Mick Hartley

Matt Ridley at Spiked on the Chinese cover-up that led to the Covid pandemic:

It is now five years since we woke to the news of a new outbreak of infectious pneumonia in China. Retelling the story of those early days of the Covid pandemic helps to shed light on how something that could have been prevented, contained and eradicated instead went on to kill more than 20 million people and devastate the education, economics and mental health of many more.

At one minute to midnight, US East Coast time, on the last day of 2019, there was a brief ‘request for information’ on ProMED-mail, an online newsletter that monitors unofficial sources to gather intelligence about new disease outbreaks affecting people and animals. It read, simply: ‘Undiagnosed pneumonia: China (Hubei).’

Dr Marjorie Pollack, the deputy editor of ProMED-mail, had been alerted by a Taiwanese colleague to a message on WeChat, the Chinese social-media site, sent by an ophthalmologist in Wuhan named Dr Li Wenliang: ‘Seven cases of SARS have been diagnosed at the Huanan Fruit and Seafood Market, quarantined in our hospital’s emergency department.’ …

Dr ‘George’ Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control in Beijing, saw the WeChat message. Just a few weeks before, he had made a rather bold claim: ‘SARS-like viruses can appear at any time. However, I am very confident to say that “SARS-like events” will not occur again, because the infectious-disease surveillance network system of our country is well established, and such events will not happen again.’

So Gao was especially alarmed to hear about an outbreak of a SARS-like virus not through the official surveillance network, but through social media. He raised the alarm with China’s health minister. Liang Wannian, head of the National Health Commission, was despatched to Wuhan on 31 December. Immediately on arrival he took the decision to close down the Huanan Seafood Market, despite the fact that Ai’s latest patient had no connection to the market.

The local officials were already acting fast – but not to stop the disease, only to stop the news of it spreading. Within hours of his WeChat post, at 1.30am on 31 December, Li Wenliang was summoned to an interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait until 4am before being interviewed and forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing ‘untruthful information’. Six weeks later, he would die of Covid.

And so it went. Every effort was made to stop the news spreading, but no effort was made to stop the virus spreading. 

Over the next few days, secrecy and bureaucratic obstinacy ensured that the only chance to nip the outbreak in the bud was missed. The authorities excluded from testing all potential cases that had no connection or proximity to the seafood market. They insisted the virus could only be caught from animals, despite nurses and doctors falling sick. They went ahead with a huge banquet for the Chinese New Year and encouraged people to travel abroad. By mid January at the latest, the virus was already in a dozen countries, every index case tracing back to a traveller from Wuhan.

It's perhaps important to note that China's cover-up remains a scandal whether the lab-leak theory is true or not. Matt Ridley has co-written a book and written numerous articles explaining why he thinks a lab leak is, overwhelmingly, the most likely explanation for what happened in Wuhan, and the subsequent world-wide pandemic. I think he's right. But even if it came from the street market, or from some other source, China's response to the unfolding crisis remains as an act of criminal irresponsibility.