What did China's Xi Jinping know, and when did he know it? BY BRADLEY A. THAYER AND LIANCHAO HAN

As the global public health crisis continues, it is useful to reflect that its cause is the actions and policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their conduct has been reprehensible. They have suppressed whistleblowers and information, destroyed lab samples and prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) from gaining access when it might have blunted a global outbreak.   

Let’s examine the timeline of the origins of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Last December, China knew the virus was transmitted human to human. Between Dec. 27, 2019, and Jan. 5, 2020, five firms and institutions detected a SARS-like coronavirus that caused pneumonia among people in Wuhan. The researcher who first sequenced the virus exclaimed that it could be more prevalent than the plague. One tester mistakenly reported that the virus was SARS. As a result, the Wuhan Health Commission issued an internal urgent notice about the virus and reported it to China’s central government, while telling the public that no clear evidence existed for person-to-person transmission. 

This caused at least eight medical professionals to sound the alarm to the public. Chinese police censured these “rumor-mongers” and silenced any other whistleblowers. On Dec. 31, China’s National Health Commission dispatched the first group of experts to Wuhan and the WHO learned of the outbreak. We now know that by the end of 2019, there were at least 104 cases in Wuhan. With so many cases, most governments would institute an emergency response. 

Instead, on Jan. 1, Hubei province health authorities oddly ordered the company that first sequenced the virus to stop testing, destroy all samples and keep information secret. Two days later, central health authorities issued a similar official order to testing facilities across the country. However, on Jan. 5, Shanghai Public Health Center also detected a SARS-like coronavirus from the Wuhan samples and reported to Shanghai and central health authorities, urging the government to take immediate action to control its spread. 

The center’s CCP chief told reporters that they knew then the virus could spread through human contact and began telling doctors to take precautions. This is the reason that China’s health authorities finally launched a second-level emergency response on Jan. 6. Later, the center’s lab provided the international community with the virus’s genetic sequence for the first time, and as a result was forced to close by Chinese authorities. 

By this time — but almost certainly well before — Chinese President Xi Jinping must have known what was transpiring. On Jan. 7, he hosted a CCP leadership meeting and likely was briefed by health officials about the Wuhan outbreak. We do not know exactly what was said in that meeting, of course, but from subsequent conduct and leaked information, we know that China began to take measures to stop the outbreak’s progression while still concealing it from the public. Xi ordered that officials must not spoil the atmosphere of the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year, during which about 3 billion national trips take place. This is perhaps the primary reason that Chinese authorities and media deliberately misled the public about contagion. 

During a critical window of time between Jan. 6 and Jan. 19, Wuhan reported no new cases as the city and Hubei province proceeded to open their “two sessions” — the annual plenary meetings and the Chinese people’s political consultative conferences, with over 2,300 delegates in attendance. The Wuhan government insisted on proceeding with a lunar year banquet on Jan. 18, where 40,000 families gathered to share home-cooked food. Other official new year celebration events didn’t end until the city closed down on Jan. 23. 

Based on statistics in the New England Journal of Medicine, we estimate there were about 300 cases of COVID-19 confirmed during this time. The official number of 41 as of Jan. 19 is certainly false. Media reports have revealed that government health officials discouraged Wuhan doctors from reporting new cases at the time, although tellingly, internal measures were taken to check passengers at airports and rail stations. 

Chinese health authorities insisted that the virus did not spread from human to human until Zhong Nanshan with the National Health Commission announced human-to-human transmission on Jan. 20. Yet even Dr. Zhong played down the dangers and ensured that China would not have a repeat of the 2003 SARS outbreak. Wuhan’s mayor later explained in an interview that without authorization he could not release information. He implied that only after Xi decided on Jan. 20 to go public could Wuhan order its lockdown on Jan. 23. 

By then it was too late. Five million people had left the city, starting the global spread of the virus. 

Even as other countries reported COVID-19 cases, China and the WHO continued to mislead the world by minimizing the threat. The WHO required that the virus be called COVID-19, rather than a term that would associate it with China, and refused access to international experts including the CDC. Xi called many state leaders, including President Trump, to advance a benign narrative of what was a dire situation.  

As a consequence, the world was duped into lowering its guard. Xi portrayed himself as a competent ruler who had matters under control. According to the CCP narrative, his personal direction of the anti-pandemic campaign rescued China from catastrophe and heroically bought time for the rest of the world to fight the pandemic.

People have questioned China’s mismanagement of this crisis. China launched a global propaganda campaign to blame the United States and Italy for bringing the virus into Wuhan. Using social media platforms, China spreads false information that contributes to considerable anxiety among Chinese Americans. China has used medical supplies it manufactures — masks, ventilators and other equipment needed to treat COVID-19 patients — as leverage to censor critics. Geng Shuang, spokesperson of China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, publicly declared to the world that those who are unfriendly to China cannot get the masks it produces. Those who received China’s supplies, such as Spain, Czechia and the Netherlands, found that testing kits were 70 to 80 percent inaccurate and many masks were defective. 

What we now know about the outbreak in China largely is because of the work of Chinese journalists and netizens who refused to be silenced. Over 41 investigative reports by journalists have been deleted and banned. Citizen journalists such as Chen Qiushi, Fan Bin and Li Zehua are still in police detention. The world will not know the full truth until they are released and free to explain how the CCP allowed the pandemic to happen. 

WHO covering up for China, says US Senator Martha McSally, calling for director general to resign

• Demand for Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to step down is part of escalating series of Republican criticisms of organisation
• McSally also wants US debts to China ‘forgiven, as a minimum’.
• US Senator Martha McSally is calling on the World Health Organisation director general to step down from his post over what she deems assistance in covering up for China's under-reporting of the coronavirus, part of an escalating series of Republican criticisms of the organisation.

  The Arizona Republican said on Fox Business on Thursday that Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus needs to resign over the organisation's handling of the virus, which originated in China.

  While China has claimed it has essentially flattened new cases of the deadly virus now killing thousands of Americans, new reporting has questioned China's rosy claims.
  “I’ve never trusted a communist. And their cover-up of this virus that originated with them has caused unnecessary deaths around America and around the world,” said McSally, who is up for re-election this fall.

  

  WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks during a Covid-19 news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in February. Photo: Reuters

  “The WHO needs to stop covering for them. I think Dr Tedros needs to step down. We need to take some action to address this issue. It’s just irresponsible, it’s unconscionable what they have done here while we have people dying across the globe.”

  Earlier this week, Senator Rick Scott called for a congressional probe into the WHO and indicated that perhaps the United States should withhold funding for “helping Communist China cover up” the ramifications of the virus.
• McSally agreed that “we need to look at addressing the WHO as well”. She also said US debts to China “should be forgiven, as a minimum”.
• Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the WHO, did not directly address McSally's demands. But he said the organisation expects members “to report data in a timely and accurate manner”.

  “Membership in WHO and signing up to the International Health Regulations both carry with it the responsibility to prioritise public health, nationally and internationally, not only because global health norms say so, but because the two are inextricably linked, as this global pandemic has made clear to the world,” Jasarevic said.

Provincial Communist Party Officials Are Concealing Extent of Coronavirus Outbreak from Beijing, According to U.S. Intelligence By ZACHARY EVANS

Volunteers from the Blue Sky Rescue team disinfect at the Qintai Grand Theaters in Wuhan, the epicentre of China’s coronavirus outbreak. April 2, 2020

The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the Chinese government does not know the full extent of the coronavirus outbreak within the country, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

China’s government has encountered difficulties collecting accurate data on the spread of the coronavirus because mid-level bureaucrats in Wuhan and elsewhere in China have been lying about the number of cases, current and former intelligence officials told the Times. Local administration officials in China fear that their superiors will punish and even fire them if they report high numbers of cases.

U.S. intelligence believes that China does conceal the extent of the outbreak known to higher-level Communist Party officials. However, because of inaccurate reporting of cases at local levels of government, the C.I.A. and other agencies have themselves been unable to determine the full scope of coronavirus cases in China.

While doctors in Wuhan were sounding the alarm about the then-unidentified illness in late December and early January, local government and hospital administrators attempted to prevent doctors from spreading news of the infections, the Wall Street Journal reported. In one case, the administration of Wuhan Central Hospital reprimanded Dr. Ai Fen, head of the hospital’s emergency department, for “spreading rumors” and damaging “the stability of Wuhan” after she alerted authorities to the spread of the SARS-like virus.

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On Tuesday Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, suggested that the U.S. responded slowly to the pandemic in part because of faulty data from China.

“The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as, this was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” Birx said at a press conference. “Because, probably … we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that we see what happened to Italy and we see what happened to Spain.

The Trail Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs By JIM GERAGHTY

Medical workers in protective suits attend to a patient inside an isolated ward of the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak, in Hubei Province, China, February 16, 2020
There’s no proof the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a laboratory, but we can’t take the Chinese government’s denials at face value.

It is understandable that many would be wary of the notion that the origin of the coronavirus could be discovered by some documentary filmmaker who used to live in China. Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China indeed posted a job opening on November 18, 2019, “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.”

The Google translation of the job posting is: “Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity. Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals.” (“Omics” is a term for a subfield within biology, such as genomics or glycomics.)

On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”

Tye contends that that posting meant, “we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus, and would like to recruit people to come deal with it.” He also contends that “news didn’t come out about coronavirus until ages after that.” Doctors in Wuhan knew that they were dealing with a cluster of pneumonia cases as December progressed, but it is accurate to say that a very limited number of people knew about this particular strain of coronavirus and its severity at the time of that job posting. By December 31, about three weeks after doctors first noticed the cases, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization and the first media reports about a “mystery pneumonia” appeared outside China.

Scientific American verifies much of the information Tye mentions about Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species.

Shi — a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years — walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals — particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”

. . . By January 7 the Wuhan team determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered — a conclusion based on results from polymerase chain reaction analysis, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus — now officially called SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the SARS pathogen — was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan, they reported in a paper published last month in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.

Some scientists aren’t convinced that the virus jumped straight from bats to human beings, but there are a few problems with the theory that some other animal was an intermediate transmitter of COVID-19 from bats to humans:

Analyses of the SARS-CoV-2 genome indicate a single spillover event, meaning the virus jumped only once from an animal to a person, which makes it likely that the virus was circulating among people before December. Unless more information about the animals at the Wuhan market is released, the transmission chain may never be clear. There are, however, numerous possibilities. A bat hunter or a wildlife trafficker might have brought the virus to the market. Pangolins happen to carry a coronavirus, which they might have picked up from bats years ago, and which is, in one crucial part of its genome, virtually identical to SARS-CoV-2. But no one has yet found evidence that pangolins were at the Wuhan market, or even that venders there trafficked pangolins.

On February 4 — one week before the World Health Organization decided to officially name this virus “COVID-19” — the journal Cell Research posted a notice written by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology about the virus, concluding, “our findings reveal that remdesivir and chloroquine are highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro. Since these compounds have been used in human patients with a safety track record and shown to be effective against various ailments, we suggest that they should be assessed in human patients suffering from the novel coronavirus disease.” One of the authors of that notice was the “bat woman,” Shi Zhengli.

In his YouTube video, Tye focuses his attention on a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology named Huang Yanling: “Most people believe her to be patient zero, and most people believe she is dead.”

There was enough discussion of rumors about Huang Yanling online in China to spur an official denial. On February 16, the Wuhan Institute of Virology denied that patient zero was one of their employees, and interestingly named her specifically: “Recently there has been fake information about Huang Yanling, a graduate from our institute, claiming that she was patient zero in the novel coronavirus.” Press accounts quote the institute as saying, “Huang was a graduate student at the institute until 2015, when she left the province and had not returned since. Huang was in good health and had not been diagnosed with disease, it added.” None of her publicly available research papers are dated after 2015.

The web page for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Lab of Diagnostic Microbiology does indeed still have “Huang Yanling” listed as a 2012 graduate student, and her picture and biography appear to have been recently removed — as have those of two other graduate students from 2013, Wang Mengyue and Wei Cuihua.

Her name still has a hyperlink, but the linked page is blank. The pages for Wang Mengyue and Wei Cuihua are blank as well.

(For what it is worth, the South China Morning Post — a newspaper seen as being generally pro-Beijing — reported on March 13 that “according to the government data seen by the Post, a 55 year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 on November 17.”)

On February 17, Zhen Shuji, a Hong Kong correspondent from the French public-radio service Radio France Internationale, reported: “when a reporter from the Beijing News of the Mainland asked the institute for rumors about patient zero, the institute first denied that there was a researcher Huang Yanling, but after learning that the name of the person on the Internet did exist, acknowledged that the person had worked at the firm but has now left the office and is unaccounted for.”

Tye says, “everyone on the Chinese internet is searching for [Huang Yanling] but most believe that her body was quickly cremated and the people working at the crematorium were perhaps infected as they were not given any information about the virus.” (The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that handling the body of someone who has died of coronavirus is safe — including embalming and cremation — as long as the standard safety protocols for handing a decedent are used. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether those safety protocols were sufficiently used in China before the outbreak’s scope was known.)

As Tye observes, a public appearance by Huang Yanling would dispel a lot of the public rumors, and is the sort of thing the Chinese government would quickly arrange in normal circumstances — presuming that Huang Yanling was still alive. Several officials at the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued public statements that Huang was in good health and that no one at the institute has been infected with COVID-19. In any case, the mystery around Huang Yanling may be moot, but it does point to the lab covering up something about her.

China Global Television Network, a state-owned television broadcaster, illuminated another rumor while attempting to dispel it in a February 23 report entitled “Rumors Stop With the Wise”:

On February 17, a Weibo user who claimed herself to be Chen Quanjiao, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reported to the public that the Director of the Institute was responsible for leaking the novel coronavirus. The Weibo post threw a bomb in the cyberspace and the public was shocked. Soon Chen herself stepped out and declared that she had never released any report information and expressed great indignation at such identity fraud on Weibo. It has been confirmed that that particular Weibo account had been shut down several times due to the spread of misinformation about COVID-19.

That Radio France Internationale report on February 17 also mentioned the next key part of the Tye’s YouTube video. “Xiaobo Tao, a scholar from South China University of Technology, recently published a report that researchers at Wuhan Virus Laboratory were splashed with bat blood and urine, and then quarantined for 14 days.” HK01, another Hong Kong-based news site, reported the same claim.

This doctor’s name is spelled in English as both “Xiaobo Tao” and “Botao Xiao.” From 2011 to 2013, Botao Xiao was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and his biography is still on the web site of the South China University of Technology.

At some point in February, Botao Xiao posted a research paper onto ResearchGate.net, “The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus.” He is listed as one author, along with Lei Xiao from Tian You Hospital, which is affiliated with the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. The paper was removed a short time after it was posted, but archived images of its pages can be found here and here.

The first conclusion of Botao Xiao’s paper is that the bats suspected of carrying the virus are extremely unlikely to be found naturally in the city, and despite the stories of “bat soup,” they conclude that bats were not sold at the market and were unlikely to be deliberately ingested.

The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan [area] of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization could not confirm if bats were present at the market. Botao Xiao’s paper theorizes that the coronavirus originated from bats being used for research at either one of two research laboratories in Wuhan.

We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus. Within ~ 280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention. WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province. The expert in Collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT). Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019. He described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him.

Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market. The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital (Figure 1, bottom) where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.

The second laboratory was ~12 kilometers from the seafood market and belonged to Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences . . .

In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.

However, Xiao has told the Wall Street Journal that he has withdrawn his paper. “The speculation about the possible origins in the post was based on published papers and media, and was not supported by direct proofs,” he said in a brief email on February 26.

The bat researcher that Xiao’s report refers to is virologist Tian Junhua, who works at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control. In 2004, the World Health Organization determined that an outbreak of the SARS virus had been caused by two separate leaks at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. The Chinese government said that the leaks were a result of “negligence” and the responsible officials had been punished.

In 2017, the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Media Group made a seven-minute documentary about Tian Junhua, entitled “Youth in the Wild: Invisible Defender.” Videographers followed Tian Junhua as he traveled deep into caves to collect bats. “Among all known creatures, the bats are rich with various viruses inside,” he says in Chinese. “You can find most viruses responsible for human diseases, like rabies virus, SARS, and Ebola. Accordingly, the caves frequented by bats became our main battlefields.” He emphasizes, “bats usually live in caves humans can hardly reach. Only in these places can we find the most ideal virus vector samples.”

One of his last statements on the video is: “In the past ten-plus years, we have visited every corner of Hubei Province. We explored dozens of undeveloped caves and studied more than 300 types of virus vectors. But I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life. Because humans need not only the vaccines, but also the protection from the nature.”

The description of Tian Junhua’s self-isolation came from a May 2017 report by Xinhua News Agency, repeated by the Chinese news site JQKNews.com:

The environment for collecting bat samples is extremely bad. There is a stench in the bat cave. Bats carry a large number of viruses in their bodies. If they are not careful, they are at risk of infection. But Tian Junhua is not afraid to go to the mountain with his wife to catch Batman.

Tian Junhua summed up the experience that the most bats can be caught by using the sky cannon and pulling the net. But in the process of operation, Tian Junhua forgot to take protective measures. Bat urine dripped on him like raindrops from the top. If he was infected, he could not find any medicine. It was written in the report.

The wings of bats carry sharp claws. When the big bats are caught by bat tools, they can easily spray blood. Several times bat blood was sprayed directly on Tians skin, but he didn’t flinch at all. After returning home, Tian Junhua took the initiative to isolate for half a month. As long as the incubation period of 14 days does not occur, he will be lucky to escape, the report said.

Bat urine and blood can carry viruses. How likely is it that bat urine or blood got onto a researcher at either Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Alternatively, what are the odds that some sort of medical waste or other material from the bats was not properly disposed of, and that was the initial transmission vector to a human being?

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Virologists have been vehemently skeptical of the theory that COVID-19 was engineered or deliberately constructed in a laboratory; the director of the National Institutes of Health has written that recent genomic research “debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.” And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.

But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.