Fresh evidence jointly published by The New York Times and ProPublica confirms that Beijing has been trying to keep COVID-19 information from the rest of the world since the very beginning of the pandemic.
On February 7, Li Wenliang, the doctor who whistled for COVID-19, died of the disease he had warned the world about. While working at Wuhan Central Hospital in China’s Hubei province, he saw a new version of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as SARS, that also emerged in China in 2002.
As news of the 34-year-old doctor’s untimely death spread and grief went viral on social media such as Weibo and WeChat, Beijing set out to bury the truth.
“They instructed news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers [Li’s] death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from hot topic pages. And they activated legions of fake online commentators to flood social sites with distracting chatter, ”reports the Times-ProPublica team. In total, the Hangzhou offices of Beijing’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, have issued more than 3,200 guidelines and 1,800 memos in their COVID censorship drive – all leaked by the hacker group CCP [Chinese Communist Party] Unmasked.
“At a time when digital media is deepening social divisions in Western democracies,” warns the research team, “China is manipulating online discourse to enforce Communist Party consensus.”
In January, before the coronavirus was even definitively identified, the CCP began working overtime to trick the world about the truth in order to protect the party’s image as infections started to soar – and the disease looked even less severe. As a result, the world lost its best chance of averting the global pandemic.
This is a devastating revelation from two left-wing news organizations. Now it is on the left, right and center to unite and hold the CCP to account for its obscene attempt to protect its own image from the enormous and deadly cost to the entire world.