China's negligence is America's gain, if Biden can make the most of it

The notion that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Chinese virology research lab is no longer a conspiracy theory voiced by fringe cranks and nativist Know-Nothings. The “lab leak” theory is getting a serious second look from public health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb. We now know that staff at the Wuhan-based lab in question were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as early as November 2019—well before China admitted to the existence of this disease. We have not yet found any viruses in the wild that would indicate an intermediate evolutionary link between an animal host and COVID-19. And as one prominent virologist told the journalist Nicholas Wade, the disease’s amino acid sequence presents “a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin.” This is a great gift to an American president committed to countering and rolling back Chinese influence. Not only has Beijing gifted the world a sham of a vaccine, it did so as part of a campaign designed to trick the world into ignoring the conduct that unleashed this plague upon us all. Through neglect, malfeasance, or simple authoritarian sclerosis, China imposed the conditions on the world that ground social and economic life to a halt. China did this to us. Biden administration officials are going to find that a hard case to make, but not because the evidence supporting it is shoddy. It will require them to make a full about-face. They will have to explain to their core supporters that the idea promulgated for a year that this was just a once-in-a-century act of God was wrong. It will force them to admit that, while America got a lot wrong in the last year of Trump’s administration, America also got a lot right; chiefly, its vaccine production and distribution regime.
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