Historically, those affected by the harmful and destructive actions of others have rightfully sought compensation.
Covid-19 has receded enough that one might go through an entire news program and not hear it mentioned. No doubt that during the winter there will be predictions of new outbreaks and threats of masking and closing businesses. But at this moment, Covid and all of its associated destruction, harm, and loss are at low ebb. At the time of writing, Google’s dashboard lists 6.52 million Covid deaths and 611 million cases worldwide. No doubt that the Chinese are hiding millions of Covid-related deaths.
So maybe the time has come to task the generally useless UN to do one thing that would justify its decades of existence: put together a claims conference of all countries adversely affected by the Covid-19 virus. All countries, save one: China. Now, humans have been very good at discerning between natural phenomena like tornadoes and hurricanes and those wrought by the hands of man such as war and conquest. Huge sums of money were paid by the belligerents of World Wars 1 and 2 to the countries they devastated and the peoples they harmed. Part of such an approach is demanding responsibility; the other part is to discourage such bad behavior in the future.
So were the Covid virus and the ensuing pandemic accidents of nature or can one hold China responsible for the death, injury, loss of business, and social destruction that has occurred since the winter of 2019? When I was once in a windowless Federal courtroom a few years back, a lawyer explained to jurors what circumstantial evidence was. He said that if people started entering the courtroom with wet clothes and dripping closed umbrellas, the jurors could reasonably conclude that it was raining outside. In this particular civil case, the jurors did not need to conjure up the possibility of some Hollywood-type production spraying people with water just before they entered the courtroom. No, people are dripping wet; it must be raining outside.
So what circumstantial evidence do we have that the Chinese created the SARS-CoV-2 RNA associated with the virus which was subsequently released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and that the virus was not just some historical happenstance of someone eating some bad stuff at the local Wuhan wet market?
1. The virus first spread in Wuhan, which conveniently hosts a Chinese military-associated laboratory for studying viruses, including bat viruses. The Wuhan Institute for Virology is considered a “BSL4” (highest level) biosafety laboratory.
2. US officials in China concluded in January of 2018 that the laboratory was not properly staffed or capable of handling potentially dangerous pathogens and repeatedly warned Washington of the same.
3. Staff members at WIV were reportedly sickened from a virus in November of 2019.
4. The Chinese destroyed blood samples, laboratory notebooks, and took down publicly available RNA sequences. They also silenced doctors who spoke of a novel coronavirus found in patients in Wuhan and later elsewhere.
5. The Chinese have refused to let anyone from the West (other than their scientific collaborator Peter Daszak) enter the WIV to get information on research performed there or determine what happened at the beginning of the pandemic.
6. The WIV was working on bat viruses and was performing gain-of-function research to alter natural viral sequences to make them more transmissible and pathogenic.
7. The SARS-CoV-2 RNA includes what is known as a “furin cleavage site” that is not found in natural versions of the virus. This site increases the transmissibility and pathogenicity of the virus. While there is a possibility that this genetic material was naturally incorporated into a SARS virus, the insertion of the cleavage site was a specific goal of the NIH-funded viral research at WIV.
8. The virus RNA sequence in the furin cleavage site of the spike protein from the original Covid virus has two arginine amino acids in a row, a feature never seen in any natural version of a SARS virus. The reason is simple: having two strongly positive amino acids next to each other is energetically unfavorable, as the positive portions of the amino acids repel each other. Such a highly positive patch would be unlikely in nature but would be ideal for binding of the viral spike protein with negatively charged human cells.
Not one piece of “evidence” above is a smoking gun that China produced the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is my personal hope that someone associated with the WIV or the Chinese government will one day give the inside details of how the pandemic started and what happened in the WIV in the critical days in the late fall and early winter of 2019. But at this time, we do not have such information. And there is one thing that we have to remember. However much China likes to show off its advanced military and claim enormous technological progress, it is still a relatively backwards country. I had an opportunity for business meetings there a few years back, and the site of the meetings was a sleek glass and metal structure that could hold its own in any Western city. The bathroom, however, was a different story, where each stall was a huge hole in the ground. There was no plumbing attached to the toilets. So again, gleaming on the outside and 1900s on the inside. We somehow expect that all countries perform to Western norms and standards; as we see with Covid, they often do not. But maybe it was the wet market? Even the Chinese admit that they have not found any animal that could have been the source of the viral material that started the pandemic in Wuhan.
The claims conference should be convened to look at the losses suffered by individuals and countries during the past two years. It would be impossible to record every change, loss, or challenge that resulted directly or indirectly from the pandemic. Was the severity of rioting in the US during the summer of 2020 partially due to lockdowns and a lack of work? That would be impossible to say or quantify. So let’s keep it simple. The conference should set a money amount for the families of anyone who died of Covid. And now is not the time to change the cause of death of those who only had a Covid comorbidity. You wrote that he died of Covid; he died of Covid. Then there are those who got sick. My guess is that most people got Covid—multiple times—but for the claims conference to work, only medically documented cases would be up for payment. Then there are the businesses that closed during Covid—how much should they get for losing their livelihood and oftentimes their dreams? I don’t know, but there must be a compensation formula that will be applied across the board and across countries for the dead, sickened, and documented loss of livelihood.
So will the USA be a country seeking damages from China or will it be a co-defendant? The claims conference may have to make that determination as well. The US, in the persons of Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH paid through EcoHealth Alliance and its head, Peter Daszak, $600,000 to the WIV to advance gain-of-function research which was banned from being performed in the US. On the only point in which I might agree with Dr. Fauci, the $600,000 was a small sum compared to the overall budget of the WIV, so my guess is that it was an entrance fee for the US and the NIH to get data from the Chinese. No pay, no data. Did this payment actively encourage the Chinese to do gain-of-function research? Probably not, but Dr. Fauci and the Wuhan “bat lady” (Shi Zhengli) were fellow travelers who were willing to take risks in modifying natural viral sequences for the goal of making virus strains more virulent and dangerous than those found in nature. Maybe Dr. Fauci is accustomed to the outstanding and professional facilities of the NIH and its US grantees, but he tied his horse to a lab where Western safety standards were either not known or practiced. The result has been the single most destructive change in the world since World War II. There must be accountability and with the Chinese not playing ball at all, the time has come for the other nations of the world to set up a claims conference and demand responsibility from a country that has dodged it for decades. The Chinese will threaten economic and military retaliation, but the time has come to put China back in the pre-Nixon bottle of isolation if it will not take responsibility for the actions of its scientists and health experts. Their actions have led to more than 6 million deaths worldwide, and the world now must hold them accountable for it. The Chinese should be given every opportunity to defend themselves and prove unambiguously that the virus transmission to man was natural in its origin. If they can’t, then the circumstantial evidence points to the virus being made in the WIV and from there it got out, probably via one or more infected staff members who shared it with their families and others.
The Chinese were welcomed into the World Trade Organization and more broadly into the family of nations, and they have generally abused their position. They have worked to destroy other economies and are attempting to control other nations through their “Belt and Road Initiative” programs that often leave weaker nations financially dependent on Beijing. The time has come to hold the Chinese responsible for their arrogance (continuing international flights from Wuhan but stopping internal flights from leaving there) and make them pay. Maybe Covid accidentally leaked out of the WIV, but its creation by staff incapable of handling a serious biohazard was willful and intentional. They thought that a dangerous strain would never leak, but it did. In 2012, Dr. Fauci argued that such research was worth the small risk of a potential leak. When the leak did occur and people in Wuhan started getting sick, Chinese officials panicked and lied about the human-to-human transmissibility as well as the source of the outbreak. If the world does not hold the Chinese accountable now, don’t be surprised by the next destructive pandemic coming from a Chinese lab in the future.