(Elias Irizarry, Headline USA) WASHINGTON D.C.–A nonpartisan panel led by former President Donald Trump’s top intelligence official proposed forcing China to pay trillions of dollars in reparations in a new report released by the Heritage Foundation.
“It is the belief of this Commission that the Chinese government and its affiliates can be and should be held liable for damages to the United States and its people,” said the report, released Monday by the think-tank’s Non-Partisan Commission on China and COVID-19.
The nine-member commission, chaired by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, directly faulted the Chinese government for the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in $18 trillion damages in the U.S. alone.
Other notable members of the commission included:
- Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D.
- former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien
- former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo
- Jamie Metzl, a former Democratic State Department official and prominent lab-leak proponent
At a panel discussion Monday, Ratcliffe and his fellow commissioners outlined the findings of the newly published report.
“All nine of us, both parties, unanimously, we are of the opinion that the most likely origin was a research-related incident,” Ratcliffe said.
China “took actions which are inexcusable—and for which they should be accountable—to destroy samples, to hide evidence, to jail journalists, to silence scientists, to obfuscate or refuse to participate in an honest investigation.”
Redfield received criticism from both the Right and Left during the pandemic. On one hand, he signed off on much of the CDC’s absurd—and, ultimately, ineffective—guidance for COVID prevention, including mask mandates and social distancing. That led to the closure of many schools and businesses.
However, Redfield said his difference of opinion on the origin of the virus, and his opposition to the controversial and risky research that likely led to its creation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, resulted in him being shut out of many of the high level discussions about the pandemic as he jostled for influence with National Institutes of Health virologist Anthony Fauci and others.
“As a virologist, I’ve always felt that the origin of this virus was gain of function research and laboratory action,” Redfield stated.
“When a virus goes from animals to humans, it takes a long time for that virus to learn how to efficiently transmit human-to-human,” he added. “But when COVID came, it was immediately one of the most infectious viruses I’ve ever seen as a virologist.”
Redfield said that researchers now know that there are documents found from the Wuhan laboratory that acknowledged that laboratory scientists successfully learned how to teach the virus to infect human tissue, which backed his belief that the COVID-19 virus was engineered with the intention of infecting humans.
In seeking restitution from China, the commission reported that there would be substantial obstacles as a result of the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, which was written to give immunity to foreign governments from the jurisdiction of U.S. federal and state courts.
The commission stated, though, that there were exceptions within FSIA that would permit legal action against China.
“The PRC’s acts and omissions that caused the global spread of COVID-19 were tortious, commercial, and nondiscretionary in nature, and they caused direct injury, property damage, and death within the United States,” the report argued. “Claims premised on conduct of these sorts fall within recognized exceptions to sovereign immunity.”
Additionally, the commission named as potential defendants several other parties: China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines and Chinese National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), as well as manufacturers of personal protective equipment.
They argued that negligence, liability for abnormally dangerous activities, public nuisance, anti-competitive behavior, fraudulent misrepresentation, as well as civil racketeering violations were all legitimate claims that could, in the future, be cited in court to support action against the Chinese government by American citizens.
In their conclusion, they made several recommendations for Congress to take in making sure that COVID-19 “never happens again.”
One such recommendation pushed for the creation of a bipartisan reparations and compensation task force to cover claims against China.
Others laid out paths the United States could take to hold China accountable and punish them for COVID-19, including economic sanctions on specific officials and entities that covered up COVID-19, as well as restricting all U.S. outbound investment into biotechnology.
“Across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic left 28 million persons dead, whole economies shattered, and the vulnerable impoverished—in addition to creating a mental health crisis,” the report concluded. “Better to take bold action now than to ask ourselves why we didn’t do more if an even deadlier pandemic emerges in the future.”
