CNN (11/30/20) examined “China’s mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19,” despite the fact that China brought its pandemic under control within two months, whereas CNN is based in a country that at the time was seeing its own outbreak surge to unprecedented heights.
Several reports on China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic came out late last year, based on what US outlets like CNN, the New York Times and ProPublica claimed to be leaked Chinese documents. Although these reports implied that China was responsible for how bad the pandemic has been because of its downplaying of numbers and censoring of critical information, these narratives are themselves misleading in several ways.
CNN (11/30/20) released “The Wuhan Files” in late November, announcing “a string of revelations contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention.” According to CNN:
Taken together, the documents amount to the most significant leak from inside China since the beginning of the pandemic and provide the first clear window into what local authorities knew internally and when.
However, though the documents provide no evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings, they do reveal numerous inconsistencies in what authorities believed to be happening and what was revealed to the public.
This is not the first time Chinese information has been leaked. Earlier in 2020, Foreign Policy (5/12/20) reported on a leaked dataset of coronavirus cases and deaths from the Chinese military’s National University of Defense Technology, which indicated that the Chinese government’s internal information matched the Covid-19 numbers the government publicly posted online, corroborating multiple professional judgments that China’s reported numbers were reliable. Dr. Bruce Aylward—a Canadian medical expert with 30 years of experience combating polio, Ebola and other global health emergencies—concluded that he “didn’t see anything that suggested manipulation of numbers,” after leading a team of experts visiting China for the World Health Organization (New York Times, 3/4/20).
‘Numerous inconsistencies’
CNN (11/30/20) pointed out that China was reporting 2,345 Covid cases at a time when a broader definition put the case count at 5,918. To put this in perspective, this is 0.01% of the total cases that the US is now reporting, vs. 0.02% as many cases.
So, what are these “numerous inconsistencies”? Again, according to CNN:
The documents show a wide-range of data on two specific days, February 10 and March 7, that is often at odds with what officials said publicly at the time. This discrepancy was likely due to a combination of a highly dysfunctional reporting system and a recurrent instinct to suppress bad news, said analysts. These documents show the full extent of what officials knew, but chose not to spell out to the public.
Even though CNN claims that the Wuhan Files “provide no evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings,” it’s still instructive to examine these inconsistencies on February 10 and March 7. On February 10, CNN notes that “Chinese authorities reported 2,478 new confirmed cases,” even though a confidential document in the Wuhan Files “list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10.” These were “never fully revealed at that time,” which CNN implies is due to “China’s accounting system” appearing to “downplay the severity of the outbreak.”
CNN is careful to note that the Chinese government wasn’t lying when it didn’t report all 5,918 newly detected cases, as it notes that the 5,918 figure is actually a total derived from a “variety of subcategories,” which include 2,345 “confirmed cases,” 1,772 “clinically diagnosed” cases and 1,796 “suspected cases.” and five who “tested positive.” (There were also five cases described as having “tested positive”; CNN does not specify how these differ from “confirmed cases,” which is how China described those who tested positive for a polymerase chain reaction [PCR] or genetic sequencing test.)
Apparently, the “inconsistencies” stem from Chinese officials taking a conservative approach in their daily reports of new coronavirus cases due to “strict and limiting criteria,” leading to “misleading figures” by omitting some subcategories:
That month, Hubei officials presented a daily number of “confirmed cases,” and then included later in their statements “suspected cases,” without specifying the number of seriously ill patients who had been diagnosed by doctors as being “clinically diagnosed.” Often in nationwide tolls, officials would give the daily new “confirmed” cases, and provide a running tally for the entire pandemic of “suspected cases,” also into which it seems the “clinically diagnosed” were added. This use of a broad “suspected case” tally effectively downplayed the severity of patients who doctors had seen and determined were infected, according to stringent criteria, experts said.
Certainly, without further context, it appears as if these announcements “downplayed” the number of China’s cases by treating as “suspected” what were really clinically confirmed cases, but merely being familiar with CNN’s own reporting about the outbreak is sufficient to dispel the notion. Just three days after these figures were presented, CNN (2/13/20) reported that health authorities in Hubei province (where Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 was first detected, is located) announced that “there had been nearly 15,000 new cases overnight—almost 10 times the number of cases announced the previous day.” What was the explanation behind this sudden and drastic increase in the number of reported cases? CNN explains that China had revised its methodology in reporting new cases to include “clinically diagnosed cases,” the very subcategory that had been omitted on February 10:
The government was quick to point out the outbreak didn’t suddenly get much worse; the authorities had simply changed the way they reported cases in order to allow more people to access treatment faster.
The total number of cases reported by China now includes “clinically diagnosed cases.” These are patients who demonstrate all the symptoms of Covid-19 but have either not been able to get a test or are believed to have falsely tested negative.
Coverup or clarifying?
Closer to home, revisions to pandemic statistics are treated as attempts to be more accurate, not as signs of a sinister coverup (Politico, 4/14/20).
Is revising how a country reports new Covid information an abnormal practice unique to China? Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove (Hindu, 4/18/20), a WHO epidemiologist commenting on China revising Wuhan’s Covid-19 death toll upwards by 1,290—adjusting its previously reported number of deaths from 2,579 to 3,869 on April 17—stated that China’s actions were “an attempt to leave no case undocumented.” She also stated that she anticipates that “many countries” are “going to be in a similar situation where they will have to go back and review records” to see if they caught all cases.
And indeed, in April, New York City (the primary source of infection around the US, after travelers from Europe infected them) revised its death toll by 3,778 in one day, bringing its previous total of 6,589 deaths to 10,367 (Politico, 4/14/20). Britain likewise added 2,142 fatalities on April 11, revising its death toll from 4,093 on April 4 to 6,235 (Wall Street Journal, 4/14/20).
Despite these revisions occurring within a week of each other, only China’s revisions were presented as a possible “coverup” (Guardian, 4/17/20). It is actually normal to revise the criteria for counting new cases and deaths during a pandemic, to incorporate new information and improved testing capacities in real time.
On February 21, when China again revised its methodology of counting cases to include more cases, not fewer, CNN (2/21/20) reported that Chinese officials cited improved testing capacity as the reason for doing so. Revising death tolls upwards and broadening case definitions to include more people are actions that contradict the Western media narrative of China trying to deceive the world with fake statistics that minimized the outbreak.
Chinese officials (Xinhua, 4/17/20) gave a detailed explanation behind its discrepancies when they revised the death toll upwards on April 17. They explained that overwhelmed medical facilities at the beginning of the outbreak caused them to miss cases; a rapid increase in designated hospitals for Covid-19 had left some medical institutions unconnected to the epidemic information network, which prevented them from reporting their data in time; and there were repetitions, mistakes and incomplete registration information among some deceased patients.
Keeping New York City and Britain’s revised death tolls in April as a frame of reference, CNN’s Wuhan Files reporting that China had only reported 2,986 deaths in Hubei province on March 7, while having a total of 3,456 deaths divided into subcategories of 2,675 confirmed deaths, 647 clinically diagnosed deaths and 126 suspected case deaths, does not seem like an egregious discrepancy.
The only examples offered of China underreporting deaths—as opposed to omitting subcategories—was on February 10, when China didn’t publicize the deaths of six healthcare workers, and on February 17, when it reported only 93 deaths in Hubei Province when the daily confirmed deaths was 196. But the size of those discrepancies is small enough to have been accounted for in future revisions, and the Wuhan Files account for these discrepancies primarily on local health officials being “reliant on flawed testing and reporting mechanisms,” not on official dishonesty.
Compared to what?
Disclaimers and qualifications aside, one cannot simply report numbers or approaches without putting them in a context that would be meaningful to the public. CNN’s Wuhan Files report omitted specific comparative figures like the ones cited above, even though it’s difficult to assess how competent China’s pandemic response was without any frame of reference. When Western media reports omit this necessary context, they imply that the appropriate benchmark to compare China’s response to is perfection, which it inevitably falls short of, allowing the creation of a narrative in which China’s pandemic response was especially (and suspiciously) incompetent and sluggish.
For example, the Wuhan Files mention a report from early March stating that the average time it took from the onset of symptoms to a confirmed diagnosis was 23.3 days, indicating that local officials were facing a “lumbering and unresponsive” IT network. Certainly, 23.3 days was a significant lag by early March, as the lag between onset symptoms and a positive test was four days in the US at the beginning of April (New York Times, 4/1/20).
But CNN citing professionals claiming that that delay would have made it hard to direct public measures is silly, considering that it had already cited the overwhelmingly successful results of the first 50 days of the pandemic (Science, 5/8/20). The Wuhan Files note that by March 7, “over 80% of the new confirmed cases diagnosed that day” were being recorded that same day, which was a significant improvement from earlier.
When compared to the US, where numerous reports (Washington Post, 3/30/20; New York Times, 3/10/20, 3/28/20; Wall Street Journal, 8/18/20) detail how the US’s failures to produce adequate testing kits and pursue aggressive testing until early March made it impossible to contain the outbreak—since it’s very difficult to stop a virus from infecting others without knowing where it is—the imperfections of China’s pandemic response seem grossly exaggerated. Notoriously, the Trump administration said that the US should slow down testing to avoid bad statistics, and even stripped the CDC of control over its own coronavirus data to a central database in Washington, which led the new Covid-19 hospital data system to be riddled with delays and inaccuracies as late as July (NPR, 7/31/20). Even when the daily growth in coronavirus cases appeared to be dropping at times, testing shortages threw the US coronavirus numbers into doubt (CNBC, 8/12/20).
When corporate media outlets report on the failures of US testing, they usually don’t go beyond comparing the US’s response with South Korea’s; if the US’s response were to be compared to China’s, the contrast would be even more embarrassing. China tests entire cities with millions of people, and implements swift lockdowns within days as soon as they detect even a single asymptomatic case. While it may be fair to criticize China for going against WHO guidelines by not including asymptomatic cases among its confirmed cases, this cannot be interpreted as a coverup, since China still records them in its own subcategory and quickly requires them to be under strict 14-day quarantine guidelines, with additional follow-up visits afterwards to make sure they are not spreading the virus (CGTN, 11/18/20).
An exceptional response
But if it’s unfair to compare China’s response with one of the world’s worst performers, the US, one can also compare China’s response to countries like Germany and South Korea—which are frequently praised by corporate media—along with India, the only country with a comparable population to China, to get a sense of how exceptional China’s response has been. Although international comparisons are difficult for a variety of reasons—including missing data from these countries early on—data on new cases per week and total deaths from Johns Hopkins University clearly shows that China outperforms all of them. Here is data on February 10 and March 7 from these countries, the dates the Wuhan Files emphasizes to make the argument that China was “downplaying” the pandemic, along with the current status of these countries.
Despite being the first country to deal with the novel coronavirus, China has the lowest new cases per day, and has fewer deaths than all of them except for South Korea. But when we recall that China’s population is approximately 27 times that of South Korea’s, it’s apparent that many more people are dying as a percentage of the population there than in China.
It’s difficult to present this data in a visual format, because the vast disparities between China and everyone else—especially the US—make such a rendering visually unhelpful:
But here is that same graph (which normalizes for population size) with the United States and Germany removed, to illustrate how even among countries that had relatively low rates of Covid infection, China was exceptional:
Although the Wuhan Files offers some vindication of China’s pandemic response by noting the difficulties it had being the first country to confront the virus, and how little knowledge of the virus China was operating with, it is hard for readers to grasp how well China has done without including other countries’ performance as a basis for comparison.
Even CNN’s defense of China’s initial pandemic response, noting that China “faced the same problems of accounting, testing and diagnosis that still haunt many Western democracies even now,” is misleading, because it suggests China’s initial response was as bad as Western democracies’ current responses. In reality, initial corporate media reporting noted that scientists had begun research with “unprecedented speed,” due to how quickly China sequenced and shared the SARS-CoV-2 genome (Washington Post, 1/24/20). The Lancet (3/7/20) criticized countries around the world for their “slow and insufficient” actions, and cited a WHO/China joint mission report describing China’s response as probably the most “ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” making for a “striking contrast.” Dr. Bruce Aylward (Vox, 3/2/20) claims that the “key learning from China is speed—it’s all about the speed.”
‘Whistleblower doctors’
A New York Times/Pro Publica article (12/19/20), on how China promoted a “soothing message from the Communist Party: that it had the virus firmly under control,” neglected to point out that the Chinese Communist Party in fact had the virus firmly under control.
Perhaps this is why CNN’s Wuhan Files, and another report from the New York Times co-published with ProPublica (12/19/20), based on supposedly leaked Chinese documents, focus on the repeatedly debunked myth of Dr. Li Wenliang and other supposed “whistleblower doctors.”
The Times/ProPublica claim to have obtained more than 3,200 directives and 1,800 memos from China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, as well as internal files and computer code from Urun Big Data Services, a Chinese company. Unlike the Wuhan Files, it’s unclear how credible these documents are, since the Times and ProPublica don’t provide lengthy explanations for how they authenticated the documents. (They were provided by a hacker group called CCP Unmasked, which has provided unauthenticated documents before.) But assuming the Times/ProPublica documents are real, the report is still misleading in several ways when it describes how China’s censors “got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative” of Li’s passing:
They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”
While Li’s loss is a tragedy, he wasn’t a whistleblower, nor the first doctor to discover the Covid-19 outbreak, and he wasn’t even ahead of the Chinese government; international media were able to publish contemporaneous reports on the Covid-19 outbreak without relying on him as a source. On December 30, Dr. Ai Fen circled the word “SARS” on a report containing a false positive for the 2003 coronavirus and sent it to a former medical school classmate, which was shared until it reached Li. He shared the picture in a private WeChat group on December 30 as well, but he didn’t consider himself a whistleblower, and asked the group not to make it public before it was leaked on December 31. He and his colleagues were brought in for questioning by the police, and were reprimanded for spreading rumors on January 3 before being released. This might be why the Times/ProPublica avoid calling him a “whistleblower,” as many Western media reports did previously.
Dr. Zhang Jixian was the first doctor to discover the Covid-19 outbreak, and she wasn’t a whistleblower either, because she followed established protocol by reporting an unfamiliar respiratory illness to her hospital’s disease control department on December 27. This is why Dr. Zhang was never punished, but rewarded for her contribution. Her report led to an investigation and resulted in an announcement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on December 30, and a media statement on December 31. This is why various foreign news outlets (e.g., Reuters, 12/31/19; AP, 12/31/19) reported on this “pneumonia outbreak,” and how institutions like the WHO (12/31/19) and the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (12/31/19) received this supposedly “secret” information in real time.
This is public knowledge, and is probably known by the Times and ProPublica, since they studiously avoid calling Li the “first” doctor to report Covid-19’s existence, and instead refer to him merely as “a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak.” The Times/ProPublica link to an early Times report last year (2/7/20) also only describes Li as “among the first to warn about the coronavirus outbreak in late December,” which suggests that they are aware that someone else had already reported Covid-19 to health authorities before Li’s information was leaked. Yet their report and a search on both their websites for Zhang’s name turns up nothing, suggesting that they are burying the real story of how Covid-19 was discovered and reported, which is ironic for a report decrying Chinese censorship.
In fact, a Nexis search for Zhang Jixian’s name from January 1, 2020, to December 19, 2020, from the Associated Press, New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and Fox News return no results. To be fair, Nexis doesn’t catch all reports, but even after searching on Google and outlets’ websites, it’s clear that the biggest news outlets in the country are themselves omitting critical information that contradicts their false narrative of a Chinese government coverup.
Although the Associated Press failed to report on Zhang’s story, it has two press releases on its website from CGTN (4/13/20, 4/13/20)—a Chinese state media outlet—that mention her role in informing the world of Covid-19. Fox News (3/13/20, 4/16/20) is the only outlet above that briefly reported Zhang’s role in two reports that present baseless speculation, relying on anonymous sources, about the evidence-free lab leak theory, and about the WHO collaborating with China to conceal Covid information. The latter piece misleadingly presents a retroactive tracing of the first Covid-19 patient in China’s Hubei province to November 17, 2019 as evidence of a Chinese coverup.
The Washington Post (whose data is no longer included by Nexis) has only mentioned Zhang twice, once in a factcheck (5/20/20) debunking President Trump’s misleading letter to the WHO (which cites Zhang), and the other in an article (2/24/20) that shares the same talking points as CNN’s Wuhan Files report. A search for Li’s name on the Post‘s website, meanwhile, returns 81 results.
Information against infection
One question ignored by the Times/ProPublica report, and countless other stories from Western media outlets condemning how local officials in Hubei province handled Li and his colleagues (for which the Chinese government has issued an apology and fired local government officials), is whether sharing Li’s mistaken information would have been helpful. If the Chinese population had been convinced that the initial reports of a mysterious pneumonia outbreak was a return of the 2003 SARS virus, instead of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19), that could have had disastrous results. One critical difference between SARS and SARS-CoV-2 is the latter having presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission (where cases could infect others before, or without developing any symptoms), whereas SARS did not (Lancet, 5/1/20). Would it have been helpful for people to think they should only quarantine or isolate themselves when they develop symptoms?
Likewise, another question the Times, ProPublica and other Western outlets ignore when they criticize China for censoring “anything that cast China’s response in too ‘negative’ a light” is whether sharing negative or sensationalized information is useful for containing a pandemic. It’s impossible for any news media outlet to cover every bit of information, so story selection and prioritization of information is unavoidable and necessary. From the beginning, the WHO has criticized what it called an “infodemic,” which is an overabundance of information that can be either inaccurate or useless. FAIR has criticized news media for not prioritizing scientific coverage of how people get infected (4/11/20, 5/9/20), sensationalist reports that incite panicked and racist responses (3/6/20, 5/7/20), or misleading coverage that instills a false sense of security (5/27/20) or resigned helplessness (3/20/20, 5/1/20).
When the Times/ProPublica criticize the Chinese government for trying to “steer the narrative not only to prevent panic and debunk damaging falsehoods domestically,” but in order to “make the virus look less severe” and “the authorities more capable,” they omit that not only have the Chinese government’s pandemic results been superior to those achieved by most other governments, but that delivery of accurate information to the public was critical to that success. A visitor to China early in the outbreak (HuffPost, 1/30/20) noted that coronavirus coverage dominated all other topics, and prioritized explaining the rationale behind government measures, scientific information on how it spreads, and reports encouraging confidence and compliance with government directives:
Another really interesting manifestation of the power of government is the news. The coronavirus may be big news internationally, but in China, it’s the only news right now…. While China’s tight control of the media has many pitfalls, it seems uniquely well-suited for keeping an epidemic under control.
Other people living in China have testified that because the vast majority of the Chinese people express trust and support for their government, Chinese media’s unified messaging and emphasis allowed for a much more unified response and widespread compliance with government directives to prevent panic and infection.
Deadly censorship
Studies of right-wing coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic “paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others” (Washington Post, 6/28/20).
In contrast, influential US media outlets like Fox News have been criticized by doctors for eroding trust in medicine, scientists and other data (NBC, 12/18/20). Numerous media studies of pandemic coverage (Washington Post, 6/28/20) have found that contradictory US media coverage has led millions of Americans to believe that the pandemic threat is exaggerated, join anti-quarantine protests, refuse to comply with wearing masks and social distancing measures, as well as panic shop for toilet paper, hand sanitizer and face masks, leading to shortages across the country at the beginning of the outbreak. The US has also allowed misinformation and conspiracy theories peddled by the notorious Plandemic documentary and right-wing media before social media giants like Twitter and Facebook began suppressing them.
The Times/ProPublica report also ignored how the US government engages in censorship and narrative controls in order to lie to the public, and crack down on actual whistleblowers. These actions are consistent with the deliberate mass infection strategy that the administration contemplated; whether or not that was the actual agenda, the government’s policies led to catastrophic deaths. These omissions create the misimpression that China’s government was uniquely incompetent and dishonest in its response to Covid, when any fair comparison would belie this.
It is important for American journalists to combat these misperceptions, so that the US can learn from China’s response on how to better deal with the current crisis—saving lives in this as well as future pandemics, as well as reducing tensions between the nuclear powers US and China.
Where is Josh Cho’s apology for spreading this stuff: “Other outlets ran articles (New Yorker, 7/21/20; Washington Post, 7/22/20; Politico, 9/4/20) and op-eds (CNN, 8/17/20) considering different scenarios of what could happen if Trump refused to leave office if he loses the election.”
Sure, the other outlets reported it. He perpetuated it. Josh tried to scare everyone that Trump wouldn’t leave his office.
Josh, where is your apology article?
Tim,
You been in a coma most of this month?
After what happened in DC on January 6, Josh’s article of September 15 that you quote from has aged exceptionally well.
Really? Did Trump leave the office? You are denying reality.
Josh, you read these comments. Where is your apology article?
You and other Trump sycophants deserve absolutely nothing. You look especially pathetic for obsessively commenting on every single FAIR article whining about it. Are you really such a loser that you have nothing better to do with your time than leave comments that most people on this site will mock?
I don’t even like the Democrats, but I bet that if Democrats had stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 or lied about election fraud and threaten not to leave office, you would go ballistic over it. You probably wouldn’t dismiss it as insignificant even if they actually did leave office. But in any case, this will be my final comment addressing your insignificant complaints. Unlike you, I have better things to do with my time.
At least I’m not trying to scare the republic. Too bad you’re not man enough to admit you were wrong. You are a little man ( in more ways than one).
HELLO Mr. Cho and re: the Tim person.
Maybe he’s a computer and —-AI certainly has a long way to go.
Great report, keep up.
So, tim, you believe everything Josh reported here is all true.
This is an apologist piece that should be retracted. It denigrates Dr Li and others who absolutely did take risks. It ignores deep and proven Caixin reporting that shows deliberate suppression of crucial information from Chinese geneticists in December that indicted the virus as deadly and highly concerning. The fact is this was originally a victory for Chinese science for early threat detection. But the CCP arm of government obliterated that win with early censorship, both in Wuhan and at a national level on social media platforms in December.
Your ridiculous assertions are things that I have already addressed in previous articles. Your “deep” and “proven” Caixin report was something I already addressed in October. In any case, it’s incredibly obvious that your comment is something that can be dismissed simply by referring to the overwhelming amount of factual information above that disproves your inane concern trolling. Please read past headlines and stop being so gullible.
https://fair.org/home/no-china-didnt-stall-critical-covid-information-at-outbreaks-start/
Unfortunately it’s not politically correct in the US media to say that China did a good job, or even a better job than the US in stopping the pandemic. Kudos to Joshua Cho for shining a light on this critical issue and getting all the facts together coherently. Maybe we can all learn something from it.
Thanks Joshua, the behavior and practices of most of the US media have been shameful. I live in Beijing and I was aware of this sickness from the beginning and that was no later than mid January, possibly earlier. At the time, no one knew exactly what it was, but I was pretty sure it was serious. I was here during SARS too. Anyway, the government has done an excellent job here and I am very happy to spend this difficult period for the planet in what is probably it’s safest country.
Can we take a deep breath here and quit the blame game? It always amazes me how critics of inadequate responses to Covid-19 tend to assume that all actors have perfect information, are well motivated and coordinated, and know exactly what they need to do and how. The world isn’t like that, and a lot falls through the cracks. There is wasted effort here and insufficient effort there. Why can’t we credit China and everyone else working the pandemic for their concerted efforts rather than being Monday morning quarterbacks who have no idea of how chaotic and complex responding to a global pandemic is. My gratitude goes out to all who took part in good faith. That said, this article is overstated and way too long.
How many articles in the English language do you think exists to counter the dominant Western corporate media narrative of Chinese deceit and incompetence at the beginning of the pandemic? For regular FAIR readers, this can comes across as overstated and lengthy (believe me, I don’t enjoy reiterating the same information over and over again), but at the end of the day, I have only written a handful of articles while there is a tsunami asserting the opposite with a lot of false and misleading information. To argue against this avalanche of western propaganda requires lengthy rebuttals.
I personally think I should do at least one more examining the anatomy of lengthy hit pieces from outlets like the New York Times and systematically debunk the story and point out why it’s wrong before leaving this topic alone for good. Anyways, I don’t have the stamina or interest to counter masses of corporate propagandists who constantly repeat falsehoods and misrepresentations of China’s pandemic response by repeating myself, and a handful of lengthy articles disproving the mainstream narrative will have to do from me. Keeping this in perspective, I don’t believe I overstated anything here, since i provided rigorous sourcing for every major claim, which is a very burdensome level of proof required of me, and a double standard since these “reputable” outlets can publish their smears with hardly any evidence, and massive counterevidence.
Stupid american’s….Stupid Trump….the Real American’s are APACHE,SIOUX etc….the Owner of a Land of United States of America….a Stupid Brirish n France Imperialism….
To Woen Tjian Fie:
“…the Real American’s are APACHE,SIOUX etc…”
Wrong.
The indigenous tribes who thrived here before the settler colonialists, did not call the place “America.” So labeling the original native population “americans”, would be a misnomer.
Like Guy Liston I live in China and can testify to the swift, massive and persistent reactions to any outbreak here, however small. The contrast to the European reaction, which I experienced first hand for a month in February 2020, traveling (uninfected!) to five different countries, is striking. The picture about the situation here painted by Western media, helped by a host of politicians and buraucrats who are desperate to cover up their own massive failure, is a parody.
I suggest these articles are collected and printed. Internet is fine but ephemeral.
China at least the sense (and social safety net) to lockdown early and return to lockdown every time the virus reared its ugly head. Most Western nations have only gone into lockdown when it threatened to overwhelm their hospital systems. This in turn has maintained a population of trillions upon trillions of replicating and mutating viruses constantly being selected for increased virulence and (pretty soon) resistance to existing vaccines. When the inevitable happens, the West will have only itself to blame — though I’m sure its media will conjure up some excuse to go on blaming China.
Thank you, Joshua, for all your stunningly accomplished research and writing on this topic, especially in this latest piece. It is maddening to witness the western press’s calculatedly blind, xenophobic, politically reactionary and racist reaction to other countries, governments, peoples and economic systems. The utterly false reporting on China and Covid in western media has brought the constant barage of imperial fictions we are accostomed to in the US to a new level of depravity. (My very small and now old contribution to the counter-narrative is here: https://www.mintpressnews.com/truth-about-china-covid-19-response/267006/)
Thank you Joshua,
We need more like you. In fact FAIR needs to be the sieve for the establishment of an actual Fourth Estate; a transparent and government funded publicly manned people’s Free Press.
One that will, for a change, be a competitor of the MSN, and actually hold these corporate, and political crooks to account.
Lord knows “Independent Journalism” can only do so much in the face of the outspending of for-profit “news.”
P.S. myself and other commenters have noticed that it is possible “t i m” may indeed be some Artificial Intelligence program, oppositional analytical message board service, or trolling technology, designed to demean the FAIR community’s collective mindset. Either way I see no plausible reason to believe this entity is an actual human.
There are few human sensibilities interlinked within “t i m’s” sociopathic and chiding replies and comments.
This is a problem for extreme libertarian idealogues, their written subtext, comes across as so cold, amoral, and uncaring, as to be indistinguishable from a non-human source.
Unarguably, China has done a good job of controlling COVID-19 after the CCP’s initial missteps and obfuscation in Wuhan. However, I feel there needs to be some context of what Chinese media is also currently reporting, before we shame ourselves over alleged Sinophobia in western media.
In recent days, a foreign ministry media spokeswoman for the CCP, Hua Chunying, has pushed the absurd claim that COVID-19 originated at Fort Derrick in the US. This is widely believed within mainland China, a common comment accompanying this news report on the biggest Chinese social media app Weibo is, “The foreign ministry said this, so it must be true.” Compared to western countries, mainland Chinese people have extraordinary levels of trust in their central government so officially-sanctioned misinformation is much more effectively peddled, and anti-US sentiment in mainland China is currently at its highest level since the Korean War.
This is not a recent phenomenon either, for months Chinese state media has been claiming, usually by producing highly dubious scientific ‘evidence’; or doctored quotes from western scientists that the virus originated from outside China. Chinese state media is also now attacking the effectiveness of western-produced MRNA vaccines, no doubt related to the unconvincing data of their state-championed vaccines.
Another irony is that the world’s epicentre of gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses is the BSL-4 Wuhan institute of virology, less than 1 kilometre from the site of the original outbreak. None of this is to suggest with certainty that Covid-19 originated from an accidental lab leak. But, as a number of scientists have suggested, the WIV should be routinely investigated, especially considering the extraordinary proximity of the lab and the nature of the work they were conducting. To not do so, is an insult to the millions who have died.
To Andy Brown,
If you come here to FAIR telling stories, please have an actual source. What are your sources? Who is this CCP “spokeswomen”? There is no such place as “Fort Derrick”?
Myself, I saw and read an “Associated Press” brief released yesterday, that said something similar to what I think you are claiming, but every statement in the article was completely unattributed to anyone. In other words it was bullshit.
Fair enough, Hua Chunying’s comments about Fort Detrick have been widely reported in both western and Chinese media, as were another CCP foreign ministry spokesperson’s (Zhao Lijuan) suggestion last year that the US army brought COVID-19 to Wuhan.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/20/china-revives-conspiracy-theory-of-us-army-link-to-covid
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1213588.shtml
I’m not trying to be an apologist for Donald Trump’s appalling ‘China virus’ comments, or any other form of Sinophobia, by highlighting this point. However, I do find it striking how little most westerners know about Chinese public opinion towards the west, and the extent too which these opinions are shaped by the CCP’s mastery of propaganda and misinformation, all amplified by the seamlessly effective ‘Great Firewall.’
Andy,
The following, was found through my limited and amateur investigation, take it or leave it:
-The very first appearance of the suspicious claim about U.S. soldiers having brought the virus to Wuhan via the Military World Games, came from A U.S. conspiracy theorist, former Dutch Intelligence operative, McAfee employee, and ‘citizen-journalist’ with ties to the CIA, named George Webb on March 10, 2020. He was the creator of the theory about Fort Detrick athletes having carried the virus to the Military Games in Wuhan in late August and early September of 2019.
– Fort Detrick is the base of operations of the CIA’s “Mind Control Experiments”, and it is the base of operations for U.S. biological weapons warfare and research. (Wow! Until I looked into your claims, I did not know this).
– While it is true, that some Chinese officials have spread the rumor, it is false that they started it.
– Look at the dates of those two articles you linked to, and go search for the earliest piece you can find discussing the conspiracy theory, and you will see that its first appearance on U.S. news sites was as early as mid-March 2020, and they all led back to George Webb (a CIA stooge).
Key search terms – Patient Zero, Military Games Wuhan, George Webb
(Then there is the link below, a report from The Daily Chronicle, an Indian news site for “Science, Satellite and Space Daily News”. The Daily Chronicle, is a more centrist source than the two you provided, and it has a higher rating of “Factual Reporting”, both according to “Media Bias Fact Check”, a bias measuring website):
https://thedailychronicle.in/news/216965/suspicions-about-fort-detrick-laboratories-causing-the-outbreak-of-covid-19/
This next link is of a story from Global Times:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183658.shtml
Using Occam’s Razor which is more likely:
– key officials of the CCP ‘created’ the story to fan the flames of a new Cold War with the U.S. why? Who knows?
– the CIA (via George Webb as stooge) created the story through a “leak” or source, which was passed to George Webb who ran with the information, to use as kindling for a new Cold War between the U.S. and China. Why? Because the U.S. always needs an enemy to rationalize its irrational military budget.
I see no plausible reason to believe that it is China and not the U.S., who is the one in search of a “new enemy”, in order to rationalize its inflated military budget, and imperialist goals.
Yes, both countries are not perfect, and yes it is tru that ‘some’ officials in the CCP spread the rumor.
Peace, and say safe brother.
The French built the labs in Wuhan and the US funded the research into bat viruses to be used as a biological weapon. Ferrets we’re injected until the virus mutated enough to be passed by breathing alone, which was then transmissable by humans.
The virus was released at the World Military games in October 19. Whether accidentally or on purpose, as the peopke in the Wuhan region had been the subject of demonstrations.
The Chinese Goverment locked down all travel from Wuhan within China but allowed the flights out to the rest of the World.
The British government ordered thousands of body bags in October 19 under the excuse of Brexit!
The Chinese, US, UK and French Governments all knew what was going on and they all have manipulated the figures.
The UK government is reporting covid deaths as the cause even if you we’re run over by a bus, if you tested within the Month beforehand.
There is something the people of the World are not being told. It is not just the Chinese whom are manipulation the figures
To the conspiracy theory junky “Anon Amous”:
Love those credible sources. “I read it on Waking Times”, doesn’t cut it either.
I think the focus on Dr. Li Wenliang by the Western media, ignoring Dr. Zhang Jixian or Professor Zhang Yongzhen, was because of the media’s love of “uncovering the truth”, without realizing their bias of thinking that CCP always hushes things the truth up.
Since Dr. Li Wenliang wasn’t an epidemiologist, and his comments seem to suggest that the main mode of infection was visiting the Huanan seafood market instead of human to human transmission. So when that market was closed down, I think most of the world developed a false sense of security.