When The Heritage Foundation released its comprehensive report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, headlines tended to focus on the cost to the U.S. That’s not surprising: At an eye-popping $18 trillion, it’s almost 10 times the projected 2024 budget deficit.
Arguably, however, the commission’s most infuriating conclusion was this: The global pandemic was “totally preventable,” in the words of Commissioner Dr. Robert Redfield, an experienced virologist who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the outbreak.
Had the Chinese government been more transparent and cooperative at the outset of the pandemic, millions of lives and trillions of dollars could have been spared. The pandemic’s “proximal origin,” the commission found, was the Chinese government’s “aggressive opposition to honesty, transparency, and accountability” along with its “systemic cover up.”
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The Cover-Up
The commission—a blue-ribbon team of experts led by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and supported by data scientists, economists, and lawyers—concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus began circulating months before Beijing warned the world, likely in August-September 2019. The Chinese government then not only withheld key details, it engaged in an elaborate and deadly cover-up.
Dr. Jamie Metzl—one of the commission’s Democrats who served at the National Security Council, U.S. Senate, and State Department—condemned Beijing for having “destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned Chinese citizen journalists, gagged Chinese scientists, blocked any meaningful international investigations, and cynically sandbagged the World Health Organization.”
Ratcliffe described China’s behavior during this period as “frankly inexcusable.”
more including the cost and the origin.
Delusions of Adequacy 