Doctors in Wuhan revealed that provincial leaders asked them to hide the outbreak. (Photo credit: ITV video screenshot)
Through unannounced visits, a British Independent Television (ITV) reporter secretly shot a video recording of Wuhan doctors confirming that they knew the virus would spread from person to person at the beginning of the Communist Party virus (Wuhan pneumonia) outbreak, but were asked by the authorities not to tell the truth. In addition, the Wuhan doctors also revealed that the authorities held New Year celebrations for political propaganda, knowing full well that they would accelerate the spread of the virus.
The documentary Outbreak: The Virus That Shook The World, shown on ITV yesterday (Jan. 19), showed a Wuhan doctor saying, “In fact, in late December or early January, a relative I know died from this virus. The virus. Many people who lived with him were also infected, including some people I knew.”
Another doctor said, “We all feel there should be no doubt about human-to-human transmission.”
Still other doctors disclosed, “We knew the virus was human-to-human, but when we met at the hospital, we were asked not to disclose it to the public. Provincial leaders told the hospital not to tell the truth.”
They said authorities knew that January’s New Year celebrations would “accelerate the spread of the virus,” but that such events were held as usual because they presented “a harmonious and prosperous society.
This part of the video was shot after the lifting of the ban in Wuhan.
It also reveals that the virus spread between Jan. 5 and Jan. 17, but that the Communist government did not officially report any new cases during those 12 days.
Public reports indicate that this period coincided with the “two sessions” held in Hubei Province and Wuhan City.
The mainland media outlet “China Business News” reported that during this period, many hospitals reported that specimens from suspected patients were sent for testing, but no results were available for several days, thus affecting the confirmation of the diagnosis.
The documentary also contains the views of several infectious disease scholars on the outbreak. Luo Yijun, deputy director of Taiwan‘s Agency for Disease Control and an infectious disease expert, said the CCP’s initial management of the outbreak was a mess, “I think this Epidemic could have been avoided if the CCP had been transparent about the outbreak at the beginning and provided the necessary information to the world quickly.”
Chuang Yin-ching, chairman of the Taiwan Society of Infectious Diseases Medicine, who had visited Wuhan in the early stages of the epidemic, recalls arriving there and still having difficulty finding clear answers until a meeting where they asked many questions and local health care workers reluctantly said, “Limited person-to-person transmission cannot be ruled out.”
But the CCP initially kept the news of human-to-human transmission vague and downplayed until January 20, when it admitted “human-to-human transmission” through the mouth of Zhong Nanshan.
Zhuang Yinqing questioned, “Why didn’t the CCP inform other countries about human-to-human transmission earlier?”
Although doctors in Wuhan disclosed that the order to conceal the epidemic came from provincial leaders, Zhou Xianwang, the then mayor of Wuhan who had just been reassigned as a member of the party group of the Hubei Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said in an interview with the CCP’s CCTV on January 27 last year, “As a local government, I was given information and authorization before I could disclose it, which was not understood by many at the Time, and later, especially on January 20 when the State Council held Standing meeting …… asked for local responsibility, after this, our work is much more proactive.” Implying that the responsibility for not disclosing information about the epidemic in a timely manner lies at the top of the Communist Party.
In addition, a media source earlier told Radio Free Asia that the crackdown on Li Wenliang and eight other doctors who revealed information about the Wuhan epidemic also shows that the gag order came from the top. Because at the end of 2019, after Li Wenliang and eight other medical professionals were disciplined, Liao Jun, a reporter from the Hubei branch of the official media Xinhua News Agency, sent a message saying that “eight people were dealt with according to the law for releasing false information,” and on March 8, Liao Jun was selected as an official representative of the so-called advanced fight against the epidemic and made a high-profile appearance at a press conference at the State Council Information Office in Wuhan Liao said he wanted to tell the world the story of China’s war against the epidemic.
This means that the Communist Party does not consider it a mistake to suppress front-line early-warning doctors; they are more concerned with the so-called image of the party and state, and are not interested in reviewing how many people and health care workers have lost their lives as a result, the media source said.
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