OPINION:
Six years after COVID-19 brought the world to its knees, the time for euphemisms is over.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bears direct responsibility for the outbreak of the deadly virus, for the systematic concealment of information at the outbreak’s critical early stage and for the continuing obstruction that has prevented the world from obtaining a complete accounting of what happened in Wuhan.
The evidence for a research-related origin at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has grown substantially and irrefutably since the pandemic began. In June 2026, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly described U.S.-funded the coronavirus work at WIV as research “now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic.”
That conclusion makes the history preceding the outbreak impossible to dismiss as coincidence.
For years, the CCP pursued global leadership in virus discovery and experimentation with breathtaking ambition while the nation’s biosafety remained ghastly inadequate.
Wuhan became the center of that effort. WIV accumulated more than 15,000 bat-virus samples, the largest such collection in the world before becoming China’s first BSL-4 laboratory, allowed by the CCP’s central health authority to store and handle microorganisms of risk group 4, the most dangerous viruses in the world. This included the coronavirus and its lab-enhanced, more deadly variations.
Yet China’s own Ministry of Science and Technology evaluation had rated WIV merely a mediocre “Good” grade, rather than among the country’s 20 “Excellent” biological and medical laboratories. Nevertheless, Chinese authorities accredited it as the only bio-lab in China to handle the world’s most dangerous pathogens.
The people running China’s laboratories knew there was a problem.
Dr. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, repeatedly warned about China’s deficient biosafety practices. He identified inadequate biosafety management, insufficient laboratory operations, shortages of specialized biosafety personnel and inadequate training.
In a 2018 paper, Dr. Yuan and his co-authors delivered an extraordinarily prescient warning: a biosafety laboratory is a “double-edged sword” that can benefit humanity but can also produce “disaster.” They catalogued the nation’s dismal biosafety deficiencies in China’s biolabs, ranging from inadequate operational standards and professional instructions to shortcomings in waste disposal, disinfection, contamination monitoring and laboratory safety procedures.
This was not theoretical. SARS had already escaped from Chinese laboratories in Beijing in 2004, causing infections, hundreds of quarantines and at least one death.
The CCP therefore had ample warnings about what could happen when dangerous pathogens met inadequate biosafety. Yet WIV continued conducting sophisticated research on precisely the class of viruses capable of producing another SARS-like epidemic.
In 2015, WIV’s Dr. Shi Zhengli, now infamously known worldwide as the Bat Lady of Wuhan, participated in research that constructed a chimeric SARS-like coronavirus to study its capacity for human emergence.
The resulting publication described a hybrid virus incorporating a spike protein from a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats. Then, in March 2019 — nine months before COVID-19 erupted in Wuhan — Dr. Shi and her research team warned that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks were highly likely and that “there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.”
Then it happened in Wuhan. Not Beijing, Shanghai or Yunnan, where many of the bats carrying SARS-related coronaviruses had been collected. It happened in Wuhan, the city containing China’s premier institute for studying those viruses and conducting more deadly gain-of-function experiments on them.
A laboratory accident does not require a conspiracy. It requires a pathogen, risky research, inadequate safeguards and one human mistake. China possessed all the ingredients.
What followed transforms a story of scientific negligence into an indictment of the CCP political system. Beijing’s instinct was not transparency. It was control.
WIV was gagged by China’s central health authority from the beginning. On Jan. 1, 2020, WIV was ordered to destroy all collected coronavirus samples. Within days, the People’s Liberation Army assumed control of the facility.
When WIV issued an open letter addressing allegations involving genetic engineering, a laboratory leak, military involvement and an alleged missing former employee, it offered no detailed evidence to resolve the allegations. Instead, all WIV employees were instructed to “rally around the CCP Central Committee and Comrade Xi Jinping.”
That response captures the fundamental problem.
A laboratory capable of affecting the health of every human being on Earth existed inside an authoritarian political system in which the Chinese Communist Party possessed ultimate authority over scientists, records, journalists and institutions.
Even Mr. Xi acknowledged that the system had failed.
On Feb. 14, 2020, he said in his first public speech since the outbreak that the Wuhan outbreak had exposed “shortcomings” and “leaking holes” in China’s management of biological materials and biological security. He demanded a new biological-security law and ordered biological security incorporated into China’s national-security system.
Then there is the evidence Beijing has withheld. The CCP-ordered destruction of samples from early Wuhan patients made reconstructing the virus’s origin more difficult.
The obstruction continues to matter today. In 2025, five years after the outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO)disclosed that China still had not supplied hundreds of early SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences, detailed information about animals sold in Wuhan markets, or requested information about research and biosafety conditions in Wuhan laboratories. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus consequently said that all hypotheses, including laboratory origin, must remain under consideration.
That is why Beijing cannot invoke uncertainty as an alibi. A government cannot destroy or withhold evidence and then demand exoneration because evidence is missing. Nor should the CCP’s responsibility be measured only by what happened inside a laboratory.
The CCP’s responsibility extends to what happened afterward. An authoritarian regime confronted an emerging infectious disease with the reflexes of an authoritarian regime: suppress information, enforce political discipline, control the narrative and resist independent scrutiny.
Accountability for COVID-19 should consequently be directed where political authority actually resided: the Chinese Communist Party and the institutions under its control.
With a contagious respiratory virus, lost time means lost lives. And the eventual price was almost beyond comprehension. Millions of people are dead — 14.5 million souls worldwide, according to the WHO. Families were shattered. Trillions of dollars in wealth and economic activity vanished. A generation lived through a catastrophe that should never have happened.
The international community should demand full access to WIV’s virus databases, laboratory notebooks, experiment records, sample inventories, biosafety records and relevant personnel files. Scientists and employees with knowledge of the outbreak should be allowed to speak to independent investigators outside CCP supervision.
Governments should also establish enforceable international consequences for any state that conceals information about an outbreak with pandemic potential.
COVID-19 demonstrated that biosafety inside a sovereign country is not merely that country’s domestic concern. A laboratory accident in one city can close schools in London, overwhelm hospitals in New York, destroy businesses in Tokyo and kill grandparents in Buenos Aires.
Sovereignty cannot mean a sovereign right to endanger humanity. And the world should reconsider whether laboratories conducting research capable of producing global consequences can be permitted to operate without meaningful international inspection.
The Chinese Communist Party should not be permitted to consign that catastrophe to history without accountability.
The world deserves the truth. The victims deserve justice. And the CCP must answer for COVID-19, morally, legally and financially.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
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