China’s Communist Party owes world an apology, compensation for COVID-19 pandemic, cardinal says
Amid numerous reports pointing to the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party in putting millions of lives and the global economy at huge risk due to its lies about the coronavirus outbreak, Cardinal Charles Bo of Myanmar has called on China to apologize to the world and pay compensation for the damage caused.
“There is one government that has primary responsibility for what it has done and what it has failed to do, and that is the CCP regime in Beijing,” the Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yangon wrote in an op-ed published in UCA News.
The cardinal clarified that “it is the CCP that has been responsible, not the people of China, and no one should respond to this crisis with racial hatred toward the Chinese.”
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He stressed that when the virus first emerged, “the authorities in China suppressed the news.”
“Instead of protecting the public and supporting doctors, the CCP silenced the whistleblowers. Worse than that, doctors who tried to raise the alarm — such as Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan Central Hospital who issued a warning to fellow medics Dec. 30 — were ordered by police to “stop making false comments,” he wrote.
Anonymously speaking to Bloomberg, three officials said the U.S. intelligence community noted in a classified report to the White House last week that China lied about the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak, under-reporting the number of infections and deaths.
“The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,” Vice President Mike Pence said on CNN earlier this week. “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.”
Apart from China’s lies about the spread of the new coronavirus, which originated in the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei Province late last year, many suspect that the virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Jim Geraghty, a senior political correspondent at National Review, wrote about a documentary film by YouTube creator Matthew Tye on the coronavirus outbreak which suggests the same.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China posted a job opening last November, “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats,” Geraghty wrote.
The same institute posted a second job posting last December. The translation of a part of that posting said “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified,” the correspondent added.
Geraghty acknowledged that there’s no “definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as that would require “much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.”
However, he concluded, that it is a “remarkable coincidence” that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and “that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19,” the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”
"The CCP’s conduct is symptomatic of its increasingly repressive nature. In recent years, we have seen an intense crackdown on freedom of expression in China," the cardinal added in his op-ed. "Lawyers, bloggers, dissidents and civil society activists have been rounded up and have disappeared. In particular, the regime has launched a campaign against religion, resulting in the destruction of thousands of churches and crosses and the incarceration of at least one million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps."
As of early Saturday, there were more than 1.1 million confirmed cases of the COVID-19 disease caused by the novel coronavirus around the world and 60,115 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. In the United States, the number of cases stood at 278,458 with 7,159 deaths.
A doctor leading the Samaritan's Purse coronavirus response at a field hospital in Central Park warned this week that “it’s serious.”
“This is not something to think this is the end of the world, but it is not something that’s also to dismiss,” Dr. K. Elliott Tenpenny told The Christian Post at the site of the field hospital. “It’s serious. It’s a serious disease. It’s not the end of the world. We’re going to make it through this, but it is serious and anyone that says differently I don’t believe they’re speaking truthfully.”
