Beijing’s coronavirus coverup is China’s ‘Chernobyl moment,’ critics say

Beijing’s attempts to hide and distort key scientific data regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and its crackdown on whistleblowers questioning the government’s response to the outbreak is China’s “Chernobyl moment,” according to the authors of an open letter published Tuesday.

The letter, signed by more than 100 experts, politicians and activists likens China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak to the Soviet Union’s initial response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, when it took Moscow three days to even acknowledge the accident and the threat its radioactive fallout posed to neighbouring countries.

The letter comes amid reports that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has launched a crackdown on Chinese journalists reporting critically on the COVID-19 crisis and is now censoring scientific research on the origins of the pandemic.

‘A coverup’ by Beijing

“While the exact source and spread of the virus are not clear yet the question of origin is highly important, for the people of China and for all humankind: only by understanding how this global disaster could emerge we can prevent it from happening again,” the letter says.

“The roots of the pandemic are in a coverup by CCP authorities in Wuhan, Hubei province.”

China expert and former Canadian diplomat Charles Burton, who is one the signatories of the letter, said he was very concerned about the Chinese disinformation campaign suggesting that the coronavirus had originated in the United States and was brought to China by U.S. athletes participating in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October, or that it may have originated in Italy.

Burton said attempts by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Zhao Lijian, to obfuscate the reality that the Chinese government had dissembled information about the person-to-person transmission and had not provided the World Health Organization (WHO) with accurate data was a serious problem.

Loss of Canadian lives due to misinformation

Based on that false information that Canada received from the WHO, the federal government did not close Canadian airports to Chinese travellers until relatively late in the process, resulting in the spread of the disease in Canada, Burton told Radio Canada International

“I think that it is important that the fact of the matter should be laid bare so that we can avoid future incidents where Chinese misinformation leads to the loss of Canadian lives,” Burton said.

If Canadian authorities knew earlier that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can be passed from human to human, they would have moved sooner to restrict travel from China and initiate more robust quarantine and contact tracing measures on travellers from there, Burton said.

WHO denies downplaying the pandemic

The open letter also claims that under China’s influence the WHO initially downplayed the pandemic.

Officials at the UN health body strenuously deny that they downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic.

WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic said the organization issued a statement saying that there was evidence of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan but more investigation was needed to understand the full extent of transmission as early as on Jan. 22, 2020.

On Jan. 30, after first reports of human-to-human transmission were reported outside of China, the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), Jasarevic said.

‘A self-inflicted wound’

“We should never forget that China’s Chernobyl moment was a self-inflicted wound,” the letter said.

The Communist government silenced Chinese doctors who wanted to warn other health professionals during the early stage of the outbreak, the letter added.

“Dr. Ai Fen can no longer appear in public after accepting a domestic media interview, while her colleague Dr. Li Wenliang died while fighting the virus in Wuhan,” the letter said.

Media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders believes that Ai, the head of the emergency department at Wuhan Central hospital, is now missing, apparently as a result of her criticism of censorship in an interview with a Chinese state-owned magazine.

More recently, reporters who have talked critically about Beijing’s response to the pandemic have disappeared and are probably being held in isolation in China’s vast network of prisons and camps, Burton said.

“They are likely under Chinese imprisonment and being subject to what is common in Chinese imprisonment, which would be torture and interrogation and sensory deprivation, such as we know from consular reports from Canada, has been the case with our own citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor,” Burton said.

Chinese crackdown on information a global concern

The pandemic has laid bare issues with the suppression of information and freedom of expression in China, Burton said.

“This doesn’t just impact people inside China such as the Uighurs in Xinjiang, who are currently being subject to a program of cultural genocide that the Chinese government describes as reeducation, or other groups,” Burton said. “But this impacts the whole global community in an increasingly globalized and internationalized world.”

Officials at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa could not be reached for comment.

Stop politicizing the pandemic, say Chinese scholars

Beijing has denied misrepresenting or hiding information about COVID-19 and has pointed to the fact that Chinese scientists openly shared the genetic sequence of the coronavirus with the global scientific community on Jan. 12, 2020.

Communist officials argue that Western countries wasted the precious time bought for them by the tremendous sacrifices made by tens of millions of Chinese citizens who endured weeks of draconian quarantine measures to slow the spread of COVID-19.

In an earlier open letter, a group of 100 Chinese scholars urged their American counterparts to refrain from “politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“Facing the most dangerous infectious disease in a century, these criticisms help neither China, the U.S., nor the world to curb the spread of the virus,” the letter by Chinese scholars read.

The letter argued that questions about the origin of the virus “are unimportant and finger pointing is demeaning and hurtful to everyone.”