The BFD | New Leaks Show Scale of China’s Virus Lies

From the very beginning, there’s been every reason to believe that Beijing has lied through its teeth about the Wuhan virus: not just its origins, but the true scale of the outbreak in Wuhan. A year on from the first reported infections, the sheer scale of at least some of China’s lies and cover-ups is being exposed beyond all doubt.

Unprecedented leaks and interviews with whistleblowers from the Chinese health system exposed how officials downplayed the severity of the pandemic to their people and the world in the crucial early stages.

The data from one day in February, when the epidemic was ravaging Wuhan in the central province of Hubei, illustrated the scale of the underreporting of the disease.

China reported 2,478 confirmed new cases nationwide on February 10, even as provincial health authorities circulated a document – marked as “internal” and “confidential” – that identified 5,918 newly detected cases, more than twice the official tally released by Beijing.

So, even from the very beginning, China lied about the scale of the disease and reduced the reported numbers by more than half. The so-called “conspiracy theories” about a massive toll of infection and death in Wuhan suddenly look much less like foil-hattery and more like a sober assessment of the deceit of the communist giant.

A laboratory technician separately told the Associated Press (AP) that it in effect became “mission impossible” to confirm new coronavirus cases in Wuhan, the epidemic’s “ground zero”, after the country’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC) set its rigid, top-down detection standards.

National officials took control away from local agencies and demanded that all patient samples be routed through Beijing, according to the AP investigation.

Even CDC staff and public health officials said the standards for confirming cases were so abnormal that they were convinced that testing was being blocked and the case count suppressed.

The new disclosures from inside the Chinese health system confirm harrowing anecdotes relayed at the time by doctors working on the front line in Wuhan’s overwhelmed hospitals in the darkest weeks of the epidemic.

Even as emergency wards filled to bursting and medical staff fell victim to the disease themselves, Chinese Communist Party officials lied and obstructed.

In a top-down authoritarian system, where fear of perceived failure is deeply entrenched in the bureaucracy, Wuhan officials would certainly have been nervous of passing bad news to their bosses in Beijing, particularly as significant party meetings took place in January, just before the lunar new year holiday.

And in Beijing, some cadres may have hoped or believed that they could bring the outbreak under control without alerting the Chinese public or the world about the scale of the problem.

This is the same authoritarian system that saw the mass starvation caused by the Great Leap Forward spiral unimaginably into the greatest act of engineered famine and mass-murder in human history. China still lies and hides the truth about that, too.

Above all else, Beijing is trying desperately to shift blame.

Beijing has portrayed its response as a great success in a “people’s war” under President Xi Jinping. In this rewrite of history, the accounts of early delays, bungles and cover-ups have been excised by the propagandists, who instead focus on the success of later containment measures following lockdown in Wuhan. To bolster their message, officials earlier drew on the depths of Internet conspiracy theories to promote outlandish claims that the virus was brought to Wuhan by American soldier-athletes who participated in the World Military Games in October last year.

But there is now a concerted campaign to cite “proof” that while the first confirmed cases occurred in Wuhan, the virus originated outside China’s borders.

The Australian

No one outside China – and its useful idiots in the West – takes these claims seriously for an instant. But that’s not the point: the point is to keep Chinese masses misinformed and compliant.

The instant Beijing admits that it screwed up, its legitimacy at home is shredded – and Chinese might start asking questions. There goes Xi Xinping’s “harmonious society”.