Re: COVIDD-19 'Pandemic'
When will China be held accountable for coronavirus?
                                                                                
On Sunday night, the two remaining Democratic Presidential  candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, entered a sparse CNN studio  for a one-on-one debate, in which the venue, context, and substances  were all unsurprisingly hijacked by the coronavirus pandemic. 
                                                                                
                                                                                Among  the top issues were how millions of Americans would endure economic  stresses caused by the outbreak and what the United States government  should do to overcome it, especially with the projected costs running  into the trillions of dollars.
                                                                                
                                                                                One of the debate’s most interesting moments came when CNN  reporter Dana Bash asked the two candidates: “What consequences should  China face for its role in this global crisis?”
                                                                                
                                                                                Responsibility is exactly what the Chinese Communist Party  government has been avoiding since the initial outbreak in Wuhan. Most  notably, Dr. Li Wenliang raised concerns about the virus in December and 
was in turn detained by Chinese authorities and  forced to sign a confession of making “false comments” and disturbing  “the social order.” The virus would eventually take his life in  February.
                                                                                
                                                                                While Bernie Sanders might be forgiven for naively blurting out  that “now is the time to be working with China,” the Chinese government  has offered little evidence to suggest that closer cooperation would  lead to a solution. Conversely, Beijing’s mishandling and negligence has  directly enabled the spread of this pandemic.
                                                                                
                                                                                China’s primary motivation throughout has been to avoid any  responsibility or accountability by deflecting blame and suppressing  criticism since day one. So effective has the Chinese campaign been that  even foreign governments (including here in Canada) have remained  largely silent about China’s role. The instinct of any totalitarian state like China is to cover up anything that might require them to take responsibility. 
                                                                                
                                                                                During the initial coronavirus outbreak, authorities in Wuhan 
stated that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Yet, as first noted in a January study in 
The Lancet, more than 
a third of patients had no connections to the Wuhan food market, and people started to become ill weeks before the government would admit. 
                                                                                
                                                                                But the obfuscation goes deeper. Instead of informing its own  people and the world, about the threat early on, the Chinese government  contributed directly to the global pandemic we face today through  politically motivated manipulation and active disinformation. By lying  about the virus’s initial spread, 
including by not acknowledging human-to-human transmission when it was quite clearly happening, and by 
prioritizing political stability over human health, China’s actions directly led to the massive spread of the virus.
                                                                                
                                                                                The first case of the virus likely occurred in mid-November,  2019. While identifying a novel virus of course takes time, Taiwan  identified the outbreak and banned flights from Hubei before the end of  2019. By comparison, before China finally acknowledged the gravity of  the situation in late January, 
some five million people left Hubei, allowing the disease to spread throughout China and the world. 
                                                                                
                                                                                To put a finer point on this: had China acted when Taiwan took  action (when it was already apparent that a crisis was upon Wuhan),  
the spread of the virus could have been reduced by some 95 per cent. While  it is also true that many Western countries are failing in tragic  fashion, thousands of lives, in China and around the world, would have  been saved had China put aside its politics and acted swiftly. 
                                                                                
                                                                                Chinese authorities had this information and data but refused  to release it in a timely manner, instead preferring an ever-changing  narrative about the outbreak that made medical assessments on the  coronavirus and its impact very difficult. Crucial weeks were lost that  could have helped to contain the country-wide and later global spread of  this virus. 
                                                                                
                                                                                Most recently, Chinese government propagandists have promoted a  bizarre story about the outbreak in Wuhan being caused by the United  States Army. This latest conspiracy, 
reported by  Eto Buziashvili of the Atlantic Council, is seemingly inspired by the  KGB’s Operation Infektion from the 1980s, which involved the KGB  planting a story in a pro-Kremlin newspaper in India where it was  claimed that HIV/AIDS was developed in a CIA laboratory in Fort Detrick,  Maryland. The Russian disinformation campaign eventually metastasized  within the U.S. media environment, 
eventually reaching mainstream U.S. national news in 1983.
                                                                                
                                                                                Buziashvili reports that stories about the U.S. army  introducing coronavirus in Wuhan were planted on pro-Kremlin platforms  in January, and have since spread to fringe western pro-totalitarian  conspiracy theory platforms, 
including one based in Montreal.   Those stories have since been amplified by Chinese government  officials, including Zhao Lijian (the deputy director of Foreign  Ministry Information Department) who posted it on 
Twitter, and 
further promoted by the Chinese Communist Party controlled social media platform, WeChat.
                                                                                
                                                                                Such aggressive Chinese government disinformation about the  coronavirus is being deliberately promoted to draw attention away from  Beijing’s own responsibility for the global pandemic.
                                                                                
                                                                                While Western governments must maintain their focus on  addressing the immediate outbreak, we cannot allow the Chinese  government to confuse and reframe our understanding of this pandemic and  to manipulate the eventual reckoning that must occur once the threat  ebbs.
                                                                                
                                                                                The cost to overcome this pandemic crisis will be steep,  regardless of the physical toll it imposes on our nation. In the coming  months, Canada will have to work with our allies to assess the Chinese  government’s responsibility and ensure that they are held to account  where appropriate. This should include compensation for economic losses  by Canadian workers, businesses and our government, and economic  sanctions against any Chinese officials deemed negligent in failing to  stop the outbreak in China.
                                                                                
                                                                                Canadians, media and our government must continue repeating  Dana Bash’s question, “what consequences should China face for its role  in this global crisis?”
                                                                                
                                                                            
www.macleans.ca/opinion/when-will-china-be-held-accountable-for-coronavirus/