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<font size="1"><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/no-china-did-not-stall-critical-covid-information-at-outbreaks-start/">https://orinocotribune.com/no-china-did-not-stall-critical-covid-information-at-outbreaks-start/</a></font>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">No, China did not “Stall” Critical Covid Information at Outbreak’s Start</h1>
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<p>By Joshua Cho – Oct 15, 2020</p>
<p>FAIR (6/21/20) has criticized various conspiracy theories propagated
by corporate media alleging a coverup of crucial information regarding
the Covid-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the
Chinese government, as well as the notion (FAIR.org, 4/17/20, 10/6/20)
that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid, emerged from a
Chinese lab. Now that some time has passed since the beginning of the
outbreak, it’s worth revisiting the less-conspiratorial corporate media
narrative that the Chinese government maliciously or incompetently
delayed the release of critical information early on, thereby causing
many unnecessary deaths.</p>
<img src="https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/AP-China-WHO.png" alt="AP: China delayed releasing coronavirus info, frustrating WHO" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="452" height="394">Associated
Press (6/3/20) claimed China “sat on releasing the genetic map, or
genome, of the virus for more than a week,” and that “Chinese government
labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of
authorities on a virologist website on January 11.” In fact, a Chinese
researcher uploaded the genome to the US National Center for
Biotechnology Information on January 5 (Time, 8/24/20).
<p>While many other news outlets (e.g., New York Times, 2/7/20; Vox,
2/10/20) have accused the Chinese government of covering up the severity
of the pandemic in its initial stages and delaying the release of
crucial information, the Associated Press has been promoting this
narrative with particular intensity. Its report, “China Delayed
Releasing Coronavirus Info, Frustrating WHO” (6/3/20), claimed that
World Health Organization “officials were lauding China in public
because they wanted to coax more information out of the government,”
based on unreleased private recordings of WHO officials complaining that
China wasn’t “sharing enough data” in internal meetings. Amid various
conspiracy theories peddled by US media of the WHO colluding with China
to conceal Covid-19’s severity, AP alleged that its findings support the
narrative of an agency “stuck in the middle that was urgently trying to
solicit more data despite limited authority.”</p>
<p>A separate AP report on June 3 report alleged “significant delays by
China in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak that compromised
the WHO’s understanding of how the disease was spreading.” China, the
news service claimed, “sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of
the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had
fully decoded the information,” which “stalled the recognition of its
spread to other countries, along with the global development of tests,
drugs and vaccines.”</p>
<p>AP reported that the first complete genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was
published by Chinese virologist Zhang Yongzhen’s team to the public
database <a href="http://virological.org">virological.org</a> on January 11, six days after they completed
the task on January 5; the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) Shi
Zhengli had finished sequencing the genome on January 2, according to a
notice on the WIV’s website. But AP’s reporting presented Chinese
stalling as an incontrovertible fact rather than a debatable opinion,
burying the views of scientists who disagreed with that assessment in
the 73rd and 74th paragraphs:</p>
<p><em>Some scientists say the wait was not unreasonable considering the
difficulties in sequencing unknown pathogens, given accuracy is as
important as speed. They point to the SARS outbreak in 2003 when some
Chinese scientists initially—and wrongly—believed the source of the
epidemic was chlamydia.</em></p>
<p><em>“The pressure is intense in an outbreak to make sure you’re
right,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealthAlliance in New
York. “It’s actually worse to go out to go to the public with a story
that’s wrong because the public completely lose confidence in the public
health response.”</em></p>
<img src="https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Time-China-Scientist.png" alt="Time: The Chinese Scientist Who Sequenced the First COVID-19 Genome Speaks Out About the Controversies Surrounding His Work" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="443" height="452">Time (8/24/20): “Crises beget scapegoats, and the coronavirus is no different.”
<p>AP’s narrative was later debunked by an exclusive interview Zhang
gave to Time magazine (8/24/20). He revealed that he had uploaded the
completed genomic sequence on January 5 (the same day his team finished)
to the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which
is corroborated by the submission date listed on the open access US
government Genbank.</p>
<p>AP seemed to downplay whether Chinese officials had any reasonable
public health concerns for not taking stricter measures sooner, and to
suggest that waiting for more evidence or confirmation was mere stalling
(e.g., “China stalled for at least two weeks more…”). The wire service
implied that the Chinese government messed up “sharing the information
with the world,” citing an earlier report by Caixin Global (2/29/20), a
Chinese corporate media outlet, that made it seem like the Chinese
government was trying to conceal the novel coronavirus when it first
reported on a confidential “gag order” by the National Health
Commission.</p>
<p>The order commanded private genomics companies to destroy or transfer
“Wuhan pneumonia samples” to “approved testing facilities” on January
3. Time also cited the gag order, and the repeatedly debunked myth of
silenced “whistleblower doctors,” as evidence that the “stakes of doing
what is right over what one is told are rendered far higher in
authoritarian systems like China’s,” even as Zhang denied Western media
reports of his lab suffering prolonged closure during the pandemic.</p>
<p>Completely omitted by Time and Caixin’s reports is the fact that
under Chinese law, private genomics companies aren’t authorized to
handle highly contagious pathogens, which is a standard public safety
measure (South China Morning Post, 5/15/20; Wall Street Journal,
5/16/20); many governments, including the US, have regulations that
require labs with lower biosafety ratings to destroy or transfer samples
of dangerous pathogens.</p>
<p>Caixin’s report also omitted that the Chinese government had notified
the WHO and the US CDC on January 3 about their discovery of a
potentially new coronavirus—the same day the “gag order” was issued—even
as it noted that the WHO received information from China about a
mysterious pneumonia outbreak on December 31. These are very strange
things to do if the Chinese government really were trying to “throttle”
and conceal news of the outbreak. It’s unclear whether the WIV was
really ordered to destroy samples of the virus, as Caixin initially
reported by citing an anonymous virologist; Zhengli denied ever
receiving orders to destroy samples after the outbreak.</p>
<p>AP’s report also framed Chinese officials initially setting strict
criteria for confirming new cases of Covid-19 as having “censored
doctors who warned of suspicious cases,” when few new cases were
reported between January 5 and January 16 (AP, 1/28/20), even as it
mentioned later that Chinese officials and health professionals lacked a
“full understanding of how widely the virus was spreading and who was
at risk.” The article noted that Chinese officials were debating whether
Covid-19 had limited or sustained human-to-human transmission before
renowned epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan confirmed there was sustained
human-to-human transmission on January 20; China ordered the quarantine
of Wuhan only days later, on January 23.</p>
<p>Debate wasn’t unreasonable at the beginning of the outbreak—when it
was unclear how infectious or deadly Covid-19 was—as the first known
death didn’t occur until January 9, in a 61-year-old man with
comorbidities. It wasn’t until January 26 that the Chinese National
Health Commission announced that researchers believed the incubation
period for SARS-CoV-2—the time it takes for an infected person to
develop symptoms—could range from one to 14 days, during which
asymptomatic carriers could still infect others, unlike the SARS virus
in the 2003 outbreak (BBC, 1/26/20). Other international outbreaks, like
bird flu viruses and MERS, turned out to have limited human-to-human
transmission, with scattered human-to-human transmission primarily
triggered by animal-to-human transmission (Stat, 1/21/20).</p>
<img src="https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/CNN-China-Count.png" alt="CNN: China's changed how it counts virus cases three times now. Here's why" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="452" height="320">CNN‘s
Bianco Nobilo (2/21/20) interviewing Laurie Garrett. CNN reported calls
to treat China’s numbers skeptically, “given the government’s track
record of suppressing information about this epidemic.”
<p>Nor is it unreasonable to revise the criteria to count new Covid-19
cases upon getting new information and improved testing capacity in real
time. By late February, CNN (2/21/20) reported that China had already
revised its methodology of counting new cases three times in order to
broaden their case definition to include more cases, not fewer, but
while plenty of other countries were doing the same thing, only China’s
revisions were singled out and framed as a “cover-up.”</p>
<p>China taking the time to discuss and confirm whether there was
sustained human-to-human transmission was also condemned by the AP in an
earlier report, “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for Six
Key Days” (4/15/20), which also accused the Chinese government of
concealing the virus from the Chinese public during the critical time
period of January 14 to January 20:</p>
<p><em>That delay from January 14 to January 20 was neither the first
mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the
outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have
dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.</em></p>
<p><em>But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus
came at a critical time—the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt
to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the
stage for a pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and
taken more than 133,000 lives.</em></p>
<p>This story was based on blatant and easily disprovable falsehoods.
Chinese state media warned the public of a “new type of coronavirus”
multiple times before this supposed “critical time,” as Beijing-based
journalist Ian Goodrum pointed out on Twitter (4/15/20).</p>
<p><a title="The Difference Between the US and China’s Response to COVID-19 is Staggering" href="https://orinocotribune.com/the-difference-between-the-us-and-chinas-response-to-covid-19-is-staggering/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">RELATED CONTENT: The Difference Between the US and China’s Response to COVID-19 is Staggering</a></p>
<p>As I also pointed out earlier (FAIR.org, 3/6/20), soon after Dr.
Zhang Jixian was the first doctor to report the novel coronavirus to
health authorities on December 27, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health
Commission made announcements on December 30 and December 31. This is
why various foreign news outlets (e.g., Reuters, 12/31/19; Japan Times,
12/31/19; Medical Xpress, 12/31/19) picked up on China’s announcement
and were able to report on this supposedly “secret” information in real
time. The health commission’s media statements were also picked up by
other institutions, like the University of Minnesota’s Center for
Infectious Disease Research and Policy (12/31/19), Hong Kong’s
government (12/31/19), the World Health Organization’s Country Office in
China (12/31/19) and the US-based International Society for Infectious
Diseases (12/30/19).</p>
<p>AP’s own reporting (1/15/20) also disproves the notion that the
Chinese government wasn’t warning the public, as both Chinese and WHO
officials urged the public not to rule out the possibility of sustained
human-to-human transmission during this time period, and were already
keeping patients isolated, since that’s a standard precaution for novel
pathogens (Guardian, 4/9/20).</p>
<p>AP’s January 15 report was published before official announcements on
SARS-CoV-2’s incubation period and capacity for asymptomatic
transmission, and noted that the reason Chinese officials claimed the
risk of sustained human-to-human transmission remained low was that
“there remains no definitive evidence of human-to-human transmission,”
as it appeared at the time that “hundreds of people” have “been in close
contact with infected individuals” without themselves being infected.
However, omitting the crucial distinction between limited and sustained
human-to-human transmission may have given the misleading impression
that Chinese officials were denying that any human-to-human transmission
was occurring at all (Scientific American, 1/24/20).</p>
<img src="https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AP-China-6-Days.png" alt="AP: China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="452" height="438">AP
(4/15/20) criticized China for a “public silence” on the coronavirus
that ended January 20—though a January 15 AP piece led with Chinese
officials warning that “the possibility that a new virus in central
China could spread between humans cannot be ruled out.”
<p>AP’s April 15 report also admitted that China had a real dilemma. If
China had announced early on that there was sustained human-to-human
transmission without waiting for evidence to confirm their claim and got
it right, many lives would have been saved. On the other hand, AP noted
that if health officials “raise the alarm prematurely,” it would
“damage their credibility” and “cripple their ability to mobilize the
public.” Yet AP’s coverage throughout the pandemic has consistently
framed following scientific procedure by taking the time to confirm new
information as needless “delays” or deliberate “stalling.”</p>
<p>Could China have done better and acted faster? While the Chinese
government admitted that their response had “shortcomings and
deficiencies,” it’s a nebulous question, because one can always conceive
retrospectively of numerous ways pandemic responses could have been
improved. There are no definitive guidelines for how soon a government
should release critical information like a novel pathogen’s genomic
sequence, or whether it’s capable of sustained human-to-human
transmission, because every pandemic situation differs widely. The most
insightful ways to assess a country’s pandemic response is to compare it
with their responses to previous pandemics, and to compare their
current response with other countries’ approaches in the real world,
instead of playing with simulations (FAIR.org, 3/17/20), or comparing
China’s response with some abstract ideal where everything was handled
perfectly.</p>
<p>Even the above condemnatory reports cited numerous health
professionals pointing out that China’s approach is more accurately
described as “appropriate verification.” To “actually have the whole
genome sequence by early January was outstanding compared to outbreaks
of the past,” Time (8/24/20) acknowledged, while admitting that there
was “some historical basis for skepticism” about the severity of the
novel pathogen. The WHO was condemned, for example, for being hasty and
overdramatic for declaring the 2009 swine flu outbreak a pandemic when
the virology didn’t warrant it (Science, 1/14/10).</p>
<p>AP’s April report (4/15/20) was based on a study that claimed that
cases could have been reduced by up to two-thirds if the Chinese
government had taken stricter public health measures a week earlier.
However, the report omitted that the study was trying to assess the
effectiveness of various “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs),
instead of trying to criticize China. It concluded that China’s NPIs
“appear to be effectively containing the Covid-19 outbreak,” and
estimated that Covid-19 cases would “likely have shown a 67-fold
increase” without China’s NPIs. But presenting the study’s actual
findings accurately would ruin the basis for AP’s hit piece. Independent
and prestigious medical journals like Science (5/8/20), Nature (5/4/20)
and the Lancet (3/7/20, 7/25/20) also hailed China’s response and
credited it for saving lives by preventing hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of cases (CGTN, 5/10/20).</p>
<img src="https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/WaPo-China-Lockdown.png" alt="WaPo: China’s coronavirus lockdown — brought to you by authoritarianism" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="398" height="452">Outlets
like the Washington Post (1/27/20) condemned China’s effective measures
to halt the Covid-19 outbreak as “authoritarianism.”
<p>China’s early, unprecedented and large-scale quarantine of Wuhan was
the biggest signal it could’ve sent to the rest of the world that it was
containing a serious problem; it was widely dismissed and condemned as
“authoritarian” by US media at the time. “China’s Coronavirus Lockdown —
Brought to You by Authoritarianism,” a Washington Post headline
(1/27/20) declared. The Atlantic (1/24/20) called the Chinese response
“a radical experiment in authoritarian medicine,” suggesting that “part
of the fear and panic in the current case seems less due to the virus
than to the response”; Slate (1/24/20) asserted, “Violating People’s
Rights Is Not the Way to Address the Coronavirus.”</p>
<p>US media could revisit those dismissals, to explore whether earlier
information from China would have made any difference, as countries like
the US didn’t act on the information it already had from China, and
squandered precious preparation time by lying to the public, censoring,
covering up cases and preventing adequate supplies from reaching medical
professionals.</p>
<p>It is easy for US media to dutifully follow US government directives
to propagate the myth of Chinese “coverups” and “delays” by
retroactively projecting current knowledge of Covid-19 onto China during
the initial phase of the outbreak (MintPress News, 5/18/20; Foreign
Policy, 7/30/20). However, the more difficult questions of why the US’s
pandemic response has been exceptionally bad, as a result of its
capitalist system prioritizing profits over people (FAIR.org, 4/1/20,
4/15/20, 5/1/20), and US imperialism preventing cooperation with China
and the rest of the world (FAIR.org, 7/28/20), would be more worthwhile.</p>
<p><em>Joshua Cho (@JoshC0301) is a writer based in Virginia.</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.pressenza.com/2020/10/no-china-didnt-stall-critical-covid-information-at-outbreaks-start/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">(Pressenza)</a></p>
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