EDITORIAL - China is fooling no one

In an effort to make itself look good before the rest of the world and perhaps deflect blame for the spread of the coronavirus, China has made claims that the coronavirus actually originated in several countries before it arrived in China.

According to reports, a team from China’s top science institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, claimed that COVID likely originated in India in the summer of 2019. Their research goes on to say the virus then evolved several times, including human-to-human transmission, before reaching Wuhan where it caught the world’s attention.

It just so happens that China and India have recently engaged in skirmishes in a disputed territory between them. Armed skirmishes that have actually resulted in casualties.

But the blame didn’t stop at India. China has also tagged the virus as coming from the USA and Australia, two more nations that don’t exactly see eye-to-eye with their policies.

This latest announcement should be taken with a grain of salt. An entire shaker of salt, in fact.

China has a penchant for shifting blame. They do this regularly in the South China Sea issue, blaming nations that cannot stand against them militarily for “escalating tensions in the region”, even as it continues to grab land in areas that don’t belong to it.

But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that China is indeed right, and that COVID-19 did originate from somewhere outside China, and that the disease was only detected in Wuhan. That still doesn’t absolve the Chinese authorities of blame for the spread of the virus.

Even after they were alerted to the presence of the virus by one of their experts, even after they were told of how potentially dangerous it could become, they decided to clamp down on this information. They decided to suppress the message. And in the end it was their deceit and their downplaying of the dangers of the virus that eventually led to its spread around the world.

China is fooling no one with their continued deflection and misdirection of the responsibility for the spread of the virus. This is one truth they must acknowledge. Establishing this will at least make headway into finding out the origins of this virus, so that similar strains can be found and possibly prevented before they can evolve into another crippling global pandemic.