John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist challenges a current narrative emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you haven’t noticed, a narrative has been brewing the last couple of days that the United States should cooperate with China to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, that the two countries need to set aside their differences, stop the blame game, and come together for the good of the world.

In alternate reality where China hadn’t lied at every turn about the origin and extent of the virus, silenced and reprimanded a whistleblower who died from the virus, concealed vital information from the rest of the world, strong-armed the World Health Organization into lying about how the virus spreads, and continued to act in bad faith, cooperation would be great.

But in the real world, cooperating with Beijing is impossible because the Chinese government refuses to be honest about what happened, how it happened, and what’s happening now. Given what we know about the Chinese Communist Party’s dissimulation, together with strong evidence now emerging that the disease didn’t emerge in a Wuhan wet market but escaped from a nearby lab, there’s no reason to trust the CCP. And without trust, there can be no real cooperation. …

… [T]he bipartisan consensus of experts who brought you Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate agreement find themselves in total agreement with the CCP’s propaganda machine. No surprise, they conclude that despite China’s manifest deception, obfuscation, and botched coverup of the outbreak, “the focus should be on finding the resolve to work together.”

Setting aside the dubious credibility of the foreign policy blob, one could just as easily argue the opposite, that no effort against the virus will be successful if it means cooperating with China, which at this point should be treated like the international pariah it obviously is.

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