New evidence published jointly by The New York Times and ProPublica confirms that Beijing has been trying to keep COVID-19 information out of the rest of the world since the pandemic began.
On February 7, Li Wenliang, the doctor who denounced COVID-19, died of the disease about which he alerted the world. While working at Wuhan Central Hospital in Hubei province in China, he saw a new version of the severe acute respiratory syndrome known as SARS, which also originated in China in 2002.
As news of the 34-year-old doctor’s untimely death spread and grief went viral on social media like Weibo and WeChat – Beijing decided to bury the truth.
“They ordered news sites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to [Li’s] death. They told social platforms to gradually remove their name from trend topic pages. And they activated legions of fake online commentators to flood social sites with disturbing conversations, ”reports the Times-ProPublica team. In all, the Hangzhou offices of the Beijing Internet regulator, the China Cyberspace Administration, issued more than 3,200 directives and 1,800 memos in its COVID censorship campaign – 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 investigative team, “China is manipulating online speech to impose consensus from the Communist Party.”
In January, even before the coronavirus was definitively identified, the CCP started working overtime to deceive the world about the truth and protect the party’s image as infections grew – even making the disease look less serious. As a result, the world has lost its best chance of preventing the global pandemic.
This is a strong denunciation by two left-wing news organizations. Now it is up to the left, the right and the center to come together to make the CCP account for its obscene effort to protect its own image at enormous and deadly cost to the entire world.