Coronavirus: The world must stand up to China and demand an apology for the pandemic

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

Liberal Party economic policy owes much to Adam Smith. Centuries ago, the Scot argued for a laissez faire approach to economics.

He was a free marketeer who believed the market would always sort out problems by and from its own governance.

This approach should work most of the time and it is only on the rarest occasions that something like this virus will drop on us from a clear blue sky and wreak havoc on the unprotected and the unprepared.

Sadly, the whole world is in the category described in the last sentence. We have been ambushed by a bug that is not discriminatory when it comes to age or colour.

It has already killed more than 250,000 people from all age groups and remains a threat to match wars between nations in terms of fatalities.

A vaccine to prevent is the subject of intensive research by some of the world’s bigger and better brains, but may be a year or so away.

US President Donald Trump has backed away from his early bullish predictions that a vaccine was only weeks away.

I am not too critical about his interventions because it is very difficult sometimes in knowing where to draw the line between preventing panic and keeping the public properly informed.

In an era where nothing remains secret for long, making a clean breast of it seems the right way to go.

In Britain the story of the virus could be read in the lines of the pasty face of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. If he feels as bad as he looks he’s in real strife.

With the technology breakthroughs of the modern world, we may have become too comfortable in our successes.

We are blindsided by the speed of the spread of this virus, as well as its severity.

You can’t rest on your laurels when the world can move so fast. World leaders were slow to cotton on to the dangers because the doctors advising them were also caught unawares.

The Chinese must face some kind of reckoning. According to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, there is ample evidence that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

The Chinese immediately stopped all internal Chinese flights in and out of Wuhan. They allowed international flights to continue in what can only be described as a catastrophic error or a display of mind-numbing arrogance.

Either way, it was reckless and stupid and must not go unpunished.

As soon as anything resembling criticism is directed at China, the shutters go up. They get angry, spiteful and ominously threatening. Totalitarian regimes value nothing more than secrecy.

This is one time when the free world must not fear standing up to the Chinese and demanding some form of apology.

The apology will not be forthcoming, but if the entire developed world stands up and gets stuck into the Chinese, their humiliation would be as big as it would be deserved.