Free Republic

Beijing's aggression confirms that the Chinese Communist Party is fully committed to fulfill its own great power ambition regardless of the consequences to other states. While nations worldwide were busy dealing with health care and economic crises caused by the Wuhan virus pandemic, Beijing is exploiting the attendant confusion to tighten its control over Hong Kong and the South China Sea.Beijing Tightens Its Grip on Hong Kong Since summer 2019, an extradition bill that would have eroded Hong Kong’s judicial independence ignited the city’s pro-democracy movement. The spread of the coronavirus added a new dimension to the movement in 2020....

Peter Daszak, a zoologist whose non-profit steered U.S. funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for pushing back on the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab, in an April 2020 email published as part of a FOIA request by Buzzfeed. Daszak’s organization, the EcoHealth Alliance, funneled $3.4 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health to the WIV to study bat coronaviruses between 2014 and 2019. While politicians and scientists in the U.S. have suggested that the novel coronavirus initially leaked from the WIV before spreading across the globe, Daszak has vehemently denied...

The theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China was dismissed as a “conspiracy” by National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins in April of last year, newly released emails show. The email from Collins to current White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and others is part of a tranche of more than 3,200 pages of emails obtained by Buzzfeed News and published Tuesday. On April 15, 2020, Fox News anchor Bret Baier reported that US officials were increasingly confident that the virus “likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory … not as a bioweapon but...