Determining China’s Culpability for the Global Pandemic Is Vital to Our National Security

Getting results from the little fish like Venezuela and Columbia is good, but Americans won’t be safe until the big fish like China and Russia know they can’t act with impunity.

With the recent news that the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that the COVID virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the issue of culpability and harm over the death and destruction from the virus are front and center once again. I certainly hope this finding pushes the Trump Administration and the Intelligence Community to investigate whether the release was (1) intentional and, once released, (2) intentionally allowed to migrate to the West. I believe the release was accidental via a lab leak, but that the Chinese government intentionally allowed it to migrate to the West via international flights.

As I stated during my exploratory run for governor, I believe on both the COVID virus and the fentanyl crisis that Congress needs to pass a law limiting the immunity of China and Mexico so that states and citizens can sue those countries for their acts and omissions (another example where I proposed action before anyone else did). More than 1,000,000 Americans died due to the COVID virus, with another 500,000 dying from fentanyl overdoses. Congress previously took this action against Saudi Arabia due to its role in the 9/11 terrorists attack, which allowed victims’ families to seek redress. The death toll on that day pales in comparison to the COVID and fentanyl deaths. One Texas congressman filed proposed legislation to do this in the last congress, but it didn’t go anywhere. That needs to change.

That wasn’t the first time I raised the alarm re biological weapons.

Back in October 2014, I wrote a column, "Prepare for Biological Weapons,” where I discussed my role in 2005 during the Bush Administration in testing America’s response systems to a biological threat as part of the TOPOFF3 full-scale national exercise program. I detailed our findings and concluded:

It staggers the imagination that nearly a decade later, despite spending billions in the interim, the federal government and our health-care system remain unprepared. Knowing what the Ebola virus is exposing about our known deficiencies, imagine what will happen should a superbug appear or our enemies successfully weaponize a far deadlier virus. The mass casualties from the pandemic influenza bug a hundred years ago would pale in comparison, given modern air travel and far higher population densities.

Despite good intentions and the heroism of its staff, one hospital’s failure to deal with one Ebola patient properly shows that our health-care system is behind the curve on dealing with deadly viruses. The Ebola virus has revealed that America has much to do to be truly prepared for a deadly virus. We can ill afford to waste another decade, as Mother Nature and terrorists cook up threats to our modern way of life. Our luck will run out eventually.

Those words proved prophetic five years later when the COVID virus caused a global pandemic and the death of over seven million people after infecting 704,753,890. The world shutdown for a period of time causing untold physical, economic, and mental harm to billions.

Early on, I believed China intentionally allowed the virus to come West in order to hurt us, as it closed all domestic travel out of Wuhan while keeping international travel open, which resulted in the massive spread of the virus just as we modeled during the TOPOFF3 exercise discussed in the above column. I believed China did so in order to hurt America and Donald Trump’s chances at re-election. China’s action worked.

A little over a year into the pandemic, I wrote the column below that I think nailed the issue of Chinese government culpability and intentionality using a simple, but powerful analysis tool called Ockham’s Razor (otherwise known as the Law of Parsimony).

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Applying Ockham’s Razor to COVID-19 Simplifies What Happened

June 2, 2021

Other than a few hardcore warhawks, no one truly has an appetite to go to war with China. Given the weapons involved and the sheer size of both militaries, such a war would be globally cataclysmic. Nonetheless, it would be utterly irresponsible for U.S. policymakers to continue to bury their heads in the sand concerning China’s acts and omissions related to COVID-19 beginning in October 2019. If you apply Ockham’s razor to several events, it seems clear China’s conduct bordered on an act of war against the United States.

Back in the 14th Century, William of Ockham propounded the idea that the simplest explanation of an unknown event is the preferred one compared to more complex theories. This idea became known as Ockham’s razor, or the law of parsimony. When it comes to events starting in October 2019, the simplest explanations of these events implicate China.

First, for much of the last year, the experts and media pushed the idea that COVID-19 made an animal-to-human transmission at a wet market in Wuhan, China. It isn’t an easy act for a virus to mutate enough for it to be transmissible from animals to humans. All attempts to find evidence supporting the complex animal-to-human transmission have come up entirely empty. Striped to its core, China wants the world to believe a virus from a bat that lives over a 1,000-miles away from Wuhan somehow made more than a dozen mutations that allowed it to jump to humans at a consumer food market.

In contrast, based on records dating back to 2012, we know the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was actively collecting bat coronaviruses and engaging in gain of function research that would make those coronaviruses transmissible to humans. We also know that outside agencies didn’t find the WIV to be totally compliant with safety protocol required when operating such a dangerous lab. Critically, U.S. intelligence reported that in October 2019 at least three personnel at the WIV were hospitalized with COVID-19-type symptoms. Ominously, we know Chinese military research took place at the WIV.

So, which of the two explanations adheres to Ockham’s razor – the complex and unverified “wet market” theory or the simple “it came out of the lab” theory?

Next, for over a year, the Chinese government has failed to explain why it shutdown domestic travel out of the Hubei Province, as it allowed international travel to the West to continue for at least a month while it hide the fact that COVID- 19 was easily transmissible human-to-human. If the Chinese government was so concerned with the virus spreading within its country that it literally quarantined an entire province, why didn’t that concern carry over to the rest of the world?

Again, Ockham’s razor leads to the basic realization that China wanted the virus to spread to other countries. We don’t have to know why it wanted that to happen—it wanted to hurt Donald Trump’s reelection chances (it did), it wanted to weaken the West because the U.S. and other countries were pushing back on its mercantilism and IP theft (it did), or knowing it would be weakened by the virus it wanted to keeps its place in the world by weakening others countries (it did). We just need to apply common sense that it acted to stop the spread within its borders as it intentionally allowed the virus to spread across the globe. We’ve prosecuted people who had a virus and knowingly engaged in conduct that infected others, yet we shy away from outright accusing China of malevolent conduct.

Finally, China has refused to provide and/or destroyed records from the WIV to prove COVID-19 wasn’t developed at the lab; it has disappeared scientist, journalists, victims, and others who could shed light on the origin of the virus; it sterilized the wet market where the virus allegedly made the jump to humans preventing any outsiders from doing forensic work; it has failed to explain easily explainable events that would exculpate China; and it either keep quiet or withheld vital information about the virus until it was too late to contain it. Do those acts sound like the actions of an innocent party?

Once again, Ockham’s razor tells us if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it is a duck. Here, virtually every act or omission by the Chinese government over the last eighteen months screams guilt. Moreover, if it possessed proof of its innocence, why doesn’t it just give the world access to that proof? It can’t because it isn’t innocent. Instead of buying into its attempts to blame frozen food or the U.S. military or some bat from a 1,000-miles away from Wuhan, the West needs to come together with one voice and hold China accountable for its conduct.

We aren’t going to go to war with China over COVID-19, but the world should demand accountability for what it intentionally unleashed on the world. We also must demand international access and monitoring of the WIV and other labs in China going forward no differently than we demand such access to other rogue countries interested in developing weapons of mass destruction. We wouldn’t tolerate a nuclear bomb launched from Iran. Why are we tolerating a potential bioweapon release from China that killed over three million and injured hundreds of millions more?

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We will never know why the Biden Administration did nothing to hold China accountable for its acts and omissions re the COVID virus and the fentanyl crisis. Perhaps Joe Biden was indebted to the Communist Chinese Government for the financial largess it showered on Hunter Biden. Regardless, the Trump Administration now has the opportunity to hold China’s feet to the fire. If it fails to do so, China and other despots and terrorist groups will know that America is a "weak horse” that no longer has the stomach to do whatever it takes to protect its people. Getting results from the little fish like Venezuela and Columbia is good, but Americans won’t be safe until the big fish like China and Russia know they can’t act with impunity.

P.S. I imagine it must drive the Left batty that Trump already has roughly $40 million set aside for his presidential library from media legal settlements. With CBS/Paramount likely to cave soon, that figure should double. Not a bad start…In contrast, the Obama presidential library finds itself mired in a $40 million lawsuit by a minority subcontractor that appears to have gotten the job doing rebar and concrete work solely due to its status as a minority-owned business, with the work being done poorly causing structural issues.