The Global Times, a Chinese government propaganda newspaper, asserted in a report Wednesday that the world needs “more early samples” of potential coronavirus patients prior to Beijing’s first reports of a novel infection.
The Communist Party admitted to the destruction of early samples of coronavirus last year, making tracing the evolution of the disease far more difficult for international scientists. Government officials also “disinfected” key sites like the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the pandemic began — depriving scientists of critical evidence that may have identified the true source of the Chinese coronavirus.
The China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a government agency, initially accepted that Wuhan was the origin location of the virus and blamed illegal meat sales at the Huanan Seafood Market for first infecting humans. Beijing has since made an abrupt shift to both denying that it is possible the virus leaked from a biological laboratory — in response to concerns about safety protocol at the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — and accusing multiple American biological laboratories of being the “true” origin of the virus.
A seafood vendor (R) wearing a face mask talks to a customer at a wet market in Shanghai on February 13, 2020. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)
The Global Times, the English-language Chinese government publication at the forefront of promoting the Communist Party’s top conspiracy theories, asserted Wednesday that a non-peer-reviewed article in the medical journal The Lancet suggests Italy, not China, is the true origin of the virus, and that Italy and other nations must produce early samples of pneumonia patients diagnosed in mid-2019.
“More data and retrospective studies of [Chinese coronavirus] traces in 2019 or even earlier should be studied to get a clearer picture of its mysterious origins, scientists from multiple countries urged,” according to the Times. The newspaper titled the article advocating for these measures “Virus Probe Needs More Early Samples, Countries: Scientists.”
The Times did not offer a link to the Lancet article or its title, but claimed to interview one of its authors, Temple University’s Sayaka Miura. Miura is listed as a co-author in a Lancet article published on August 6 that concludes the Chinese coronavirus may have been spreading rapidly in “late summer 2019” in Lombardy, northern Italy, one of the world’s most severe coronavirus hotspots. Lombardy is host to significant migration from China, as workers flock to work in the garment industry.
The article studied “the association between SARS-CoV-2 [Chinese coronavirus] infection and measles-like symptomatology” to find that the virus “was circulating in Lombardy during the late summer of 2019.” It concluded that more evidence — namely, early samples from people diagnosed with pneumonia and similar respiratory diseases in Lombardy in 2019 — would be necessary to definitively cement the early findings in the study.
The Global Times admitted that Miura told the newspaper the study “doesn’t tell the origins of the coronavirus” but nonetheless appears to indicate the pandemic began long before China first reported the discovery of a new pathogen in December 2019.
Citing a Chinese government-approved “expert,” the state propaganda outlet asserted that the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) needed “to collect samples of the patients who had pneumonia from 2018 to 2019.” The expert notably omitted China as one of the nations that should offer such samples.
Leaked Chinese government documents indicate the first confirmed diagnosis of Chinese coronavirus occurred in Wuhan on November 17, 2019. A study by researchers at the University of California San Diego published in March indicated that the virus may have been spreading in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, as early as October of that year. China notified the W.H.O. of its alleged first case of Chinese coronavirus in humans on December 8 and insisted for almost two months that no evidence suggested the highly contagious virus was transmissible from human to human, a lie the W.H.O. spread globally.
Multiple reports surfacing in the past two years indicate that, following the discovery of human infections, the Communist Party endeavored to hide or destroy key evidence that may have helped scientists retract the origin of the pathogen. The Chinese government actively censored Wuhan health workers who expressed concern, both in public and in private social media groups, about a sudden surge in respiratory illness. It arrested at least eight people; one, Dr. Li Wenliang, died of a coronavirus infection at age 34. Li was arrested for urging fellow doctors in a group WeChat message to use personal protective equipment (PPE) when treating patients with signs of respiratory illness because they appeared to be showing symptoms of a new infectious disease.
Chinese officials also actively destroyed early samples of the Chinese coronavirus used to initially sequence its genome and study patients. Officials also “disinfected” the Huanan Seafood Market, meaning they destroyed any live virus samples that may have been present there.
“Based on comprehensive research and expert opinion, we decided to temporarily manage the pathogen causing the pneumonia as Class II — highly pathogenic — and imposed biosafety requirements on sample collection, transport and experimental activities, as well as destroying the samples,” Liu Dengfeng, a member of China’s National Health Commission, admitted in May 2020.
The identification of a novel coronavirus in December 2019 followed reports, detailed in a U.S. State Department fact sheet published last year, that several workers at the WIV had been hospitalized in autumn 2019 with a mystery respiratory illness. The WIV is one of the world’s premier research institutes on coronaviruses generally and was known to have been studying bat coronaviruses at the time. The Chinese government has denied any ties between the WIV and the pandemic, accusing American biological laboratories, without evidence, of being more likely origin locations.
Beijing denied the W.H.O. access to key sites in Wuhan for a year. When researchers finally had the opportunity to visit Wuhan in early 2021 to draft a report on the origin of the virus, their report revealed little information. The 120-page report concluded that the likeliest hypothesis on how the virus first infected humans was that the animal first incubating the virus infected a second animal, which in turn infected humans. The report could not identify a single animal in the wild in Hubei, however, testing positive for Chinese coronavirus, despite testing 80,000 samples.