As China faces global backlash for creating and hiding the Coronavirus Pandemic, it is trying to overwhelm the world with a massive misinformation campaign. Over the past few months, China has emerged as the hub of extensive propaganda. Its PR campaign is based entirely upon playing the good guy. Guilty of covering up the Wuhan virus outbreak and causing a pandemic, China is now promptly alerting the world about new disease outbreaks in the country, be it the Hanta virus, a deadly swine flu or the bubonic plague.
Initially, China was selling and shipping defective testing kits, masks and other sub-standard medical equipment to show that it cares for the entire world. And now it has started projecting itself as a responsible power that informs the world about upcoming threats.
Over the past few weeks, China has reported back-to-back virus outbreaks supposedly for warning the world about future threats and public health risks.
Beijing has a track record of trying to hide how it has become the hotbed of epidemics. It never lets the world know what goes on inside the Communist country.
But shortly after the Coronavirus Pandemic gripped the whole world and the backlash started, the Global Times, a Chinese Foreign Ministry overhang, reported that a man died in China’s Yunnan province from Hantavirus while travelling on a bus to the Shandong province.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mouthpiece had even claimed that all fellow passengers on the bus were tested for the virus. This was the first attempt by China to create the illusion that it is transparent about the epidemic outbreaks in the country.
More recently, there have been two such reports of virus outbreaks in China. Last month, Chinese researches stated that a new strain of swine flu with ‘pandemic potential’ was discovered.
China claimed that the flu strain was similar to the H1N1 influenza virus that caused the Swine Flu Pandemic in the year 2009.
Now, a Chinese city, Bayannur has sounded the alarm for a Bubonic Plague. The Bubonic Plague is a rare but lethal infection that had caused Black Death in Asia, Europe and Africa in the fourteenth century. More than 50 million people had died of Bubonic Plague- wiping out 25% to 60% of Europe’s population.
On July 1, China’s State-owned Xinhua news agency reported two cases of Bubonic Plague from the Khovd province in western Mongolia. Now, Chinese State media outlet People’s Daily Online has reported that Bayannur, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, announced a level III warning of plague prevention and control.
The reports of different outbreaks in China are all the more perplexing because they come amidst some shocking reports about a 2013 Coronavirus outbreak in the Yunnan province of China.
Sunday Times has reported that six men had contracted severe Pneumonia while cleaning Bats’ fecal matter in a Copper Mine in the Yunnan province seven years ago. Three of them had died later.
The virus samples from the mine were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in frozen form. Now, it has been revealed that the COVID-19 is 96.2 per cent similar to a virus strain named RaTG13 found in 2013. Sunday Times claims that RaTG13 is “almost certainly” the virus found from the abandoned mine.
This has raised some serious questions about China’s intentions. The Wuhan lab where the samples were sent is already being accused of being the source of the COVID-19 outbreak.
This is why China’s Coronavirus cover-up also becomes very suspicious. Today, China might be reporting several epidemics but when the chips were actually down, it was misleading the entire globe.
Not only did China hide the Pandemic, but it also targeted journalists, whistleblowers and doctors who tried to make the world aware of an impending disaster.
In December last year itself, Dr. Ai Fen, a doctor in China’s Wuhan had found out that a novel virus, a cousin of the 2003 SARS outbreak had struck the world. She had also shared the information with a former classmate and soon it was doing the rounds in Wuhan’s medical circles.
Wuhan’s doctors had started talking about this mysterious virus too. Dr. Li Wenliang was 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.
When Dr. Ai Fen tried to speak up about the Communist country’s cover-up, she was summoned by the head of her hospital’s disciplinary committee and admonished for “spreading rumours” and “harming stability”.
Dr. Fen spoke up against the Coronavirus cover-up once again March this year. This time she was not admonished, rather she went missing mysteriously.
It was not till January 24 that the world came to know about human-to-human transmission of Coronavirus through a World Health Organisation (WHO) advice. By this time, most of the damage was already done.
The world has been asking tough questions of China. It is asking why Beijing kept the entire human race in dark about an absolute catastrophe that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.
Now, even the WHO, which has been at the forefront of a campaign to whitewash China’s blunders, is finding it increasingly difficult to defend the Communist country.
In fact, The Associated Press has reported that there was considerable frustration amongst WHO officials regarding China’s erratic behaviour and delayed release of information about the Coronavirus outbreak.
According to The Associated Press report, WHO officials were praising China publicly only because they wanted to obtain more information out of an opaque Chinese government. Privately, even the WHO officials complained how China was not releasing sufficient information to assess the severity of the outbreak.
Facing allegations of covering up the Pandemic or even creating it deliberately, China is now trying to report potential Pandemics. This is not an act of goodwill, but yet another propaganda tactic to deflect the massive outrage that the country is facing around the world.