Wuhan

We still don’t know the origins of COVID-19, a full year and a half out from the start of the pandemic. The Chinese government initially claimed that the virus was spread through a wet market in the Wuhan province or that it perhaps came to China from parts of Europe in frozen food trucks. Almost immediately, any inquiries into how the outbreak started beyond the CCP’s original story were brushed aside and dubbed conspiracy theories by the US’s corporate media. Quite why is a question that should trouble any independent-minded person. When Sen.

The World Health Organization now says the virus ‘most likely came from animals.' But everybody knows that the WHO is heavily influenced by China, and China is not a reliable source. Everybody, that is, except large and important sections of the US media. Before the WHO’s latest report, Feng Zijian, the deputy director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed the virus spread after a bat infected a human — or the virus initially went from bat to another animal or mammal species, which then jumped to humans or that shipments of frozen food from Europe or even the United States spread the virus throughout the province of Wuhan. It’s always the West’s fault, the way Beijing tells it.

The idea that SARS-CoV-2 — the virus which causes COVID-19 — could have man-made origins has been rejected by many scientists, dismissed by some as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. A different view, however, has been put forward by Rossana Segreto of the University of Innsbruck in association with Yuri Deigin of Canadian genetics company Youthereum Genetics. In a paper published on Wiley Online, they have again raised the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could indeed be a man-made virus, and that its passage into the human population could be the result of a laboratory accident. 'The artificial creation of SARS-CoV-2 is not a baseless conspiracy theory that is to be condemned,' they write.

We don’t yet know the full story of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Even so, it already has a tragic hero: Dr Li Wenliang. His name is known around the world now, but the details of what happened to him are telling. On December 30 last year, Li warned fellow medics on a WeChat group that seven patients had been quarantined at his hospital in Wuhan. They had some kind of coronavirus. A few days later, after screenshots of his messages were posted to the wider internet, he was summoned by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau. The secret police presented him with a typed confession stating he had lied. He signed it. He had to. The police document was sententious but chilling: ‘Your behavior severely disrupted social order... We advise you to calm down and reflect carefully.

On December 30, Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, got the lab results back about one of her patients who had a flulike illness. The words she read on the report made her blood run cold: ‘Sars coronavirus’. She circled the word ‘Sars’, took a photo and emailed it to a doctor at a neighboring hospital. Within hours, the photo had been sent to dozens of people in the Wuhan medical community. One of them sent a series of messages to a private group on WeChat, advising his colleagues to take precautions, and someone took screenshots of those messages and shared them more widely.

Should we blame China for the spread of coronavirus? And how should the West respond if the communist regime did cause the pandemic by lying about the virus as it emerged? I spoke about these questions to the dissident author Ma Jian, who has been described — by another dissident — as ‘one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature’. His novels have been called — by a critic — ‘a powerful corrective to the self-interested Western view of China’. Ma believes that the economic miracle in China that has given us cheap goods in the West is also bribing the Chinese to forget their past and infantilizing them in their relationship with their rulers.