https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/08/who_loses_when_the_china_bat_cave_implodes.html
The story about Wuhan’s “wet market” is taking on water. We’ve moved well past the “trust but verify” stage. We’re now in the “don’t trust a damn thing they say” stage. In this case, “they” refers mostly to the Chinese Communist Party. But the public’s mistrust has spread to our own government’s public health experts, and to much of the Western media, as well.
We still don’t know where the COVID-19 pandemic originated, but the more we learn, the less China’s official story sounds right. The World Health Organization’s year-long endorsement of Beijing means nothing. At this point, even the WHO is starting to say we need a more thorough investigation. Good luck with that. China has prevented independent scientists from conducting any serious, open inquiry of the pandemic’s origins. That won’t change.
China’s secrecy tells us sometimes, but we can’t be sure what. Remember, U.S. intelligence agencies and the George W. Bush administration made the wrong inference from Saddam Hussein’s secrecy about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam impeded international inspectors to search freely for WMDs, which he possessed previously. There was no proof he had destroyed them. Yet he blocked unannounced international inspections of Iraqi sites that might contain WMDs. The natural inference was that he still had those weapons and was hiding them. American and British intelligence researched that conclusion. The CIA director famously told President Bush it was a “slam dunk.”
It wasn’t. What Saddam was actually hiding was that he didn’t have WMDs. He was hiding that less from his Western enemies and more from his dangerous neighbor, Iran, and possibly from internal enemies in Iraq itself. That mistaken inference is worth remembering as we ponder the still-murky origins of the Wuhan virus. We know China is hiding something. What we don’t know is what it is hiding and why.
Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.
Beijing could be hiding that the escaped virus was artificially enhanced, made more contagious and lethal (called “gain of function”).
Beijing could be hiding the fact that China’s military was involved in this gain-of-function project, or at least in some aspects of the lab’s research.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese political leaders knew, early on, that the virus spread from human to human and that it kept this crucial finding secret for months. During that period, Beijing and the WHO were falsely telling the world that the virus could not spread from human to human.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese leaders not only knew the virus was contagious, but that they acted on that knowledge by allowing Chinese nationals to travel freely around the world, spreading the disease, while sharply restricting travel within China from Wuhan. And, finally,
Beijing could be hiding anything and everything simply because that’s how totalitarian regimes operate. They always hide information, control the flow, and prevent outside inspections.
Whatever they’re hiding, they have powerful reasons. The Chinese Communist Party knows how high the stakes are if it is found responsible for a deadly lab leak and for keeping that information secret when others could have acted promptly and saved countless lives. Americans will be outraged, as they should be, and Washington will be forced to take serious action.
