It’s Not Too Late To Hold China Accountable on COVID; 4 Years Later, CDC Documents on COVID-19’s Origin in China Emerge as Oversight Wanes, and other C-Virus related stories

By admin On Jul 13, 2024

It’s Not Too Late To Hold China Accountable on COVID | Opinion:

No matter who wins in November, preparing for the next pandemic needs to be a top priority for America’s leaders. An essential first step must be holding the last pandemic’s main culprit—the Chinese government—accountable.

COVID-19 resulted in over 28 million excess deaths around the world, including 1.1 million in America. As our new Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 report shows, the financial cost to our country amounted to 18 trillion dollars. Despite these astronomical damages, however, our government has so far failed to hold China to account for its unacceptable negligence and malfeasance.

The strong preponderance of evidence supports our assessment that a research-related incident in Wuhan was most likely the source of the initial outbreak. But our assertion of Chinese culpability holds regardless of how the initial spillover happened, whether from a laboratory accident or, as some allege, as a result of China’s illegal wildlife trade. Either way, what followed was a coverup.

Beijing could have contained the outbreak early on by alerting its own citizens—and the world—to the threat. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maximized COVID-19’s spread and impact by destroying samples, hiding records, imprisoning journalists, gagging scientists, blocking international investigations, and lying to and seeking to co-opt the World Health Organization.

That’s why accountability today is so important to our safety tomorrow. Without it, every authoritarian state official facing similar circumstances in the future will be incentivized to follow the CCP’s COVID-19 playbook of lies and obfuscation.

To that end, our report lays out a blueprint for the next administration to hold China accountable. One of our most important recommendations is that the U.S. government empower American victims of COVID-19 to hold Chinese entities liable through mass tort class action lawsuits. —>READ MORE HERE

4 Years Later, CDC Documents on COVID-19’s Origin in China Emerge as Oversight Wanes:

Newly released documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal early evidence and analysis four years ago in which U.S. government officials indicated that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China.

These findings in the CDC documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, dating from about six months after the disease’s initial outbreak, are coming to light only now because of the government’s repeated delays in releasing relevant documents through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In addition, federal employees’ use of encrypted private messaging applications such as Signal or WhatsApp to evade records-retention requirements under the Federal Records Act has become commonplace in the federal workplace, despite clear violations (as we will see below).

To date, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, in that post since January 2021, has released minimal documentation under the COVID-19 Origin Act, which President Joe Biden, who appointed her, signed into law in March 2023.

The new law requires Haines as director of national intelligence to declassify information about links between COVID-19 and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology within 90 days of its enactment.

But Haines apparently didn’t make sure such documents were provided to Congress.

Heritage’s Oversight Project obtained 1,066 pages of related documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, through the Freedom of Information Act.

The intelligence community’s official assessment of the origin of COVID-19, as of June 2023, states that it can’t be determined: “The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.”

However, the documents released to Heritage’s Oversight Project include a presentation labeled “Overview of COVID-19 Disease” by Dr. John T. Brooks, who was chief medical officer for the CDC’s emergency COVID-19 response, according to his LinkedIn profile.