Yesterday afternoon the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing announced journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have been expelled from the country. Journalists who remain are being told to report to the Chinese government.
Bloody Tuesday.
— B. Allen-Ebrahimian (@BethanyAllenEbr) March 17, 2020
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs just announced it is expelling all the American reporters at Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post.
And not allowing them to work in HONG KONG either. Unprecedented.https://t.co/OiwQ783v9l
All of these outlets were working on stories about the Wuhan coronavirus, which the government has repeatedly covered up. This censorship led to a devastating pandemic, which is wreaking havoc on the global economy as the virus continues its lethal path of destruction.
This expulsion of reporters, who have been publishing crucial information about the virus, proves China has more to hide. The country's officials claim they want to be better understood and yet, continue to shut down any last piece of transparency on this issue. Why? Because the truth of the Wuhan coronavirus timeline is devastating to the regime and completely undermines their ongoing narrative about competent handling of the crisis.
In recent days, the Chinese foreign minister and other officials have unleashed libelous claims the U.S. military started the Wuhan coronavirus. Reporting proves otherwise.
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.
"The disinformation campaign that they are waging is designed to shift responsibility. Now is not the time for recrimination. Now is the time to solve this global pandemic and work to take down risks to Americans and people all across the world," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Tuesday.
"We know this much: We know that the first government to be aware of the Wuhan virus was the Chinese Government. That imposes a special responsibility to raise the flag, to say, 'We have a problem, this is different and unique and presents risk.' And it took an awful long time for the world to become aware of this risk that was sitting there, residing inside of China," he continued. "We’ll do the after-action when the time is right. Every nation has a responsibility to share all of their data, all of their information in as timely and accurate a fashion as they have the ability to do not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because that’s how you save lives for your own people as well. The Chinese Communist Party had a responsibility to do this not only for Americans and Italians and South Koreans and Iranians who are now suffering, but for their own people as well."
The Chinese have moved to scrub all evidence of the virus and where it came from. They're shutting down labs that could be used to find a vaccine and have been arresting people, including a doctor who died from the disease, who have been sounding the alarm for months.
The Shanghai laboratory where researchers published the world’s first genome sequence of the deadly coronavirus that causes Covid-19 has been shut down.
The laboratory at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre was ordered to close for “rectification” on January 12, a day after Professor Zhang Yongzhen’s team published the genome sequence on open platforms. It closed temporarily the following day.
The release of the data helped researchers develop test kits for the virus.
“The centre was not given any specific reasons why the laboratory was closed for rectification. [We have submitted] four reports [asking for permission] to reopen but we have not received any replies,” a source with the centre said, requesting anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
“The closure has greatly affected the scientists and their research when they should be racing against the clock to find the means to help put the novel coronavirus outbreak under control,” the source said.
China continues to lie about a virus that started in their country. They allowed it to spread to the rest of the world by engaging in lethal censorship. People are dead and lives have been destroyed in a matter of days due to a cratering economy. The only question now is how Beijing will be held accountable.