China’s and the Wuhan Virus - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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I came across an excellent article in Atlantic (no fan of Trump) detailing China’s attempt to hide its culpability in the catastrophe the world has suffered:

How China Is Planning to Win Back the World

    It was posed as an innocent question, not an accusation. If the U.S. was so concerned about transparency, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying wondered aloud to nearly half a million followers on Twitter earlier this month, why not open its own biodefense lab in Maryland’s Fort Detrick to international inspectors?

    Hua’s tweet was also an invitation to a conspiracy theory, and a message that, if President Donald Trump was determined to speculate about the virus first appearing in a Chinese lab—a notion that scientists have dismissed and that allied intelligence agencies find “highly unlikely”—then China was going to give as good as it got. Beijing does not accept that the virus originated in China at all, insisting that just because the country first reported the virus, and traced many of the first cases to an outdoor market in Wuhan, doesn’t mean it came from there. What if, Hua intimated without quite saying, it came from a U.S. lab instead?

    After that May 8 tweet, Chinese state media outlets picked up the question and started pushing it in multiple languages: Spanish and Arabic as well as English. On May 12, the state-run China Global Television Network offered a story on the Fort Detrick lab’s “purely freakish history,” including the very real CIA experiments on humans that began there in the 1950s. The hawkish Communist Party newspaper Global Times ran a piece on May 14 declaring, “The US can't just claim all reasonable inquiries to its bio-labs as ‘conspiracy theories.’” This followed the paper’s earlier speculation, citing a mysterious anonymous petition on the White House website, that the base may have been the source of a virus leak.

    The party has never waged a global struggle quite like this one—and its battle with the U.S. over where the virus came from and whose failures made the pandemic worse have marked a serious deterioration in the two countries’ ties. Just months ago, Trump was praising Xi Jinping for how he handled the outbreak; now Trump is toying with cutting off relations with the Chinese government altogether.

    Seven decades ago, Mao Zedong publicly embraced a benevolent view of propaganda, as if he were a latter-day prophet spreading the communist gospel: “We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory,” he mused in 1945. Just a few months ago, Xi Jinping urged state journalists to spread “positive propaganda” for the “correct guidance of public opinion.” Indeed, Beijing’s global propaganda efforts in recent years have been more about promoting China’s virtues than about spreading acrimony and confusion, à la Russian information ops and election meddling. Moscow wants a weakened and divided West, one that leaves Russia free to dominate its self-appointed sphere of influence—but Russia in 2016 was also an economically sluggish, oil-dependent nation with an economy a tenth the size of America’s, and lacked the resources to remake the world in its image.

    Beijing has a much bigger prize in mind and a much longer-term plan to get it: The contest isn’t about who gets to run the U.S. It’s about who deserves to run the world. And China, with its economy poised to overtake that of the United States, has already plowed billions into crafting an image as a responsible global leader, and billions more into cultivating global dependence on Chinese investments and Chinese markets.

    “While the [Chinese Communist Party] has long sought to be a global influencer, their efforts today are aggressive and sophisticated,” Bill Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, wrote in an email. “In short, they’re looking to reshape the history of coronavirus and protect their reputation at home and around the world.”

    Before the coronavirus hit, the party was becoming bolder in its propaganda efforts overseas as China grew richer and more powerful, trying to promote around the world the orthodoxy it enforced at home, about the beneficence and goodness of the CCP. This involved publicizing Chinese investments in the developing world, arm-twisting diplomats to toe a pro-China line, ruthlessly trying to stifle even other countries’ freedom to dissent—to the point of sanctioning Norway in 2010 when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its peace prize to the imprisoned democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who died in 2017. Xi has elevated the role of propaganda even further as he has vowed to build China’s power and prosperity, declaring, “The superiority of our system will be fully demonstrated through a brighter future.”

    The coronavirus outbreak and the global outcry against China’s failures of transparency and containment were not part of the plan. They sparked an international backlash that, by Beijing’s reported reckoning, was worse than anything it had faced since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. So Beijing leaped to seize, or at least confuse, the global story of the virus and its cast of heroes and villains.

    This has involved unleashing techniques Russia perfected during the U.S. presidential election in 2016. “We’ve seen China adopt Russian-style social media manipulation tactics like using bots and trolls to amplify disinformation on COVID-19,” Lea Gabrielle, the special envoy and coordinator for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, wrote to me in an email. “Both countries repress information within their countries while taking advantage of the open and free information environments in democracies to push conspiracy theories that seek to undermine those environments.”

    As the world realized the virus was spreading out of control, Chinese diplomats, official media, and Twitter influencers launched an aggressive frenzy of defense, scrambling to preserve the Chinese Communist Party’s cratering reputation at home and overseas. And then they went on offense, with an assist from perhaps thousands of fake or hacked Twitter accounts, according to the investigative site ProPublica. The result was a coordinated campaign of attacks on the United States, and the spread of disinformation and confusion about where the virus really came from and whose screwup it was, really, that led to so much death.

    Other countries’ faltering responses to the virus have only bolstered this narrative, and the CCP has gleefully trumpeted America’s failures in particular. “Loose political system in the US allows more than 4000 people to die of pandemic every day,” Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of the Global Times newspaper, tweeted in April. “Americans are so good tempered.” Beyond the immediate crisis, this kind of narrative also serves the longer-term goal. In the words of Matt Schrader, a former China analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund: “Ultimately it’s about the [Chinese Communist Party] being the most powerful political entity on the planet.”

    The CCP has evolved in its themes and tactics over the course of the coronavirus information war so far, as it battles to bolster its own reputation and degrade that of the United States. The campaign has been widespread and highly focused at the same time. And the party has grown even more emboldened in the belief that it’s too big to fail, and that the reeling world may condemn it but still depends on it.

    Suppression and celebration

    Even more important than what the Chinese Communist Party says is what it doesn’t say. The party is such an aggressive suppressor of negative news that at one point government censors tried to block social-media references to Winnie the Pooh—because whimsical Chinese netizens had seized on the pudgy cartoon bear’s purported resemblance to Xi. The Central Propaganda Department distributes guidelines to media organizations and scrubs microblogging platforms for references to the widespread abuses of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang and to hopes for autonomy in Tibet.

    So “relatively open” online discussions of the virus in late January, according to a report by the Freedom House China analyst Sarah Cook, seemed almost out of character. “Professional journalists took advantage of the government’s slow response to publish reports on the early days of the outbreak and life under the dramatic lockdown of numerous cities in China.” The party’s flagship paper, the People’s Daily, however, had largely ignored the gathering virus up until that point, Cook notes; back then it was covering the U.S. House and Senate impeachment votes on Trump and the U.S. strike against the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. And China had already waged perhaps the most dangerous information-suppression campaign of the entire crisis—reprimanding doctors who tried to warn one another about the disease, blocking reports about sickened health-care workers, and ordering labs to destroy samples.

    The coronavirus killed one of those doctors, Li Wenliang, in early February, prompting an outpouring of grief and outrage on Chinese social media. What openness there had been was over. “Less than 90 minutes after his death on Friday morning, the hashtag ‘I want freedom of speech’ was trending on Weibo, a popular Chinese blogging site, with nearly 2 million posts,” wrote NPR’s Emily Feng and Amy Cheng. “The posts were gone by sunrise.”

    At the same time that Chinese authorities were pulling down criticism, they were pushing out praise for first responders. State media published stories about robots delivering food, factory employees giving up their holidays to make masks, a nurse shaving her head to speed up the process of putting on protective gear. The People’s Daily ran a love letter to the city of Wuhan, titled “Heroic City, Heroic People”: “Our hospitals have become the battlefield!,” reads a partial translation by the China Media Project. Of the medical workers who had rushed to Wuhan from around the country, it noted: ”In order to not impact the flow of their work, some doctors and nurses wore adult diapers … Their white outfits are war fatigues, and they are the most beautiful resisters, the most adorable people of the New Era!”

    Cook traces how the narrative began to shift into February, accruing credit to the Communist Party’s own actions and then, ultimately, turning attention to the rest of the world as the coronavirus slammed into other countries. Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, told me that the party’s line about other countries’ response was essentially: “They couldn’t handle it either.” The government version of events became that China had handled the outbreak well by comparison, and had a lot to teach the world about it. In March, the government dispatched aid to virus-ravaged Italy at a time when the European Union would not step in, and state-run papers published pictures of the team arriving along with quotes of gratitude from Italian officials.

    Before the month was out, Chinese state media was suggesting that the virus may have originated in Italy instead—an early effort to flood the world with confusion about where the virus came from.

    The counterpunch

    As the message was shifting, one tactic remained consistent: Pump up the seeming good news about the party and suppress the bad. In March came the expulsion of American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, which China’s Foreign Ministry characterized as a response to U.S. restrictions on Chinese media acting on behalf of a foreign government. (One senior State Department official told reporters, while announcing the new restrictions in February: “We think it’s altogether appropriate that we basically call these entities what they are, which are organs of the Chinese one-party state propaganda apparatus.”)

    By mid-April, diplomats and state media were focused on rising infection rates in the United States and the United Kingdom. Hua, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, pointed out on April 12 that the U.S. then led the world in infections and deaths, despite having been warned in early January about the situation in Wuhan. State broadcasters highlighted praise for China’s early response from the World Health Organization, right as Trump was swiping at the agency for its criticism of the U.S. and complaining that the organization seemed “to always err on the side of China.”

    The most aggressive trolling came in video form. The state-run news agency Xinhua’s “Once Upon a Virus” featured animated Legos—a set of responsible, masked Chinese ones trying to warn a recalcitrant Lego Statue of Liberty that people needed to take the virus seriously and wear masks. After dismissing the warnings, the Lego Liberty turns red with rage and ends up on an intravenous drip, whining, “Why didn’t you warn us?” The Chinese embassy in France tweeted the video, which racked up more than 15,000 retweets. Graham Brookie, the director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, wrote to me in an email that it was fair to say the tweet was "targeted towards the Western world,” and specifically Europe. Brookie noted that a small portion of the video’s Twitter spread was aided by accounts with Western-sounding names, such as “Emily Clark,” and “bot-like indicators”—ones that were recently created, or had handles involving a first name and a scramble of numbers, or lacked profile pictures, or whose sole tweet was the Lego video. “All retweeted the China Xinhua News' tweet with the same copy-and-pasted text,” he wrote.

    Another video put the narrative in even more explicit terms, presenting America as not merely hapless but in outright decline. The United States has now seen 100,000 deaths attributable to the virus, while China has claimed only about 5,000, though U.S. intelligence officials believe China is far underreporting its numbers. The state-owned China Global Television network pronounced the virus “Waterloo for America’s leadership,” as a British-accented announcer intoned, over shots of the Capitol building and homeless people gathered in a parking lot: “An increasing number of observers are beginning to see that the health emergency is signaling the end of the American century … There is growing evidence that Washington is tumbling to rock bottom over its coronavirus response.”

    The conspiracy

    Perhaps the most surprising new feature of China’s coronavirus propaganda effort has been the dabbling in Russian-style disinformation. Nowhere has this been clearer than in prominent government officials’ efforts to obscure the origins of the virus, floating the baseless theories that the U.S. Army might have brought the disease to Wuhan, or that maybe it started in Italy. Sometimes these weren’t so much pure “fake news” plants as they were the “people are saying” variety of misdirection that has become a hallmark of how Trump’s White House deals with criticism.

    Some of these types of attacks appeared to be experiments and have since faded. Gabrielle, the State Department special envoy, said at a press conference in March that Chinese officials in Africa briefly pushed a U.S.-origin theory of the virus, but then “abandoned that disinformation campaign” after receiving mostly negative online reactions. Elsewhere, Gabrielle wrote to me, Beijing backed off from directly attributing the virus to the U.S. “But we continue to see CCP propaganda like CGTN push content that suggests the U.S. is the origin of the virus. The [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] is still citing conspiracy websites in its messaging.”

    Hence the Fort Detrick tweets from the foreign ministry, which never directly say the U.S. bio lab cooked up the virus, but darkly hint that there may be something there to investigate.

    Economic coercion and diplomatic arm-twisting

    When all else fails—when hints on Twitter just don’t seem to cut it—Beijing can rely on its economic power to try to coerce kindness from foreign officials or stifle their criticism. This has two benefits relative to China’s domestic audience: Praise can be trumpeted as evidence that China is respected around the world, while criticism can be used to stoke nationalist defensiveness in the face of politicians seen as unfairly targeting China.

    When Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, China’s ambassador to Australia lashed out, pronouncing the Chinese public to be “frustrated, dismayed, and disappointed” and launching into some hypotheticals in the vein of nice trading relationship—would be a shame if anything happened to it. “The tourists,” said Ambassador Cheng Jingye in an interview with the Australian Financial Review, “may have second thoughts.” (More than 1 million people visit Australia from China every year, more tourists than visit from any other country.) “Maybe the parents of the students would also think whether this place, which they find is not so friendly, even hostile, is the best place to send their kids to … And also, maybe the ordinary people will think why they should drink Australian wine or eat Australian beef.” The implications for a country that relies on trade with China were hard to miss. Australia has continued to push for the inquiry.

    China then started restricting some Australian meat imports, imposed tariffs on barley, and, according to Bloomberg, is considering targeting wine and dairy.

    Beijing has even reportedly pressured foreign officials not to criticize its own use of disinformation. The Financial Times reported that Chinese officials complained to the European Union three times right before the bloc released a report on disinformation in the pandemic—and the published report removed a sentence in an earlier draft saying that China was running a “global disinformation campaign to deflect blame.” The EU’s top diplomat denied having bowed to any pressure, but one EU disinformation analyst aware of the changes accused EU diplomats of “self-censoring to appease the Chinese Communist Party.” It’s unclear what specific threats, if any, Chinese officials made, though China and the European Union are among each other’s largest trading partners.

    But the biggest battle is between the United States and China, particularly as the U.S. struggles to stabilize its death toll and has appeared disinterested in leading a global response—for example sitting out an EU-led fundraising conference for a vaccine to which China sent a low-level representative. China has made ostentatious pledges of cash to the WHO as the U.S. has paused its funding, and Beijing has vowed to offer any vaccine discoveries from Chinese scientists as a global public good.

    In Washington, officials and lawmakers are demanding some unspecified form of accountability from China and concocting ways to pull some manufacturing back to the United States, while demanding investigations into the virus’s origins. Chinese state media outlets characterize Trump’s blaming China as a deflection of responsibility for his own government’s failures—but just because it’s propaganda doesn’t mean it’s false. “What I see is a race to the bottom with China,” Susan Shirk, the chair of the 21st-Century China Center at UC San Diego, told me. “The cost of this is more people are going to die. More people are going to die because the two biggest economies in the world are not going to put their disputes aside to get the world to work together to confront this pandemic.”

    The longer-term implications stretch far beyond the immediate crisis, however. When it’s all over, China will have gained experience pushing its propaganda overseas at a volume and intensity it never had before. The CCP has succeeded at home, through rigorous information management, in controlling what Schrader, the former German Marshall Fund scholar, calls the “means of perception.” And the party is having some success extending those tools beyond its borders. “Controlling the means of perception is fundamental to power,” Schrader said. And the better China’s propaganda works, the more power it will have to shape the rest of the world.
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And here’s an AP report on the CCP’s foot-dragging getting information to the WHO, and the frustration of the WHO’s people even while Trevos was publicly praising the CCP’s response. Very informative, despite its odd declaration that it doesn’t support Trump’s narrative when it actually confirms it.

China delayed releasing coronavirus info, frustrating WHO

    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 casues 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, 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’ 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 Tedros’ 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.”

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