| | | OFFLINE | | Post: 32.775
Post: 14.857 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
|
I don't necessarily share Maurizio Blondet's view that the Coronavirus pandemic was an overhyped and massive worldwide ploy by well-funded
elements pushing for a one-world government under the UN, if only because the human and economic toll it has taken are much too real to be
cheapened by such skepticism. However, it is a viewpoint shared by many serious Italian commentators.
I am much more convinced that China caused the pandemic by covering up the truth of the epidemic for weeks after it first struck Wuhan,
then callously allowed tens of thousands of Chinese who had come home to Wuhan for the Chinese New Year celebrations to return to their
adopted countries while preventing any travel form Wuhan to other parts of China. (Little noted by American commentators is that Italy's
northern Lombardy region, its industrial center, was first and hardest hit in Italy because it has about 200,000 Chinese workers. If even
only 10,000 of them - and many Chinese are still tradition-bound despite Communism - went home for the Chinese New Year, and of those,
only a few hundred went to Wuhan province, that would have been more than enough to spread the virus they would conceivably have borne
back from China.)
In any case, the following item from Blondet's blog is interesting for what it reveals about a recent Lancet article about Covid-19 and
hydroxychloroquine. he prestigious British medical journal had to issue a formal statement just one week after it had published the article,
that it was reviewing the article and the methodology employed by the study, in response to protests from many scientific experts. Why it
passed its peer review board, to begin with, raises serious questions about the integrity of Lancet and many so-called scientific journals
even more, following the decades that these journals have been 'validating' through publication the most tendentious, anti-scientific
and often outright fact-defying reports on climate change and global warming. And how could Lancet fail to vet the authors of the study and
their dubious data-gatherer?
Who pays for this enormous fraud
and all its consequences?
by Maurizio Blondet
Translated from
June 1, 2020
One week! All it took was one week, and the so-called study published by Lancet [a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal in the UK, one of the oldest well-reputed medical publications in English] – which your chronicler had immediately called ‘embarrassing’ – claiming that hydrochhloroquine kills Covid-19 patients, is coming down in flames.
The study had claimed to have looked at the clinical charts of more than 96,000 Covid-19 patients 'in hundreds of hospitals around the world' (although 70% of the hospitals are in the USA). The Australian Department of Health, noting that the number of Australian Covid deaths in the report was much higher than their own records, sought clarification from the 5 Australian hospitals cited by Lancet. The hospitals were flummoxed – they had never been contacted by Surgisphere, the ‘mysterious’ start-up cited as having gathered the data (96,000 charts!), nor had they even heard of it before.
When asked to provide the list of all the hospitals from which they claimed to have gathered the data, Surgisphere refused to do so.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/24/doubts-about-that-article-claiming-that-hydroxychloroquine-chloroquine-is-killing...
Medical and epidemiologic experts were astounded at the fact that the ‘study’ indicated a mortality of 16-24% among Covid patients treated with hydroxychloroquine compared to only 9% in controls. “That’s an enormous number! How is it none of us were ever aware of this?” One expert said ironically, “There are not so many medications that efficient at killing patients!”
[Several estimates have suggested that the risk of dying, for those infected with Covid-19 and showing its flu-like symptoms, is around 1 or 2 percent. Elderly adults have a considerably higher risk of both becoming infected and dying, as do people with compromised immune systems. The estimates might change as new data arrive, but the range of 1 to 2 percent for fatalities among the symptomatic seems to be the consensus for now. The overall fatality rate for people infected with Covid-19 will be lower — possibly much lower — when we know how many people are infected but asymptomatic.]
Even the fact that the paper only had 4 authors seemed strange. With 96,000 study subjects from around the world, the study should have had at least half a page of acknowledgments and gratitude to collaborators around the world.
Yet hour by hour, something worse is being found out. Surgisphere, which claims to have carried out the work of gathering the charts and digitalizing their data, appears to have been legally liquidated (compulsory administrative liquidation’ is the legal term) in Sept 2015, as proven by the ff document:
Surgisphere was created on March 1, 2007, by Dr. Sapan Desai, who is listed as one of the four authors of the Lancet study. The enterprise was supposed to specialize in ‘big data’ and the use of artfiicial intelligence in the analysis of data. Another corporation under Desai’s name, Surgisphere Corporation, was established on June 28, 20112 then dissolved in Jan 2016. It appears that corporations with the same name have been created and cancelled in various states for lack of accountability.
As for Desai, he has no other scientific publication to his name except a few plagiarisms and has been dismissed by one patient as “More a businessman than a doctor – very bad experience”. In short, a crook.
What to say about the first author of the Lancet study? Mandeep R. Mehra is a specialist in vascular surgery. Being a professor at Harvard Medical School, his name gave some ‘luster’ to the Lancet study. Interviewed by France Soir, Mehra confirmed ‘the extreme danger posed by hydroxychloroquine toCOvid-19 patients, and claimed to have started active data collection of the use of HCG in the treatment of COViD-19 since December 2019”. [1) COVid-19 was not formally identified till February 11, 2020. 2) HCQ to treat Covid-19 obviously started later than that.] So it appears that he, too, is dishonest.]
twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD/status/1267114163542818822
The study itself is riddled with falsifications. The Guardian has published a story on the Lancet article that the rest of the media appeared to ignore.
[The Guardian reported on June 2:
WHO resumed use of HCQ after The Lancet, which published a study based on data provided by Surgisphere, declared that it was reviewing the data and methods of the study which had come in for criticism by a large number of experts.
“We are issuing an Expression of Concern to alert readers to the fact that serious scientific questions have been brought to our attention. We will update this notice as soon as we have further information,” said a statement issued by The Lancet on Wednesday…
At a press conference on Wednesday, June 3, the WHO announced it would resume its global trial of hydroxychloroquine, after its data safety monitoring committee found there was no increased risk of death for Covid patients taking it.]
But doubts on the credibility of the Lancet study have been expressed even by the New York Times, considering that the scandal would soon be international despite the efforts of the mainstream media to ignore it. Lancetgate, in effect.
There is now concrete suspicion that the authors were paid by some entity to organize this falsehood. And that even Lancet was paid to publish the study. Must have been really big bucks, if the journal was willing to put all its prestige in play with this fraud.
But the questions should not stop here. Based on the Lancet article and its false alarms, our own Minister of Health (Italy’s) immediately banned the use by hospitals of HCQ to treat Covid-19. Was he too paid off? One almost wishes this were so, because if he did that on his own, he would confirm himself as an ignoramus, a zombie robotically obedient to the World Health Organization in an enormous falsehood. [In fairness to WHO, despite its corrupt China-manipulated leadership, it did promptly resume its HCG testing after the Lancet disclaimer.]
He has thereby made himself complicit in the enormous hoax about the entire Coronavirus pandemic, of the mediatic terrorism that has been deliberately carried out supranationally, of the lockdown and virtual house arrest of entire populations, for the purpose of forcing them to invoke obligatory vaccination so that they can be free to return to work – if they still have work to return to in the economy which the Coronavirus fraud has devastated.
“Now, Covid-19 from the medical point of view, no longer exists,” says Dr Alberto Zangrillo, the chief of San Raffaele hospital in Milan, where he is director of intensive care. “Samples tested in the past 10 days have a viral load that is absolutely infinitesimal compared to that found in patients 1-2 months ago. We cannot continue calling attention to the words of non-clinicians, no matter how ridiculous, who are not genuine virologists but who are selfstyled professors. Clinically, the virus no longer exists”.
Still to be known is whether self-administration of HCG as a preventive measure by millions of doctors, nurses and hospital workers who were exposed to contagion daily, helped to neutralize the virus – which would have passed through them without being able to multiply – so that COVID-19 cases would disappear before a vaccine can be developed that authorities threaten to impose universally.
Lancet's article could be the crude, clumsy and belated attempt to ward off this outcome by the international criminal organization organizing the pandemic. At this point, Dr. Zangrillo's other observation becomes crucial: "Terrorizing the country is something for which someone must take responsibility.”
But who pays for all this? The world economy has been stalled by the virus-terror whipped up by the WHO and the media, by the "scientific committees" that have led governments to order the lockdown even of the healthy population (young people capable of working, among whom Covid-19 has been shown not to cause serious illness) instead of isolating the truly endangered minority – those older than 70 who have other serious ailments? Who pays for the irresponsible damage to the economy? And to what extent has it been conscious and deliberate?
With the excuse of health protection, an unprecedented global therapeutic dictatorship was established, to be extended now with mandatory clinical tracking using digital tools. Who pays?
In the USA, some 40 million unemployed. In Italy, one or 2 million, with many firms forced to close permanently, the tourism industry devastated for years, chains of suicides, to which we must add those who died from major diseases because they could not be treated due to the singular focus of all health personnel on Covid-19. Who pays?
Who pays for the absurd sadistic prohibitions, the fines pitilessly imposed on harmless innocents, the inability of children to play outdoors, the despotic and arbitrary violations of our personal liberties, all in the name of a pseudo-pandemic?
Who pays for the charges, intimidations and censorship of journalists who denounced the fraud, by the notorious Monitoring Center on Disinformation on Coronavirus?
This has been an enormous supranational/international fraud with national complicities and all the ramifications thereof, from governments to the media to the ‘scientists’, that has destroyed millions of lives. The European Commission has been working since 2018 to require a certificate of vaccination for all Europeans against whatever disease they may decree.
Recently, a whole series of Italian politicians lined up to advocate obligatory mass vaccination. To what end? So that citizens will be required to get a vaccination certificate in order to be able to go on with normal life? We can see the local executors of such a mandate on TV. Who is ordering them? Who are those who engineered this criminal enterprise of a pseudo-pandemic and its devastating consequences?
They have committed a crime without historical precedent, assisted by thousands of persons in authority who have played along with them. Is there anyone who will charge them with the crime? Not in Italy, where we no longer have a magistrature, but rather a ‘palamara' [referring to a noted Italian judges indicted last year for widespread corruption (money for magistrature favors), which led to the revelation that several more of Italy’s leading judges were just as corrupt].
We put our [weak] hopes in the USA or the UK.
For someone who has worked in the medical field for the past 30 years, it was with great shock that I learned of Lancet’s published study on HCQ and Covid-19 (also published by the equally prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in the USA), following the patently false alarm caused in the USA by a report on 358 elderly Covid-19 patients (median age 65, majority black), 60% with serious co-morbidities, treated at the Veterans Hospital from March 9-April 11, 2020.
The report concluded that “the study found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone.”
• Doctors and epidemiologists who know how to read reports like these properly have pointed out a lot of procedural deficiencies in the study, chief being the selection bias that patients treated with HCG +/- azithromycin were inherently more seriously ill than those who did not receive those drugs as treatment, and that for the most part, they were treated at the point where they needed ventilation, which is an advanced stage of the disease.
• The ‘Results’ summary of the report says rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively, but it conveniently omits these numbers in the Conclusion Summary, perhaps because it is clearly an apples-and-oranges comparison.
• Significantly, one of the authors of the Veterans Hospital report is someone who has received several grants from Gilead Pharmaceutical, the company behind the recently hyped remdesivir- a clear would-be competitor against HCQ.
• And it may be a technicality, but the paper is clearly labeled by the publisher as a pre-print which it defines as a “preliminary report of work that has not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.”
Which of course, the mainstream media in the USA, led by CNN and MSNBC, completely ignored, rushing to claim that the study supported their frank and total dismissal from the very start of the possibilities of HCQ to treat Covid-19, perhaps just because Donald Trump cited the favorable outcomes found in France, for example.
6/4/2020
Sorry I missed the really BIG story about Covid-19 yesterday, for the simple reason that none of the mainstream US media, and not even Fox News, even mentioned it at all - and yet it is a major piece of investigative reporting by the Associated Press, the premier news syndicate in the world. I first became aware of it this morning through the AsiaNews story that follows. (I will post the full AP story after that):
Recordings and emails show that
WHO and Xi Jinping lied about Covid-19
by Wang Zhicheng
June 3, 2020
Beijing (AsiaNews) – The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Chinese government, most notably WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Chinese president Xi Jinping, have lied to the international community:
According to the Associated Press (AP), backed by WHO recordings and emails, China did not share crucial information about the virus and its spread, whilst the WHO, aware of China’s silence, failed to voice its concern and instead praised Beijing for its response to the pandemic.
Wuhan doctors Li Wenliang and Ai Fen had already exposed delays. Medical authorities in Taiwan has also reported delays in making public human-to-human transmission of the virus.
AP noted first and foremost that China’s health authorities had sat for weeks on the virus’s genetic map or genome. Strict controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were largely to blame.
AP also found that Chinese health officials only released the genome after a Chinese lab published it ahead of authorities on a virology website on 11 January. Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more at a time when the virus was spreading around the world.
According to a study by the University of Southampton, cited by Cardinal Charles Bo of Myangmar in an angry statement against the Chinese Communist Party, "if China had acted responsibly one, two or three weeks earlier, the number of people infected with the virus would have been 66%, 86% and 95% lower respectively."
At the WHO Assembly last month, Xi Jinping defended himself and his country by claiming that they had “acted with openness, transparency and responsibility” and “provided information to WHO and relevant countries in a most timely fashion”.
AP’s revelations come at a time of a power struggle between the UN agency and US President Donald Trump who decided to cut funding for the agency (US$400 million) accusing it of being too closely aligned with China.
According to WHO officials, cited by AP, the UN agency tried to woo Beijing in order to get it to release all the data it had. This happened, but perhaps too late.
China delayed releasing coronavirus info,
frustrating WHO,which nonetheless publicly
praised China for its pandemic 'response'
June 3, 2020
Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus “immediately,” and said its work and commitment to transparency were “very impressive, and beyond words.”
But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found.
Despite the plaudits, China in fact sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. Tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents.
Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11. Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more on providing WHO with detailed data on patients and cases, according to recordings of internal meetings held by the U.N. health agency through January — all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed.
WHO officials were lauding China in public because they wanted to coax more information out of the government, the recordings obtained by the AP suggest. Privately, they complained in meetings the week of Jan. 6 that China was not sharing enough data to assess how effectively the virus spread between people or what risk it posed to the rest of the world, costing valuable time.
“We’re going on very minimal information,” said American epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, now WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, in one internal meeting. “It’s clearly not enough for you to do proper planning.”
“We’re currently at the stage where yes, they’re giving it to us 15 minutes before it appears on CCTV,” said WHO’s top official in China, Dr. Gauden Galea, referring to the state-owned China Central Television, in another meeting.
The story behind the early response to the virus comes at a time when the U.N. health agency is under siege, and has agreed to an independent probe of how the pandemic was handled globally. After repeatedly praising the Chinese response early on, U.S. President Donald Trump has blasted WHO in recent weeks for allegedly colluding with China to hide the extent of the coronavirus crisis. He cut ties with the organization on Friday, jeopardizing the approximately $450 million the U.S. gives every year as WHO’s biggest single donor.
In the meantime, Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to pitch in $2 billion over the next two years to fight the coronavirus, saying China has always provided information to WHO and the world “in a most timely fashion.”
The new information does not support the narrative of either the U.S. or China, but instead portrays an agency now stuck in the middle that was urgently trying to solicit more data despite limited authority. Although international law obliges countries to report information to WHO that could have an impact on public health, the U.N. agency has no enforcement powers and cannot independently investigate epidemics within countries. Instead, it must rely on the cooperation of member states.
The recordings suggest that rather than colluding with China, as Trump declared, WHO was itself kept in the dark as China gave it the minimal information required by law. However, the agency did try to portray China in the best light, likely as a means to secure more information. And WHO experts genuinely thought Chinese scientists had done “a very good job” in detecting and decoding the virus, despite the lack of transparency from Chinese officials.
WHO staffers debated how to press China for gene sequences and detailed patient data without angering authorities, worried about losing access and getting Chinese scientists into trouble. Under international law, WHO is required to quickly share information and alerts with member countries about an evolving crisis. Galea noted WHO could not indulge China’s wish to sign off on information before telling other countries because “that is not respectful of our responsibilities.”
In the second week of January, WHO’s chief of emergencies, Dr. Michael Ryan, told colleagues it was time to “shift gears” and apply more pressure on China, fearing a repeat of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that started in China in 2002 and killed nearly 800 people worldwide.
“This is exactly the same scenario, endlessly trying to get updates from China about what was going on,” he said. “WHO barely got out of that one with its neck intact given the issues that arose around transparency in southern China.”
Ryan said the best way to “protect China” from possible action by other countries was for WHO to do its own independent analysis with data from the Chinese government on whether the virus could easily spread between people. Ryan also noted that China was not cooperating in the same way some other countries had in the past.
“This would not happen in Congo and did not happen in Congo and other places,” he said, probably referring to the Ebola outbreak that began there in 2018. “We need to see the data…..It’s absolutely important at this point.”
The delay in the release of the genome stalled the recognition of its spread to other countries, along with the global development of tests, drugs and vaccines. The lack of detailed patient data also made it harder to determine how quickly the virus was spreading — a critical question in stopping it.
Between the day the full genome was first decoded by a government lab on Jan. 2 and the day WHO declared a global emergency on Jan. 30, the outbreak spread by a factor of 100 to 200 times, according to retrospective infection data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus has now infected over 6 million people worldwide and killed more than 375,000.
“It’s obvious that we could have saved more lives and avoided many, many deaths if China and the WHO had acted faster,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
However, Mokdad and other experts also noted that if WHO had been more confrontational with China, it could have triggered a far worse situation of not getting any information at all.
If WHO had pushed too hard, it could even have been kicked out of China, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, a global health professor at the University of Sydney. But he added that a delay of just a few days in releasing genetic sequences can be critical in an outbreak. And he noted that as Beijing’s lack of transparency becomes even clearer, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s continued defense of China is problematic.
“It’s definitely damaged WHO’s credibility,” said Kamradt-Scott. “Did he go too far? I think the evidence on that is clear….it has led to so many questions about the relationship between China and WHO. It is perhaps a cautionary tale.”
WHO and its officials named in this story declined to answer questions asked by The Associated Press without audio or written transcripts of the recorded meetings, which the AP was unable to supply to protect its sources.
“Our leadership and staff have worked night and day in compliance with the organization’s rules and regulations to support and share information with all Member States equally, and engage in frank and forthright conversations with governments at all levels,” a WHO statement said.
China’s National Health Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no comment. But in the past few months, China has repeatedly defended its actions, and many other countries — including the U.S. — have responded to the virus with even longer delays of weeks and even months. [????]
“Since the beginning of the outbreak, we have been continuously sharing information on the epidemic with the WHO and the international community in an open, transparent and responsible manner,” said Liu Mingzhu, an official with the National Health Commission’s International Department, at a press conference on May 15.
The race to find the genetic map of the virus started in late December, according to the story that unfolds in interviews, documents and the WHO recordings. That’s when doctors in Wuhan noticed mysterious clusters of patients with fevers and breathing problems who weren’t improving with standard flu treatment. Seeking answers, they sent test samples from patients to commercial labs.
By Dec. 27, one lab, Vision Medicals, had pieced together most of the genome of a new coronavirus with striking similarities to SARS. Vision Medicals shared its data with Wuhan officials and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, as reported first by Chinese finance publication Caixin and independently confirmed by the AP.
On Dec. 30, Wuhan health officials issued internal notices warning of the unusual pneumonia, which leaked on social media. That evening, Shi Zhengli, a coronavirus expert at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who is famous for having traced the SARS virus to a bat cave, was alerted to the new disease, according to an interview with Scientific American. Shi took the first train from a conference in Shanghai back to Wuhan.
The next day, Chinese CDC director Gao Fu dispatched a team of experts to Wuhan. Also on Dec. 31, WHO first learned about the cases from an open-source platform that scouts for intelligence on outbreaks, emergencies chief Ryan has said.
WHO officially requested more information on Jan. 1. Under international law, members have 24 to 48 hours to respond, and China reported two days later that there were 44 cases and no deaths.
By Jan. 2, Shi had decoded the entire genome of the virus, according to a notice later posted on her institute’s website.
Scientists agree that Chinese scientists detected and sequenced the then-unknown pathogen with astonishing speed, in a testimony to China’s vastly improved technical capabilities since SARS, during which a WHO-led group of scientists took months to identify the virus. This time, Chinese virologists proved within days that it was a never-before-seen coronavirus. Tedros would later say Beijing set “a new standard for outbreak response.”
But when it came to sharing the information with the world, things began to go awry.
On Jan. 3, the National Health Commission issued a confidential notice ordering labs with the virus to either destroy their samples or send them to designated institutes for safekeeping. The notice, first reported by Caixin and seen by the AP, forbade labs from publishing about the virus without government authorization. The order barred Shi’s lab from publishing the genetic sequence or warning of the potential danger.
Chinese law states that research institutes cannot conduct experiments on potentially dangerous new viruses without approval from top health authorities. Although the law is intended to keep experiments safe, it gives top health officials wide-ranging powers over what lower-level labs can or cannot do.
“If the virologist community had operated with more autonomy….the public would have been informed of the lethal risk of the new virus much earlier,” said Edward Gu, a professor at Zhejiang University, and Li Lantian, a PhD student at Northwestern University, in a paper published in March analyzing the outbreak.
Commission officials later repeated that they were trying to ensure lab safety, and had tasked four separate government labs with identifying the genome at the same time to get accurate, consistent results.
By Jan. 3, the Chinese CDC had independently sequenced the virus, according to internal data seen by the Associated Press. And by just after midnight on Jan. 5, a third designated government lab, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, had decoded the sequence and submitted a report — pulling all-nighters to get results in record time, according to a state media interview.
Yet even with full sequences decoded by three state labs independently, Chinese health officials remained silent. The WHO reported on Twitter that investigations were under way into an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases with no deaths in Wuhan, and said it would share “more details as we have them.”
Meanwhile, at the Chinese CDC, gaps in coronavirus expertise proved a problem.
For nearly two weeks, Wuhan reported no new infections, as officials censored doctors who warned of suspicious cases. Meanwhile, researchers found the new coronavirus used a distinct spike protein to bind itself to human cells. The unusual protein and the lack of new cases lulled some Chinese CDC researchers into thinking the virus didn’t easily spread between humans — like the coronavirus that cusues Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, according to an employee who declined to be identified out of fear of retribution.
Li Yize, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said he immediately suspected the pathogen was infectious when he spotted a leaked copy of a sequencing report in a group chat on a SARS-like coronavirus. But the Chinese CDC team working on the genetic sequence lacked molecular specialists and failed to consult with outside scientists, Li said. Chinese health authorities rebuffed offers of assistance from foreign experts, including Hong Kong scientists barred from a fact-finding mission to Wuhan and an American professor at a university in China.
On Jan. 5, the Shanghai Public Clinical Health Center, led by famed virologist Zhang Yongzhen, was the latest to sequence the virus. He submitted it to the GenBank database, where it sat awaiting review, and notified the National Health Commission. He warned them that the new virus was similar to SARS and likely infectious.
“It should be contagious through respiratory passages,” the center said in an internal notice seen by the AP. “We recommend taking preventative measures in public areas.”
On the same day, WHO said that based on preliminary information from China, there was no evidence of significant transmission between humans, and did not recommend any specific measures for travelers.
The next day, the Chinese CDC raised its emergency level to the second highest. Staffers proceeded to isolate the virus, draft lab testing guidelines, and design test kits. But the agency did not have the authority to issue public warnings, and the heightened emergency level was kept secret even from many of its own staff.
By Jan. 7, another team at Wuhan University had sequenced the pathogen and found it matched Shi’s, making Shi certain they had identified a novel coronavirus. But Chinese CDC experts said they didn’t trust Shi’s findings and needed to verify her data before she could publish, according to three people familiar with the matter. Both the National Health Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology, which oversees Shi’s lab, declined to make Shi available for an interview.
A major factor behind the gag order, some say, was that Chinese CDC researchers wanted to publish their papers first. “They wanted to take all the credit,” said Li, the coronavirus expert.
Internally, the leadership of the Chinese CDC is plagued with fierce competition, six people familiar with the system explained. They said the agency has long promoted staff based on how many papers they can publish in prestigious journals, making scientists reluctant to share data.
As the days went by, even some of the Chinese CDC’s own staff began to wonder why it was taking so long for authorities to identify the pathogen.
“We were getting suspicious, since within one or two days you would get a sequencing result,” a lab technician said, declining to be identified for fear of retribution.
On Jan. 8, the Wall Street Journal reported that scientists had identified a new coronavirus in samples from pneumonia patients in Wuhan, pre-empting and embarrassing Chinese officials. The lab technician told the AP they first learned about the discovery of the virus from the Journal.
The article also embarrassed WHO officials. Dr. Tom Grein, chief of WHO’s acute events management team, said the agency looked “doubly, incredibly stupid.” Van Kerkhove, the American expert, acknowledged WHO was “already late” in announcing the new virus and told colleagues that it was critical to push China.
Ryan, WHO’s chief of emergencies, was also upset at the dearth of information.
“The fact is, we’re two to three weeks into an event, we don’t have a laboratory diagnosis, we don’t have an age, sex or geographic distribution, we don’t have an epi curve,” he complained, referring to the standard graphic of outbreaks scientists use to show how an epidemic is progressing.
After the article, Chinese state media officially announced the discovery of the new coronavirus. But even then, Chinese health authorities did not release the genome, diagnostic tests, or detailed patient data that could hint at how infectious the disease was. By that time, suspicious cases were already appearing across the region.
On Jan. 8, Thai airport officers pulled aside a woman from Wuhan with a runny nose, sore throat, and high temperature. Chulalongkorn University professor Supaporn Wacharapluesadee’s team found the woman was infected with a new coronavirus, much like what Chinese officials had described. Supaporn partially figured out the genetic sequence by Jan. 9, reported it to the Thai government and spent the next day searching for matching sequences.
But because Chinese authorities hadn’t published any sequences, she found nothing. She could not prove the Thai virus was the same one sickening people in Wuhan.
“It was kind of wait and see, when China will release the data, then we can compare,” said Supaporn.
On Jan. 9, a 61-year-old man with the virus passed away in Wuhan — the first known death. The death wasn’t made public until Jan. 11.
WHO officials complained in internal meetings that they were making repeated requests for more data, especially to find out if the virus could spread efficiently between humans, but to no avail.
“We have informally and formally been requesting more epidemiological information,” WHO’s China representative Galea said. “But when asked for specifics, we could get nothing.”
Emergencies chief Ryan grumbled that since China was providing the minimal information required by international law, there was little WHO could do. But he also noted that last September, WHO had issued an unusual public rebuke of Tanzania for not providing enough details about a worrisome Ebola outbreak.
“We have to be consistent,” Ryan said. “The danger now is that despite our good intent...especially if something does happen, there will be a lot of finger-pointing at WHO.”
Ryan noted that China could make a “huge contribution” to the world by sharing the genetic material immediately, because otherwise “other countries will have to reinvent the wheel over the coming days.”
On Jan. 11, a team led by Zhang, from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, finally published a sequence on virological.org, used by researchers to swap tips on pathogens. The move angered Chinese CDC officials, three people familiar with the matter said, and the next day, his laboratory was temporarily shuttered by health authorities.
Zhang referred a request for comment to the Chinese CDC. The National Health Commission, which oversees the Chinese CDC, declined multiple times to make its officials available for interviews and did not answer questions about Zhang.
Supaporn compared her sequence with Zhang’s and found it was a 100% match, confirming that the Thai patient was ill with the same virus detected in Wuhan. Another Thai lab got the same results. That day, Thailand informed the WHO, said Tanarak Plipat, deputy director-general of the Department of Disease Control at Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health.
After Zhang released the genome, the Chinese CDC, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences raced to publish their sequences, working overnight to review them, gather patient data, and send them to the National Health Commission for approval, according to documentation obtained by the AP. On Jan. 12, the three labs together finally published the sequences on GISAID, a platform for scientists to share genomic data.
By then, more than two weeks had passed since Vision Medicals decoded a partial sequence, and more than a week since the three government labs had all obtained full sequences. Around 600 people were infected in that week, a roughly three-fold increase.
Some scientists say the wait was not unreasonable considering the difficulties in sequencing unknown pathogens, given accuracy is as important as speed. They point to the SARS outbreak in 2003 when some Chinese scientists initially — and wrongly — believed the source of the epidemic was chlamydia.
“The pressure is intense in an outbreak to make sure you’re right,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealthAlliance in New York. “It’s actually worse to go out to go to the public with a story that’s wrong because the public completely lose confidence in the public health response.”
Still, others quietly question what happened behind the scenes.
Infectious diseases expert John Mackenzie, who served on a WHO emergency committee during the outbreak, praised the speed of Chinese researchers in sequencing the virus. But he said once central authorities got involved, detailed data trickled to a crawl.
“There certainly was a kind of blank period,” Mackenzie said. “There had to be human to human transmission. You know, it’s staring at you in the face… I would have thought they would have been much more open at that stage.”
On Jan. 13, WHO announced that Thailand had a confirmed case of the virus, jolting Chinese officials.
The next day, in a confidential teleconference, China’s top health official ordered the country to prepare for a pandemic, calling the outbreak the “most severe challenge since SARS in 2003”, as the AP previously reported. Chinese CDC staff across the country began screening, isolating, and testing for cases, turning up hundreds across the country.
Yet even as the Chinese CDC internally declared a level one emergency, the highest level possible, Chinese officials still said the chance of sustained transmission between humans was low.
WHO went back and forth. Van Kerkhove said in a press briefing that “it is certainly possible there is limited human-to-human transmission.” But hours later, WHO seemed to backtrack, and tweeted that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” – a statement that later became fodder for critics.
A high-ranking official in WHO’s Asia office, Dr. Liu Yunguo, who attended medical school in Wuhan, flew to Beijing to make direct, informal contacts with Chinese officials, recordings show. Liu’s former classmate, a Wuhan doctor, had alerted him that pneumonia patients were flooding the city’s hospitals, and Liu pushed for more experts to visit Wuhan, according to a public health expert familiar with the matter.
On Jan. 20, the leader of an expert team returning from Wuhan, renowned government infectious diseases doctor Zhong Nanshan, declared publicly for the first time that the new virus was spreading between people. Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the “timely publication of epidemic information and deepening of international cooperation.”
Despite that directive, WHO staff still struggled to obtain enough detailed patient data from China about the rapidly evolving outbreak. That same day, the U.N. health agency dispatched a small team to Wuhan for two days, including Galea, the WHO representative in China.
They were told about a worrying cluster of cases among more than a dozen doctors and nurses. But they did not have “transmission trees” detailing how the cases were connected, nor a full understanding of how widely the virus was spreading and who was at risk.
In an internal meeting, Galea said their Chinese counterparts were “talking openly and consistently” about human-to-human transmission, and that there was a debate about whether or not this was sustained. Galea reported to colleagues in Geneva and Manila that China’s key request to WHO was for help “in communicating this to the public, without causing panic.”
On Jan. 22, WHO convened an independent committee to determine whether to declare a global health emergency. After two inconclusive meetings where experts were split, they decided against it — even as Chinese officials ordered Wuhan sealed in the biggest quarantine in history. The next day, WHO chief Tedros publicly described the spread of the new coronavirus in China as “limited".
For days, China didn’t release much detailed data, even as its case count exploded. Beijing city officials were alarmed enough to consider locking down the capital, according to a medical expert with direct knowledge of the matter.
On Jan. 28, Tedros and top experts, including Ryan, made an extraordinary trip to Beijing to meet President Xi and other senior Chinese officials. It is highly unusual for WHO’s director-general to directly intervene in the practicalities of outbreak investigations. Tedros’s staffers had prepared a list of requests for information.
“It could all happen and the floodgates open, or there’s no communication,” Grein said in an internal meeting while his boss was in Beijing. “We’ll see.”
At the end of Tedross’ trip, WHO announced China had agreed to accept an international team of experts. In a press briefing on Jan. 29, Tedros heaped praise on China, calling its level of commitment “incredible.”
The next day, WHO finally declared an international health emergency. Once again, Tedros thanked China, saying nothing about the earlier lack of cooperation.
“We should have actually expressed our respect and gratitude to China for what it’s doing,” Tedros said. “It has already done incredible things to limit the transmission of the virus to other countries.”
The story speaks for itself and confirms the US government's accusation laying the blame on China for the unnecessary spread worldwide of what was originally a local epidemic in Wuhan in the almost six weeks before WHO obtained the necessary data to finally declare a Coronavirus pandemic on March 11, a little over 2 months since scientists in China and elsewhere had sequenced the genome for Covid-19. Donald Trump was partially wrong, it turns out, by laying the blame equally on the WHO, because apparently its officials tried unsuccessfully for weeks to get the necessary information out of China upon which WHO could issue the right warnings. But WHO's director-general, a known protege of China who owed his WHO appointment to China, proved complicit with China in publicly praising their 'incredible commitment' to the cause of world health up to January 29 despite knowing that for weeks, China had refused to provide WHO with the necessary information it needed. If Tedros had any decency at all, he would have resigned immediately when Trump made the final decision to stop US funding of WHO, because the fundamental reform WHO needs to merit that funding and the trust of the world community is for the agency not to be beholden to any single country and accept its 'convenient' lack of cooperation because that country chooses to 'protect' its reputation and national interest at the expense of the rest of the world.
It remains to be seen whether and how the rest of the world can somehow make China compensate for all the lives lost, the disrupted lives and economies left in the wake of the pandemic.
Any monetary figure, no matter how high, would simply be mere token compensation for the global devastation China has caused. As ridiculously token as the $2 billion it has pledged to WHO to fight the pandemic that China alone caused.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/06/2020 18:20] |