The 2022 Winter Olympics have been marred by COVID as athletes are forced to miss events, and spectators have been limited. Yet China, the country responsible for unleashing COVID on the world, was still allowed to host the Winter Games.
While it matters whether COVID truly spread from a Chinese wet market or was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the question does little to change China’s guilt. As the virus spread throughout Wuhan, the Chinese Communist Party silenced doctors who blew the whistle about the severity of the virus.
On Jan. 13, 2020, the virus was first identified outside of China in Thailand. On Jan. 14, Chinese health officials met to discuss emergency preparations for the virus, which had proven capable of human-to-human transmission. Meanwhile, China told the World Health Organization the opposite: On the same day as that meeting, the WHO informed the world that China found “no clear evidence” of human-to-human transmission.
When scrutiny turned toward China’s story on the origins of the virus, the CCP responded by pointing the finger at other countries. It was the U.S. Army who brought COVID to China in October 2019, China claimed. COVID actually originated in Italy, not China, according to the CCP. Or was it brought to China by cold-chain beef imported from Australia? Wherever it came from, China was merely the helpless, blameless country that was infected by outsiders, not the lying authoritarian state that covered up the spread and severity of the virus.
All the while, the CCP did all it could to neuter investigations into Wuhan. The WHO investigation team was supervised by Chinese officials during its visit and quickly dismissed the more damning lab leak theory. When the WHO itself admitted that the investigation had been insufficiently thorough, China informed it that there wouldn’t be another.
Now, athletes at the 2022 Winter Olympics are being forced into brutal quarantines and self-isolation periods by the very government that caused the problem in the first place. The country that loosed a pandemic on the world — killing more than 5 million people globally, and which has repeatedly lied about the virus’s origins, severity, and the deaths it has caused in China — is now in charge of the health and welfare of Olympic athletes from across the globe.
There have been no real consequences for the lies China has spread about COVID. The WHO did nothing when China dictated the direction of its investigation, and the International Olympic Committee did nothing to evaluate moving the games elsewhere or even to guarantee that athletes staying in China would be treated with basic dignity. China lied, repeatedly, about the global pandemic, and as a reward, the world sent its athletes to compete under its authoritarian rules and restrictions.
