The US needs to hold China accountable for Wuhan lab leak: Vivek Ramaswamy
2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy weighs in after a classified intelligence report from the Energy Department reportedly found COVID-19 likely came from a Chinese lab on 'The Next Revolution.'
Even before I launched my campaign for president, I’ve called for the United States to declare our independence from China because there have long been strategic reasons for doing so. But now we have powerful evidence that we must also hold China accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S. Energy Department recently concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak in China. This represents a shift in position for the Energy Department which had previously stated that it was undecided about the origin of the pandemic – making it the second major U.S. department, after the FBI, to conclude that the virus originated in a Chinese lab. This is a critical catalyst that requires both a retrospective admission from key U.S. officials and prospective actions against China by the U.S. president.
Retrospectively, key U.S. officials and leaders in the private sector should publicly admit their mistake over the last two years in suppressing discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.
This starts with the censors-in-chief at social media companies. Elon Musk has done a good job at Twitter in lifting the veil on government tech censorship, but Facebook and Google need to admit that they suppressed the fact that COVID-19 leaked from a lab and share the details.
ANOTHER US AGENCY ASSESSES COVID-19 ORIGIN LIKELY A CHINESE ‘LAB LEAK’
Even more importantly, tech companies and the mainstream media need to apologize for labeling as ‘racist’ everyone who dared to question the official narrative and said that China was responsible for the pandemic. This had nothing to do with racism; it was about attacking President Donald Trump.
In the name of stopping misinformation, leaders in the public and private sectors created misinformation. If we don’t learn from our mistakes as a country, we are destined to repeat them. Each of these leaders must publicly acknowledge their mistakes and apologize for it – calling for humility rather than hubris as it relates to suppression of speech in the future.
This aerial view shows the P4 laboratory (centre L) on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on May 27, 2020. - Opened in 2018, the P4 lab conducts research on the world's most dangerous diseases and has been accused by some top US officials of being the source of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. China's foreign minister on May 24 said the country was "open" to international cooperation to identify the source of the disease, but any investigation must be led by the World Health Organization and "free of political interference". (Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP) (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)
Prospectively, the U.S. must hold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accountable for the origin of the deadliest pandemic in over a century that wreaked hell on the U.S. and the rest of the world – or else we can rightly expect even worse from the CCP in the future. The U.S. must pursue damages through international courts for the financial and nonfinancial losses incurred by the U.S. government and its citizens. We must go further to extract reparations from the CCP using every available financial lever. The U.S. president should impose sanctions on CCP officials who played a role in covering up the origin of the pandemic and in obstructing international investigations into the origins of the pandemic. At long last, China should be expelled from the World Trade Organization unless and until it has paid due recompense to other WTO members.
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The U.S. must also hold certain of its own government officials accountable as well. Ultimately, the buck must stop with Anthony Fauci. It’s increasingly clear that the man in charge of America’s pandemic response likely caused the pandemic, when he and the NIH funded gain-of-function research through a pass-through company called Eco-Health Alliance. Fauci even gave them more funds for Coronavirus research as he left office. Republicans in the House Oversight Committee are doing a good job exposing this, but prosecution in a criminal court may be in his future.
The U.S. Department of Justice should thoroughly investigate whether government officials broke any laws and if so, that they are held accountable for their role in creating the COVID-19 pandemic as well. We only have the authority to hold China accountable if we hold key U.S. officials accountable as well.
I call on President Biden to take these steps immediately. Republicans and Democrats alike should applaud him if he does. I doubt he will, so I’m committed to taking these steps as the next U.S. President if elected: accountability is a precondition for justice.