China was accused of distorting and hiding important and sensitive information about the COVID-19 pandemic by not being attentive to the dangers of the virus from the start, and being late to announce, or perhaps delaying the announcement of the pandemic. This has had grave consequences on world health and economy, causing thousands of deaths and millions of infections around the world while also causing damage to the world economy. US President Donald Trump even considered it worse than the 9/11 attacks and the Pearl Harbor incident.
With the return of mutual accusations between China and the US: Was the virus a result of negligence in labs of the Chinese city of Wuhan, after leaks and news surfaced in the German magazine Der Spiegel showing that the World Health Organization (WHO) was complicit with the Chinese President’s request to delay issuing the warning against the new coronavirus?
The WHO is also accused of being complicit with China in delaying the announcement of the magnitude of danger that the virus posed. Der Spiegel mentioned that the Chinese president asked the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to conceal information regarding the human-to-human transmission of the virus and delaying the announcement of the pandemic; the WHO described these claims as “baseless accusations”.
In light of the prosecution of the Chinese authorities, particularly the Communist Party, the Attorney General of the US State of Missouri, Eric Schmitt, filed a lawsuit against the Chinese government on the COVID-19 pandemic, accusing China of “lying to the world”. Schmitt mentioned in his lawsuit that “these procedures led to irreparable damage in many countries around the world, the loss of lives, and economic damage”.
“China could have saved hundreds of thousands around the world and could have spared the world a descent into global economic malaise had they dealt with it transparently”, said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He added, “There is a significant amount of evidence that this emerged from a lab”.
Will the WHO be the scapegoat that China will use to make it pay trillions of dollars in compensation for the expensive coronavirus bill that would not have existed had China not been six weeks late to announce the pandemic as the number of cases would have been substantially lower. China also spread misinformation to the WHO about the virus not undergoing human-to-human transmission and that masks were not important, which led to the death of hundreds of physicians and healthcare workers.
The question remains: Is the world able to prove that the virus was developed and exported from a Chinese facility? And that negligence is the reason? Will the world be able to force China to pay the 3.9 trillion US dollars required in compensation, while the United Kingdom has also requested that China pays 351 billion pounds in compensation for the losses incurred as a result of the pandemic, as The Daily Mail mentioned.
China neither cares for these accusations nor for the demands to pay this massive bill, instead, it is aiming to re-evaluate its trade agreement with the US. At the same time, Trump said: “I do not care about that at all” which confirms that there is a large economic struggle coming between major countries and a phase of new alliances and axes.
The coronavirus bill is due, sooner or later, and China is the most likely to pay. This reminds me of Libya paying the Lockerbie incident bill without any conclusive evidence of it being involved.
Are we facing a new Lockerbie scenario but with a different balance of powers, as China is not in the same position Libya was in at the time?
The next days will carry many surprises, and the world will not go back to what it was before the coronavirus.
