China’s COVID ambitions – hiding key data and avoiding blame – couldn’t be realized without Western scientists willingly playing useful idiots for Beijing, The Recent York Times (of all places!) revealed.
In response to the paper’s report, “Chinese scientists suppressed data, withdrew genetic sequences from public databases, and adjusted key details in journal submissions,” while “Western journal editors made these efforts possible” — and the World Health Organization blessed all of it.
Two narratives pushed by China are at play here: that the virus didn’t escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that China’s murderous, totalitarian response to the pandemic was a model of success.
The degree of complicity in promoting them to leading institutions outside of China is astonishing.
Guilty, amongst others major universities comparable to Oxford-style and cutting-edge scientific journals, not to say mega-powerful global non-profit organizations.
The journal Clinical Infectious Diseases apparently falsely corrected an article on possible COVID mutation pathways by suggesting that the info it relied on was collected later than it actually was.
The Lancet, arguably crucial academic journal, pulled a bunch letter from Chinese hospital employees begging for international aid.
And the WHO, the world’s principal health watchdog, has too repeatedly played the role of a megaphone for Chinese claims concerning the origin of the virus.
The reasons are ugly and clear.
Magazines don’t need to lose access to the lucrative Chinese market by insulting the federal government; many universities depend on money flowing in various ways from China; Beijing pursues tough, bureaucratic policies to dominate organizations just like the WHO.
And the elite institutions, especially within the academy, have been completely captured by the left and have long sought some alternative to the evil capitalist hegemony of the USA and located it within the supposedly benevolent dictatorship of Beijing.
One of them, of course, is The Times itself, which greedily repeated Chinese COVID nonsense for much of the early pandemic.
It will not be time for our elite to face the facts and stop kneeling before Beijing, pretending it’s a rustic like several other.
It has cost countless lives in the course of the pandemic and can cost countless more.