When news first broke that a mysterious illness was afflicting residents of Wuhan, China, it drew little attention in Washington.

After all, China’s first SARS epidemic barely touched the US, and the conclusion of a Sino-American trade deal against the backdrop of an escalating geopolitical rivalry was dominating the headlines.

But the wages of this oversight still lay beyond the imagining.

At this writing, worldwide SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) cases have topped 100 million, with more than two million recorded deaths.

In the United States alone, the death toll is nearing 500,000, with COVID-19-related deaths currently averaging more than 3,000 per day. The global pandemic has devastated the world economy, destroyed public health systems, and inflicted untold misery across the planet.

As foreign policy analysts and scientists tried to understand how a local Chinese epidemic could fast become a planetary plague, we published “China Unquarantined” in National Review in June 20201 to catalogue the startling array of additional risks the US had unwittingly assumed because of decades of “engagement policy” with China—in effect, tying our national fortunes to those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

As we explain, Xi Jinping’s empire of fear created the current global health catastrophe. The CCP turned a local epidemic into a global pandemic through its yin of repressive measures and yang of totalitarian error: cover-up, censorship, corruption of international institutions such as the World Health Organization, and more, detailed in our report.