The tidal wave of probability, circumstantial evidence of such mass and consistency that it is now almost irrefutable, that the novel coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, will alter China’s relationship with the world and particularly with the United States.
Accompanied as it is by the increasing volume of evidence that Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases—a post he has held for 37 years—and chief medical advisor to the president, went to unjustified lengths to deny that the coronavirus was anything but an unforeseeable escapee from a live food market, the unraveling story will ramify very widely. Seen as a whole, it has been an immense strategic victory for the People’s Republic of China. This victory is all the more remarkable because it was probably an extraordinary act of improvisation.
There is no reason to believe at this point that the Chinese authorities deliberately manufactured this virus and unleashed it mindless of the great damage it wrought among China’s civilian population. The great preponderance of evidence now is that the coronavirus was indeed manufactured, presumably for the purpose of enhanced research. As not infrequently occurs, it escaped, and while China imposed draconian measures to contain its spread among the Chinese population (and has never published believable figures about the extent of the harm that it did in China) it waited an unconscionable length of time before taking any measures to reduce its spread outside China.
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