Doctor and activist
28/05/2020
China is a rising power with 1.3 Billion people. Its government is totalitarian, and focussed on improving its place in the world. From a Chinese point of view the West exploited it when it could, and it is now taking its rightful place as the Middle Kingdom, in the centre with others coming to it. […]
23/05/2020
23 May 2020
I am not sure of the answer to this question. China obviously hid the facts initially as whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang revealed, later dying of COVID19 himself[1]. Dr Ai Fen of Wuhan Central Hospital also blew the whistle and has now disappeared[2].
China clearly suppressed information initially, and may not be telling the truth now, particularly on the numbers affected.
It used very authoritarian tactics and now claims that the infection of controlled. It seems hard to deny this, if we presume that millions of deaths cannot be hidden. The SARS virus was successfully suppressed with an unprecedented lockdown, and this would appear to be the same. Probably few other countries could have suppressed movement of people as effectively as China could, which is good and bad.
The initial cover up allowed movement to other countries which has allowed the epidemic to spread world wide.
Here is an Indian TV station calling out the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus for not standing up to China, and giving a pretty damning assessment of his actions, both in not getting the facts from China early and then ignoring their delays. The circumstances of his election to WHO seems to be a reliance on China’s lobbying at WHO, and also his debts to China from his role as Health Minister and then foreign minister of Ethiopia. He is contrasted with the previous head of WHO Health, a Norwegian, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, who called out China and embarrassed them over SARS, so China had an incentive to get a more malleable person in the job.
The TV station seems to have a good story and also claims to be daring and young, though it is owned Esselgroup, which is owned by Subhash Chandra, an Indian billionaire with links to the BJP. Things are not always clear in politics , but it does seem that the Director-General is a Chinese patsy.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1NGzmDVWxA&feature=youtu.be
[1] www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795, 7/2/20
[2] https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/whistleblowing-coronavirus-doctor-mysteriously-vanishes/
21/05/2020
21 May 2020
Readers may recall that I posted on this subject on 19/4/20, and had Dr Li as the original whistleblower on social media. He was an ophthalmologist who died of COVID-19. The origin of the virus was via the markets, but possibly via a bat research project in a secondary Wuhan research laboratory.
The document I used was cited but was from the web and not from a standard journal and sounded very plausible.
Now this document that again seems very plausible casts doubt on the previous story.
Presumably there will be a WHO investigation which will come up with a conclusion. This probably would have happened without the ham-fisted and tactless intervention of Morrison. Whether the US or China is deceiving us all may or may not become apparent. Both have quite a lot of prestige riding on the inquiry, and Trump needs someone to blame if he is win the November election.
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The Fable of the Chinese Whistleblower | by Stephen S. Roach & Weijian Shan – Project Syndicate
25/04/2020
Taiwan’s Response to COVID-19- not perfect, but better than anyone else’s. An article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) of 3/3/20 outlines the effective approach that Taiwan took to the COVID-19 crisis, which is why they have so few cases despite their close proximity to China. It is instructive to look at what […]
25/04/2020
There has been a general acceptance that the COVID19 coronavirus came from the Wuhan Seafood market from some of the wild animals there, with a pangolin, a type of scaly anteater. It was a wet market which means that species are sold there raw. This seemed more plausible than the various conspiracy theories that it […]