but we promise this wasn't an engineered virus....wink wink, nudge nudge
Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December
Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.
A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1.
China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.
The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.
Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the Chinese internet.Caixin
Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December
Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.
A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1.
China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.
The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.
Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the Chinese internet.Caixin
ointer: cheersgif
Top 10 Reasons To Believe the Wuhan Virology Lab Caused 2019-nCoV
MARK OLIVER
263 COMMENTS
“We are not just battling the virus, but also conspiracy theories,” a spokesman for the Wuhan Institute of Virology has said.[1] “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice.”
He was trying to squash an idea that has been growing in popularity ever since the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus outbreak began: that his Virology Lab, at the heart of Wuhan, might be responsible.
In a way, he was right. In a time of crisis, the last thing anyone would want to do is spread fear — especially if it’s based on nothing but a baseless rumor.
But when you start looking into those claims that the epidemic that’s already infected almost 250,000 people across the world started in a Wuhan Virology Lab, it starts looking like something other than a conspiracy theory. It starts looking like an explanation that holds up unnervingly well — and that, if we take the time to look into it, could help prevent something similar from happening again.
10) The Outbreak Started Across The Street From A Virology Lab
The official story is that 2019-nCoV started in a seafood market in Wuhan. Unclean animals sold there were carrying the virus, Chinese scientists have suggested, and, as a result, some unlucky shoppers ended up becoming patient zeros for a global crisis.
You’ve probably already heard that explanation before, and there’s a good chance you’ve accepted it as a fact — but there are some glaring problems with it.
For one thing, the first patients with 2019-nCoV have no connection to the market whatsoever. They lived nearby, and they appear to have spread the disease to people who went there — but the real patient zeros never actually stepped foot inside of it.[2]
Also, 2019-nCoV is believed to have originated in bats — and this was a seafood market. Nobody was selling bats inside of this market. Bats just aren’t something people in Wuhan normally eat.[3]
Even China’s scientists have started backing away from this theory. To quote one directly:
“It seems clear that [the] seafood market is not the only origin of the virus… But to be honest, we still do not know where the virus came from.”[4]
A lot of people have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is just a 30 minutes drive for the seafood market. But if that’s not close enough for you, there’s another lab that researches bat coronaviruses that’s even closer: The Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention.
It’s not just on the other side of town. It’s on the other side of the street.[5]
9) The Wuhan Virology Lab Was Studying Bat Coronaviruses
The Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention isn’t just an administrative office. Scientists were inside that building actively conducting research — including studies on coronaviruses in bats.[6]
A lot of researchers in Wuhan were. It had been a major project for the city, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology took great pride in. They were at the forefront in researching the causes of SARS, and it was their researchers who had proven that the last SARS outbreak originated in bats.[7]
They had to look at an awful lot of sick bats to do it, though. Researchers had been gathering bats infected with the coronavirus since at least 2012, and they were focusing on ones that could spread their illness to human beings.[8]
There were hundreds of bats in Wuhan’s labs when the 2019-nCoV outbreak started, and the researchers there were studying at least 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses in them.[9] And, yes — they were doing it across the street from the place where the outbreak started.
8) 2019-nCoV Is a 96% Match For A Bat Virus In The Wuhan Virology Lab
The coronavirus that’s spreading around the world at this very moment has been called “novel” because it’s unique. It’s different from past diseases, like SARS. About 30% different, to be exact.
That’s not just a number we pulled out of our heads. Scientists have compared the genetic sequence of SARS to 2019-nCoV, and they’ve found that they’re about 70% similar.[10]
That’s a rough number — the real one might be a bit higher. But the real number probably isn’t 96% — which is the percentage match scientists have found between 2019-nCov and a form of the coronavirus carried by bats inside of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[11]
“But wait a minute,” you say. “If those bats had the virus, there were probably bats all around Wuhan that had it — right?”
Afraid not. 2019-nCoV isn’t just similar to bat coronaviruses in general — it’s similar to a very specific strain of bat coronavirus carried by bats in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not every bat coronavirus has that 96% match — in fact, when another lab compared 2019-nCoV to their own bats, the closest match they could find was 88%.[12]
And those bats weren’t local. If you were living in Wuhan and you really wanted to find one of those bats, you’d either have to go to the virology lab or to the place those bats had come from: Yunnan and Zhejiang.
That’s a little over 900km away.[13]
7) An Infected Bat Bled On A Researcher Shortly Before The Outbreak
Ok, so a disease lab was researching diseases. So what? That doesn’t prove that it ever got out — right?
While it’s highly unlikely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology deliberately plagued its own people, it really wouldn’t have been that hard for somebody to catch it by accident.
Imagine if a bat attacked a researcher and, in the chaos, spilled its blood onto his bare skin. Or imagine if he got a bit too close and got bat urine on his body. Or imagine both of those things happened to the same person not long before the 2019-nCoV outbreak began.
That’s exactly what happened. According to a report by Chinese researchers Botao and Lei Xiao,[14] a researcher named Junhua Tian described these exact experiences in an interview with the Changjiang Times.
Junhua Tian claims he quarantined himself to keep from spreading these disease — but even if he and his colleagues used every possible precaution, it’s possible that the virus still could have leaked out.
One thing we’ve learned since the outbreak is that people can show no symptoms at all and still be infected. And, according to a recent study out of Japan, people who have recovered can still carry the virus.[15]
6) SARS Escaped From A Beijing Lab Twice
Of course, it’s also possible that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology just didn’t use every possible precaution.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s walked out of a Chinese virology lab carrying a deadly sickness. It’s happened before — in fact, it once happened twice in a single month.[16]
On April 4, 2004, a postgraduate student working at a virology lab in Beijing was diagnosed with SARS. She had gotten infected while researching the virus, and, unaware that she was sick, walked out into the public and very nearly caused a second outbreak.
That’s pretty bad — but what makes it downright terrifying is that, two weeks later, another postgraduate student working at the exact same lab did the exact same thing.
That’s not just negligent. According to scientist Antoine Danchin, it should technically be impossible.
“Normally, it’s not possible to contaminate people even under level two confinement if the security rules are obeyed,” he said after the incident. “It suggests there has been some mishandling of something.
“The lab might have all the right rules, but the people may not comply.”
5) The Wuhan Virology Lab Was Testing A Virus That Matches 2019-nCoV
In case there was any doubt, the Wuhan Institute of Virology definitely had postgraduate students on staff.
We can confirm that because, on Nov. 18, 2019, shortly before the breakout, the institute put up a job posting[17] asking for postgraduate students to help study the coronavirus in humans and bats.
That’s not exactly out of the ordinary — but the description in the job posting is a little disturbing. It says that they were particularly interested in molecular mechanisms that let coronavirus lie dormant for a long time without symptoms.
Sound familiar? That’s one of the distinguishing traits of 2019-nCoV — the fact that people can go around without any apparent symptoms and still spread it.
322 of the people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship tested positive without symptoms,[18] and there’s proof that those asymptomatic people can spread the disease. In fact, one woman is confirmed to have spread it at least five people without showing any symptoms of her own.[19]
4) Researchers At The Lab Had Recently Created A New Coronavirus
The staff at Wuhan Institute of Virology didn’t just work on cures. They also spent some developing new, super viruses of their own.
In 2015, two researchers at the Institute participated in an international experiment led by American scientist Ralph Baric.[20] The goal? Create a new coronavirus with the ability to infect human beings.
If that sounds like a weird goal to you, you’re not alone. A significant part of the scientific community was outraged by this experiment.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” biologist Richard Ebright protested when the work came out.[21]
French virologist Simon Wain-Hobson agreed. “If the virus escaped,” he warned,[22] “nobody could predict the trajectory.”
3) 2019-nCoV Has Eerie Similarities to HIV
According to a controversial study out of India, some aspects of 2019-nCoV have “uncanny similarities” to HIV.[23]
Full disclosure — this study’s gotten a fair degree of scrutiny. Some scientists have questioned whether it used enough data to be statistically significant, and they’ve put it through the wringer enough that, at this point, the study’s authors have withdrawn their work.[24]
But while their work might be unproven, that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong — and there’s a little bit of evidence to back it up. HIV drugs are proving to be remarkably effective in treating the drug,[25] and most patients are showing low white blood cell counts[26] — something that doesn’t happen with any other form of coronavirus.[27]
That’s creepy — because researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology have worked on or conducted studies combining SARS-CoV and an HIV pseudovirus in bats and humans.[28]
There’s no hard proof that the 2019-nCoV is a man-made virus — but if scientists ever find proof that it is, there’s a lot of reason to be worried.
2) The Communist Chinese Government Ordered Silence
Infectious disease specialist Daniel Lucey got the chance to review the documents and data China had in its possession when 2019-nCoV broke out, and he came out of it baffled. Their official story, he said, just didn’t make any sense.
“China must have realized the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market,” Lucey told the press.[29]
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps somebody in Wuhan knew that the story didn’t add up even when they first announced it. But if they did, they were under strict orders not to say anything about it.
On Jan. 2, 2020 — the day after the Huanan seafood market was blamed for the disease — the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent out a disclosure strictly “prohibiting disclosure of information” on 2019-nCoV.
Some scientists have spoken up anyway. A good part of this article, for example, draws from a study by the National Natural Science Foundation of China called “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus”.
It might not surprise you to find out that, shortly after that study was released, the communist government did its best to pull it off the internet with as much vigor as they are using in attempting to stop people referring to the virus as a “Chinese virus” or as the “Wuhan flu”.[30]
1) The Chinese Government Is Tightening Up Biolab Security
The biggest smoking gun of them all came straight out of the mouth of President Xi Jinping.
On Feb. 14, 2020, President Xi gave a speech on the need to contain 2019-nCoV. Chinese, he said, needs to “learn our lessons… so we can strengthen our areas of weakness and close the loopholes exposed by the epidemic.[31]
While Xi was never completely explicit about how those loopholes were to be closed, he did announce his plan to push through a new law for “biosecurity at laboratories” specifically targeting the use of biological agents that “may harm national security”.
The very next day, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology followed up on Xi’s speech with a new directive entitled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”[32]
There’s only one microbiology lab in all of China that handles advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.
It’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
https://listverse.com/2020/03/20/top-10-reasons-to-believe-the-wuhan-virology-lab-caused-2019-ncov/
“We are not just battling the virus, but also conspiracy theories,” a spokesman for the Wuhan Institute of Virology has said.[1] “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice.”
He was trying to squash an idea that has been growing in popularity ever since the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus outbreak began: that his Virology Lab, at the heart of Wuhan, might be responsible.
In a way, he was right. In a time of crisis, the last thing anyone would want to do is spread fear — especially if it’s based on nothing but a baseless rumor.
But when you start looking into those claims that the epidemic that’s already infected almost 250,000 people across the world started in a Wuhan Virology Lab, it starts looking like something other than a conspiracy theory. It starts looking like an explanation that holds up unnervingly well — and that, if we take the time to look into it, could help prevent something similar from happening again.
10) The Outbreak Started Across The Street From A Virology Lab
The official story is that 2019-nCoV started in a seafood market in Wuhan. Unclean animals sold there were carrying the virus, Chinese scientists have suggested, and, as a result, some unlucky shoppers ended up becoming patient zeros for a global crisis.
You’ve probably already heard that explanation before, and there’s a good chance you’ve accepted it as a fact — but there are some glaring problems with it.
For one thing, the first patients with 2019-nCoV have no connection to the market whatsoever. They lived nearby, and they appear to have spread the disease to people who went there — but the real patient zeros never actually stepped foot inside of it.[2]
Also, 2019-nCoV is believed to have originated in bats — and this was a seafood market. Nobody was selling bats inside of this market. Bats just aren’t something people in Wuhan normally eat.[3]
Even China’s scientists have started backing away from this theory. To quote one directly:
“It seems clear that [the] seafood market is not the only origin of the virus… But to be honest, we still do not know where the virus came from.”[4]
A lot of people have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is just a 30 minutes drive for the seafood market. But if that’s not close enough for you, there’s another lab that researches bat coronaviruses that’s even closer: The Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention.
It’s not just on the other side of town. It’s on the other side of the street.[5]
9) The Wuhan Virology Lab Was Studying Bat Coronaviruses
The Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention isn’t just an administrative office. Scientists were inside that building actively conducting research — including studies on coronaviruses in bats.[6]
A lot of researchers in Wuhan were. It had been a major project for the city, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology took great pride in. They were at the forefront in researching the causes of SARS, and it was their researchers who had proven that the last SARS outbreak originated in bats.[7]
They had to look at an awful lot of sick bats to do it, though. Researchers had been gathering bats infected with the coronavirus since at least 2012, and they were focusing on ones that could spread their illness to human beings.[8]
There were hundreds of bats in Wuhan’s labs when the 2019-nCoV outbreak started, and the researchers there were studying at least 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses in them.[9] And, yes — they were doing it across the street from the place where the outbreak started.
8) 2019-nCoV Is a 96% Match For A Bat Virus In The Wuhan Virology Lab
The coronavirus that’s spreading around the world at this very moment has been called “novel” because it’s unique. It’s different from past diseases, like SARS. About 30% different, to be exact.
That’s not just a number we pulled out of our heads. Scientists have compared the genetic sequence of SARS to 2019-nCoV, and they’ve found that they’re about 70% similar.[10]
That’s a rough number — the real one might be a bit higher. But the real number probably isn’t 96% — which is the percentage match scientists have found between 2019-nCov and a form of the coronavirus carried by bats inside of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[11]
“But wait a minute,” you say. “If those bats had the virus, there were probably bats all around Wuhan that had it — right?”
Afraid not. 2019-nCoV isn’t just similar to bat coronaviruses in general — it’s similar to a very specific strain of bat coronavirus carried by bats in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not every bat coronavirus has that 96% match — in fact, when another lab compared 2019-nCoV to their own bats, the closest match they could find was 88%.[12]
And those bats weren’t local. If you were living in Wuhan and you really wanted to find one of those bats, you’d either have to go to the virology lab or to the place those bats had come from: Yunnan and Zhejiang.
That’s a little over 900km away.[13]
Ok, so a disease lab was researching diseases. So what? That doesn’t prove that it ever got out — right?
While it’s highly unlikely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology deliberately plagued its own people, it really wouldn’t have been that hard for somebody to catch it by accident.
Imagine if a bat attacked a researcher and, in the chaos, spilled its blood onto his bare skin. Or imagine if he got a bit too close and got bat urine on his body. Or imagine both of those things happened to the same person not long before the 2019-nCoV outbreak began.
That’s exactly what happened. According to a report by Chinese researchers Botao and Lei Xiao,[14] a researcher named Junhua Tian described these exact experiences in an interview with the Changjiang Times.
Junhua Tian claims he quarantined himself to keep from spreading these disease — but even if he and his colleagues used every possible precaution, it’s possible that the virus still could have leaked out.
One thing we’ve learned since the outbreak is that people can show no symptoms at all and still be infected. And, according to a recent study out of Japan, people who have recovered can still carry the virus.[15]
6) SARS Escaped From A Beijing Lab Twice
Of course, it’s also possible that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology just didn’t use every possible precaution.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s walked out of a Chinese virology lab carrying a deadly sickness. It’s happened before — in fact, it once happened twice in a single month.[16]
On April 4, 2004, a postgraduate student working at a virology lab in Beijing was diagnosed with SARS. She had gotten infected while researching the virus, and, unaware that she was sick, walked out into the public and very nearly caused a second outbreak.
That’s pretty bad — but what makes it downright terrifying is that, two weeks later, another postgraduate student working at the exact same lab did the exact same thing.
That’s not just negligent. According to scientist Antoine Danchin, it should technically be impossible.
“Normally, it’s not possible to contaminate people even under level two confinement if the security rules are obeyed,” he said after the incident. “It suggests there has been some mishandling of something.
“The lab might have all the right rules, but the people may not comply.”
In case there was any doubt, the Wuhan Institute of Virology definitely had postgraduate students on staff.
We can confirm that because, on Nov. 18, 2019, shortly before the breakout, the institute put up a job posting[17] asking for postgraduate students to help study the coronavirus in humans and bats.
That’s not exactly out of the ordinary — but the description in the job posting is a little disturbing. It says that they were particularly interested in molecular mechanisms that let coronavirus lie dormant for a long time without symptoms.
Sound familiar? That’s one of the distinguishing traits of 2019-nCoV — the fact that people can go around without any apparent symptoms and still spread it.
322 of the people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship tested positive without symptoms,[18] and there’s proof that those asymptomatic people can spread the disease. In fact, one woman is confirmed to have spread it at least five people without showing any symptoms of her own.[19]
4) Researchers At The Lab Had Recently Created A New Coronavirus
The staff at Wuhan Institute of Virology didn’t just work on cures. They also spent some developing new, super viruses of their own.
In 2015, two researchers at the Institute participated in an international experiment led by American scientist Ralph Baric.[20] The goal? Create a new coronavirus with the ability to infect human beings.
If that sounds like a weird goal to you, you’re not alone. A significant part of the scientific community was outraged by this experiment.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” biologist Richard Ebright protested when the work came out.[21]
French virologist Simon Wain-Hobson agreed. “If the virus escaped,” he warned,[22] “nobody could predict the trajectory.”
According to a controversial study out of India, some aspects of 2019-nCoV have “uncanny similarities” to HIV.[23]
Full disclosure — this study’s gotten a fair degree of scrutiny. Some scientists have questioned whether it used enough data to be statistically significant, and they’ve put it through the wringer enough that, at this point, the study’s authors have withdrawn their work.[24]
But while their work might be unproven, that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong — and there’s a little bit of evidence to back it up. HIV drugs are proving to be remarkably effective in treating the drug,[25] and most patients are showing low white blood cell counts[26] — something that doesn’t happen with any other form of coronavirus.[27]
That’s creepy — because researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology have worked on or conducted studies combining SARS-CoV and an HIV pseudovirus in bats and humans.[28]
There’s no hard proof that the 2019-nCoV is a man-made virus — but if scientists ever find proof that it is, there’s a lot of reason to be worried.
Infectious disease specialist Daniel Lucey got the chance to review the documents and data China had in its possession when 2019-nCoV broke out, and he came out of it baffled. Their official story, he said, just didn’t make any sense.
“China must have realized the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market,” Lucey told the press.[29]
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps somebody in Wuhan knew that the story didn’t add up even when they first announced it. But if they did, they were under strict orders not to say anything about it.
On Jan. 2, 2020 — the day after the Huanan seafood market was blamed for the disease — the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent out a disclosure strictly “prohibiting disclosure of information” on 2019-nCoV.
Some scientists have spoken up anyway. A good part of this article, for example, draws from a study by the National Natural Science Foundation of China called “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus”.
It might not surprise you to find out that, shortly after that study was released, the communist government did its best to pull it off the internet with as much vigor as they are using in attempting to stop people referring to the virus as a “Chinese virus” or as the “Wuhan flu”.[30]
The biggest smoking gun of them all came straight out of the mouth of President Xi Jinping.
On Feb. 14, 2020, President Xi gave a speech on the need to contain 2019-nCoV. Chinese, he said, needs to “learn our lessons… so we can strengthen our areas of weakness and close the loopholes exposed by the epidemic.[31]
While Xi was never completely explicit about how those loopholes were to be closed, he did announce his plan to push through a new law for “biosecurity at laboratories” specifically targeting the use of biological agents that “may harm national security”.
The very next day, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology followed up on Xi’s speech with a new directive entitled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”[32]
There’s only one microbiology lab in all of China that handles advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.
It’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
https://listverse.com/2020/03/20/top-10-reasons-to-believe-the-wuhan-virology-lab-caused-2019-ncov/
CHINA IS LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR COVID-19 DAMAGE AND CLAIMS COULD BE IN THE TRILLIONS
As the novel coronavirus incubated in Wuhan from mid-December to mid-January, the Chinese state made evidently intentional misrepresentations to its people concerning the outbreak, providing false assurances to the population preceding the approach of the Lunar New Year celebrations on Jan. 25. In mid-December, an outbreak of a novel influenza-like illness was traced to workers and customers of the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which contained exotic and wild animal species. On Dec. 26, multiple Chinese news outlets released reports of an anonymous laboratory technician who made a startling discovery: The sickness was caused by a new coronavirus that was 87 percent similar to SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, sounded the alarm in an online chatroom on Dec. 30. That night, Wuhan public health authorities solicited information on the emergence of a “pneumonia of unclear cause,” but omitted Li’s discussion about SARS or a novel coronavirus. Li and other medical professionals who tried to disclose the emergence of the virus were suppressed or jailed by the regime. On Jan. 1, the state-run Xinhua News Agency warned, “The police call on all netizens to not fabricate rumors, not spread rumors, not believe rumors.” Four days after Li’s chatroom discussion, officers of the Public Security Bureau forced him to sign a letter acknowledging he had made “false comments,” and that his revelations had “severely disturbed the social order.” Li, who has become something of an underground folk hero in China against chicanery by state officials, ultimately died of the disease. China silenced other doctors raising the alarm, minimizing the danger to the public even as they were bewildered and overwhelmed. State media suppressed information about the virus. Although authorities closed the Wuhan “wet market” at the epicenter of the contagion, they did not take further steps to stop the wildlife trade. By Jan. 22, when the virus had killed just 17 yet had infected more than 570 people, China tightened its suppression of information about the coronavirus that it deemed “alarming,” and further censored criticism of its malfeasance. “Even as cases climbed, officials declared repeatedly that there had likely been no more infections.”
On Dec. 31, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission falsely stated that there was no human-to-human transmission of the disease, which it described as a seasonal flu that was “preventable and controllable.” On Feb. 1, the New York Times reported that “the government’s initial handling of the epidemic allowed the virus to gain a tenacious hold. At critical moments, officials chose to put secrecy and order ahead of openly confronting the growing crisis to avoid public alarm and political embarrassment.”
Importantly, China failed to expeditiously share information with the World Health Organization (WHO) on the novel coronavirus. For example, China waited until Feb. 14, nearly two months into the crisis, before it disclosed that 1,700 healthcare workers were infected. Such information on the vulnerability of medical workers is essential to understanding transmission patterns and to devise strategies to contain the virus. The experts at WHO were stymied by Chinese officials for data on hospital transmissions. China’s failure to provide open and transparent information to WHO is more than a moral breakdown. It is also the breach of a legal duty that China owed to other states under international law, and for which injured states — now numbering some 150 nations — may seek a legal remedy.
Unfortunately, China’s evasions are part of the autocratic playbook, repeating its obstruction of information that worsened the SARS crisis 18 years earlier. In that case, China tried to cover up the SARS epidemic, which led WHO member states to adopt the new International Health Regulations in 2005. In both cases, China and the world would have been spared thousands of unnecessary deaths had China acted forthrightly and in accordance with its legal obligations. Although China’s public health system has been modernized, observed Jude Blanchette, head of China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, its political system has regressed.
International Health Regulations
As one of the 194 states party to the legally binding 2005 International Health Regulations, China has a duty to rapidly gather information about and contribute to a common understanding of what may constitute a public health emergency with potential international implications. The legally binding International Health Regulations were adopted by the World Health Assembly in 1969, to control six infectious diseases: cholera, plague, yellow fever, smallpox, relapsing fever, and typhus. The 2005 revision added smallpox, poliomyelitis due to wild-type poliovirus, SARS, and cases of human influenza caused by a new subtype, set forth in the second annex.
Article 6 of the International Health Regulations requires states to provide expedited, timely, accurate, and sufficiently detailed information to WHO about the potential public health emergencies identified in the second annex in order to galvanize efforts to prevent pandemics. WHO also has a mandate in Article 10 to seek verification from states with respect to unofficial reports of pathogenic microorganisms. States are required to provide timely and transparent information as requested within 24 hours, and to participate in collaborative assessments of the risks presented. Yet China rejected repeated offers of epidemic investigation assistance from WHO in late January (and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early February), without explanation. The Washington Post concluded in a story on Feb. 26 that China “was not sending details that WHO officials and other experts expect and need.” While WHO later commended China for its efforts, Mara Pillinger of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law concluded that Beijing’s partial collaboration “makes it politically tricky for WHO to publicly contradict” China while still getting at least some useful data from China.
China’s Legal Responsibility
While China’s intentional conduct is wrongful, is it unlawful? If so, do other states have a legal remedy? Under Article 1 of the International Law Commission’s 2001 Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, states are responsible for their internationally wrongful acts. This commission’s restatement of the law of state responsibility was developed with the input of states to reflect a fundamental principle of international customary law, which binds all nations. “Wrongful acts” are those that are “attributable to the state” and that “constitute a breach of an international obligation” (Article 2). Conduct is attributable to the state when it is an act of state through the executive, legislative, or judicial functions of the central government (Article 4). While China’s failures began at the local level, they quickly spread throughout China’s government, all the way up to Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. He is now being pilloried by Chinese netizens for his failures of action and inaction. The most prominent critic, Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, lambasted Xi for his mishandling of the coronavirus, calling him a “power hungry clown.” Ren soon disappeared.
Responsibility flows from local Wuhan authorities to Xi himself, which are all organs of the state of China, and whose conduct is therefore attributable to China. An “organ of the state” includes any person or entities that are acting in accordance with national law. Even if China were to disavow conduct by local authorities or state media as not necessarily directly attributable to the national government, such actions nevertheless are accorded that status if and to the extent the state acknowledged and adopted the conduct as its own, as was done by the officials in Beijing (Article 11).
Wrongful acts are those that constitute a breach of an international obligation (Article 11). A breach is an act that is “not in conformity with what is required of it by that obligation … .” China’s failure to expeditiously and transparently share information with WHO in accordance with the International Health Regulations constitutes an early and subsequently extended breach of its legal obligations (Article 14). Consequently, China bears legal responsibility for its internationally wrongful acts (Article 28). The consequences include full reparations for the injury caused by the wrongful acts. China did not intentionally create a global pandemic, but its malfeasance is certainly the cause of it. An epidemiological model at the University of Southampton found that had China acted responsibly just one, two, or three weeks more quickly, the number affected by the virus would have been cut by 66 percent, 86 percent, and 95 percent, respectively. By its failure to adhere to its legal commitments to the International Health Regulations, the Chinese Communist Party has let loose a global contagion, with mounting material consequences.
The cost of the coronavirus grows daily, with increasing incidents of sickness and death. The mitigation and suppression measures enforced by states to limit the damage are wrecking the global economy. Under Article 31 of the Articles of State Responsibility, states are required to make full reparations for the injury caused by their internationally wrongful acts. Injuries include damages, whether material or moral. Injured states are entitled to full reparation “in the form of restitution in kind, compensation, satisfaction and assurances and guarantees of non-repetition” (Article 34). Restitution in kind means that the injured state is entitled to be placed in the same position as existed before the wrongful acts were committed (Article 35). To the extent that restitution is not made, injured states are entitled to compensation (Article 36), and satisfaction, in terms of an apology and internal discipline and even criminal prosecution of officials in China who committed malfeasance (Article 37). Finally, injured states are entitled to guarantees of non-repetition, although the 2005 International Health Regulations were designed for this purpose after SARS (Article 48). As the world continues to suffer the costs of China’s breach of its legal duties, it remains to be seen whether the injured states can be made whole.
No one expects that China will fulfill its obligations, or take steps required by the law of state responsibility. So, how might the United States and other nations vindicate their rights? The legal consequences of an internationally wrongful act are subject to the procedures of the Charter of the United Nations. Chapter XIV of the charter recognizes that states may bring disputes before the International Court of Justice or other international tribunals. But the principle of state sovereignty means that a state may not be compelled to appear before an international court without its consent. This reflects a general proposition in international law, and its fundamental weakness.
Still, injured states are not without remedy. Barring any prospect for effective litigation, states could resort to self-help. The law of state responsibility permits injured states to take lawful countermeasures against China by suspending their own compliance with obligations owed to China as a means of inducing Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and debt (Article 49). Countermeasures shall not be disproportionate to the degree of gravity of the wrongful acts and the effects inflicted on injured states (Article 51). The choice of countermeasures that injured states may select is wide open, with only minimal limitations. For example, countermeasures may not involve the threat or use of force or undermine the human rights of China (Article 50). Except for these limitations, however, the United States and other injured states may suspend existing legal obligations or deliberately violate other legal duties owed to China as a means to induce Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and address the calamitous damages it has inflicted on the world.
The menu for such countermeasures is as limitless as the extent that international law infuses the foreign affairs between China and the world, and such action by injured states may be individual and collective and does not have to be connected explicitly to the kind or type of violations committed by China. Thus, action could include removal of China from leadership positions and memberships, as China now chairs four of 15 organizations of the United Nations system. States could reverse China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, suspend air travel to China for a period of years, broadcast Western media in China, and undermine China’s famous internet firewall that keeps the country’s information ecosystem sealed off from the rest of the world. Remember that countermeasures permit not only acts that are merely unfriendly, but also licenses acts that would normally be a violation of international law. But the limitations still leave considerable room to roam, even if they violate China’s sovereignty and internal affairs, including ensuring that Taiwanese media voices and officials are heard through the Chinese internet firewall, broadcasting the ineptness and corruption of the Chinese Communist Party throughout China, and reporting on Chinese coercion against its neighbors in the South China Sea and East China Sea, and ensuring the people of China understand the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party in unleashing a global contagion.
James Kraska is chair and Charles H. Stockton professor of international maritime law in the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of the Stockton Center, the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated, “On Jan. 31, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission falsely stated that there was no human-to-human transmission of the disease.” That was incorrect. The Wuhan Municipal Heath Commission’s released the statement on Dec. 31, not Jan. 31.
MARCH 23, 2020
As the novel coronavirus incubated in Wuhan from mid-December to mid-January, the Chinese state made evidently intentional misrepresentations to its people concerning the outbreak, providing false assurances to the population preceding the approach of the Lunar New Year celebrations on Jan. 25. In mid-December, an outbreak of a novel influenza-like illness was traced to workers and customers of the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which contained exotic and wild animal species. On Dec. 26, multiple Chinese news outlets released reports of an anonymous laboratory technician who made a startling discovery: The sickness was caused by a new coronavirus that was 87 percent similar to SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, sounded the alarm in an online chatroom on Dec. 30. That night, Wuhan public health authorities solicited information on the emergence of a “pneumonia of unclear cause,” but omitted Li’s discussion about SARS or a novel coronavirus. Li and other medical professionals who tried to disclose the emergence of the virus were suppressed or jailed by the regime. On Jan. 1, the state-run Xinhua News Agency warned, “The police call on all netizens to not fabricate rumors, not spread rumors, not believe rumors.” Four days after Li’s chatroom discussion, officers of the Public Security Bureau forced him to sign a letter acknowledging he had made “false comments,” and that his revelations had “severely disturbed the social order.” Li, who has become something of an underground folk hero in China against chicanery by state officials, ultimately died of the disease. China silenced other doctors raising the alarm, minimizing the danger to the public even as they were bewildered and overwhelmed. State media suppressed information about the virus. Although authorities closed the Wuhan “wet market” at the epicenter of the contagion, they did not take further steps to stop the wildlife trade. By Jan. 22, when the virus had killed just 17 yet had infected more than 570 people, China tightened its suppression of information about the coronavirus that it deemed “alarming,” and further censored criticism of its malfeasance. “Even as cases climbed, officials declared repeatedly that there had likely been no more infections.”
On Dec. 31, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission falsely stated that there was no human-to-human transmission of the disease, which it described as a seasonal flu that was “preventable and controllable.” On Feb. 1, the New York Times reported that “the government’s initial handling of the epidemic allowed the virus to gain a tenacious hold. At critical moments, officials chose to put secrecy and order ahead of openly confronting the growing crisis to avoid public alarm and political embarrassment.”
Importantly, China failed to expeditiously share information with the World Health Organization (WHO) on the novel coronavirus. For example, China waited until Feb. 14, nearly two months into the crisis, before it disclosed that 1,700 healthcare workers were infected. Such information on the vulnerability of medical workers is essential to understanding transmission patterns and to devise strategies to contain the virus. The experts at WHO were stymied by Chinese officials for data on hospital transmissions. China’s failure to provide open and transparent information to WHO is more than a moral breakdown. It is also the breach of a legal duty that China owed to other states under international law, and for which injured states — now numbering some 150 nations — may seek a legal remedy.
Unfortunately, China’s evasions are part of the autocratic playbook, repeating its obstruction of information that worsened the SARS crisis 18 years earlier. In that case, China tried to cover up the SARS epidemic, which led WHO member states to adopt the new International Health Regulations in 2005. In both cases, China and the world would have been spared thousands of unnecessary deaths had China acted forthrightly and in accordance with its legal obligations. Although China’s public health system has been modernized, observed Jude Blanchette, head of China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, its political system has regressed.
International Health Regulations
As one of the 194 states party to the legally binding 2005 International Health Regulations, China has a duty to rapidly gather information about and contribute to a common understanding of what may constitute a public health emergency with potential international implications. The legally binding International Health Regulations were adopted by the World Health Assembly in 1969, to control six infectious diseases: cholera, plague, yellow fever, smallpox, relapsing fever, and typhus. The 2005 revision added smallpox, poliomyelitis due to wild-type poliovirus, SARS, and cases of human influenza caused by a new subtype, set forth in the second annex.
Article 6 of the International Health Regulations requires states to provide expedited, timely, accurate, and sufficiently detailed information to WHO about the potential public health emergencies identified in the second annex in order to galvanize efforts to prevent pandemics. WHO also has a mandate in Article 10 to seek verification from states with respect to unofficial reports of pathogenic microorganisms. States are required to provide timely and transparent information as requested within 24 hours, and to participate in collaborative assessments of the risks presented. Yet China rejected repeated offers of epidemic investigation assistance from WHO in late January (and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early February), without explanation. The Washington Post concluded in a story on Feb. 26 that China “was not sending details that WHO officials and other experts expect and need.” While WHO later commended China for its efforts, Mara Pillinger of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law concluded that Beijing’s partial collaboration “makes it politically tricky for WHO to publicly contradict” China while still getting at least some useful data from China.
China’s Legal Responsibility
While China’s intentional conduct is wrongful, is it unlawful? If so, do other states have a legal remedy? Under Article 1 of the International Law Commission’s 2001 Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, states are responsible for their internationally wrongful acts. This commission’s restatement of the law of state responsibility was developed with the input of states to reflect a fundamental principle of international customary law, which binds all nations. “Wrongful acts” are those that are “attributable to the state” and that “constitute a breach of an international obligation” (Article 2). Conduct is attributable to the state when it is an act of state through the executive, legislative, or judicial functions of the central government (Article 4). While China’s failures began at the local level, they quickly spread throughout China’s government, all the way up to Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. He is now being pilloried by Chinese netizens for his failures of action and inaction. The most prominent critic, Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, lambasted Xi for his mishandling of the coronavirus, calling him a “power hungry clown.” Ren soon disappeared.
Responsibility flows from local Wuhan authorities to Xi himself, which are all organs of the state of China, and whose conduct is therefore attributable to China. An “organ of the state” includes any person or entities that are acting in accordance with national law. Even if China were to disavow conduct by local authorities or state media as not necessarily directly attributable to the national government, such actions nevertheless are accorded that status if and to the extent the state acknowledged and adopted the conduct as its own, as was done by the officials in Beijing (Article 11).
Wrongful acts are those that constitute a breach of an international obligation (Article 11). A breach is an act that is “not in conformity with what is required of it by that obligation … .” China’s failure to expeditiously and transparently share information with WHO in accordance with the International Health Regulations constitutes an early and subsequently extended breach of its legal obligations (Article 14). Consequently, China bears legal responsibility for its internationally wrongful acts (Article 28). The consequences include full reparations for the injury caused by the wrongful acts. China did not intentionally create a global pandemic, but its malfeasance is certainly the cause of it. An epidemiological model at the University of Southampton found that had China acted responsibly just one, two, or three weeks more quickly, the number affected by the virus would have been cut by 66 percent, 86 percent, and 95 percent, respectively. By its failure to adhere to its legal commitments to the International Health Regulations, the Chinese Communist Party has let loose a global contagion, with mounting material consequences.
The cost of the coronavirus grows daily, with increasing incidents of sickness and death. The mitigation and suppression measures enforced by states to limit the damage are wrecking the global economy. Under Article 31 of the Articles of State Responsibility, states are required to make full reparations for the injury caused by their internationally wrongful acts. Injuries include damages, whether material or moral. Injured states are entitled to full reparation “in the form of restitution in kind, compensation, satisfaction and assurances and guarantees of non-repetition” (Article 34). Restitution in kind means that the injured state is entitled to be placed in the same position as existed before the wrongful acts were committed (Article 35). To the extent that restitution is not made, injured states are entitled to compensation (Article 36), and satisfaction, in terms of an apology and internal discipline and even criminal prosecution of officials in China who committed malfeasance (Article 37). Finally, injured states are entitled to guarantees of non-repetition, although the 2005 International Health Regulations were designed for this purpose after SARS (Article 48). As the world continues to suffer the costs of China’s breach of its legal duties, it remains to be seen whether the injured states can be made whole.
No one expects that China will fulfill its obligations, or take steps required by the law of state responsibility. So, how might the United States and other nations vindicate their rights? The legal consequences of an internationally wrongful act are subject to the procedures of the Charter of the United Nations. Chapter XIV of the charter recognizes that states may bring disputes before the International Court of Justice or other international tribunals. But the principle of state sovereignty means that a state may not be compelled to appear before an international court without its consent. This reflects a general proposition in international law, and its fundamental weakness.
Still, injured states are not without remedy. Barring any prospect for effective litigation, states could resort to self-help. The law of state responsibility permits injured states to take lawful countermeasures against China by suspending their own compliance with obligations owed to China as a means of inducing Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and debt (Article 49). Countermeasures shall not be disproportionate to the degree of gravity of the wrongful acts and the effects inflicted on injured states (Article 51). The choice of countermeasures that injured states may select is wide open, with only minimal limitations. For example, countermeasures may not involve the threat or use of force or undermine the human rights of China (Article 50). Except for these limitations, however, the United States and other injured states may suspend existing legal obligations or deliberately violate other legal duties owed to China as a means to induce Beijing to fulfill its responsibilities and address the calamitous damages it has inflicted on the world.
The menu for such countermeasures is as limitless as the extent that international law infuses the foreign affairs between China and the world, and such action by injured states may be individual and collective and does not have to be connected explicitly to the kind or type of violations committed by China. Thus, action could include removal of China from leadership positions and memberships, as China now chairs four of 15 organizations of the United Nations system. States could reverse China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, suspend air travel to China for a period of years, broadcast Western media in China, and undermine China’s famous internet firewall that keeps the country’s information ecosystem sealed off from the rest of the world. Remember that countermeasures permit not only acts that are merely unfriendly, but also licenses acts that would normally be a violation of international law. But the limitations still leave considerable room to roam, even if they violate China’s sovereignty and internal affairs, including ensuring that Taiwanese media voices and officials are heard through the Chinese internet firewall, broadcasting the ineptness and corruption of the Chinese Communist Party throughout China, and reporting on Chinese coercion against its neighbors in the South China Sea and East China Sea, and ensuring the people of China understand the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party in unleashing a global contagion.
James Kraska is chair and Charles H. Stockton professor of international maritime law in the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of the Stockton Center, the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated, “On Jan. 31, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission falsely stated that there was no human-to-human transmission of the disease.” That was incorrect. The Wuhan Municipal Heath Commission’s released the statement on Dec. 31, not Jan. 31.
