SINOPHOBIA IN FANCY DRESS:

On Jan. 30, 2020, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton addressed military leaders at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing and presented a startling idea. At that time, the novel coronavirus was spreading around China and had killed hundreds of people, though it had not yet been identified in the U.S. Chinese officials said the virus had originated at a seafood market in Wuhan.

Cotton charged that China was "lying" about the origins of COVID-19. He raised another possibility: "I would note that Wuhan also has China's only biosafety level-four 'super laboratory' that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus." What if the virus had instead originated there? [...]

Over the past 50 years, the rate of outbreaks of infectious disease has more than quadrupled. At least 55 of those outbreaks have killed hundreds or thousands of people and have had the potential to become pandemic. But with only one possible exception--the "Russian flu" pandemic of 1977-78--every single one of these was either a previously unknown disease originating in animals (e.g., HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS, novel strains of flu) or an exacerbation of a previously endemic disease (e.g., dengue, malaria, cholera). Regardless of where the COVID-19 pandemic came from, it's clear that the threat of pandemics in general comes from spillover of novel viruses from wild animals or factory-farmed animals to humans.

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