After largely burying any serious look into the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic for four months when he assumed office in January, President Biden finally gave into to strong public pressure in late May and ordered a 90-day review by the intelligence community into that critical question. This week, Biden’s team completed that top-to-bottom review of the available intelligence, and, as so many predicted from the outset, it drew no conclusion on where the deadly virus came from -- whether it was engineered as part of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bioweapons research in a lab in Wuhan, China, or spread naturally from animals to humans, possibly in a market in the same city.
Although CCP leaders and a number of U.S. companies and institutions that do business with them would like to use the inconclusive Biden report to move past holding China accountable for the spread of the pandemic, the review should in no way dissuade our leaders from doing so. If anything, it should hasten that effort.
The central question on the virus origins is no trivial matter, as the pandemic in less than two years to date has cost over 630,000 lives in the U.S., or the same number killed in the Civil War, and over 4.5 million worldwide. And, despite broad radio silence by most media outlets and Big Tech during the Presidential election year 2020 on China’s possible culpability in engineering the virus, by the time that the newly installed President Biden announced his 90-day review this May, a global consensus had emerged in the affirmative on that very issue.
Summing up the research of Nicholas Wade, Katherine Eban, Jim Geraghty and others from earlier in the year, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy concluded shortly after Biden's decision that the lab leak theory was proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.” He wrote, “Unless and until China comes forward with convincing evidence that the lab-leak theory is wrong, the position of the United States and the world must be that China is culpable. We should stop spouting the untenable and irresponsible drivel that, because the case is ‘circumstantial,’ the truth may never be known. We know plenty.”
Since McCarthy wrote that, we actually know even more. CCP officials took a number of steps to block Biden’s 90-day review, including refusing to give U.S. investigators access to the Wuhan lab and other critical information and "push[ing] fringe theories including that the virus slipped out of a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2019.” Also, despite China’s refusal to cooperate with the inconclusive review, its Foreign Ministry spokesman slammed the report this week as an attempt to “frame China.” If the CCP had nothing to hide, why would it behave this way?
For this reason, even though the Biden report fails to come to a conclusion on the virus origins, China’s own stonewalling and reaction to its release actually gives us even more reason than before to suspect it did, in fact, originate in the Wuhan lab. That alone justifies Biden’s 90-day effort, and means we should hasten, rather than dismiss, efforts to hold the CCP accountable for the death and misery its pandemic has wrought over the last two years.
Accountability for unleashing such a devastating pandemic from a government bioweapons lab can take a number of forms. To their credit, House Republicans under Leader Kevin McCarthy in June proposed an eight-point-plan for doing so, including allowing for greater sanctions against Chinese leaders, waiving sovereign immunity to allow U.S. families to sue the Chinese government for damages from the virus, and preventing China from hosting the 2022 Olympics. A number of much harsher steps are also contemplated in some quarters, such as sanctioning companies who do business in China, a wholesale decoupling of economic relations with the country, reparations or charges cutting into the U.S. debt to China, and regular visits to Taiwan by U.S. and Quad-country naval ships and combat aircraft.
Without a doubt, these are all significant measures with enormous attendant risks for our security and economic well being, at least in the short and medium-term. Yet the CCP’s culpability in engineering and unleashing the virus, and driving a large-scale effort to cover it up -- as its actions in response to the Biden report suggest strongly to be the case -- merit our leadership in fact contemplating such a menu of possible actions. Under such a scenario, we can give the CCP until November 1 to disprove that the virus came from its bioweapons lab, and in the meantime contemplate the actions that we will take in response. If there is no resolution to the contrary, the plan can then take effect beginning January 1. The hundreds of thousands of Americans who died in the pandemic deserve no less than our considering such a course of action, and Biden’s 90-day review actually gave us even more reason to do so.
John Ullyot was Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and NSC Spokesman from 2019-2021.