The great villain of Covid is China. Not Matt Hancock

The Telegraph has a hell of a scoop with its lockdown files, aka Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps. It’s a major public interest story. We see with increasing clarity now how our government flapped and flailed and obfuscated as ministers and senior officials desperately tried to figure out the deadliness of Covid and what to do about it. There’ll be more recriminations in the coming days and rightly so.

But if we really want to be angry at something, and we do, shouldn’t we also direct our indignation at another government? One which, US intelligent agencies believe, probably let the Covid-19 virus escape from one of its laboratories, covered the crisis up and let the virus spread across the world, then lied about it for years? I’m talking about China, obviously. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray has just confirmed that his bureau believes the virus ‘most likely’ originated in a ‘Chinese government-controlled lab’ – though its most damning evidence remains classified. The US Ambassador to China yesterday called on Beijing to ‘be more honest’ about the origins of Covid. Good luck with that. China has stubbornly declined to be in any way transparent about the early spread of the virus and blocked international attempts to unearth the truth.  

The Biden administration is willing to make tough noises towards China, especially over the defence of Taiwan, but when it comes to perhaps the greatest scandal of the last century, there’s a curious lack of urgency. The White House prides itself on its ‘twin track’ approach to China – co-operating with the Chinese Communist party (CCP) where possible, challenging where not. This sounds pragmatic. But the pandemic has shown quite clearly that China, the planet’s second most powerful country, is a malign and untrustworthy actor on the world stage. Even if the lab leak theory is eventually disproved, there can be no doubt that China has obscured the origins of Covid. To what extent, then, can it be trusted about anything? 

Free speech enthusiasts are rightly now having fun berating all the official-line lackeys in the west who dismissed and shut down the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis as baseless conspiracy theory, when it was anything but. My favourite, for what it’s worth, was Anne Applebaum, the historian and Atlantic writer. She compared those mooting the lab leak to ‘Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented Aids’. Funny that, since the real Communist propagandists from China were at that time busy trying to blame the CIA for creating the virus. What a wicked web we weave… 

Anybody paying any attention knew about the ‘gain of function’ research at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan by the end of February 2020, even though such talk was not allowed in mainstream publications and on most airwaves, such was the climate of fear around Covid, for many months. It also became evident, from the early weeks of the pandemic, that the World Health Organisation (WHO) was compromised when it came to talking frankly about China and Covid. So nobody took very seriously the 2021 joint China-WHO investigation, which suggested the lab leak theory was ‘extremely unlikely.’

But while it’s worthy and satisfying to berate international bodies, our own politicians and media bigwigs for shirking their responsibilities, all avenues of blame for the almighty disaster that was Covid ultimately lead back to China.

Yes, western governments, in their panic, lost all sense of perspective, shut us down, wrecked our finances for at least a generation, and forgot the vital importance of human liberty. But there were no bungling Hancocks, half entertaining the thought of a career in reality TV, in charge of pandemic response in the buildings Zhongnanhai. What happened there was far less amateurish and far more sinister.  

We won’t ever see any WeChat (The sino-equivalent of Whatsapp) leaks showing senior CCP officials discussing how to cover up the outbreak. Because China is an authoritarian state and we are not. That should be our strength and their weakness, not the other way around.

Yet China has avoided widespread international condemnation for Covid to an extent that is mind-boggling. In the developing world, China’s energetic ‘vaccine diplomacy’ – as western nations frantically hoarded as many jabs as possible – meant that it was able to cast itself as the global good guy in contrast to the selfish, profiteering western powers and their Big Pharma interests.

Perhaps rising superpowers can get away with anything. So many countries now rely on China’s money, or are entrapped in debt to Beijing, that nobody dares challenge them. Only the American government occasionally says the obvious out loud and even then proceeds with caution, especially when threatening the CCP over its not-so-tacit support for Russia over Ukraine. It’s hard to freeze out China, the great engine of global productivity, without further destabilising a struggling world economy.  

But journalists and citizens should no feel such constraints. Even after the speech-suffocations of lockdown, we are still mostly free to speak our minds and we can still be clear that the great villain of the Covid tragedy was not Matt Hancock or Boris Johnson. It was China – or the CCP, to be more precise. In a fair world, China’s ruling elite ought to be held accountable.