When a neighbor’s overgrown tree crashes through your roof, they’re on the hook for the damages. Why should China be any different?
It isn’t as though they have been what you’d call a good geopolitical neighbor.
Not even a little bit.
No one can blame Beijing for a viral outbreak beyond its control. But the Chinese communist regime should be blamed — and held legally liable — for intentionally lying to the world about the danger of the virus, and proactively impeding a global response that might have prevented a worldwide contagion.
We now know that the first case of covid-19 appeared in China’s Hubei province on Nov. 17. By mid-December, Chinese officials knew that the virus was capable of human-to-human transmission because doctors and nurses were getting sick. But instead of alerting the world, they tried to cover it up and punished doctors who tried to sound the alarm. On Jan. 14, the World Health Organization tweeted that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” On Jan. 15, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared on state television that “the risk of human-to-human transmission is low.” These were lies, and Beijing knew it. More than 1,700 Chinese medical workers had been infected.
As China lied, it intentionally hampered U.S. efforts to prepare for the virus’s arrival on our shores by refusing to share samples with us. U.S. officials became so frustrated that they tried a back channel — asking the director of the biocontainment lab at the University of Texas, which had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to see whether he could get samples. The Post reports that “At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.” That intervention came one day after Beijing finally imposed a belated lockdown on Wuhan — which means even after Chinese officials finally publicly acknowledged they were battling a pandemic they were still obstructing the U.S. response. —WaPo
Even now, they’re working against the international best interest.
We STILL don’t have any simple answers for how a bat virus for a bat species that isn’t native for HUNDREDS of miles showed up in a Wuhan wet market that just HAPPENED to be practically neighbors with a Virus research center studying — bat viruses.
And lawsuits — lawsuits that could actually stick — are coming.
Damages are only PART of the reason China should be worried.
The process of discovery could turn up some interesting tidbits that they’d rather keep hidden.
A personal injury law firm based in Boca Raton, Fla., is bringing the suit against China and various Chinese government agencies on behalf of “individuals and business owners in the United States and State of Florida, for damages suffered as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.”
The suit claims China “knew that COVID-19 was dangerous and capable of causing a pandemic, yet slowly acted, proverbially put their head in the sand, and/or covered it up in their own economic self-interest.”
“This is an undertaking against a world superpower who has the ability to pay for what they’ve done,” Jeremy Alters, the chief strategist and non-attorney spokesperson for the Berman Law Group, the class-action firm backing the suit, told Fox News.
“They have the money to pay for what they’ve done, and we should all together make China pay for what they’ve done,” he said. — FoxNews
