By Chris Satullo

A while back, I received a group email from someone whom I have to deal with on a regular basis. A propos of nothing, this person opened his email by saying he hoped everyone was doing OK with “the China virus.” Amazingly, appallingly, this was about a week after the slaughter of Asian-American women in Atlanta.

To be honest, a few years ago, I might have let it pass, focusing on the likely futility of any response. This time, after a few moments weighing my options, I sent him a critical note in the form of a “praise sandwich,” a gambit I learned a long time ago as a manager.

Which is to say, I opened by thanking him for the useful information he provided in the email and ended by thanking him for the overall job he did in his role with the group. In between those slices of praise came the real meat of the email: I asked him to refrain from gratuitous ethnic references that were offensive to many and utterly inappropriate in light of the recent events in Georgia.

I did all this knowing what his response – had he bothered to reply (he didn’t) – would have been: “Hey, you need to chill. I didn’t mean anything by the phrase. After all, factually, the pandemic virus did come from China.”

He’d be wrong, in that, thanks to Donald Trump and his minions, using the phrase “China virus” has become a political act dripping with blame and bias.

But he’d also be right in that there’s little doubt the virus originated in China and spread so rapidly around the world in part because of the Chinese regime’s lack of transparency.

What’s more, it’s become clear in recent weeks that, despite months of denials and eye-rolls that equated the assertion with tin-foil-hat territory, a non-trivial possibility does exist that the virus did escape into the world from a lab in Wuhan, China.

To be crystal clear, that indeed may have happened – not through the king of Dr. Evil-style malevolence hyped by right-wing crackpots, but possibly through simple human error.

It turns out the lab had been doing work on a bat virus found in a cave in China in 2012 that had been linked to the death of three workers who’d been told to shovel bat guano there – a virus whose genetic sequence bears strong resemblance to the novel coronavirus. For a deep dive into the background, you can look here or here.

It’s important that those of us in the trust-the-science contingent actually prove willing to follow and to assess calmly the slowly developing evidence about the Wuhan lab, rather than reflexively dismissing the topic as just more Trumpist xenophobia.

After all, if we want to respond better to the next potential pandemic, we need to know all the errors that went into the spread of the current one.

We need to track the evidence, no matter how obnoxious Fox News reporters might get in White House media scrums, no matter how painful it would be to have to admit that someone as irritating as Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) might have been a little right about this.

We have to resist the temptation to dismiss the whole topic in a gesture of solidarity with our fellow Asian-American citizens, who’ve been subjected to all manner of painful abuse due to the “China virus” rhetoric from the Trumpists.

We’ll be a long time flushing from our civic bloodstream all the toxins Donald Trump insistently injects into it. The conditions he exploits have been brewing for a long time, but he has been the trigger of all triggers, the catalyst of all catalysts.

Thanks to him, one of our major political parties has taken full leave of its senses. It lives in a dark fantasy world where up is down, black is white, losses are wins, failure is success and success is failure. Where equity equals racism and racism equals patriotism. Where lack of evidence is proof of conspiracy and facts that counter your pet theory are just part of the conspiracy. Where “what-about-ism” is as reflexive as breathing and accountability is only for other people.

This state of delusion has become the predicate of our political dialogue. As much as we may hate Trumpism, the rest of us still tend to define ourselves and calibrate our behavior in response to it. For example, I know that, as a Pfizered person, I don’t need, for my safety or others’, to wear a mask when walking through my city on a sunny day. But I still sometimes slip one on when I see a group of masked people approaching, simply because I don’t want them to think I’m a selfish Trump voter.

This syndrome doesn’t help when a situation arises like plausible evidence that the Chinese lab may indeed be implicated in the spread of the virus. We’re in danger here of responding not to facts, but merely to our Trump trauma.

After all, it should come as no shock that governments of autocratic tendencies, like China’s, might go to great and damaging lengths to cover up evidence of their mistakes and misdeeds.  Think of Chernobyl, or the Serbian massacres in the ‘90s, or the Saudi denials of the Khashoggi murder.

Or, for that matter, Trump’s response to the pandemic.

No matter how eagerly Trump has wielded “China virus” to shield himself from blame for how he botched America’s response to the pandemic, a hint that the Wuhan lab may in fact be culpable in no way exonerates him. No matter how the virus first reached America, his accountability for the unnecessary loss of thousands of American lives is vast and clear. 

To the degree, though, that we try to bury the question of Chinese culpability – out of an understandable but misplaced desire not to fuel racist abuses – we give Trump’s apologists in the media and Congress more fuel for their fog machine, as they try to push a 100-percent-guano narrative about a Biden administration cover-up.

Let’s support the uphill quest to wrest some data and honesty from China, and emphasize that any evidence of error there will reflect only on the culprits, not on America’s Asian-American citizens.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia