Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has filed a lawsuit against the Chinese government for allegedly running an “appalling campaign of deceit, concealment, misfeasance, and inaction” amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern State of Missouri, alleges that the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party of China and other governing bodies in the country misrepresented and concealed the seriousness of the outbreak from the rest of the world during the period of December 2019 through January 2020.
“During the critical weeks of the initial outbreak, Chinese authorities deceived the public, suppressed crucial information, arrested whistleblowers, denied human-to-human transmission in the face of mounting evidence, destroyed critical medical research, permitted millions of people to be exposed to the virus, and even hoarded personal protective equipment — thus causing a global pandemic that was unnecessary and preventable,” according to a copy of the lawsuit.
YES, BUT IT WOULD HAVE MADE LIFE MORE DIFFICULT FOR XI’S DICTATORSHIP: A free press in China could have prevented the coronavirus pandemic, media watchdog says.
Strongman leaders around the world are using the coronavirus crisis to stifle journalists, a leading press freedom watchdog has warned, as it bemoaned a missed opportunity to highlight the severity of the outbreak in its early days in Wuhan, China.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) criticized China for censoring early coverage of the coronavirus outbreak, telling CNN Business that the global pandemic could have been averted or lessened had journalists had more freedom in the country.
It also condemned Hungarian President Viktor Orbán for securing sweeping new powers to punish journalists in the wake of the crisis, and singled out US President Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro for their attempts to “denigrate the media and encourage hatred of journalists” in their respective countries.
“If there had been a free press in China, if these whistleblowers hadn’t been silenced, then this could have been prevented from turning into a pandemic,” RSF’s UK bureau director Rebecca Vincent told CNN Business, as the group unveiled its annual assessment of media liberty in 180 countries.
THIS WAS THE FIRST SARS, NOT SARS-COV-2: SARS escaped Beijing lab twice: Laboratory safety at the Chinese Institute of Virology under close scrutiny.
This story is from 2004. Lab escapes happen outside China, too. It’s why it’s a very bad idea to work with very dangerous pathogens.
On Tuesday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said he believes that World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and others were paid by the Chinese government and called for W.H.O. members to be open to lawsuits in the United States.
Cotton responded to the World Health Organization’s statement that the coronavirus originated in animals and wasn’t manipulated in a lab by stating, “The most plausible explanation is that, through incompetent, slipshod safety practices, one of those viruses escaped from the lab and began to infect people in Wuhan. So the W.H.O. is answering a question that is not being asked, which tells you they’re trying to spin and cover up for China once again. The W.H.O. is a corrupt, rotten organization.”
h/t GR