Opinion
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March 12, 2020 (Population Research Institute) — I can’t believe how many people in the media and in politics are covering up for China. Astonishingly, they even call it “racist” to note that the Coronavirus came from there.

But it is common practice to name a disease after its place of origin. After all, Ebola is named after a river in Africa, while the Zika virus is named for a place in Africa. The West Nile Virus comes from the river of the same name, while Lyme disease is named after Lyme, Connecticut. 

Of course, sometimes we get it wrong. There is new evidence that the so-called “Spanish flu” that caused the great influenza epidemic in 1918-19 was actually brought to Europe during WWI by Chinese laborers hired to dig trenches. In other words, like the Chinese Coronavirus we are dealing with now, it originated in China. It should be called the Chinese Flu not the Spanish Flu.  I guess we owe an apology to Spain.

But there is another, even better reason to single out China as the source of this scourge. China's Communist leaders hid the epidemic from their own people — and from the world — for two long months. During this time, the Chinese Coronavirus reached epidemic proportions in the city of Wuhan and the surrounding countryside. Only after an estimated 5 million people had left Wuhan in the weeks leading up to the Chinese Lunar New Year did the Communist authorities admit they had a problem and quarantined the entire city. Of course, by then these travelers and tourists had spread the disease to all parts of China and the world.

The pandemic the world is now facing is thus a man-made disaster, and the men who created this disaster are the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, starting with President-for-Life Xi Jinping himself. What we are now facing is the “Made in China by the Chinese Communist Party Coronavirus.” This is a little long and clumsy, so I will call it the “Chinese Coronavirus” for short. Because that’s what it is.

If there was ever a time to put a “country of origin” label on a product, it is now.  

The Chinese Communists now claim that they are getting their epidemic under control, and they have gone into damage control mode. They have launched a worldwide propaganda campaign to shift the blame for the global pandemic away from China.  Incredibly, they are now claiming that their handling of their own epidemic can serve as a model for other countries. 

According to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on March 9, “China has been updating the WHO & other countries including the US on #COVID19 in an open, transparent & timely manner. China’s endeavor to combating the epidemic has bought time for int’l preparedness. Our contribution is there for all to see.” 

This is, of course, a complete inversion of the truth. The efforts of the Communist leaders to “combat” the epidemic were at first characterized by deadly delays and a total lack of transparency, with deadly consequences for their own people and the world. Then, when they finally acted, they imposed terrifying police state controls which cost additional lives. The behavior of the Chinese Communist Party is a “model” of what not to do.

You would think that everyone would recognize this claim as nothing more than a piece of Communist Chinese propaganda, but you would be mistaken. Among those who fell for it was a Harvard University economist who gushed on a March 9 interview on NPR’s Marketplace that “China really did great work in buying the rest of us time.”  

In fact, the Communist Chinese could not have done a better job at starting a global pandemic if they had been doing it on purpose. I tend to believe that it was incompetence rather than evil, but people around the world are dying in earnest nonetheless.   

In order to shift blame away from themselves, the Chinese Communists are now claiming that the Chinese Coronavirus did not actually originate in China. One of China’s leading scientists, a Party official by the name of Zhong Nanshan, held a Feb. 27 press conference in the southern city of Guangzhou and said, “Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China.”

Chinese ambassadors and propaganda outlets around the world are now parroting Zhong’s absurd claim. I have argued that the most likely origin of the Chinese Coronavirus is a Chinese government laboratory in Wuhan, and for this my article was censored on Facebook. Yet even some Chinese scientists now agree with me, pointing out that one research facility is only 300 yards from Wuhan Seafood Market that the authorities first blamed as the source of the virus — before they changed their story.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that you can’t fool all the people, all the time. The Chinese Communist Party, which invented brainwashing almost a century ago, disagrees. And they have set out to fool not only their own people, but the world, about the origins of the Chinese Coronavirus and the pandemic that it has caused.

The Chinese Communists are trying to bury the evidence of their own culpability for the pandemic under a torrent of propaganda.  The facts, however, are clear. The Chinese Coronavirus originated in Wuhan, was allowed to flare up into an epidemic, and then was allowed to spread throughout the rest of China and the world.

I, for one, will not be cowed into silence by either Leftist bullying on Facebook or Communist Chinese propaganda.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.