Holding China Accountable for Its Role in the Most Catastrophic Pandemic of Our Time: COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic carries with it enormous human and economic costs to the world that will linger for generations to come. In the pandemic’s wake, 28 million lives were lost, dreams were shattered, the vulnerable were impoverished, and economies endured trillions of dollars of losses in damages. The United States alone is estimated to have suffered 1.1 million dead and $18 trillion in losses from COVID-19.

The Heritage Foundation convened a Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19 (the Commission) to embark on a fact-finding mission to determine the enormous costs to the United States from the pandemic, to look at all the evidence available regarding the virus’s origin and spread based on the scientific and operating environment in China, to review and offer legal options, and to provide policy recommendations for the United States to implement based on its findings. The Commission’s report does not rule out that many other governments, institutions, and individuals may have played contributing roles in the pandemic, but it finds that China has been in a league uniquely of its own in its active and aggressive opposition to honesty, transparency, and accountability regarding the virus and its spread. This behavior by the Chinese government, more than anything else, was the proximal origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this report, the Commission documents several major facts about the pandemic that contradict the Chinese-propagated narrative. The Commission finds that the balance of available evidence points toward the pandemic’s having resulted from an initial spillover resulting from a research-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), an institution known internationally for its coronavirus-related research, rather than emerging from wild animals sold at a market in that city.

The Commission finds numerous examples of the Chinese government not taking appropriate steps to secure the WIV from potential contamination. It notes that several scientists at the lab became suspiciously ill and that the Chinese government acted to cover up highly pertinent information about the disease during the critical early weeks and months of the outbreak from their own public, the scientific community, and the world at large. The Commission documents how the Chinese government has destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned Chinese journalists for asking basic questions, enforced a gag order on Chinese scientists, and fiercely blocked any meaningful international investigation of the origin of the pandemic. The Commission also finds that China published false data about the outbreak. These and other actions were taken by the Chinese government despite it’s being a signatory to an international agreement that requires it to notify the World Health Organization of public health emergency concerns and to provide timely, accurate, and detailed information about the disease.

Read the full report on The Heritage Foundation.