My daily update must start with the revelation by an independent, investigative journalism team at Caixin Global.
The team discovered that Chinese scientists destroyed proof of research involving the novel coronavirus that is now spreading at pandemic levels.
An article published by the Times of London indicates that Chinese authorities have been deleting the stories from the internet.
Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.
The Times of London continues, noting that despite warnings being given through December about the severe nature of the contagion, on Jan. 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued a gag order.
Laboratories were told not to release any information and to hand over or destroy the samples.When a CDC team was sent to Wuhan on January 8, it was deliberately not informed that medical staff had already been infected by patients — a clear confirmation that the disease was contagious.
Caixin Global prepared a summary of 10 of its coronavirus posts. As a sample, one featured the gag orders implemented by China’s government.
It’s now clear that despite dire warnings from frontline doctors, hospital managers and city health officials implemented gag orders, forbade doctors to share information with the public and ordered biotech companies to stop testing. Authorities burdened the process of filing cases to the national contagious disease alert system with enough red-tape to render the system nearly ineffective. They also withheld critical information on person-to-person transmission of the virus when three teams of medical experts were sent from Beijing to investigate.This delayed the response by several weeks, allowing the best window for containing the virus to close. During this period, the virus ran rampant in Wuhan and then spread around the country as people returned to their hometowns for holiday celebrations.
Additionally, Axios has put together a detailed timeline that clearly demonstrates China’s early actions led to the virus spreading around the globe. Some of the dates cited:
Dec. 10: Wei Guixian, one of the earliest known coronavirus patients, starts feeling ill.Dec. 27: Wuhan health officials are told that a new coronavirus is causing the illness.Jan. 1: Wuhan Public Security Bureau brings in for questioning eight doctors who had posted information about the illness on WeChat.Jan. 11–17: Important prescheduled CCP meeting held in Wuhan. During that time, the Wuhan Health Commission insists there are no new cases.Jan. 18: Annual Wuhan Lunar New Year banquet. Tens of thousands of people gathered for a potluck.
As a reminder that Legal Insurrection has been on top of this story early on. We posted on a “novel microbe” coming out of Wuhan on Jan. 10.
Symptoms of the new disease include high fever, difficulty breathing, and lung lesions. Currently, there are 59 known cases of this pneumonia-like illness. And while Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has been ruled out as a cause, public health officials are concerned about another potential pandemic.
This information is essential to consider for several reasons. Chiefly, one study had ascertained that if China had begun treating the outbreak as a serious health threat when the severity of the illness first came to light in late December, the spread of the disease could have been reduced by 95%.
The research also found that if interventions in the country could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively – significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.
The behavior of Chinese authorities in the wake of the pandemic has been appalling. Furthermore, the attempt by the mainstream media to make the daily briefings into social justice lectures becomes all the more angering to most Americans who are more and more aware of the Chinese government’s gag orders, sample destruction, and obfuscations.
During Wednesday’s daily briefings, there were no less than four separate scolding President Donald Trump received for referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese Virus.”
Perhaps the most shrill and trivial came from ABC’s Cecilia Vega.
Her exchange wasn’t received in quite the way she intended:
The response was so overwhelming against her that Cecilia pinned this tweet to the top of her page:
In conclusion, the timeline supports the designation of the pathogen as “Chinese Virus,” despite press outrage and social justice scolding.
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