Communism Kills: China Reportedly Arrested Virus Whistleblowers Who Tried Sounding Alarm
On Thursday, the first confirmed case of first person-to-person coronavirus, the deadly outbreak that allegedly started due to a Chinese seafood “wet market” in Wuhan, was confirmed in the United States.
“The husband of an Illinois woman with Wuhan coronavirus is now infected with the illness, and is the first confirmed case of person-to-person transmission of the virus in the United States, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Thursday,” CNN reported.
The director of the Illinois Department of Public Health said that “the risk of this novel coronavirus to the general public in Illinois remains low” and that they would “continue to keep the public fully informed as additional information becomes available.”
The same cannot be said from where the outbreak started.
Virus whistleblowers had detected the outbreak in December, a month before it was officially reported by Chinese officials. Instead of being lauded for scientific rigor, they were “arrested for spreading rumors,” according to the U.K. Mirror.
The news, which broke as an airlift repatriating Britishers from disease epicenter Wuhan, “comes as the Chinese authority’s attempts to suppress news of the viral outbreak became known.”
“A leading UK expert on China claims whistleblowers who warned last month about the outbreak at Wuhan’s live animal market were arrested for ‘spreading rumors,’ the Mirror can reveal. A legal document seen by the Mirror appears to be signed and finger-printed by citizens promising to stop discussing the outbreak.
“Their whereabouts now are not known. Dr. Yukteshwar Kumar of the University of Bath, who obtained the document, said eight were held for talking about the outbreak on Chinese messaging service WeChat.”
“They were asked to sign a confession stating that they will not spread false news. If they had taken steps earlier the situation could have been better because they did know about it,” Dr. Kumar told the Mirror. “People could have been made aware in late December. The authorities could have stopped people travelling earlier. I highly appreciate the efforts made by the government of China in locking down the whole city. However, if they’d listened to the advice of these eight people and some scientists the situation would have been perhaps better.”
This is somewhat important considering the fact that the World Health Organization held off declaring the coronavirus a global health emergency in part because of the low number of confirmed cases and the lack of evidence of human-to-human transmission, according to The New York Times.
Part of the decision, the paper reported on Thursday, was also because “the coronavirus outbreak spread well beyond China, where it emerged last month.
“The move reversed the organization’s decision just a week ago to hold off such a declaration. Since then, there have been thousands of new cases in China and clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in several other countries, including the United States. All of which warranted a reconsideration by the W.H.O.’s emergency committee, officials said,” The Times added.
While WHO officials praised China’s aggressive response to the outbreak — something that’s a lot easier to do when you’re dealing with a totalitarian country — there were also hints of Beijing’s issues with reporting on the outbreak.
“Experts in the United States have complained of spotty epidemiological information from China,” The Times reported. “Residents have complained that local authorities kept mum about the outbreak’s severity — initially insisting that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission outside Wuhan — but admitted the truth after press reports in Hong Kong.”
Welcome to communism, folks.
Lest you think that — since China has now opened itself (kinda, sorta) to global capitalism — it’s no longer communist, consider how it controls information. This is the hallmark of how the Soviet Union used to deal with issues of famine and mass arrests.
Communist governments don’t care about life and never have. What they care about, among other things, is controlling information.
In this case, it’s led to the loss of life.
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