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China has responded furiously to what it called “absurd allegations” made by the United States about its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The 30-page, 11,000-word article came when a report claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping personally asked the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom, to ‘delay a global warning’ about the threat of Covid-19 during a conversation in January.
German Der Spiegel published the accusations this weekend, citing information from the country’s Federal Intelligence Service, known as ‘Bundesnachrichtendienst’ (BND).
But the WHO insisted that the shock reports are “unfounded and false” soon after, claiming that Dr. Tedros and President Xi “did not speak on January 21 and never did on the phone.”
On Saturday, Beijing issued a lengthy rebuttal of what it claimed were 24 “ludicrous accusations” made by the United States regarding its handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
China’s Foreign Ministry fiercely rejected accusations made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Beijing withheld information about the deadly virus at the start of the pandemic.
Pictured: Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian speaks during a daily briefing at the Foreign Ministry office in Beijing in February
Pompeo also accused China of withholding virus samples that he said were necessary for the vaccine investigation, as President Donald Trump insisted earlier this week that there is sufficient evidence to show that President Xi’s regime misled the global community.
“As Lincoln said, you can fool some people all the time and fool all the people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” says the article’s foreword.
The lengthy rebuttal provided a timeline of how China had reportedly provided information to the world in a “timely”, “open and transparent” manner to rebuke suggestions that the alarm had been slow.
Willing to dispel suggestions that the virus was deliberately created or somehow leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he claimed that all evidence shows that Covid-19 is not man-made and insists that the institute is not capable of synthesizing a new virus.
The article cited media reports that US citizens had been infected with the virus before the first cases in Wuhan were confirmed, although there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case.
He also rejected criticism of Bejing’s handling of the case of Li Wenliang, the doctor who first tried to raise the alarm about the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
The article claimed that Wenliang was not a “whistleblower” and that he was never arrested, despite western reports to the contrary.
It came when the Bundesnachrichtendienst bomb report claimed that President Xi asked WHO Director-General Adhanom to ‘delay a global warning’ about the Covid-19 threat.
According to the BND: ‘On January 21, China’s leader Xi Jinping asked WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to withhold information about a person-to-person transmission and delay a pandemic warning.
An explosive report in Der Spiegel claims that Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) personally asked World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom (left) to ‘delay a global warning’ about the COVID threat -19 in January. The couple is pictured together in Beijing on January 28 of this year. The WHO has denied the accusation.
“The BND estimates that China’s information policy lost four to six weeks to combat the virus worldwide.”
The WHO issued a statement shortly after the impact statements were released, calling them “unfounded and false.”
‘Dr. Tedros and President Xi did not speak on January 21 and never did on the phone. Such inaccurate reports distract and detract from the efforts of WHO and the world to end the COVID-19 pandemic, ” the statement read.
He continued: ‘China confirmed human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus on January 20 [prior to the alleged phone conversation].
“The WHO publicly stated on January 22 that” the data collected … suggests that person-to-person transmission is taking place in Wuhan. “
If the claims were true, they would reinforce President Trump’s claim that the WHO is “focused on China.”
Relations between Washington and the WHO have deteriorated throughout the crisis after Trump consistently accused the body of siding with China, saying it has been in Xi Jinping’s hands to cover up the outbreak. The image is a laboratory in Wuhan that is certified to handle dangerous pathogens.
Donald Trump doubled down on his attacks on the World Health Organization last Monday. “The World Health Organization has been a disaster, everything they said was wrong and they are focused on China,” he said at the event, held last Monday.
In April, the Trump Administration alleged that the WHO was becoming a ‘Chinese propaganda’ tool, and the President decided to stop funding the organization.
Last week, the president launched a new attack on the organization during a virtual Fox News town hall meeting.
“The World Health Organization has been a disaster, everything they said was wrong and they are focused on China,” he said at the event, held last Monday.
‘All they do is agree with China, whatever China wants to do. So our country, perhaps foolishly in hindsight, has been paying $ 450 million a year to the World Health Organization, and China has been paying $ 38 million a year, but before they were more political than all of our leaders.
“What they did, what World Health did, was that they lost all the calls and we are not going to bear it.”
Relations between Washington and the WHO have deteriorated throughout the crisis after Trump consistently accused the body of siding with China, saying it has been in Xi Jinping’s hands to cover up the outbreak.
Director-General Adhanom has hailed China as an example of how to handle an emergency despite widespread skepticism about the official number of deaths from coronavirus in the country.
Earlier this week, Trump also said there was enough evidence to show that President Xi Jinping’s regime misled the global community.
‘Well, I don’t think there is any doubt about it. We wanted to enter, they did not want us to enter. Things are coming out that are quite convincing. I don’t think there is any doubt, “the president said Sunday.
“Personally, I think they made a horrible mistake and didn’t want to admit it,” he added.
His comments came when a Department of Homeland Security report shared on Sunday revealed that US officials believe China “intentionally concealed the severity” of the pandemic in early January and amassed medical supplies.
The four-page report dated May 1 that was obtained by the Associated Press notes that China publicly downplayed the virus, but increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies.
The document accuses China of covering its tracks by “denying export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying the provision of its trade data.”
It gives weight to a leaked dossier compiled by the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that describes how Beijing made whistleblowers ‘disappear’, destroyed early virus samples and erased any mention of the disease in the early stages on the Internet.
The 15-page document marks Beijing’s secrecy about the pandemic as an “assault on international transparency” and highlights the cover-up tactics deployed by the regime.
He claims that the Chinese government silenced its most vocal critics and removed any online skepticism about handling the health emergency from the Internet.
China has been criticized for suppressing the magnitude of its early outbreak that did not give other nations time to react before the disease hit their shores.
Five Eyes, the intelligence mix of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, exposed their scathing assessment of the Xi Jinping administration in a memo obtained by the Australian Saturday Telegraph.
It describes how Beijing was externally downplaying the outbreak on the world stage while secretly struggling to bury all traces of the disease.
More than four million people worldwide have contracted the highly contagious virus, and at least 279,000 have died.
There are currently at least 1.3 million cases of coronavirus in the United States. USA And more than 79,000 deaths.
Last month, British MPs warned China had cost lives by spreading disinformation about the coronavirus outbreak.
The Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said that, as the country where the outbreak originated, China should have played a central role in collecting data on its spread.
But he accused Beijing of trying to “obfuscate” about what was really happening from the beginning.
Drill at Wuhan Airport for passengers with a new type of coronavirus last SEPTEMBER, French athletes became ill in the city in OCTOBER and a warning from the Bat Woman expert a year ago … so when did Covid explode in China? ?
By Ian Birrell for Sunday Mail
On the afternoon of September 18 last year, the Wuhan Tianhe Airport customs office received an emergency message that a passenger on an incoming flight was unwell and distressed by respiratory difficulties.
Staff at the gleaming modern airport went into emergency mode, donning protective masks when managers unleashed their action plans.
Soon after, “the Wuhan First Aid Center reported that the transfer case had been clinically diagnosed as a new type of coronavirus,” according to a journalist with a state-run media agency.
This was, the agency reported, a drill to assess responses ahead of the World Military Games, to be held the following month with 10,000 competitors in the fast-growing city in central China. The officials passed with great success.
Pictured: Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, a world-renowned coronavirus expert, inside the P4 lab in Wuhan in 2017. Shi Zhengli warned of the danger of eating bats in a document he released in March last year.
However, what a strange coincidence they chose that particular exercise, given what would soon unfold in Wuhan as the birthplace of a global pandemic. As one person later asked on social media, “Why did you choose a new coronavirus to drill through?”
Now this question has become even more pertinent with last week’s revelation that French athletes believe they caught Covid-19 while competing in those games.
Several became ill with flu-like symptoms during the event, which took place for nine days starting October 18. “Many athletes at the World Military Games were very ill,” said Elodie Clouvel, a modern pentathlete world champion.
This followed the revelation that a fish shop treated at a Paris hospital on suspicion of pneumonia on December 27 had been confirmed as a victim of the new virus. He was baffled since he had not traveled abroad.
This is highly significant. China reported the disease to the World Health Organization four days after the Frenchman was in hospital and did not lock Wuhan up for another 24 days.
One study found that this virus spreads so fast that if officials had acted three weeks earlier, they would have reduced cases by 95 percent. Even a week faster could have cut the numbers by two-thirds.
Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, is a transportation hub. During three crucial months since December, there were 7,530 flights between there and other parts of China, with more than a million passengers, and ten direct flights to the United Kingdom.
However, even in January, Chinese leaders blocked outside expert teams from investigating the virus, silenced doctors trying to warn citizens, and refused to admit that there was human transmission until January 20.
It is not surprising that as the number of deaths in the world increases, families are devastated and economies are destroyed, there are more and more calls for an international investigation into the origins of this pandemic, despite the blatant challenge of the bosses. of the Beijing Communist Party.
So what do we know now about the origins of the virus outbreak? Certainly, as that exercise at the airport demonstrated, these are not unpredictable events.
Pictured: A woman is disinfected before spending 14 days in quarantine after recovering from the coronavirus in March.
The Mail on Sunday may reveal that last year Shi Zhengli, a world-renowned coronavirus expert, known as Bat Woman for her cave expeditions to collect samples of nocturnal mammals, explicitly warned of the dangers.
In an article published with three colleagues in March 2019, he admitted that there was “ highly likely ” that there would be a bat-borne coronavirus outbreak “ and there is a greater chance of this happening in China. ”
Zhengli, who helped demonstrate the link to bats through consumption of civet cats in the 2002 SARS epidemic, said: ‘Chinese food culture holds that live slaughtered animals are more nutritious, and this belief may improve the viral transmission.
‘In general, bat-borne coronaviruses are believed to resurface to cause the next disease outbreak. In this regard, China is a likely entry point. She was, of course, correct. But China’s politicians did nothing to close its gruesome markets that sell wild-caught animals, until on Jan. 1 they suddenly closed down on Wuhan who was blamed for this latest outbreak of the disease.
A stream of expert documents has identified the virus on the market. A typical study by leading Chinese scientists insisted that the cluster of mysterious pneumonia-like symptoms began to emerge on December 21.
“All the current evidence points to wild animals being sold illegally at the Huanan wholesale seafood market,” he said. Many experts from around the world agree with this analysis. Even last week, an article published in Nature by Chinese scientists pointed to the possibility of pangolin (a squamous mammal) as an “intermediate host” of the disease-causing SARS-CoV-2. They rightly said that the lack of control of the illegal wildlife trade threatened public health.
However, the link to the market remains unproven. There are valid questions about whether the coronavirus could have inadvertently leaked from two laboratories in the city, one near the market and the other in China, first with a high-level biosecurity status.
President Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State, said they have seen evidence that the virus comes from one of the labs. Reports suggest that several US intelligence agencies suspect the same but lack a “smoking gun.”
The Mail on Sunday has exposed poor security, including an image of a substandard seal on a refrigerated vault containing deadly viruses, and an admission by the biosecurity team leader at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for poor security procedures.
An academic article published in February by Botao Xiao, a professor of bioscience at South China University of Technology, and Lei Xiao, a Wuhan-based researcher, concluded that “the killer coronavirus likely originated in a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Pictured: A medical worker in Wuhan checked the ICU drip from a coronavirus patient in January.
The document, titled The Possible Origins Of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus, was posted on a site used by scientists to share research. He called for increased security in high-risk labs, but was mysteriously withdrawn after two days.
This explosive newspaper, seen by The Mail on Sunday, said 605 bats were kept at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, which is about 500 yards from the market.
It described how bats attacked, bled and urinated on an investigator, forcing him to be quarantined twice. “It is plausible that the virus has leaked,” he said.
Some in the media have rejected such suggestions by combining them with online conspiracy theories of human-caused diseases and biological weapons, presumably fueled by hatred of Trump rather than sympathy for China’s totalitarian regime. However, we need to establish the truth if it is remotely possible.
“It would be incredibly helpful to know where the new coronavirus came from so that we can prevent this from happening again,” said Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh.
So how much can we figure out about the details and timing of this outbreak by examining scholarly research articles, media reports, and social media posts? Let’s start with a fascinating report in the respected South China Morning Post, based on data said to come from the Beijing government that tracked the virus until November 17. He did not rule out the possibility of previous cases.
The report identified a 55-year-old man from Hubei as the first known case. However, authorities, he said, could not determine who was patient zero of the initial nine cases: four men and five women, aged between 39 and 79.
Pictured: Staff line up as they prepare to spray disinfectant at Wuhan Train Station in March
There were then one to five new cases every day, and on December 27, a hospital doctor named Zhang Jixian confirmed that they were dealing with a new coronavirus.
This conflicts with an influential study published in January by Chinese researchers in The Lancet, which stated that the “symptom onset date” of the first identified patient was December 1.
This study also found that 27 of its sample of 41 patients admitted to the hospital in the early stages “had been exposed to the market.”
Wu Wenjuan, one of the authors and chief physician at Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital, which specializes in infectious diseases, told the BBC’s Chinese service that his first patient was an older man with dementia.
“He lived four or five buses from the seafood market, and because he was sick, he basically didn’t go out,” he said, adding that three more people developed symptoms in the following days, although only one had “exposure” to the market.
His words are related to a chart in the study showing one case on December 1, three on December 10, and then none until December 15. Solo uno de los cuatro casos iniciales estaba vinculado al mercado, pero luego los diez siguientes.
El gobierno de Wuhan afirmó que el primer caso confirmado cayó enfermo el 8 de diciembre, un hombre que se recuperó de la enfermedad. Dijo que negó ir al mercado de animales.
Sin embargo, ese estudio de Lancet también contiene otra pepita intrigante. El primer caso fatal se identifica como un hombre vinculado al mercado. Cinco días después del “inicio de la enfermedad”, su esposa, “una mujer de 53 años que no tenía antecedentes conocidos de exposición al mercado”, también se presentó ante los médicos con neumonía y fue hospitalizado en una sala de aislamiento.
Wu Wenjuan también le dijo al Wall Street Journal que sus primeros casos incluyeron a un comerciante de 49 años en el mercado que cayó enfermo el 12 de diciembre.
Siete días después, su suegro, que no había estado expuesto al mercado, contrajo la enfermedad. Luego, los médicos y las enfermeras comenzaron a enfermarse el 25 de diciembre, lo que fue revelado por informes en los medios estatales.
Todos estos casos implican claramente la transmisión de persona a persona varias semanas antes de que Pekín lo admitiera públicamente. Esta información crucial finalmente se confirmó al mundo solo cuatro días antes de que se publicara ese importante artículo en The Lancet.
Cinco días antes, Li Qun, jefe del centro de emergencias de salud pública de China, incluso dijo a la televisión estatal que “después de un examen cuidadoso y un juicio prudente, hemos llegado a la última comprensión de que el riesgo de transmisión de persona a persona es bajo”.
Otro artículo en el New England Journal Of Medicine confirmó que los médicos chinos vieron evidencia de transmisión humana ‘entre contactos cercanos desde mediados de diciembre de 2019’.
Y un equipo del Centro para el Control de Enfermedades de Wuhan publicó un artículo en Nature Microbiology el mes pasado que mencionaba que se tomaron muestras de “pacientes de Wuhan con enfermedades similares a la influenza del 6 de octubre de 2019 al 21 de enero de 2020”.
El comienzo de octubre es más temprano que cualquier otro experto que haya indicado signos de este virus. Estos investigadores encontraron que nueve de sus 640 hisopos dieron positivo, pero luego concluyeron que esto sugería ‘transmisión comunitaria’ a principios de enero de este año.
Un blogger también descubrió un hecho tentador: en julio del año pasado, la Comisión Nacional de Salud de China emitió un edicto sobre protección contra enfermedades infecciosas que instó a todas las localidades a fortalecer su monitoreo de ‘casos similares a la gripe, neumonía inexplicable’.
El boletín, no respaldado por datos relevantes y ausente de un aviso anterior similar, agregó que después de cualquier brote, debe haber ‘investigaciones epidemiológicas, pruebas de laboratorio y medidas de implementación rápidas, como desinfección y tratamiento de áreas epidémicas para prevenir la propagación’. Claramente eso no sucedió.
En su defensa, las autoridades chinas se enfrentaban a un nuevo virus. Sin embargo, su país ya había visto dos coronavirus ‘zoonóticos’ (de animales a humanos) anteriores surgir dentro de sus fronteras este siglo, infligiendo pandemias menos letales en nuestro planeta.
Significativamente, Lianchao Han, un disidente chino y ex funcionario de la oficina en el extranjero, dice: “ La falta de bioética y su carrera por el dinero para encontrar vacunas contra los virus hacen que los científicos chinos sean muy imprudentes en el manejo del virus más peligroso.
“Su reiterada negativa a permitir que expertos internacionales investiguen el origen del virus hace que sea muy sospechoso que el régimen esté ocultando algo”.
Muchos misterios todavía giran en torno a esta saga.
El fin de semana pasado, los medios de comunicación chinos negaron que Shi ‘Bat Woman’ hubiera desertado con una reserva de documentos secretos.
‘Internautas’ chinos [millions of web users] se preguntó si Huang Yanling, un estudiante del Instituto de Virología de Wuhan, podría haber sido el paciente cero después de haberse infectado en el laboratorio.
Esto fue negado, y los funcionarios dijeron que se había mudado a otra parte de China. Tantas preguntas; tan pocas respuestas Sin embargo, a medida que la cifra global de muertos supera los 275,000, una cosa parece segura: la culpabilidad de las autoridades de China al encubrir la nueva enfermedad que estalló con una fuerza tan terrible en algún lugar de Wuhan el año pasado.