On December 1, an Associated Press team of journalists attempting to visit a “bat cave” in southern China was followed by plainclothes police who blocked the road to the cave, a mine, in multiple vehicles. The investigation found that Beijing authorities are tightly controlling the investigation into the origin of the virus while actively promoting the theory that it may have come from outside China.
Internal documents obtained by the Associated Press show that top Communist Party officials have ordered a secret search for the origin of the New Crown virus, that all research related to the New Crown virus is being tightly controlled, and that samples in the hands of scientists searching for the bat roost virus have been confiscated by police.
The BBC reported earlier that when their reporters went to investigate an abandoned copper mine in the town of Tongguan in Yunnan, the road was blocked by people dressed as ordinary people. French newspaper ‘Le Monde’ reported that that mine was the one from which Shi Zhengli’s group at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences took samples from bats. in 2012, six miners working in that mine, which was covered with bat guano for two weeks, contracted a pneumonia virus, four of whom died without treatment. after the outbreak of the 2019 New Crown epidemic, scientists were surprised to find that more than seven years The virus that struck the town of Tongguan more than seven years ago bears a striking resemblance to the 2019 New Crown virus.
A lengthy Associated Press report on Wednesday, on the other hand, noted that bats carrying the coronavirus closest to the New Coronavirus were once found in a mine in Yunnan, China. The area has thus sparked high interest among scientists because it could provide clues to the source of the new coronavirus that has killed 1.8 million people, but the AP story writes: “For scientists and journalists, however, it has become a black hole of no information because of its political sensitivity and secrecy.”
A bat research team that visited the area recently managed to collect samples, but the samples were confiscated, the AP said, citing two people with knowledge of the matter.
However, the Chinese government has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to state-sponsored scientists searching for the origin of the virus, and those scientists in southern China are believed to have ties to the military. Internal documents obtained by the Associated Press show that the Chinese government mandated that any release of data or research be approved by a new cabinet-level working group, an initiative directly under the responsibility of China’s top leader Xi Jinping. The rare leak of dozens of pages of internal documents confirms what many have long suspected: that the clampdown on information comes from the highest levels of China.
The Associated Press investigation was based on dozens of interviews with Chinese and foreign scientists and officials, public notices, leaked emails, internal data, and documents from the Chinese State Council and the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The investigation reveals that a system of government secrecy and top-down control patterns have been clearly evident throughout the new coronavirus outbreak pandemic.
Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at Duke University, asked himself, “What did they really find? Maybe their data is not conclusive, or maybe they’re suppressing it for some political reason. I don’t know. …… I wish I knew.”
A public health expert who works regularly with the CDC and declined to be named for fear of retaliation said, “They only choose people they trust and can control. The military team and others are working on it, but whether they can release it to the public will depend on what the specific findings are.”
An international expert mission from the World Health Organization will travel to China this month to investigate the origin of the new coronavirus. Will they get cooperation from the Chinese side to provide information, open up the data and allow access to the bat cave to investigate? The outside world is not optimistic.
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