While the debate over the origin of the coronavirus remains unsettled, the evidence is piling up that had China and the World Health Organization been honest, the world wouldn’t be in the situation it now finds itself in.
According to a 96-page Foreign Affairs Committee report, China had engaged in cover-ups immediately after the virus began to spread, the the World Health Organization began repeating China’s propaganda about the virus instead of the facts.
According to a summary of the report from the New York Post’s Ebony Bowden:
- The CCP destroyed evidence and buried troubling data, while nationalizing the supply chains and limiting exports of US companies 3M and General Motors, keeping key goods in the country.
- “It is beyond doubt that the CCP actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world,” reads the report.
- Had China been more transparent and proactive when the first signs of the burgeoning health crisis emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, the outbreak could have been largely contained — potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide, the pols wrote.
- “Research shows the CCP could have reduced the number of cases in China by up to 95 percent had it fulfilled its obligations under international law and responded to the outbreak in a manner consistent with best practices,” the report said, citing a study on Medrxiv, a Yale University-linked online clearinghouse for medical manuscripts.
- On Jan. 1, CCP officials ordered that the Wuhan wet market from which the contagion is believed to have sprung “be closed and sanitized, destroying forensic evidence that may have provided insight into the origins of the outbreak.
- On Jan. 2, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology completed a full genetic sequence of COVID-19 which indicated that it was likely highly contagious, but did not immediately share that data with the WHO.
- The WHO also ignored whistle-blowing warnings from the Taiwan Centers of Disease Control and the Hong Kong government about human-to-human transmission, incorrectly claiming for weeks that Chinese authorities had found “no evidence” of this — even though China by then knew it was genetically similar to the 2002 SARS strain
James Agresti of Just Facts noticed an overlooked case where WHO spread misinformation (that isn’t mentioned in the report) from March 3, 2020, when Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gave a press conference where he stated that “Covid-19 spreads less efficiently than flu.” More than two weeks before this, a medical journal summarized the results of 12 studies that estimated the contagiousness of C-19, all of which found that it was more contagious than the flu. Most of the studies found that C-19 was substantially more contagious.
Earlier in February, Google enacted a policy to ensure that the first results for searches on C-19 led straight to the World Health Organization. In May, Google/YouTube adopted a policy of censoring people who post content “that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about Covid-19.”
And as a result, a supposed attempt to steer people clear of misinformation led them directly to Chinese state propaganda, which also happened to be misinformation.
