Chinese President Xi Jinping waves after addressing a forum of businessmen, at the Quirinal Palace, in Rome, Italy, March 22, 2019. Tiziana Fabi/Pool via REUTERS

We have been paying dearly for China’s lies.

«This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the world is facing a global pandemic,» said Rep. Michael T. McCaul, the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, before the US intelligence community concluded, in a classified report to the White House, that China has concealed the origin and extent of the catastrophic global coronavirus outbreak.

The Chinese Communist Party’s «failure has unleashed a global contagion killing thousands», wrote Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, on April 1. «As we survey the damage done to lives around the world, we must ask who is responsible?»

«… there is one government that has primary responsibility for what it has done and what it has failed to do, and that is the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] regime in Beijing. Let me be clear — it is the CCP that has been responsible, not the people of China… Lies and propaganda have put millions of lives around the world in danger… In recent years, we have seen an intense crackdown on freedom of expression in China. Lawyers, bloggers, dissidents and civil society activists have been rounded up and have disappeared.»

One more person has just disappeared: Ai Fen, a Chinese physician who was head of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, had worked with the late Dr. Li Wenliang. Ai, who claimed that her bosses silenced her early warnings about coronavirus, appears to have vanished. Her whereabouts, according to 60 Minutes Australia, are unknown. The journalists who saw what happened inside Wuhan have also disappeared. Caixin Global reported that the laboratories which sequenced the coronavirus in December were ordered by Chinese officials to hand over or destroy the samples and not release their findings. «If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared about the reprimand, I would have fucking talked about it to whoever, where ever I could», Ai Fen said in an interview in March. Those were her last recorded words.

There is no record at all, however, about how this pandemic began. Wet market? A cave full of bats? Pangolins? Or a bio-weapons laboratory? No foreign doctors, journalists, analysts or international observers are present in Wuhan. Why, if the virus came out of a wet market or a cave, did China suppress inquiries to such an extent? Why, in December, did Beijing order Chinese scientists to destroy proof about the virus? Why did Chinese officials claim that US soldiers brought the virus to Wuhan? Why should it be scandalous that a US President calls a virus that began in China a «Chinese virus«?

Who announced on January 11 that Wuhan’s wet market was the origin of this epidemic? The Chinese regime. It was later discovered that the first known case of coronavirus traced back to November 17, 2019.

The same Chinese regime later claimed that this coronavirus «may not have originated in China». What respected scientist or institution can now trust anything that comes out of China?

Many leading scientists have dismissed the claim that the Covid-19 virus was an engineered pathogen. This conclusion was seemingly based on the fact that Wuhan has two major virus research labs: the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is apparently less than a mile from the market, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, handling the world’s most deadly pathogens, located just seven miles from the market. The story was immediately and emphatically trashed as a «conspiracy theory«.

Those scientists claim that the virus likely originated among wildlife before spreading to humans, possibly through a food market in Wuhan. They say that, through genetic sequencing, they have identified the culprit for Covid-19 as a batcoronavirus. End of story? Science, thankfully, begins by asking questions and thenseeking answers.

Bats were not, it seems, sold at Wuhan’s wet market. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first Covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the market. The Lancet‘s paper, written by Chinese researchers from several institutions, detailed that 13 of the 41 first cases had no link to the market. «That’s a big number, 13, with no link,» commented Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University. So how did the epidemic start?

«Now it seems clear that [the] seafood market is not the only origin of the virus, but to be honest we still do not know where the virus came from now», notes Bin Cao, pulmonary specialist at Capital Medical University, and the corresponding author of the Lancet article.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that China’s Communist Party is withholding information about the coronavirus.

If we do not know, it is necessary be open to all possibilities.

«Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention» wrote David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

«Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread?».

«Collecting viruses» presumably does not exclude the possibility of a «leaked virus». Worse, if China is not able to protect its laboratories, it needs to be held accountable and made to pay for the devastating global damage.

«Experts know the new coronavirus is not a bioweapon. They disagree on whether it could have leaked from a research lab», stated The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, and a major biosecurity expert, agreed with the Nature Medicineauthors’ argument that the coronavirus was not manipulated by humans. But Ebright does think it possible that the Covid-19 started as an accidental leak from a laboratory, such as one of the two in Wuhan, which are known to have been studying bat viruses:

«Virus collection or animal infection with a virus having the transmission characteristics of the outbreak virus would pose substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker, the public.»

Ebright has also claimed that bat coronaviruses are studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, «which provides only minimal protection» compared with the top BSL-4.

«We don’t know what happened, but there are a lot of reasons to believe that this indeed was a release of some sort», China expert Gordon Chang said to Die Weltwoche.

«No one has been able to study it. How can you say it’s not a release from a lab if you can’t go to the lab? Indeed, we have seen Beijing do its best to prevent virologists and epidemiologists from actually going to Wuhan. The World Health Organization team went to Wuhan for like half a day with only part of the team.»

That is another major problem. The potential major investigator of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic’s origin, the World Health Organization (WHO), is now accused of being «China’s coronavirus’ accomplice«. As late as January 14, the WHO quoted Chinese health officials claiming there had been no human transmissions of the coronavirus within the country yet.

China poses a biosecurity risks for the entire planet. One year before the first coronavirus case was identified in Wuhan, US Customs and Border Protection agents at Detroit Metro Airport stopped a Chinese biologist with three vials labeled «Antibodies» in his luggage. According to an unclassified FBI tactical intelligence report obtained by Yahoo News:

«Inspection of the writing on the vials and the stated recipient led inspection personnel to believe the materials contained within the vials may be viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials.»

Why is China trafficking in dangerous viruses in the first place?

According to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations:

«A safety breach at a Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab is believed to have caused four suspected SARS cases, including one death, in Beijing in 2004. A similar accident caused 65 lab workers of Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute to be infected with brucellosis in December 2019. In January 2020, a renowned Chinese scientist, Li Ning, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for selling experimental animals to local markets».

In February, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology, wrote in a research paper:

«In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level [sic] may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories».

Xiao later told the Wall Street Journal that he had withdrawn the paper because it «was not supported by direct proofs».

Chinese laboratory mistakes have happened before. By 2010, researchers published as fact: «The most famous case of a released laboratory strain is the re-emergent H1N1 influenza-A virus which was first observed in China in May of 1977 and in Russia shortly thereafter». The virus may have escaped from a lab attempting to prepare a vaccine in response to the U.S. swine flu pandemic alert.

In 1999 the most senior defector in the US from the Soviet biological warfare program, Ken Alibek, revealed that Soviet officials concluded that China had suffered a serious accident at one of its secret biological plants, causing two major epidemics of fever that had swept China in the late 1980s. «Our analysts», Alibek stated in his book, Biohazard, «concluded that they were caused by an accident in a lab where Chinese scientists were weaponizing viral diseases».

In 2004, the World Health Organization disclosed that the latest outbreak of «severe acute respiratory syndrome» (SARS) in China involved two researchers who were working with the virus in a Beijing research lab. The WHO denouncedChinese breaches of safety procedures, and director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Li Liming, resigned. Science magazine also stated that «for the third time in less than a year, an outbreak of SARS seems to have originated from a failure in laboratory containment».

Moreover, three years ago, when China opened the laboratory in Wuhan, Tim Trevan, a Maryland biosafety specialist, told Nature that he worried about the safety of the building because «structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important.» Free speech and open information: exactly what Chinese regime fought against in December and January.

A Chinese video about a key researcher in Wuhan, Tian Junhua, which was released a few weeks before the outbreak in Wuhan, shows Chinese researchers handling bats that contained viruses. In the video (produced by China Science Communication, run by the China Association for Science and Technology), Tian says:

«I am not a doctor, but I work to cure and save people… I am not a soldier, but I work to safeguard an invisible national defense line».

Tian is also reported as having said:

«I can feel the fear: the fear of infections and the fear of getting lost. Because of the fear, I take every step extremely cautiously. The more scared I feel, the more care I take in executing every detail. Because the process of you finding the viruses is also when you can be exposed to them the easiest. I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life».

For a month, the Chinese Communist Party, instead of fighting the contagion, did everything possible to censor all information about the Covid-19 outbreak. After President Xi Jinping declared «a people’s war» on the epidemic on January 20, Chinese security services pursued 5,111 cases of «fabricating and deliberately disseminating false and harmful information». The Chinese Human Rights Defenders documented several types of punishment, including detention, disappearance, fines, interrogations, forced confessions and «educational reprimand».

After that, China lied about the real number of deaths. There are photographs of long lines of stacked urns greeting family members of the dead at funeral homes in Wuhan. Outside one funeral home, trucks shipped in 2,500 urns. According to Chinese official figures, 2,548 people in Wuhan have died of the Covid-19. According to an analysis by Radio Free Asia, seven funeral homes in Wuhan were each handing out 500 funeral urns containing remains for 12 days, from March 23 to the traditional tomb-sweeping festival of April 5, a time that would indicate up to 42,000 urns, or ten times higher than the official figure.

In February, it was reported that Wuhan crematoriums were working around the clock to cope with the massive influx of infected bodies. Wuhan’s officials are apparently pushing relatives of the victims to bury the dead «quickly and quietly«.

«Natural virus» does not exclude its fallout from a laboratory where pathogens are collected and studied. The Nature Medicine authors «leave us where we were before: with a basis to rule out [a coronavirus from] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident», Professor Ebright commented.

«Debate may rage over which center it is, but at this point it seems undeniable that a center has been directly involved with research on viruses, although not necessarily on the creation of a virus» wrote Father Renzo Milanese, a longtime Catholic missionary in Hong Kong.

«In other words, the virus passed from a research center in Wuhan early on. More importantly there is also no question that the authorities were aware of the dangerousness of the virus, that they did not inform anyone and that they tried to keep the facts hidden».

US Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a resolution calling for an international investigation into China’s handling of the spread of the virus. According to Hawley:

«The Chinese Communist Party was aware of the reality of the virus as early as December but ordered laboratories to destroy samples and forced doctors to keep silent. It is time for an international investigation into the role their cover-up played in the spread of this devastating pandemic».

Admitting a fault, as the Japanese did after the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, might be one way for a country to be accepted again by the international community. Censoring, denying and covering up, as China is doing, will not.

«China claims that the deadly virus did not escape from its biolab,» said a China specialist with the Population Research Institute, Steven W. Mosher. «Fine. Prove it by releasing the research records of the Wuhan lab».

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.