Marc Thiessen argues that the Wuhan coronavirus “should
be forever linked to [China], the regime that facilitated its spread.” He’s
right. I’ll let him explain:
We are in the midst of a pandemic lockdown
today because the Chinese Communist regime cared more about suppressing
information than suppressing a virus. Doctors in Wuhan knew in
December that the coronavirus was capable of human-to-human transmission
because medical workers were getting sick. But as late as Jan. 15, the head of
China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared on state television
that “the risk of human-to-human transmission is low.”
On Jan. 18, weeks after
President Xi Jinping had taken charge of the response, authorities allowed a
Lunar New Year banquet to go forward in Wuhan where tens of thousands of
families shared food — and then let millions travel out of Wuhan, allowing the
disease to spread across the world. It was not until Jan. 23 that the Chinese government
enacted a quarantine in Wuhan.
If the regime had taken action as soon as
human-to-human transmission was detected, it might have contained the virus and
prevented a global pandemic. Instead, Chinese officials punished doctors for
trying to warn the public and suppressed information that might have saved
lives.
According to the Times of London, Chinese doctors who
had identified the pathogen in early December received a gag order from China’s
National Health Commission with instructions to stop tests, destroy samples and
suppress the news.
Here
is a portion of the Sunday Times of London article to which Thiessen refers:
Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a
highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were
ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media
outlet has revealed.
A regional health official in Wuhan, centre
of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established
the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not
acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks
later.
The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected
independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the
cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control
the outbreak.
Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the
Chinese internet.
Caixin reported that several genomics companies sequenced
the coronavirus by December 27 from samples from patients who had fallen sick
in Wuhan.
There was a striking similarity between the new virus and
the Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) coronavirus that killed nearly 800
people in 2002-3. But the news was shared with only a small group of medics and
party officials.
The laboratory findings were relayed to officials in
Beijing at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The information should have
alerted national health chiefs to a looming crisis, but on January 3, the
National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own
gagging orders. Laboratories were told not to release any information and to
hand over or destroy the samples.
When a CDC team was sent to Wuhan on January 8, it was
deliberately not informed that medical staff had already been infected by
patients — a clear confirmation that the disease was contagious.
It was entirely predictable that the Red Chinese would
respond as they did. As Thiessen says:
This is what totalitarian regimes do. First, they lie to
themselves, and then, they lie to the world. The system creates such fear that
people are terrified to report bad news up the chain, causing “authoritarian
blindness.”
Then, when those at the top finally discover the truth,
they try to cover it up — because leaders who abuse their people are less
concerned with saving lives than making sure the world does not discover the
deadly inefficiency of their system.
Thiessen draws an additional lesson from China’s response
to its coronavirus and the devastating consequences to the world:
The ongoing pandemic should serve as a
reminder of the lesson that President George W. Bush tried to teach us after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: What happens thousands of miles away in
a foreign land can affect us here at home.
Both viruses and
virulent ideologies fester in the fever swamps of totalitarianism and then
emerge to kill us in our cities and our streets. Two decades ago, it was a
terrorist attack; today, it is a once-in-a-generation pathogen. But in both
cases, the lack of freedom in a distant land created conditions that allowed an
unprecedented threat to grow, bringing death and destruction to our country.
What Bush called the “freedom agenda” is out of vogue
today. But we can now see that caring about freedom is putting America
first, because how China treats its people affects the health and security of
the American people.
I think Thiessen is right, again. Freedom abroad is in
America’s interests.
This doesn’t mean that every foreign intervention we
might undertake in the name of freedom is wise. (No one advocates invading
China, to cite an extreme example.) It doesn’t even mean, necessarily, that all
of President Bush’s interventions were wise or worth sustaining.
It does mean that the internal affairs of nations all
over the world matter to America. We should not regard them with indifference.
