A growing number of Americans believe China should pay reparations for their bungling of COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then for their initial coverup allowing it to spread into a global pandemic.
Reparations mean the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. And sadly there have been many!
There are reports China knew about Wuhan lab safety concerns for a while and Beijing was preparing bio security law, but apparently not fast enough.
Reparations have been extracted from countries guilty of war crimes for a long time and over long periods.
It took Germany 92 years to repay its World War I reparations, thanks to a financial collapse and another world war.
Allied victors took a punitive approach to Germany at the end of World War I. Intense negotiation resulted in the Treaty of Versailles’ “war guilt clause,” which identified Germany as the sole responsible party for the war and forced it to pay reparations.
The Treaty of Versailles didn’t just blame Germany for the war—it demanded financial restitution for the whole thing, to the tune of 132 billion gold marks, or about $269 billion today.
Was President Trump’s casting the virus as “foreign” just a simple rhetorical flourish? I don’t think so. It appears he meant it when he used the expression “Chinese virus” more than 20 times between March 16 and March 30.
The deliberateness of the wording was made clear when a photographer captured the script of his speech wherein Trump had crossed out the word “Corona” and replaced it with “Chinese.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of putting the world at risk for its lack of transparency, even scrapping a joint G7 statement after its members refused to refer to the virus as the “Wuhan virus.”
So, did Secretary Pompeo not have a point? By early February there was already strong evidence of a Chinese cover-up and repression of whistle-blowers, later confirmed by investigations.
So, are reparations from China now in order for the 29,220,373 confirmed cases and 929.088 deaths from the COVID-19 outbreak as of September 14, 2020?
I’d start by asking the families of those who’ve died, now approaching 1 million.