MAKE CHINA A PARIAH STATE: Six Days in Hubei: How China’s lies and intimidation cost the world its last chance to stop a pandemic. “China lied; people died. And that brings us to why. It’s hard to imagine, although not impossible, that China would have gone to all this trouble just to cover up a viral jump from animals to humans in a wet market in Wuhan. It’s certainly possible, because dictatorial communist regimes will overreact in weird and irrational ways even to natural disasters. However, it certainly seems more likely that Beijing had more specific incompetence to cover up — namely, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its work on the very same classes of coronaviruses from bats, work that prompted a series of State Department warnings about the potential for a leak and a global disaster. We can’t know for sure, because China is still lying while people are dying.”
That they are lying helps us to know.
Related: Time to put China on lockdown for its dishonesty amid coronavirus crisis.