring system? Another of the unanswered questions regarding the crimes of the CCP.

On Jan. 3, Li signed his letter of reprimand telling the Wuhan Public Security Bureau that his posts on WeChat were “illegal.”

A month later, in the face of growing popular anger, police rescinded the letter of reprimand but accused Chinese supporters of the doctor of using the “Li Wenliang incident” as part of a conspiracy by “hostile forces” to undermine the CCP leadership.

CCP propagandists sought to turn the tables on popular anger by praising Li as a CCP member they claimed backed the regime. “It should be recognized that certain hostile forces, in order to attack the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government, gave Dr. Li Wenliang the label of an anti-system ‘hero’ and ‘awakener.’ This is entirely against the facts. Li Wenliang is a Communist Party member, not a so-called ‘anti-institutional figure’ and those forces with ulterior motives who wish to fan the fires, deceive people and stir up emotions in society are doomed to fail.”

Hostile forces is the blanket term used by CCP propagandists to discredit those who speak out and criticize Party leaders and institutions by insinuating they are acting as tools for foreign governments.

At the same time the doctors were sounding the alarm, the Hubei health commission ordered all genomics companies to stop testing and destroy samples. At least nine virus samples has been worked by the end of December at several testing facilities in China – further spreading the virus around the country. Many of the testing facilities were not told of the dangers or contagiousness of the disease.

Caixin reported that one worker at a gene sequencing firm disclosed that he received a call on Jan. 1 from an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission. The official notified the worker that if any sample of the new virus were sent for testing, it must not be retested and must be destroyed. Information about the sample also must be kept secret from the public. Relevant papers and data on the samples were not to be published in any form.

On Jan. 3, China’s National Health and Welfare Commission issued a notice on “Strengthening the Management of Biological Sample Resources and Related Scientific Research Activities in the Prevention and Control of Major Emergent Infectious Diseases.” The directive called for using the strictest security measures possible in handling and transporting the new virus. The objective was to prevent infections in humans and, more important for the CCP, to keep secret all information about the virus.

On Jan. 2, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the sole laboratory in China capable of working on highly infectious diseases like the new coronavirus, completed the gene sequencing. On Jan. 5 the institute had had isolated the virus strain.

Extreme CCP policies on secrecy prevented making public the genome sequence until February, and only under pressure from the international community.

Another serious misstep occurred in early January when the National Health Commission announced it was sharing the virus genome sequence with the WHO.

Earlier on Dec. 31, Chinese officials, in another egregious example of misinformation, notified WHO country officers posted in Beijing that the unknown origin pneumonia in Wuhan was a disease that was both “preventable and controllable.”

Nearly two weeks later, here is what the WHO announced in a statement Jan. 12 on the disease outbreak:

WHO is reassured of the quality of the ongoing investigations and the response measures implemented in Wuhan, and the commitment to share information regularly. The evidence is highly suggestive that the outbreak is associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan. The market was closed on 1 January 2020. At this stage, there is no infection among healthcare workers, and no clear evidence of human to human transmission. The Chinese authorities continue their work of intensive surveillance and follow up measures, as well as further epidemiological investigations.

It was a complete lie coated in CCP-style propaganda.

At another point in the statement, the agency said “WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers.”

Later in a tweet still resonating worldwide on social media, the WHO announced that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #ChinaFlag of China.”

The Lunar New Year, one of China’s largest celebrations, was rapidly approaching at the time of the tweet. It was clear that Xi and the CCP leadership had no intention of limiting travel by tens of millions of Chinese for the coming — and appropriately named — Year of the Rat.

Had authorities in China acted sooner to limit the spread of the virus, as many as 95 percent of the coronavirus cases may never have taken place, according to one British study.

As noted, Wuhan authorities closed the market on Jan. 1 and began disinfecting the entire area, in the process destroying vital evidence and failing to take blood samples from market workers. The action prevented international investigators from learning which animals at the market may have been carrying the virus. Or did the authorities take those steps because they already knew what the source of the virus was? Another of the unanswered questions.

Early on in the outbreak, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made repeated requests of both the Chinese government and the WHO to allow American virus experts to go to China. Instead, they were stonewalled.

China claimed it notified the United States about the virus but a senior State Department official said the notification was vague and in many ways elusive. “No one really picked up on that and the CDC began asking for access to Wuhan in early January and it was denied,” the official said. “The World Health Organization then asked to bring a team in and that was denied for about two weeks. And then when they were finally allowed, they were cooling their heels in Beijing for another two weeks or more. “

At the same time the director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian communist who was Beijing’s choice to head the organization, offered effusive praise for China’s handling of the crisis.

“All the time WHO’s Tedros was praising the Chinese for their response, [China’s] response was to hide, cover-up and to prevent access to the site where people could have had a better understanding of what was going on,” the senior official said.

Taiwan’s government, a rival to Beijing, also on Dec. 31 alerted the WHO based on reports from its sources in China that medical workers in China are getting sick – a clear sign that the infections were hitting other people not associated with the market and indicating person-to-person transmission.

 The information is not published by WHO’s data-sharing platform that is used by health authorities from 196 countries. Taiwan also alerted Chinese officials but the warning falls on deaf ears in Beijing.

The World Health Organization, coopted by China through several years of covert influence operations, was first notified by Chinese authorities of the outbreak on Dec. 31 that several cases of pneumonia of unknown origin had broken out. By Jan. 7, Xi Jinping had taken over the handling of the emerging coronavirus crisis and made perhaps his most serious mistake since taking power in 2012: He made no effort to curtail upcoming holiday travel. By then, the rapidly spreading virus had reached epidemic proportions that were compounded by the spreading by people who showed no symptoms. Scores or even hundreds of infected Chinese criticized has become virus time bombs by the beginning of the New Year holiday. They were interspersed among the 5 million residents of Wuhan who left the city and traveled all over China and the world. That travel would be the beginning of the nightmare pandemic now afflicting nearly every nation in the world.

       The doctors were not the only voices raised in warning early in the crisis. Chinese writer Wang Fang, known by her pen name as Fang Fang, became a voice of opposition against CCP authorities in Wuhan.

       Fang was among the first to expose the Wuhan government’s early false claim that the virus could not be transmitted between people, and that the disease was preventable and controllable.

       “This isn’t entirely an issue of moral character, but rather they are a part of a certain machine,” she wrote. “The rapid operation of this machine causes their eyes to stare only at their superiors and become unable to see the masses of common people.”

       By early March, Fang was targeting CCP authorities for their crimes. In a social media post, she wrote “The government is the people’s government; it exists to serve the people. Please take back your arrogance and humbly show gratitude to your masters—the millions of Wuhan people.”

       The post on March 7 was one of the numerous entries in Fang’s book, “Diary from a Sealed City” recounted the mass quarantine that was not imposed on Wuhan until Jan. 23 — a total of 52 days after the first case of the Wuhan coronavirus was discovered. Fang was allowed to post her musings on the virus crisis.

But others were not so lucky. Xu Zhangrun, a well-known professor at Tsinghua University documented the carnage of Wuhan during the quarantine and was silenced by authorities after writing an essay critical of Xi’s handling of the virus outbreak.

Two video bloggers who reported inside Wuhan helped show the world the stacks of body bags filled with corpses in the city in the early days of the epidemic.

Both men Fang Bin and Chen Qiuishi within days of their postings disappeared and are believed to have been imprisoned by CCP security forces.

Their videos went viral and highlight the growing demand among the Chinese population for free and uncensored speech and press, one of the major casualties under Xi Jinping’s dictatorial rule.

The Disinformation

       By the middle of March, China’s cover story that the virus originated at the seafood market was beginning to fray as more information came out about its research into bat coronaviruses – including experimenting with viruses capable of infecting humans.

       Very early on a senior American official disclosed to me that shortly after China began its lockdown of Wuhan on Jan. 23, rumors had begun circulating on the Internet that the new virus was a creation of the American government deliberately unleashed on China.

       I reported Jan. 26 in the Washington Times: “One ominous sign… is that false rumors circulating on the Chinese internet claim the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons. That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter any charges that the new coronavirus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defense research laboratories.”

       On March 12 that scenario played out. An official spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijan, deputy director-general of the Foreign Ministry information department, took to Twitter — a social media platform banned in China but open to Chinese propagandists – to spread the anti-U.S. disinformation. Zhao questioned when the first American patient to contract the Wuhan virus disease was detected and how many people were infected. “What are the names of the hospitals? It might be the U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” he wrote, without offering any evidence.

       Zhao then urged his followers to read a report produced by a Canadian group called the Centre for Research on Globalization known to publish Russian government disinformation. The spokesman pointed to an article containing Russian disinformation headlined “Further evidence that the virus originated in the U.S.”

       The comments by the spokesman followed the remarks of one of China’s most senior virology experts, Zhong Nanshan, who stated during a press conference Feb. 27 that the new coronavirus may not have originated in China. Instead, Zhong suggested the virus came from outside the country. Zhong headed the CCP’s team of experts investigating the virus. “The infection was first spotted in China,” he said. “But the virus may not have originated in China.”

       The comments by both officials were part of a carefully scripted disinformation campaign designed to try to deflect growing international outrage at China for its mishandling of the epidemic.

       President Trump shot back at the false claim the Army spread the deadly pathogen. His tactic was to begin referring publicly to the “Chinese virus,” something that so angered Beijing in prompted a phone call from Xi in late March that produced a temporary truce in the war of words.

       White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien was the most vocal in denouncing China’s handling of the disease outbreak. “This outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien said in a speech, a coverup he said delayed the global response by two months and led to thousands of deaths.

       Beijing also covered up the number of people who died, claiming less the 4,000 people succumbed. But intelligence estimates put the number much higher, with as many as 42,000 people dead. Intelligence agencies monitored the exhaust from crematoria in Wuhan and noted that funeral homes in Wuhan were importing 3,500 urns a day, suggesting a horrific death toll.

Conclusion

       The devastating Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in China that has made the world sick may have one slightly positive result:: It likely will mark the beginning of the end for rule by the Chinese Communist Party. As China expert Minxin Pei put it, the crisis exposed the fragility of Xi Jinping’s dictatorial rule. “One likely reason that Beijing failed to take aggressive action to contain the outbreak early on was that few crucial decisions can be made without Xi’s direct approval, and he faces heavy demands on his limited time and attention,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

       Two of the supreme leader’s decisions made after the quarantine of Wuhan – sending an underling to Wuhan instead of visiting himself, dropping out of site for nearly two weeks – exposed him as a weak and vacillating leader who was late in firing Wuhan’s mayor and the provincial leader and slow to prevent the disclosure of the virus in the media.

       “The brief window during which Chinese social media and even the official press erupted in outrage revealed just how tenuous the CCP’s control over information has become and highlighted the latent power of Chinese civil society,” he said.

       Events surrounding the Wuhan coronavirus revealed a CCP that is brittle, not strong and bolsters the case for continued pressure and economic decoupling from the People’s Republic of China.

 “The depth and brazenness of the Chinese Communist Party’s lethal mendacity along with its corruption of WHO has shocked the international community as if it is something new,” said Bernard Moreland, a civilian China expert with the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

       The cooperation and trust of China has been lethal for countries foolish enough to try — including the United States that to an extent believed false Chinese data and information in the early days of this crisis.

“There is a sudden moment of clarity about what the CCP really is,” he noted. “However it’s always been what it is today, an amoral, fundamentally dishonest, relentlessly expansionist and violent bureaucracy. It’s primary mission is to extend its own power without limits. Nuisances of governance such as public health, pollution, and law enforcement are troublesome distractions to be minimized.”

       Congress is moving swiftly to hold the CCP accountable with legislation that will seek to punish Beijing for its crimes and force payments for the economic damage, measured in the trillions of dollars.

       “This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the world is facing a global pandemic,” said Representative Michael T. McCaul, Texas Republican and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

McCaul and others in Congress have called for investigations into the Wuhan virus outbreak. Action with the cooperation of the Trump administration is expected later in 2020 when it was hoped the epidemic in the United States was under control.

       Wei Jingsheng, one of China’s most prominent political dissidents, bluntly pointed to the Communist Party of China for its role in the death and disruption caused by the pandemic.

       The CCP concealed the truth and destroyed evidence to hide the epidemic while promoting the false narrative that the virus could not be transmitted between people.

“What was the CCP doing? This is murder.  The use of disease to kill people is an old tradition of the CCP. Initially, it was only aimed at political enemies, but Xi Jinping expanded it against ordinary people across the country,” Wei said.

       The virus may not have been engineered by China’s bat virologists. But the probability the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan is high and for that the CCP is directly responsible.

        The Wuhan virus epidemic has altered the political landscape in the United States as the nation is engaged in the 2020 presidential election.

       Former Pentagon official Joseph Bosco described the Wuhan virus as, “serendipitously or otherwise,” boosting the fortunes of Xi Jinping and CCP by ravaging the United States and hitting the American economy hard. Within a few weeks of the U.S. outbreak, 16 million people were out work and the stock market plummeted as the country was locked down to limit the spread.

“Xi might well have asked his colleagues: Who will rid me of this troublesome president? Suddenly, thanks to the export of China’s virus, Trump’s reelection prospects seem considerably less favorable than they did just a few months ago. And a return to a more accommodating U.S. China policy with a new president seems disturbingly more likely,” Bosco stated in a column in The Hill.

What should be done

       As shown, China’s assertion the virus was the result of poor Chinese peasants at a wet mishandling wild animal is no longer a viable theory. A preponderance of evidence suggests the Wuhan virus set off the pandemic due to poor safety at one of the Wuhan laboratories engaged in studying deadly bat coronaviruses. Proof will no doubt be difficult to obtain from the embattled CCP that will under all circumstances hide evidence and lie to protect its grip on power.

       However, the United States and the world community must take action or more deadly pandemics can be assured.

       As with the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Chinese lied to cover up a major natural disaster – only now the damage is not simply the irradiation of an area in and around a city in Ukraine. The Chinese have inflicted a collapse of the world economy and rendered inactive half of the world’s population.

       In response, the American policymakers and legislators should examine adopting the following actions and policies:

       — Friendly U.S. trade and other relations with China must be put on hold and further ties pre-conditioned on Beijing allowing a major American-led investigation into the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus. This probe must be carried out without intervention by the WHO or the United Nation. China cannot avoid being held accountable the way the Saudi Arabian government was allowed to avoid scrutiny for its responsibility for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

       — Congress must act quickly to abolish the sovereign immunity within the U.S. court system for the People’s Republic of China and all its tentacles in the United States. Americans must be allowed to obtain the truth and remuneration from China through both civil and criminal legal means.

— U.S. policies must be implemented that would severely penalize American supply chains and goods that are dependent completely or partially on China. The epidemic revealed that the United States, according to the Food and Drug Administration, was running short of drugs needed to treat coronavirus patients. It turns out large portions of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry had been moved offshore to China over the past several decades. To bring home the vulnerability that has caused, the CCP threatened at one point in the crisis to impose exports controls on its pharmaceuticals. The not-so-subtle message from Beijing was that China was ready to plunge the United States into what Chinese state media called “the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

— All training in the United States for Chinese managerial, technical and scientific personnel must be halted immediately. High-security laboratories in Wuhan studying deadly pathogens are staffed by Western-trained and educated personnel. The pandemic demonstrated China’s ruling CCP system cannot be trusted to be the elusive “responsible stakeholder” several U.S. presidential administrations tried to produce with conciliatory policies that included the influx of hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals. American universities and research institutes have become too dependent on CCP cash and must find alternatives and must be barred from working with PRC students and researchers.

— To counter the CCP’s covert infiltration and takeover of international organizations like the WHO, the United States must expel the People’s Republic of China from international organizations. Alternatively, the United States should withdraw international organizations under Beijing’s control. CCP control over the WHO resulted in Chinese leaders’ complicity in mass death. It must never be repeated. Expelling China from the World Trade Organization also is needed because promised reforms in China did not take place as its membership in the organization had expected. The United States should instead re-organizing such organizations by working solely with like-minded democracies.

It is now clear that decades of international engagement and cooperation with Communist China was a mistake that seriously undermined fundamental American values of freedom, democracy, openness, honesty, and free markets.

A state that has imprisoned more than 1 million of its citizens in concentration camps in western China, supplied nuclear weapons technology and long-range missile equipment to American enemies like North Korea and Iran should no longer be part of the U.S.-led free world order.

The world does not need to prove the Communist regime in Beijing was responsible for the escape of the Wuhan coronavirus from a lab, or that it allowed the continued operation of potentially deadly wild animal markets. Suspicions regarding the nefarious behavior of the Chinese Communist Party is enough evidence that these national defense and security measures must be put in place. The time to act is now.