Good Monday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions.
Before the world can move on from the COVID-19 pandemic, it must come together to understand how the pandemic started and take steps to avoid another.
"Unfortunately," writes JEREMY HUREWITZ, "China has put the world at risk by blocking these efforts."
We know COVID-19 originated in China, but we don't know how, because, as Hurewitz writes, "China has stridently refused to accept any responsibility for COVID's beginnings."
Something similar happened in the mid-2000s with the SARS outbreak, which also began in China. Hurewitz covered that outbreak as a reporter, visiting "the wet markets in Guangdong, where the most notorious of these markets are located. I found them curtailed, with most of the exotic wildlife hidden from sight or no longer for sale. Vendors were reluctant to talk to a Western journalist, and it was clear that the government had cracked down."
But soon afterwards, the markets were open again and selling all the exotic wildlife they had before.
China has a responsibility as a member of the World Trade Organization and other global institutions to "inform the world in a timely manner of any public health emergency originating within its borders and to share all details on the crisis in a transparent manner."
China failed to do that with both SARS and COVID. In the latter case, it even retaliated by placing trade restrictions on the Australian government merely for calling for an independent inquiry into COVID's origins.
What can be done?
Hurewitz, a policy advisor on national security for the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, thinks the international community should demand that China place new regulations on their wet markets to improve sanitary conditions and place restrictions on the types of wildlife sold and slaughtered there.
And, he writes, "the United Nations should set up a commission to fully investigate China's failures and explore the idea of it paying trillions of dollars in reparations in light of the millions of deaths and incalculable economic losses due to COVID-19."
The latter recommendation is bold. But "if the world is to take China seriously as a great power – which is what China wants – it must take the concerns of the world seriously."
Read Hurewitz's op-ed here.
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