New evidence published jointly by the New York Times and ProPublica confirms that Beijing has been trying to keep COVID-19 information from the rest of the world since the beginning of the pandemic.
On February 7, Li Wenliang, the doctor who whistled COVID-19, died of the disease he had warned the world about. While working at Wuhan Central Hospital in Hubei Province, China, he saw a new version of the severe acute respiratory syndrome known as SARS, which also originated in China in 2002.
When news of the 34-year-old doctor’s untimely death spread and the pain went viral on social media like Weibo and WeChat, Beijing set out to bury the truth.
“They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications that alerted readers [Li’s] death. They were told on social media to gradually remove their name from the trend theme pages. And they activated legions of fake online commentators to flood social media with distracting talks, “reports the Times-ProPublica team. In total, the Hangzhou offices of Beijing’s Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration, China, issued more than 3,200 directives and 1,800 reports to its COVID censorship unit, all leaked by the CCP hacker group [Chinese Communist Party] Unmasked.
“At a time when digital media is deepening social fractures in Western democracies,” the research team warns, “China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus.”
In January, even before the coronavirus was definitively identified, the PCC began to work overtime to trick the world into the truth to protect the party’s image as infections began to spread, until and while making the disease seem less severe. As a result, the world lost the best chance of preventing the global pandemic.
This is a condemnatory exposition of two left-leaning news organizations. It is now up to the left, right and center to unite to demand that the CCP explain its obscene effort to protect its own image at the enormous and deadly expense to the whole world.