Just imagine how easy it was for Pharaoh to clamp down on inconvenient news. When the only mass media were expensive papyrus and carvings, he could easily cover up inconvenient episodes like the Ten Plagues.

I

s this the cover-up of the century?

The Covid-19 death toll in the UK is now above 4,300, that of America more than 8,000 – but apparently China, where the disease ran rampant for weeks before authorities acted, got away with only 3,300 casualties.

Given that the country allowed 5 million people to leave Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began, before imposing lockdown on January 23^rd, that low figure defies belief, even accounting for China’s rapid shutdown once the virus had become established.

Anecdotal evidence points to far higher numbers, including unsubstantiated reports of mass deliveries of urns to funeral homes in Wuhan. But in a measure of China’s almost total control of information, there’s not much more that Western governments and media can do to prove those suspicions.

Whatever the true numbers, a new report by London’s Henry Jackson Society (HJS) says that China could be liable for damages in the trillions of dollars based on broken treaty obligations by failure to truthfully acknowledge the scale of the pandemic.

“Potential damages liable against China at the time of writing could run to £3.2 ($4) trillion from just the G7 nations,” the report claims. “The UK is said to have a claim worth a potential £351 billion ($449 billion) in damages based on formally announced government spending.  Using the same methodology, the US meanwhile could claim £933.3 billion ($1,200 billion), Canada £47.9 billion ($59 billion), and Australia £29.9 billion ($37 billion).”

Given China’s clout, these astronomical claims seem to have greater moral than practical value. But HJS Executive Director Dr Alan Mendoza, said that raising the idea of China’s accountability is at a basic level a matter of fairness. “If a restaurant poisons its customers, they have a right to sue. Similarly, we would not be in this situation if they had done their duty. And China is signatory to various treaties, so don’t dismiss the idea of redress.

“More broadly,” continues Dr Mendoza, “this is about the post-Covid-19 world. We need to shield our economies from dependence on China. That includes no Chinese-made elements in our 5G communications networks, and producing more at home even if it costs more.”

The world may never know the real truth about what happened in Wuhan. For a country that forced the young doctor who first warned of the new disease to recant, who then went on to die of the illness he’d warned of – it’s probably right to be cautious about official figures.

More broadly, coronavirus will lead to greater suspicion between China and the West, and persuade many countries to decrease their reliance on the rising economic giant.

Burying the evidence

There’s a surprising Pesach application for all of this.

While the truth of what happened in China is an important question for health experts and foreign policy types, it could also be key to a fundamental part of Jewish belief: Yetzias Mitzrayim.

The fact that the Jewish people left Egypt in a series of miracles is the foundation of all Emunah. It teaches us that Hashem is master of Nature, that He has a destiny for the world, and that the Jewish people play a major part in bringing about that destiny.

And that’s why so much of our lives revolve around that historic episode: We remember it twice daily in Shema; by wearing Tefillin; by keeping Pesach, Shavuos and Sukkos; by hanging a mezuzah on the door; by doing pidyon haben.

But the question is: if a nation of millions of men, women and children walked free while Egypt, the ancient world’s superpower, was humbled, why is there no historical record of that?

There should be some fragment, some stray record as evidence that it was all true. And yet the earliest certain mention of the Jews, in all of the records that the Egyptians left posterity, comes from far later. Why is that?

The answer, I think, is: cover-up.

Twentieth-century history provides an illustration of just how successfully an autocratic leader can hide inconvenient facts.

Over the course of a few years in the early 1930s, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin caused a man-made famine, called the Holodomor, that killed millions of Ukrainians, intending to eliminate kulaks, or landowning peasants who resisted his forced-collectivization program.

We know it happened, and yet hardly any pictures remain, hardly anything leaked out to the outside world.

A dictatorship can censor information that will damage it.

That was only 90 years ago, in a country next to Europe, and when communication technology could spread news around the world.

Just imagine how easy it was for Pharaoh to clamp down on inconvenient news. When the only mass media were expensive papyrus and carvings, he could easily cover up inconvenient episodes like the Ten Plagues. “That was embarrassing,” he might have said, “let’s not record that we lost a nation of slaves.”

What Stalin could do, Pharaoh certainly could.

Mesorah, the unparalleled chain of transmission that stretches back all the way to those Jews who escaped Pharaoh, doesn’t need archaeology to prove its validity.

But when we sit at the Seder table this week, we have a window into the events of Pesach by the coverups that continue until today.

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