With Lab Origin Obvious, China Must Pay for COVID Pandemic

For four long years, a cabal led by Anthony Fauci sought to hide the origins of COVID in a Chinese laboratory from the public.

With the active help of Beijing, they have largely succeeded.

Skeptics like me, who suggested Americans should not believe China's crazy bat guano story that the virus came from a wet market, have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists in the United States and attacked as racist by China.

My New York Post article exposing the lab was censored on Facebook by Fauci's good friend Mark Zuckerberg.

Today, of course, the truth is finally revealed, or as the Chinese would say, the water has receded and the rocks have emerged.

Even the New York Times, which once mocked Senator Tom Cotton for questioning whether a lab leak was to blame for the pandemic, has now capitulated.

What he once dismissed as a fringe theory and now allows may well be scientific fact.

And the scientific facts described by Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University last week before the Senate Homeland Security Committee are: There is no evidence that the COVID virus originated in nature, and multiple sources of Secure evidence indicates a scientific origin.

Now that we have pieced together the puzzle of how COVID-19 originated, there is a need for accountability.

The good news is that Fauci and his bought-and-paid viral acolytes are slowly being exposed for their role in funding dangerous research in the Wuhan lab and then trying to cover it up.

The bad news is that a very bad actor has so far largely escaped scrutiny for his role in creating and spreading COVID around the world.

China is directly responsible for the deaths of nearly 20 million people, the collapse of the global economy, and the destruction of the mental health and education of our children.

Simple justice demands that China's leaders be held accountable for their crimes against humanity and that China pay compensation worth trillions for the damages inflicted.

In an ideal world, the international community would speak with one voice to demand just that.

But the world remained silent.

The United Nations has not made the slightest criticism of China and its leaders, much less condemned their actions.

Don't count on the International Criminal Court in The Hague to act either, even if it exists to try individuals for crimes against humanity.

These days, the ICC is far more interested in charging Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes than in addressing the fact that Xi Jinping's China is responsible for as many deaths as the First World War.

If it is impossible to bring to justice those responsible for the outbreak of a pandemic in the world, can we at least make the responsible country pay damages?

After all, the hit to the global economy over the three years of the pandemic is in the tens of billions of dollars.

Until 2023, the United States alone lost about $14 trillion more than half of its annual GDP to the pandemic.

I have no illusions that we will ever see a dime from China as long as Joe Biden is president, since he views Beijing as merely a competitor rather than the dangerous adversary that it actually is.

During his last meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in San Francisco, Biden glossed over the entire COVID pandemic.

He neither demanded an investigation into the Wuhan lab nor insisted on reparations for the devastation his created virus wreaked around the world. Instead, he simply ignored the problem.

The meta-message of Biden's continued silence is: don't blame China.

Don't demand reparations, don't decouple our economies, don't upend the geopolitical order in which China marches relentlessly, despite unleashing a devastating virus on the world.

Of course, Biden isn't the only one afraid to face the dragon: We haven't heard any of our allies demanding reparations, either.

The only one to have spoken is the same one who, very early on, dared to refer to the virus by its country of origin, proclaiming that it came from Chy-na.

Donald Trump is also the only leader who has a plan to recoup America's losses from China's misdeeds, and who has the will to implement that plan.

Instead of reparations that Beijing will almost certainly refuse to pay, Trump has pledged to impose high and widespread tariffs.

Tariffs will hurt China far more than the United States.

Thanks in part to Trump's previous rounds of tariffs, still in effect today, we are less dependent on China than before.

China's economy, by contrast, remains a one-trick pony, largely based on an export sector that too often relies on forced, even slave, labor to keep costs low.

If America leads this way, some of Europe's most promising populist leaders will surely follow.

None of this will bring back Gramma, Abuela, or Nani, but forcing China to face harsh consequences will force Beijing to recalculate the costs of its irresponsible biological weapons program.

And maybe it will help prevent the next pandemic.

Steven W. Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and author of “The Devil and Communist China: From Mao to Xi.”