According to a report published in Providence Magazine, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s deployment of an army officer to assume charge of Wuhan lab, proving that the govt of China was never upfront about the virus’s origins and that it was all a ruse to create misleading narratives.
It may be recalled that last year in February, Chinese military scientist and a high-level officer in the People’s Liberation Army, Major General Chen Wei was reportedly selected to take over a secretive virus laboratory in Wuhan, raising conspiracy rumours that the Covid-19 crisis could be linked to the army. Reports had then suggested that Chen Wei was flown into Wuhan by the CCP government before taking over as director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Meanwhile, the report by Providence further stated how the Chinese govt tried to keep COVID origin investigations at bay by deliberating its propaganda media to create an elaborate online disinformation campaign centred on an internet persona claiming to be a Swiss biologist to mislead the public about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Notably, Dr Wilson Edwards, a self-described Swiss virologist, had alleged on Facebook that the US was exerting undue political pressure on the WHO to blame China for the coronavirus. However, Edwards was not a real person, as the Swiss embassy in Beijing stated in August 2021.
The report spoke about another incident, wherein a Chinese journalist was put in jail for documenting the Wuhan lockdown. On December 30, 2020, OpIndia had reported how Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who was detained by the Chinese government in May this year for reporting on the Wuhan virus, was sentenced to four years imprisonment on December 28. 37-year old Zhan was accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a charge that is very commonly invoked against critics and activists in China.
Further, in its effort to scuttle the probe into the origin of coronavirus, China attempted to provoke a trade war with Australia after Canberra demanded an independent probe into the origins of COVID.
Around February 2020, when the pandemic expanded from Wuhan to the rest of the world, the CCP put a gag order on any publications about COVID-19’s origin.
On December 24, 2020, OpIndia reported that Chinese ophthalmologist Li Wenliang had tried to warn his friends and associates about a strange SARS-like virus affecting the people of Wuhan. He used the ubiquitous Chinese social media app WeChat to express his concerns with his friends. However, the Chinese Communist Party, with its tools of surveillance detected the messages and chastised the Doctor for spreading “rumours”. It swiftly moved to remove any references made to coronavirus on the app.
As early as January 1, China censored keywords related to coronavirus and criticism of Chinese Premier Xi Jinping. The report probing the censorship in China also found that as the outbreak swelled, WeChat, owned by Chinese firm Tencent, blocked more words to block Chinese people from knowing facts about the raging COVID-19 pandemic.
In fact, the authoritarian control over the information regulation is so sweeping in China that barely days after thousands were reported to have contracted the coronavirus, China censored all inconvenient information related to the disease and its adverse fallout within the country. It stopped reporting the number of coronavirus cases altogether.
However, reports from some journalists and activists revealed that the number of coronavirus cases in China was significantly larger than what the CCP was claiming. But, CCP not only threatened and intimidated the whistle-blowers, but it also pulled down all the reports that challenged CCP’s utopian view of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Lab leaks do occur, and they are common enough that the government discloses them. Taiwan officially verified a SARS-COV-2 lab leak in December 2021. However, in early 2020, a lab infection occurred in China, but the CCP never formally disclosed the incident, raising the question of whether the lab leak was an accident. The leak hypothesis has also been labelled a “conspiracy” by Western virologists and media.
