When will Chinese government answer for its role in the COVID-19 pandemic? (opinion)
These days, if you can’t accept even the possibility that the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute for Virology in China, then you’re probably the conspiracy theorist.
Funny how things have changed.
The latest development in the greatest mystery of our time are reports that scientists who were working on novel coronaviruses at Wuhan were the first people to fall ill with COVID-19.
That’s a pretty important clue right there. Even Inspector Clouseau couldn’t miss that one.
When future generations read about the pandemic and see that Wuhan was ground zero for the virus; that there was a lab there that was messing with coronaviruses, and that scientists there were the first to get COVID-19, they’re going to wonder how any of us missed the connections.
Unless for some reason we didn’t want to see the connections.
Look at the utter destruction wrought by the virus, starting with the millions who died of or with COVID-19.
That’s millions of lives cut short, millions of still-grieving families and loved ones. Millions of empty seats around dinner tables.
There’s no replacing those lives or the time that others lost by being laid up in the hospital or otherwise sick with the virus.
And there’s no replacing the businesses that failed during the pandemic, thanks in part to draconian lockdown measures that were often needlessly restrictive and almost comically non-sensical (remember those “Cuomo Combos?”).
There’s no making it up to workers who were fired because they refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine, even if those workers had recovered from the virus and could rely on some measure of immunity.
There’s also no replacing the years of education lost by millions of students who were forced to sit in their homes, stare vacantly at their computers and “learn remotely.” If they even logged on at all, that is.
We continue to pay for those years of needlessly stunted learning with lower math and reading scores. Some kids will never make up for those losses.
And never mind all the quality time that we didn’t spend with loved ones, all the graduations, weddings and other milestone events that were canceled.
All because it increasingly looks like someone in a lab was sloppy when handling a virus that it turns out was perfectly engineered to do damage to humans.
And it wasn’t just the likely accidental release of the virus from a lab. It was the cover-up afterward, with China refusing to cooperate with inquiries into the origins of the virus and making those who spoke out within China enemies of the state.
And when do our own lawmakers and scientists come clean about the role the United States played in funding some of the research that helped created COVID-19? When does someone like Dr. Anthony Fauci admit that it might not have been such a good idea to mess with Mother Nature like that? Where’s the mea culpa?
And what about all those respected scientists who said that even suggesting a lab leak was a conspiracy theory and anti-China racism? Whose interests were they serving? It wasn’t ours.
How much time at the very beginning of the pandemic was lost because of all these smoke screens?
If China knew more about the origins and causes of the virus, it was up to them to share the information. It could have saved lives. It could have saved businesses. It could have saved the world.
If China was a company instead of a country, they’d be in for an avalanche of lawsuits. So where do we go in order to be made whole?
The COVID-19 pandemic was the single most deadly, disruptive and costly human event that many of us will ever know. Isn’t it time we figured out what happened and hold those responsible accountable?
MORE FROM TOM WROBLESKI
NYC Mayor Eric Adams ridiculously extends COVID-19 emergency declaration (opinion)
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from SILive.com can be found here.
