What Must Happen RIGHT NOW. THIS MINUTE. TODAY.

I know I’ve told you about this incredibly brilliant and precious friend I have on social media who has one of those brains that just fascinate me to no end.  I forget what pseudonym I’ve used for him here previously, so for purposes of this post I’m gonna call him TJ.

TJ always has amazing insights into current events, has a background in public policy, and has become super special to me even though we’ve never met in person.

Anyway, what he wrote today about China was spot on, and as always, he’s said he’s open to it being shared without attribution.

Enjoy his commentary – I always do!

Since first paying attention to what became COVID-19 in late December, I have adhered to an Occam’s-razor view of its origin: namely, that it originated in zoonotic transmission. This was an easy thesis, as it concurs with the known origin of SARS, and with my own experience of the live-animal market trade in various Chinese cities. The presence of the known pathogens-research facility in Wuhan seemed a confounding factor rather than an explanatory one; and the actions of the Chinese Communist apparatus — suppressing its own public-health apparatus, refusing Americans offers of assistance — seemed merely examples of its usual paranoiac-cowardly brutalist aesthetic. COVID-19 originated, I believed, as a product of the ordinary east-Asian proclivity for exotic foods.

I no longer believe this to be the case. I now believe the weight of the evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic originated as a consequence of poor safety protocols at the Wuhan pathogens-research facility.

Obviously there is no conclusive proof for this — and the Chinese Communist Party will under no circumstances allow the transparency and accountability necessary to adjudicate the matter. I won’t present the case in full here: it is easy to find it elsewhere at this point. This thesis is just a thesis, but the point is it is a sufficiently compelling thesis to demand our attention — and our action.

Assuming this is the true origin of the pandemic — a Chinese laboratory bungled its safety protocols, the Communist authorities suppressed information and action, and the PRC continues to lie about it to this day — then what we have here is a sort of super-Chernobyl. A Communist regime that, to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, lives on lies, has on its watch incurred a natural disaster. The difference is in the consequences: instead of the irradiation of a swath of Ukraine, the outcome is the collapse of the world economy and the immobilization of half the human race.

The uncertainty — not the certainty, which would make it even more compelling, but the mere uncertainty — of the thing demands certain actions and understandings from us. Here are some of them in no particular order:

First, the PRC’s relationship with the United States must be entirely predicated upon the former’s willingness to accede to a full American-led — not WHO-led, not UN-led — investigation of the pandemic’s origins. We excused the Saudis after 9/11; we cannot excuse the PRC after this.

Second, the United States Congress must act swiftly to wholly remove the sovereign immunity of the PRC and its enterprises in American courts. Americans are entitled to seek truthfulness and compensation — by civil and criminal means — from the PRC.

Third, American trade policy must actively penalize supply chains — and their goods — that exist in full or in part in the PRC. The American market and American consumers deserve protection from the errors rife in a non-transparent system that yields outcomes including fatally adulterated baby formula (yes, this is a real incident) and globe-stopping pandemics.

Fourth, the United States needs to immediately halt its training of the PRC’s managerial, technical, and scientific classes. The Chinese Communist state is able to do things like open pathogen laboratories in Wuhan because the West has eagerly trained its administrators, and shared its knowledge. It is obvious now that this polity cannot be trusted as a responsible steward of that expertise. Its citizens must therefore be barred from it — no matter what our higher-education establishment, more interested in its cash flow than in the good of the nation, says.

Fifth, the United States must either withdraw from, or work toward the expulsion of, the People’s Republic of China from any common international framework and institution. It is obvious by now that PRC participation in the World Health Organization presents a grave threat to humanity at large. It is similarly obvious that PRC participation in the World Trade Organization has yielded none of the promised benefits for liberal democracies — and in fact has empowered the Communist Party in its accretion of Western expertise. The United States can and should embrace a regime of free trade, free travel, and international cooperation — but only with other liberal democracies. The People’s Republic of China, operator of the world’s largest concentration-camp apparatus, and probable cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, is outside our circle.

These things are not recommendations for if and when we prove one thesis of the pandemic’s origin or another. The mere fact that the suspicion is well-founded and plausible is evidence enough that these protective measures are eminently warranted.

It’s time to act.

See, if I were going to share my thoughts on China with you today, I’d have just said, CHINA CAN SUCK MONKEYBALLS and left it at that.

But TJ has a much better way of breaking things down than I do.

Thoughts?