Former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe is urging the United States to lobby to relocate the Beijing 2022 Olympics in order to impost a reputational cost on Beijing for its refusal to allow a transparent investigation into the origins of the COVID pandemic.
As justification for the move, Ratcliffe listed the Chinese regime’s poor international record and transgressions, including “mass cover-up of COVID’s origins and its initial outbreak, in addition to its crimes against humanity in Xinjiang,” in an interview with Axios.
In an earlier op-ed for Fox News, the Trump administration DNI noted that the scheduled venue for the Winter games, the Chinese capital of Beijing, houses the party leaders who helped cover up crucial information that would allow the international community to better understand the origins of the ongoing pandemic, and prevent a future one.
While he insisted that the Winter Olympics should still be held, he suggested that the International Olympic Committee should not glorify Beijing with the opportunity to host the event given its obstructionism and lack of accountability in the investigation to determine COVID’s origins.
“China rejected the World Health Organization’s (WHO) plan to investigate the theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan,” he listed as an example of the government’s malfeasance.
Ratcliffe declared his belief that the lab-leak hypothesis that COVID is probable rather than just possible, and said that the evidence trail points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He cast great doubt on the former mainstream consensus, now under scrutiny, that the pathogen naturally emerged when it transferred from an animal to a human.
China has refused to turn over raw data on the earliest known COVID cases in Wuhan to the WHO and has silenced internal whistleblowers. The playbook is in keeping with China’s ultimate goal of establishing global hegemony and disrupting the U.S.-led international order, Ratcliffe wrote.
Therefore, pulling the Winter Olympics out of Beijing will be a crucial step in countering China’s dishonesty and aggression, he suggested. “We’ve got to get our priorities in order, and standing strong against the CCP’s global ambitions must be at the top of the list,” he said to Axios.
Some Republican lawmakers have already called to revoke China’s privilege to host the games or outright boycott them, claiming its necessary to make a statement and expose China’s egregious human rights violations. A number of them, including Senator Tom Cotton, slammed companies Coca-Cola, Visa, Airbnb, and others for sponsoring the Beijing Olympics in some form, criticizing American capitalism’s dependence on the Chinese market that ignores international ethics.
Source: National Review
