How China Covers Up the Origins of Covid-19

After two difficult years of the pandemic, life returned to normal in the spring of 2022 in large parts of the world. The most drastic measures have been lifted. In the People’s Republic of China it was very different. The economic metropolis of Shanghai with 22 million inhabitants was in the middle of a two-month hard lockdown a year ago.

Beijing has long boasted that it had beaten the coronavirus with its strict zero-Covid policy, while millions of people died in the “decadent” West. The Omicron variant shattered this myth. In 2022, as the world recovered from the effects of the pandemic, China clung to zero-Covid.

It was not just about the story, coddled by Xi Jinping and his regime, that China protects its people better than the West. China also tried to divert attention from its responsibility for causing the pandemic. Because Sars-Cov-2 was first discovered in late 2019 in the city of Wuhan in central China.

New York Times research shows just how far China has gone. Under government pressure, scientific evidence has been censored, including a study published in February 2020, the same day the disease caused by the virus was designated Covid-19 by the World Health Organization.

It was compiled by scientists from the US and China and contained data on the spread of the virus and deaths. At the time, the study was regarded as the ultimate example of international cooperation in times of crisis, but was withdrawn after a few days, which was hardly noticeable in the excitement about the pandemic.

Today it is clear that the results were not responsible for this. The pullback came at the prompting of officials seeking to “throw a cloud of dust around data from early Covid cases,” the New York Times wrote Monday. “There was a lot of cover-up and cover-up,” said University of Florida epidemiologist Ira Longini, one of the study’s authors.

The New York Times admitted that it was nothing new that the Chinese government was trying to cover up the suspected origins of the pandemic. In early 2021, for example, a WHO investigative committee was only allowed to enter the country after a long tug of war and only worked under the supervision of Chinese officials.

Unsurprisingly, their final report did not include a clear statement about the start of the pandemic. China’s “control mania” went much further, according to the study. Databases were censored and scientific publications, including internationally renowned ones, had to withdraw from ‘unpleasant’ work.

As an example, a study by Chinese researchers on virus mutation is cited, which was published on March 9, 2020 in “Clinical Infectious Diseases”, a journal of Oxford University Press. It shows that the disease had spread in Wuhan from mid-December 2019, several weeks before the government decided to intervene.

The next day, under threat of punishment, the Ministry of Education asked the universities to submit planned research work for advance approval. Two months after the publication of that study, an update appeared in “Clinical Infectious Diseases” according to which the Wuhan samples were not collected in December 2019, but in January 2020.

China’s covid censorship has far-reaching consequences. The origin of the pandemic is disputed to this day. A “fish market” in Wuhan, where wild animals were traded illegally, was under suspicion from the start. From this, the coronavirus would have spread to humans, and so the disaster has run its course.

However, in late February, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US government believed an accident at a virology lab in Wuhan was the cause of the pandemic. Just a few weeks later, the “wild animal theory” was given new impetus by swabs from the “fish market” that Chinese scientists had published in a database.

Western researchers accidentally stumbled upon it and discovered during sequencing that the samples contained virus DNA as well as genetic material from raccoon dogs. These animals have long been considered the “prime suspects” for the spread of the pandemic. As soon as these findings were published, the Chinese raw data disappeared.

“I think there’s a heavy political agenda influencing the science,” University of Sydney biologist Edward Holmes, who was involved in the sequencing, told the New York Times. Even the WHO, which often treats China with care, sharply criticized the lack of transparency in handling data from Wuhan.

But Beijing is undeterred in its policy of concealment and cover-up. This includes the abrupt end of the Zero Covid strategy last December. It is estimated that 80 percent of the population has become infected within a very short time. The hospitals and many crematoriums were overloaded. However, from the government’s point of view, everything went smoothly.

In February, she celebrated “victory” over the pandemic. China has “created a miracle in human history,” it said wholeheartedly. The country’s Covid-19 death rate remains the lowest in the world. According to official figures, fewer than 100,000 people have died from or with a corona infection. That would actually be very little.

Figures from the Macau Special Administrative Region, which apparently provides more transparent information, paint a different picture. The death rate there had literally exploded in December. While many old people live in the gambling eldorado, independent experts estimate up to 2.4 million Covid deaths in mainland China.

How many there really are may never be known. Because science in China is still in the “stranglehold” of the state. The lab of a Chinese researcher who was investigating the wildlife trade has been closed, according to the New York Times. The government feared a connection to the pandemic.

And just this month, government researchers announced that the search for the origin of the coronavirus should finally begin outside of China. While the pandemic clearly started in Wuhan, Chinese officials have long claimed the virus “originated” in a US laboratory.