China tries to change the narrative
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Remember, China is an asshole:
Nearly a year after doctors identified the first cases of a worrying new disease in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the country appears to be stepping up a campaign to question the origins of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
State media has been reporting intensively on coronavirus discovered on packaging of frozen food imports, not considered a significant vector of infection elsewhere, and research into possible cases of the disease found outside China’s borders before December 2019.
The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”.
“Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected but it was not where it originated,” it quoted Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, as saying. A foreign ministry spokesman, asked about state media reports that the virus originated outside China, said only that it was important to distinguish between where Covid-19 was first detected and where it crossed the species barrier to infect humans.
“Although China was the first to report cases, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the virus originated in China,” Zhao Lijian told a briefing. “Origin tracing is an ongoing process that may involve multiple countries and regions.”
Chinese scientists have even submitted a paper for publication to the Lancet – although it has not yet been peer-reviewed – that claims “Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human Sars-CoV-2 transmission first happened”, suggesting instead that the first case may have been in the “Indian subcontinent”.
Claims that the virus had origins outside China are given little credence by western scientists. Michael Ryan, director of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization (WHO), said last week that it would be “highly speculative” to argue that the disease did not emerge in China. “It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.
Reports of Covid circulating in Italy in autumn 2019, based on samples from a cancer unit, seem “weak”, said Prof Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “The serological data [from Italy] can most likely be explained by cross-reactive antibodies directed against other coronaviruses.” In other words, antibodies found in the cases in Italy had been triggered in individuals who had been infected by different coronaviruses, not those responsible for Covid-19.
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They're a bunch of lying pony dog soldiers...
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This fvcking virus was discovered and identified in animals in the Wuhan province months before the first cases. It was actively being studied in the lab in Wuhan. The first documented cases were in Wuhan.
End story.
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@George-K said in China tries to change the narrative:
Remember, China is an asshole:
In a report marked "internal document, please keep confidential," local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China's accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak.
The previously undisclosed figure is among a string of revelations contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, shared with and verified by CNN.
Taken together, the documents amount to the most significant leak from inside China since the beginning of the pandemic and provide the first clear window into what local authorities knew internally and when.
The Chinese government has steadfastly rejected accusations made by the United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since the beginning of the outbreak. However, though the documents provide no evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings, they do reveal numerous inconsistencies in what authorities believed to be happening and what was revealed to the public.One of the more striking data points concerns the slowness with which local Covid-19 patients were diagnosed. Even as authorities in Hubei presented their handling of the initial outbreak to the public as efficient and transparent, the documents show that local health officials were reliant on flawed testing and reporting mechanisms. A report in the documents from early March says the average time between the onset of symptoms to confirmed diagnosis was 23.3 days, which experts have told CNN would have significantly hampered steps to both monitor and combat the disease.
China has staunchly defended its handling of the outbreak. At a news conference on June 7, China's State Council released a White Paper saying the Chinese government had always published information related to the epidemic in a "timely, open and transparent fashion." -
Kissinger has a scary take on state of US -China relations.
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@Mik said in China tries to change the narrative:
Kluurs, run CCLEANER. If it works like my newspaper you'll get a whole new set of articles.
The problem with CCleaner is that it deletes ALL cookies - I would like to keep some. I do it manually.
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@George-K said in China tries to change the narrative:
@Mik said in China tries to change the narrative:
Kluurs, run CCLEANER. If it works like my newspaper you'll get a whole new set of articles.
The problem with CCleaner is that it deletes ALL cookies - I would like to keep some. I do it manually.
Click Options
Click Cookies
Select Cookies to keep -
@Copper said in China tries to change the narrative:
@George-K said in China tries to change the narrative:
@Mik said in China tries to change the narrative:
Kluurs, run CCLEANER. If it works like my newspaper you'll get a whole new set of articles.
The problem with CCleaner is that it deletes ALL cookies - I would like to keep some. I do it manually.
Click Options
Click Cookies
Select Cookies to keepThanks....
That's a very very long list. Easier to just go and delete the cookies I want to disable.
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@Loki said in China tries to change the narrative:
Kissinger has a scary take on state of US -China relations.
I don't know that I agree with Kissinger. I think we can ill-afford to support a regime that imprisons 2-3 million in re-education camps. The changes we have hoped to see in an opening China have clearly not materialized.
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@Mik said in China tries to change the narrative:
@Loki said in China tries to change the narrative:
Kissinger has a scary take on state of US -China relations.
I don't know that I agree with Kissinger. I think we can ill-afford to support a regime that imprisons 2-3 million in re-education camps. The changes we have hoped to see in an opening China have clearly not materialized.
The way we are going, we'll soon be begging them to help us with our re-education camps.