While China has employed a propaganda offensive to counter the increasing pressure mounted by a growing chorus of voices around the world blaming the country for unleashing the coronavirus pandemic, a report prepared by intelligence agencies of five different countries has claimed that China had deliberately resorted to falsehoods about the coronavirus outbreak that has wreaked havoc across the globe, killing more than 2 lakh people and affecting more than 3.4 million people globally.
The spy dossier put together by the intelligence agencies of the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand stated that despite crystal clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, China withheld the crucial information from the rest of the world until January 20, thereby catching many countries girding for the pandemic flat-footed. The report stated that China’s deliberate opacity in not revealing the full scale of the pandemic was an “assault on international transparency”.
“Despite the red flag raised by the officials in Taiwan as early as December 31 and experts in Hong Kong on January 4, China remained tight-lipped about the challenges posed by the infection,” the report observed.
Read- China deliberately glossed over the magnitude of Wuhan coronavirus outbreak: US Intelligence report
The report also pointed out China’s bungled approach initially in minimising the contagion and its heavy-handedness in targeting doctors and healthcare workers who dared to warn the world about the virus. The report notes that China had also denied providing samples to scientists working on the vaccine, claiming that there was the destruction of evidence in laboratories.
In a scathing account of China’s nebulous response to the coronavirus outbreak, the report highlights how China had downplayed the threat posed by the pandemic by stating that restrictions on the movement of people should not be followed by other countries while itself enforcing onerous strictures on its own people.
In an attempt to blame China for intentionally spreading the virus across the world, the report observed that millions of people were freely allowed to leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before a stringent lockdown was enforced in the city.
“Throughout February, Beijing dissuaded countries like the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours from imposing extensive travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposed gruelling restrictions on its own people,” it added.
The document, which was obtained by Australia’s The Saturday Telegraph, called attention to the fact that China also waged a digital war in fending off the criticism directed at it for messing up the coronavirus outbreak. It added how the People’s Republic of China’s Communist Party got removed terms like “SARS variation”, “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia” from the search engines as a part of its digital warfare to avoid accountability.
Earlier, in an article published by the Daily Mail hinted that the experiments were conducted on mammals captured more than 1000 miles away in Yunnan at the Wuhan-based laboratory. It has been rumoured that the researched were funded with a whopping USD 3.7 million grant by the US government for these experiments.
The UK government sources are seriously considering the fact that the pandemic could have touched off after an untoward accident that took place in the Wuhan laboratory. The Daily Mail report claimed that the experiment on bats was as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health. It is conjectured that some researchers at Wuhan Institute of Virology could have become infected after being sprayed with blood containing the virus after which the local community got infected from the COVID-19 positive scientists.
