The origins of the Chinese coverup insofar the Coronavirus is concerned has been traced down to Dr. Ai Fen, the Director of the Emergency ward at the Wuhan Central Hospital. Interestingly, she has gone missing now as latest reports claim that her whereabouts are missing now. This development is important because she is the one who unveiled the Communist Part of China (CPC) Coronavirus coverup.
She spoke about the Coronavirus outbreak in an interview to the Chinese magazine, Renwu (or people) last month, in which she had disclosed how she had found several patients with flu-like symptoms in the month of December last year who were not responding to the usual treatment methods. She later also received a lab report about one of the patients which contained the words “Sars coronavirus”.
Breaking into cold sweat, Dr. Ai Fen knew that a novel virus, a cousin of the 2003 SARS outbreak had struck the world. She circled the word Sars, and sent a photograph of the report to her former medical school classmate. Soon, the photograph was doing the rounds amongst the Wuhan medical circles.
Other doctors started talking about this mysterious virus too. One of the doctors was Dr. Li Wenliang, one of the first whistle-blowers in China whose voice was muzzled by the Communist regime in China and who later succumbed to the novel Wuhan infection.
We translated the warning letter Chinese doctor Li Wenliang got from the police for telling others about the coronavirus outbreak before it killed hundreds, including himself https://t.co/G5SiIXmTOL pic.twitter.com/MCsYqZ196P
— Alan Wong (@alanwongw) February 7, 2020
But the photograph that was doing the rounds caught the eye of China’s censor authorities, and the police tracked her down as the source of information. That night itself, Dr. Fen received a message from her hospital that warned her against divulging information about the mysterious virus, on the ground that it could cause panic. Two days later, she was summoned by the head of hospital’s disciplinary committee and reprimanded her for “spreading rumours” and “harming stability”.
In her interview, Dr. Ai Fen also said, “If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared about the reprimand. I would have f*****g talked about it to whoever, where ever I could.” She also said, “I knew there must be human to human transmission.”
On being asked if she was the whistle-blower, she said, “I am not the whistle-blower. I am the one who provided the whistle.” But the interview too did not go down well with China’s Communist government and was gagged by the censor authorities in the country.
But it kept surfacing again and again on the social media in different forms, such as emojis, and other newer versions of the interview too kept appearing on social media in different codes like the morse code, as well as pinyin, the romanisation system for Mandarin, so that the Chinese readers could translate the interview and read it by evading the strong censor system in the country.
WeChat users in China also evaded censor by forwarding the interview through different means- some writing it backwards, others inserting typos and emojis, and some of them even sharing it in fictional languages such as Klingon.
As web users fought a hard battle against the Censor authorities to keep the interview text online, albeit in a coded form, tweets of the interview in telegram codes have also emerged.
Wuhan doctor Ai Fen shares her own story of being disciplined for sharing early December 2019 diagnostic reports on the coronavirus — and web users fight to keep it alive online, even resorting to telegram codes. https://t.co/yLAxVc2Kne pic.twitter.com/NRcbaQVdWP
— China Media Project (@cnmediaproject) March 11, 2020
For those who’re already applauding China’s COVID-19 responses, CN is still heavily censoring info. A magazine’s feature on a whistleblower is being taken down from the entire CN internet. Ppl have to turn article into EMOJI to avoid censorship. Chinese readers can u decode it? pic.twitter.com/4p4vgXJ3I5
— Tony Lin 林東尼 (@tony_zy) March 10, 2020
https://twitter.com/lotus_ruan/status/1237747168368308225
But it seems that Dr. Ai Fen had to pay the price for exposing how China knew about the mysterious virus ever since December last year, but decided to do nothing about it. The CCP has been quite adamant on not tolerating anyone divulging its criminal negligence that has left more than 1.1 million infected and more than 60,000 dead around the world.
In February, two journalists- Chen Quishi and Fang Bin had also disappeared mysteriously. Their crime? They unmasked the true face of the Chinese Communist Party as they exposed the government’s inability to tackle the virus at its epicentre in Wuhan. And Dr. Ai Fen has also committed the same crime now.
With the level of censorship that there is in China, and CCP’s desperation to cover-up its criminal negligence that has created a Pandemic, it does not really come as a surprise that she has gone missing.
Cryptic messages keep coming up on her page on the Chinese social media website, Weibo. But she is nowhere to be found outside the virtual world, and it seems that her interview titled, “The one who supplied the whistle”, seems to have cost her heavily.
It is believed that the authorities in China force detainees to keep posting social media messages- a part of the country’s PR campaign to create an “all is well” illusion. It is also possible that the Chinese authorities might be operating her social media accounts themselves. Dr. Ai Fen ruffled the feathers of the mighty Dragon, and the Dragon seems to be settling scores. She has gone missing- probably detained, or worse taken out of the way by Beijing.