Hi, My perspective is that, if the pandemic started due to the virus hunting program which was a very international collaboration (US, China, several European,

Hi, My perspective is that, if the pandemic started due to the virus hunting program which was a very international collaboration (US, China, several European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern countries), then it's not really a China-specific thing. It could just be that China is so much further along in their virus discovery and characterization pipeline (as the scientific literature points out) that unfortunately they were the first to leak one of these pandemic level viruses either found in the wild and sent to the lab or created in the lab during the process of characterization. I don't think that a country should be singled out for punishment for having a lab accident (unless it can be demonstrated that they do not have proper biosafety protocols and accountability mechanisms in place; a case of reckless negligence). But I do think there should be new international agreements and penalties for suppressing information about an emerging outbreak, e.g., transmissibility of the virus, its genomic sequence, number of cases and geographic spread etc., and costing other countries time in preparing to respond to the outbreak.