China’s COVID ambitions — to hide crucial data and avoid blame — could not have been accomplished without Western academics eagerly playing the useful idiot for Beijing, The New York Times (of all places!) has revealed. Per the paper’s reporting, “Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions” while “Western journal editors enabled those efforts” — and the World Health Organization blessed it all. Two China-pushed narratives are at stake here: that the virus did not escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that China’s murderous, totalitarian response to...