Rubin: China’s COVID lie is dangerous for whole world

As Americans wrestle over how to defeat the delta variant of COVID-19, China’s government is still refusing to provide the data necessary to determine the origins of the pandemic.

Instead, Beijing — in tandem with Russian state media outlets — is promoting the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in the United States.

Call it the Big COVID Lie. It is downright dangerous.

“It would be difficult if not impossible to prepare for the next pandemic if we don’t get to the bottom of this one,” says Anthony Ruggiero, a former U.S. National Security Council official for biodefense and counterproliferation. That is true whether the coronavirus originated naturally, jumping from an animal to a human, or leaked accidentally from a lab.

So China is playing a risky political game.

The March report by the World Health Organization into COVID-19’s origins was widely considered inadequate, largely because Beijing waited so long to let the WHO in and refused to provide critical information.

That missing information included data that could determine whether the virus was circulating before December 2019, as well as records of experiments at a Wuhan lab that studied coronaviruses.