Some scientists are coming to see the lab-leak theory of SARS-Cov-2 as plausible, due to reports that workers in the Wuhan virus lab got badly sick a month before the identification of the disease Covid-19.

According to this theory, China's applied its standard approach to problems — cover up and deny! — and this led to the pandemic.

There is not much evidence for that theory; what exists is not clear or conclusive.

If the lab-leak theory is true, it does not mean that China deserves all the blame for the harm that the disease has done.

Last December, people had little knowledge about what this virus would do. The Chinese authorities may have believed they could prevent the disease from spreading, get rid of it, and the world would never notice a problem or complain. Such a response would have been risky, but not vicious.

Later efforts to cover up the outbreak were injustices, of course, regardless of whether there was a lab leak.

More blameworthy are the right-wing rulers such as Bolsonaro, Johnson, Modi and Trump, who decided to let their compatriots die rather than take action to bring the epidemic to a halt. That was murderous.