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China launches a Cold War. Coronavirus disinformation is just the start.

China is enraged that the West is publicising the origin of Covid-19, that it is describing their wildlife markets as disgusting and dirty, that it is saying that Covid-19 was a laboratory escape and is accusing China of deliberately delaying the WHO by declaring that Covid-19 was not transmitted between humans.

What has China done to contradict this litany of accusations?

China has forced the withdrawal of two important scientific papers, the first is a first hand account in early February of poor biosafety at the Wuhan virology labs with the strong implication that COVID-19 was a lab escape. See The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. This was written by a group based in China.  The second paper that was withdrawn covered the presence of HIV inserts in the coronavirus: Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag.  The presence of the inserts has subsequently been confirmed and led the discoverer of HIV, Professor Luc Montagnier, to declare that the virus could only have been created in the laboratory. The inserts were subsequently confirmed by a Chinese group.  China has been flexing its economic muscles with academic publishers. See Guardian and Nature.

A report by the "Five Eyes" Intelligence group was leaked to the Australian Sunday Telegraph. The dossier states that "to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine."

It goes on to say:

"On December 31, Chinese authorities started censoring news of the virus from search engines, deleting terms including “SARS variation, “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.” [The Great Firewall of China means the Chinese cannot access Western news].

On January 1 without any investigation into where the virus originated from, the Wuhan seafood market was closed and disinfected. It has been reported in the New York Times that individual animals and cages were not swabbed [ie: samples were not taken] “eliminating evidence of what animal might have been the source of the coronavirus and which people had become infected but survived”. 

The Hubei health commission ordered genomics companies to stop testing for the new virus and to destroy all samples. A day later, on January 3, China’s leading health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered Wuhan pneumonia samples be moved to designated testing facilities or destroyed, while instructing a no-publication order related to the unknown disease.

Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”

..“Despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December, PRC authorities deny it until January 20,”. “The World Health Organisation does the same. Yet officials in Taiwan raised concerns as early as December 31, as did experts in Hong Kong on January 4.”

The paper exposes the hypocrisy of China’s self-­imposed travel bans while condemning those of Australia and the United States, declaring: “Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23.” “Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.” 

“As Australia calls for an independent inquiry into the pandemic, PRC threatens to cut off trade with Australia. PRC has likewise responded furiously to US calls for transparency.”

The dossier also noted that the EU had come under pressure from China  According to Reuters the EU produced a report that referred to China's involvement in Covid disinformation and in response China told the EU that “if the report is as described and it is released today it will be very bad for cooperation,” and it would make Beijing “very angry”.  The EU reacted to this by removing much of the content that irritated China.  The online magazine Politico has seen the original report and recorded that the report said “China has continued to run a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image. Both overt and covert tactics have been observed,” and Politico also noted that "Chinese criticism of France's reaction to the pandemic was erased" from the final report. (The French tend to the belief that Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan).

The final EU report is still damning towards China. Here is the section that describes Chinese actions:

"There is also significant evidence of covert Chinese operations on social media. ProPublica uncovered a network on Twitter involved in a coordinated influence campaign with ties to the Chinese government[xiii]. The Daily Telegraph found Chinese state media circumventing social media platforms’ political ad rules and buying advertising that praised China’s handling of the COVID-19/Coronavirus crisis and attacked the US[xiv]. According to the Daily Telegraph, “the ads are part of a worldwide propaganda campaign, coordinated across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and traditional media, attempting to depict China as a global leader in the fight against Covid-19 and drown out accusations that it made the crisis worse by trying to cover up its own outbreak.”

Formiche has found a coordinated operation of Twitter bots in Italy amplifying messages of the Chinese embassy and attacking the EU[xv]. Thousands of tweets with pro-China hashtags published in a two-week period in March came from bots.

China has even demanded that EU reports be amended to purge the mention of COVID-19 originating in China.  The EU acquiesced.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has found in their analysis of COVID-19 /Coronavirus disinformation[xvi] that “elements of China’s diplomatic and state media messaging continue to demonstrate disinformation tactics more familiar to coordinated and persistent Russian state-sponsored disinformation. Chinese state efforts to contest the information domain are supported by coordinated, although not necessarily inauthentic, pro-China patriotic trolling”."

China seems to have persuaded Twitter to eject users who spread "conspiracy theories" about COVID-19 being a lab escape and possibly an economic bioweapon - see Twitter bans Zero-Hedge.

There is clear evidence of pressure being brought to bear by China in the UK. The heavy suppression by the BBC and UK broadcasters of any mention that the virus was probably a lab escape or that China persuaded the WHO to issue a report saying that human to human transmission does not occur with Covid-19 and that it was safe to travel to Wuhan is very suggestive of interference by China.

We should be deeply concerned about the threat from China and the West should be seriously considering the security implications of continued trade and openness to Chinese interference.  We must not forget that China has become a National Socialist State (NAZI) and poses a huge threat to the globe.

27/4/2020

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