The history of the coronavirus in China is that it developed over several months in a rigid, top-down, hierarchical society that discourages individual responsibility and stifles innovation. America is a free country built on innovation, and it appears that this has paid off with a vaccine that Inovio Pharmaceuticals created in three hours.

The obvious reason why the coronavirus (now known officially as COVID-19) emerged in China is because the Chinese, especially those in Wuhan, have a habit of eating wild, rather than domesticated, animals. People snacking on bats, mice, snakes, and other exotic fare are a recipe for zoonosis — that is, infectious diseases that start with animal-to-animal transmission, morph to animal-to-human transmission, and then leap into human-to-human transmission.

However, there's also a systemic reason for COVID-19's emergence in China as a potential pandemic, and that is China's communist government. Communism stifles individual initiative. For that reason, when COVID-19 began to make inroads in Wuhan, no one person or institution was going to step forward and identify a problem.

While America lauds those who speak out and even has Whistleblower statutes to protect them, China punishes those who point to flaws in the system. So it was that the doctor who first exposed the virus's scope was punished, rather than allowed to take the lead on stopping the disease's spread or helping with its treatment. After all, an all-powerful government cannot be exposed as fallible.

China's communist system also stifles innovation. There is no benefit to be had in doing something better or faster.

In America, as the old saying goes, "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Indeed, in late 19th-century America, after Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, America was on fire with the idea of doing things better in order to improve life, gain fame, and make money. Those incentives are nonexistent in China.

Ultimately, communism will always rely on brute force to make things happen. That's how you get videos of masked men dragging screaming people out of buildings and locking them into boxes. China has the police power to engage in mass quarantine and incarceration, but its political system strongly militates against true prevention and innovative cure.

The same is true in neighboring North Korea, only much, much worse.

Things are very different in America. As Mike Konrad explained here at American Thinker, America already has a better medical infrastructure for dealing with viral outbreaks, whether it's steroids to deal with blocked airways or antibiotics to deal with secondary infections. (Having said that, one of our major weaknesses is that we've farmed out to China, of all places, the job of manufacturing most of those medicines.)

In addition to our basic efficiencies, we also incentivize innovation: if you invest time, energy, and creativity in doing something important in a better way, you will be rich, and being rich is nice. And that's why we have this heartening story out of San Diego about a vaccine in process for fighting COVID-19 (emphasis added):

In a race against the clock, a San Diego lab is scrambling to get a COVID-19 vaccine out and on the market. As the days go by, Inovio Pharmaceuticals is getting closer to releasing the desperately needed vaccine against the deadly virus. Inovio Pharmaceuticals, which is located in Sorrento Valley, has also created a vaccine for the Zika virus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and the vaccine for Ebola. Dr. Trevor Smith, who is the director of research and development at Inovio, said, "It's something we are trained to do, and the infrastructure is here and the expertise is in house." When Chinese scientists released the genetic sequence on Jan. 9, Inovio researchers got to work immediately and within 3 hours they had a vaccine for coronavirus, or COVID-19 as it is now being referred to. "We have an algorithm which we designed, and we put the DNA sequence into our algorithm and came up with the vaccine in that short amount of time," said Dr. Smith.

If the vaccination works, it will be ready by early summer. The virus can do a lot of damage between now and then, but still...

Imagine how different things would have been if the Chinese had a free market that allowed scientists in November to begin work on vaccination. Or imagine if China had a government that could admit mistakes, allowing data about COVID-19 to go public sooner so that firms such as Inovio could step in and help out.