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 CDC 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.”
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 coverup.
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.”
Added Metzl: "There can be, in our view, little doubt that China's government is primarily responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all.”
The Cost
Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic is considered one of the seven deadliest plagues in human history, with excess deaths topping 28 million, according to some estimates. The World Bank has characterized the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic as “the largest global economic crisis in more than a century,” with low-income countries hit the hardest.
The Commission’s assessment that the pandemic cost the U.S. alone $18 trillion includes $8.6 trillion in “excess deaths,” $1.8 trillion in income lost, $6 trillion in chronic conditions like “long COVID,” $1.1 trillion in mental health costs, and $400 million in education losses.
The Origin
While the origin of the pandemic wasn’t the focus of the Commission, notably all nine Commissioners concluded, without dissent, that the pandemic "very likely stemmed from a research-related incident in Wuhan.”
Indeed, evidence continues to emerge further strengthening the “lab leak” theory and casting greater doubt on the “natural spillover” theory. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was at the time conducting dangerous gain of function experiments to make coronaviruses more transmissible to humans, and it was doing so in alarmingly unsafe conditions.
The WIV experienced an unspecified “incident” in 2019, when several lab workers fell sick, the Chinese military abruptly assumed control of the lab, the lab mysteriously deleted its online database of over 10,000 bat virus samples at 2:00am, and ordered an expensive new air incinerator. A Chinese military scientist then produced a vaccine with logic-defying speed before suddenly going missing and being scrubbed from government records.
In recent months, new details have emerged about a 2018 grant proposal that sought funding to manipulate coronaviruses at the WIV in very specific ways—ways that exactly match the highly unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that have never been seen in nature.
At the event unveiling the Heritage report, Dr. Redfield contended SARS-CoV-2 shows “clear signs of engineering” and its origin “had nothing to do with” a natural spillover event at a Wuhan animal market. The full Commission report concludes that despite four years of extensive hypothesis testing, today “there is no evidentiary basis” for the theory of natural spillover. The handful of early pandemic academic papers advancing the natural spillover theory have since been hollowed out by fatal challenges to their underlying methods and conclusions.
Rather than a viral leap from animal to humans, Dr. Redfield contended that the pandemic was “a direct consequence of scientific arrogance, with the scientists that were intentionally teaching this virus how to infect humans never recognizing something would ever go wrong. And, in fact, unfortunately this virus did escape.”
Preventing Another Pandemic
To avoid a future pandemic and hold the Chinese government accountable, the Commission report concluded with several practical recommendations for the U.S. government:
- Establish a bipartisan national COVID commission to conduct "a review of China's negligence and cover-up as well as an evaluation of domestic policies that were implemented" in response to the pandemic;
- Create a bipartisan reparations or compensation task force to cover claims against the Chinese government;
- Facilitate the filing of civil claims against China to allow civilians harmed by COVID to receive compensation by amending the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act;
- Decouple U.S. government and commercial supply chains from Chinese state-backed companies;
- Audit all U.S. government funding for biomedical research and related research activities in China;
- Impose economic sanctions on Chinese officials and entities who were complicit in or supported the "distortion and concealment" of information related to the COVID pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic was almost certainly the deadliest and costliest event of the 21st century. Beijing’s ability to escape virtually any accountability—and the global media’s relative disinterest in the pandemic’s origins, cost, and China’s culpability—are equal parts confounding and infuriating.
“China’s response to SARS1 20 years ago was abysmal,” Dr. Metzl argued at the Heritage event. “China’s response to SARS2, 20 years later despite all these international processes, was even worse. And the reason…is there was no accountability for all the obfuscation in the first case. With 28 million people dead as a result of COVID-19 and tens of trillions of dollars in damages it simply unacceptable, and frankly unimaginable, that every stone should not be overturned examining what went wrong."
Jeff M. Smith is director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation.
