COVID-19: The Greatest Cover-Up in History—From Wuhan to the White House

PART I: OUTBREAK

Make no mistake. This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one.

—Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,

WHO Director General, March 11, 2020

CHAPTER ONE

ONCE UPON A TIME IN WUHAN

We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.

—President Donald Trump,

CNBC interview, January 22, 2020

It began in China. It began with a single person.

In the fall of 2019, Wuhan—the capital city of Hubei Province in the center of the world’s most populous country—was a place few people outside the People’s Republic had even heard of. Within a few months it would become forever synonymous as ground zero for the greatest medical emergency of our age.

Nobody could have guessed the coming notoriety that November, however. The sun was shining. The sprawling city’s 11 million people were, as usual, thronging the streets, parks, and markets.

Golden October—as the Chinese call fall—had passed, and if the people of Wuhan were preparing for winter, they were doing so with little out of the ordinary on their minds. Winters in central China tend to be relatively mild, and at the end of them comes the Chinese New Year holiday, a time of intense celebration during which some 450 million people travel across the country. As a major transportation hub, Wuhan could expect at least 15 million to do so via the city.

But a hidden menace was lurking in the very air the people of Wuhan were breathing. A strange new virus was developing and mutating rapidly.

It was here in Wuhan, in the streets and factories, the offices and apartment blocks, the train stations, metro carriages, and markets, that the invisible enemy was born—festering at least a month and a half before the world was told.

By which time it was already too late.

***

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market is a vast and chaotic space occupying over 50,000 square meters in the Jianghan district of Wuhan, an area conveniently close to shops, homes, and offices and just 800 meters from the Hankou railway station, the main Wuhan terminal for high-speed trains to and from Shanghai, home to some 24 million.

Over a thousand tenants set up stalls in this wet market, selling seafood and live animals. Some were licensed, some were not—for although Huanan market was officially a space for the mass selling of seafood to shops and restaurants, there was another trade going on here too.

Besides the traditional crab, shrimp, striped bass, and salmon for sale, there were all types of exotic and wild animals, from pangolins to bats, rats and frogs to wolf pups. A price list posted by one vendor on the popular Chinese review site Dazhong Dianping listed 112 items available, including a number of wild animals. The South China Morning Post reported the market had a section selling around 120 wildlife animals across 75 species. In documents reviewed by these authors, the breathtaking range of creatures includes badgers, beavers, camel, crocodiles, dogs, donkeys, foxes, giant salamanders, hedgehogs, koalas, ostrich, otters, peacocks, pheasants, porcupines, rabbit organs, sheep, snakes (including the many-banded krait, Bungarus multicinctus, an extremely venomous species), and turtles.

Also available at Huanan were masked palm civets—a mammal native to southeast Asia and India, a little like a cross between a cat and a small bear. In 2003, the SARS virus was isolated in a number of masked palm civets found in another wet market in the Chinese city of Guangdong, ten hours from Wuhan. In 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Hong Kong and Guangzhou established a direct genetic link between the SARS virus appearing in civets and in humans, with many believing that inadequate or unhygienic preparation of the meat may have been the cause of the disease outbreak.

Between 2002 and 2003, SARS would spread to more than two dozen countries in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia and infect 8,098 people worldwide, killing just under one in ten of them before it was contained.

But by fall of 2019, SARS was considered old news. There hadn’t been a reported case anywhere in the world since 2004. The stallholders of Huanan—and those who thronged the market browsing for everything from shrimp to camel, masked palm civets, pangolin, and bats included—were completely relaxed about any threat from that disease. It was a beaten virus.

Not all the meat sold at wet markets like Huanan was dead. There was also a steady trade in live animals—not as pets, but to be either taken away and slaughtered at home, or else picked out by the customer and butchered there and then. Such livestock would often be kept alongside carcasses in the narrow, crowded, chaotic lanes and stalls that made up the market, with little or no separation between living and dead, one species or another.

One report in the Bangkok Post quoted a local resident of the Jianghan district describing a selection of the live animals on offer: There were turtles, snakes, rats, hedgehogs and pheasants. The report also carried photographs of the shocking conditions in which they were slaughtered, with unwashed buckets, scales, and knives, splattered with blood and entrails, being reused between several species without washing.

Not that the official authorities were especially concerned about the trade in animals—or the conditions in which they were kept and slaughtered. In September 2019, the Wuhan Administration for Industry and Commerce said that government officials had inspected eight stalls at Huanan wet market selling live animals and were happy they all had the correct documentation and licensing.

To those in the West, it seems barbaric. To the Chinese people, however, eating rare, unusual, or exotic meat is deeply ingrained in their history and culture. According to Hu Xingdou, professor of economics at Beijing Institute of Technology, While the West values freedom and other human rights, Chinese people view food as their primary need because starving is a big threat and an unforgettable part of the national memory.

Furthermore, what may once have been born of necessity is now an indication of status. While feeding themselves is not a problem to many Chinese nowadays, Hu continued, eating novel food or meat, organs or parts from rare animals or plants has become a measure of identity to some people.

This collision of cultural identity and the chaotic reality of life inside wet markets such as Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market—as well as a profound refusal to learn the lessons that SARS should have taught—would provide the ideal breeding ground for the return of a disease everyone thought had gone away forever.

When COVID-19, a new, deadlier strain of SARS, was discovered, that initial collision was made indescribably worse by the deliberate actions of governments, as you will learn through the pages of this book—first in China and then elsewhere—who, for one reason or another, sought to downplay the threat … with horrific, worldwide consequences.

***

On December 31, 2019, when Chinese authorities contacted the World Health Organization and informed them of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan—the first official admission that there was anything unusual happening in the city—few would have dared guess just how much carnage this unknown pneumonia would go on to cause around the world.

In fact, at that time the Chinese government was still denying that the new strain of pneumonia was in any way linked to SARS. And they were prepared to go to extreme lengths to prove they were right.

One man, however, was convinced that these patients were potentially the forerunners of a pandemic. His name was Li Wenliang.

A little over a month later, he would be dead.

Dr. Li was an ophthalmologist who worked as a physician at Wuhan Central Hospital. He was known as a calm, patient, and diligent doctor, a dedicated family man, married with one child and another due in the spring. He had been at Wuhan Central since 2014, and at thirty-three years old was a fit and healthy man, with a keen interest in basketball.

On December 30, 2019, Dr. Li’s world was turned upside down. It began with a patient’s report from his colleague Dr. Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at the hospital. In the preceding weeks she had treated two patients who had been admitted with apparent influenza, but strangely for whom conventional treatment methods did not seem to have had any effect. One was a delivery person at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market; the other had no apparent history of contact with the market—and seemingly no connection with the first patient.

What seemed a strange coincidence took a more frightening turn after Dr. Ai saw the lab results from one of those patients. The report contained the words SARS coronavirus, pseudomonas aeruginosa, 46 types of oral / respiratory colonisation bacteria.

Dr. Ai circled the word SARS and sent an image of it to another doctor, who forwarded it to his colleagues; by the afternoon it had spread through Wuhan’s medical circles until it reached Dr. Li. As other doctors passed on the information and shared details of their own patients, it turned out those two cases were not as unique as first expected.

At 5:43 p.m., Dr. Li posted in a private WeChat group of his medical school classmates. (WeChat is China’s biggest and most comprehensive multipurpose messaging and social media app, akin to WhatsApp, and boasting a billion monthly users. It is also subject to whispers of political censorship and mass surveillance by the Chinese government. Imagine Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Apple Pay all combined … but watched over by Big Brother.)

Dr. Li’s message read: Seven confirmed cases of SARS were reported from Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. He also posted shots of the patient’s diagnosis report and CT scan image before adding, They are being isolated in the emergency department of our hospital.

Fifty-nine minutes later, he received a reply warning him that WeChat was not a secure platform.

Be careful, said the message, or else our chat group might be dismissed.

But around him, the toll mounted. More pneumonia cases with unknown causes presenting with fever, fatigue, coughing, and breathing difficulties continued to be diagnosed.

Undeterred, Dr. Li kept posting. The latest news is it has been confirmed that they are coronavirus infections, but the exact virus strain is being subtyped, he wrote, adding, Don’t circulate the information outside of this group, tell your family and loved ones to take caution.

Dr. Li’s posts were not kept within the group. Screenshots were taken and shared. To use an unfortunate phrase, under the circumstances, his warnings of a new, potentially deadlier strain of SARS went viral.

It did not take long for Big Brother to notice. Within twenty-four hours, the authorities became involved—but not in the way one might have hoped, expected, or even imagined. The Chinese state’s response to Dr. Li’s posts was not to take swift, decisive action against the threat of a new epidemic, but to attempt to swiftly, decisively silence any mention of it.

The cover-up had begun.

On January 1, 2020, Wuhan police announced that eight internet users were being punished for spreading rumors. They claimed that these eight people were guilty of, in the words of the Beijing News, posting and forwarding false information on the Internet without verification, causing adverse social impact.

Two days later, the Wuhan Public Security Bureau interrogated Dr. Li, issuing him with a warning notice and censuring him for making false comments on the Internet. He was made to sign a letter of admonition promising not to do it again. The police warned him that if he failed to learn from the warning and continued to violate the law, he would be prosecuted. They also issued a report stating that Dr. Li’s original message, Seven confirmed cases of SARS were reported from Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, was unequivocally false.

Why exactly were the authorities so desperate to bury such potentially important information? What could their motivations for suppressing warnings of a deadly new coronavirus possibly spring from?

The censorship did not end with Dr. Li and the other seven so-called rumor makers. In early March 2020, a report issued by the Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab found that WeChat had begun censoring key words about the coronavirus outbreak from as early as January 1—in other words, almost from the moment Dr. Ai first became aware of it and Dr. Li messaged his fellow medical students warning them of a potential virus.

Citizen Lab’s report found that during the whole of January, WeChat censored no fewer than 132 keyword combinations … and that during the first fifteen days of February—by which time the cat was well and truly out of the bag—a further 384 new keywords were added to the blacklist. These all included references to Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping, references to government policies on handling the epidemic, and responses to the outbreak in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau.

References to Dr. Li were also censored.

As well as the crackdown on WeChat, the report noted that popular Chinese live-streaming site YY also blacklisted forty-five keywords from its platform, including the terms Unknown Wuhan pneumonia and SARS outbreak in Wuhan.

Somebody, it seemed obvious, was trying to rewrite history.

Did the executives behind WeChat and YY make the decision to censor content and supposedly private messages themselves, perhaps conscious of attracting official reprimands for being seen as vessels for posting and forwarding false information on the Internet? If that is the case, it would seem they were not only extremely quick off the block to quash any kind of rumors, but also immediately and astonishingly aware of the Communist Party’s desire to keep this particular information locked down.

What seems far more likely is that those whispers of state involvement and surveillance through the likes of WeChat and YY are more than whispers after all. For a regime that has banned Google and Wikipedia altogether, attempting to control the spread of information—and specifically what information is spread—by effectively censoring the internet itself does not seem so far-fetched.

It’s appalling to see the wide range of terms, even including some non-sensitive terms, [being] censored, Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International, told the BBC in March.

It shows how obsessed and concerned the Chinese government is [in] trying to curb any discussion … that falls outside the official narrative. It’s totally about social control and deprives citizens of their rights to freedom of information and expression.

That social control of its own citizens was to have a devastating effect on the whole planet.

***

For the moment, however, it seemed the Chinese authorities’ efforts to quash any talk of a new SARS outbreak was proving successful. WeChat was shutting down attempts to spread awareness, YY was doing the same, Dr. Li Wenliang had been publicly admonished, an official statement had been put out, and life in the People’s Republic was to carry on as normal.

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was closed on January 1 by the Wuhan health authorities. It was later admitted that this was in response to Dr. Ai’s initial patients, and that the closure was to conduct investigations into the outbreak, as well as to clean and disinfect the market. But at the time, the state-run Xinhua News Agency claimed its closure was simply for renovations.

It was too little, too late, and with much of the population being kept ignorant of the disease, COVID-19 began to spread like wildfire. On January 2, forty-one patients were hospitalized in Wuhan with the new coronavirus, now named 2019-n-Cov; 66 percent of them had had direct exposure to Huanan wet market. The following day, health authorities reported forty-four cases, eleven of whom were seriously ill. That same day, Dr. Li Wenliang resumed his position at Wuhan Central Hospital.

What followed was the bitterest twist of fate in this horrific story to date.

On January 8, just over a week after his original WeChat posting and just five days after returning to work, Dr. Li treated a female patient with glaucoma. At that time, she showed no obvious signs of infection with coronavirus—her body temperature was normal and she did not appear to have a cough. Prior to its closure, she had been a storekeeper at Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

The next day the woman developed a fever, and a CAT scan revealed she had a lung infection. It emerged that two of her relatives had also developed fevers. Despite the official warnings to keep quiet, Dr. Li was convinced this was another case of the new virus—and reported to the hospital that this was evidence that it could be transmitted human to human. He would be proved horribly correct.

On January 10, Dr. Li developed a cough, followed quickly by a fever, and was admitted to the hospital—as a patient—after a scan showed he too had a lung infection. His parents were also admitted with the same infection. Two days later, Dr. Li was placed in intensive care. As his condition worsened—and more and more people became infected—Dr. Li Wenliang once again became a household name in China.

This time, his attempts to warn the country about the disease were acknowledged, rather than suppressed. In a national TV broadcast on January 29, Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said on national television that Dr. Li and the other seven people punished by the police for speaking out the month before should not be considered troublemakers but instead be held in high regard.

The same day—perhaps in an attempt