How Xi Jinping ate bats and muzzled Bat Woman
Tedros is no misanthrope; he is a man repaying his debt.
Most criminals end up planting more evidence against themselves when they go back to cover up crime scenes. When China went back to revising its Wuhan death toll, it lifted the shroud off 1,290 bodies, claiming they too died of Covid-19 in the central Chinese town. This increase of a full 50 per cent from 2,579 in the number of dead only convinced the world of what it was already convinced of: China lied, people died.
There are fears that no country might be reporting the real figures on the toll – some are not testing the dead, some not even those alive. Most of this is not deliberate. No country has enough testing kits. Stocks being imported from Xi Jinping's China are failing the testing test itself.
But China’s lie about the death toll pales ahead of the fact that it allowed the virus-infected people to travel in and out of Wuhan to China and then in and out of China to the rest of the world.
Tedros Ghebreye: The Chinese alibi
When seasoned criminals set out to commit crimes, they keep an alibi ready. China got its alibi on its side back in 2017 - Tedros Ghebreyesus. The Ethiopian born director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO) was the first African non-doctor to be elected to the post. So, what part of Tedros’s career appealed to the Chinese diplomats to lobby for him?
Tedros was health minister in Ethiopia before he became WHO director general. The New York Times in a 2017 article highlighted that Tedros was accused of covering up epidemics in Ethiopia. Tedros’s younger brother died of measles when he was barely four and the former says he could never come to terms with the loss, adding that it was unfair a child died of a preventable disease just because he was born in the wrong place.
Children are innocent. They believe in fair and unfair. Then they grow up and start to live by the Darwinian theory of ‘survival of the fittest’. Positions must be gained and held on to. When the kid Tedros grew to be Ethiopian Health Minister Tedros, he began forcing journalists to suppress information about epidemics in the country. He grew some more to suppress information on pandemics. Why remain local, when you can go global?
China liked this ‘grown up’ Tedros and ensured he became the WHO chief. The thing with propelling undeserving people to power is that they owe you. When they owe you, they have to oblige you. Tedros is no misanthrope; he is a man repaying his debt.
Those not repaying their debts have had to pay with lives and careers. Whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang had to die of the same virus he dared to inform the world about because he thought that that would be fair.
On December 30, 2019, Li alerted his colleagues about a ‘SARS-like outbreak’ on chat group Weibo after he saw seven Covid-19 cases in his hospital. Li died on February 7 but not before the Chinese authorities made him sign a letter saying he spread “untrue speech”.
Project: Information suppression
The same day Li spoke out about the virus on Weibo, Shi Zhengli walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai to head to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where she worked as a virologist. Over 16 years of virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves had gotten her the title Bat Woman.
Shi had been warning about the outbreak of such a virus for years and that is why she was quick to react. She reached WIV and within three days, along with her team, Shi declared the new virus was linked to horseshoe bats found over 1,000 miles away in Yunnan, in southern China. The team showed the virus was similar to the one that caused SARS, a disease that emerged in China in 2002 and led to an epidemic in 33 countries.
Chinese journalist Gao Yu freed in the first week of April, after 76 days of lockdown in Wuhan, said he spoke to Shi during his incarceration. Gao says Shi told him that her team at the institute finished unravelling the genetic composition of the new disease as early as January 2, but was muzzled.
Information on a virus’s genetic composition is crucial for developing diagnostic tests and vaccines.
China instead asked Shi’s team to stop their work on the virus, not share any information about their findings with anyone and destroy all the samples because “inappropriate and inaccurate information” was causing “general panic”. Eight doctors had by then been arrested after they issued warnings to local residents about the virus.
By the first week of January, China knew what it was dealing with. It then decided to not deal with it at all till it became impossible to leave the problem unattended.
Yanyi Wang, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Bat Woman works, said the National Health Commission of China “unequivocally requires that any tests, clinical data, test results, conclusions related to the epidemic shall not be posted on social media platforms, nor shall [it] be disclosed to any media outlets including government official media, nor shall [it] be disclosed to partner institutions.”
By the second week of January, a professor in Shanghai published a genome sequence on an open access platform. The professor had received samples from an infected patient. As a response, his laboratory was shut two days after he went online with his findings.
Tedros could say WHO relies on information provided by countries in disease mitigation but his own record as Health Minister should have reinforced to him that countries hide data. In China’s case, all real data is hidden. The data China hands out in the name of data is propaganda.
Tedros and his team could have still found real data if they had cared to find it. Shi said her team found on January 14 that the novel coronavirus could infect people. The same day, WHO tweeted in support of China's denial of human transmission.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China????????. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
Wuhan and the entire Hubei province, under which Wuhan falls, were locked down on January 23. Hubei has a population of six crore; Wuhan alone has a population of 1.9 crore. It is estimated that seven million people came into Wuhan and seven million went out of Wuhan in this time. And we are yet not sure how far back to go in 2019 to ascertain when the outbreak happened. So we do not know how many people contracted the virus in China, how many died and how many survived.
The global figures are thus numbers representing positive cases and deaths of all countries – minus China.
Bat Woman
It was in 2004 that Shi along with her team went looking for bat caves and putting nets at the opening before dusk. The team then patiently waited for the nocturnal creatures to come out to feed for the night. The researchers would then collect blood, saliva and fecal swabs to test them for viruses.
In October 2015, Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of the villages around the Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan.
It found that six people had antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats. None of these people had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia-like symptoms. But all of them had seen bats flying around their villages.
In 2019, Shi’s team published two detailed reviews about coronaviruses in Viruses and Nature Reviews Microbiology warning of the risk of outbreaks of bat-borne coronaviruses.
It is one thing to dismiss people and million-dollar Hollywood ventures pronouncing the arrival of dystopia. But to dismiss them while living in the dystopian world is criminal stupidity – China style.
Science they say can answer ‘how’ things happen, but never ‘why’ things happen. The world knows how China suppressed information. It will never know why. Thankfully, it is enough to know ‘how’ China brought the world to this crisis to hold it to account once the world has a grip over the virus. That too is a long way from now.