Historian Niall Ferguson on Tuesday wrote in The Globe and Mail that Chinese President Xi Jinping should be questioned over his government’s role in the coronavirus pandemic and the circumstances at the onset of the outbreak.
“First, what exactly was going on in Wuhan that led to the initial emergence of Sars-CoV-2? If the virus originated from a bat at one of the disgusting ‘wet’ markets (where wildlife intended for human consumption is sold alongside chicken and beef), which your regime inexplicably has not shut down, that is bad enough,” Ferguson wrote, before bringing up the theory that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese government laboratory.
“But if it originated because of sloppy practices at the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, that is worse,” he wrote. “It is insanity for research on potentially lethal zoonoses such as coronaviruses to be going on in the heart of a vast metropolis like Wuhan.”
Ferguson continued, “Second, how big a role did the central government play in the cover-up after it became clear in Wuhan that there was human-to-human transmission? We now know there were 104 cases of the new disease, including 15 deaths, between December 12 and the end of that month. Why was the official Chinese line on December 31 that there was 'no clear evidence' of human-to-human transmission? And why did that official line not change until January 20?”
He concludes, “Third, after it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China – on January 23 – but not from Hubei to the rest of the world?”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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