A newly discovered secret Chinese order dating back to the early weeks of the novel coronavirus pandemic in 2020 provides some of the most compelling evidence yet that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was involved in a Covid cover-up.
According to a confidential memo obtained by US Right to Know, authorities in Beijing issued a directive to suppress information about the coronavirus pandemic. The order prohibited the sharing of viral samples outside of government-sanctioned laboratories under the guise of “biosecurity.”
The destruction of these early samples not only hampered the global response to the pandemic, but also hampered the ability of the US intelligence community to determine its origin.
The National Health Commission, the branch of the State Council responsible for health, issued the order on January 3, 2020, just two days after the world was informed about the new coronavirus through a global system alert of information on infectious diseases ProMed.
While Caixin and the Associated Press have previously reported some details of the warrant, US Right to Know is now publishing the full document for the first time.
According to the order, all samples were to be shared with government-designated institutions at the provincial level or above for testing and then disposed of. Laboratories that obtained samples before January 3 were instructed to share them with government-designated institutions or destroy them immediately.
The government pledged to improve law enforcement inspections and take severe action against individuals and institutions that violate law and order.
The order explicitly stated that no institution or individual could release any relevant information to the public without authorization. The scientists were not allowed to communicate their findings without approval, as the document stated that results related to infectious diseases and biosecurity must be reviewed before dissemination.
The order repeatedly emphasized the timely elimination of security hazards and the foolproof nature of biosecurity measures. It was issued shortly after the closure of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan, which was linked to numerous early cases of COVID-19.
In early 2020, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was inspected by the National Security Commission, which tested blood samples from researchers for exposure to the virus. This information was revealed in a recently declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Anonymous sources in the intelligence community told the New York Times that the destruction of the first samples hampered efforts to trace the origin of the virus. However, they also cautioned against exaggerating the significance of the destroyed samples.
Early viral sequences are crucial to understanding the lineage of SARS-CoV-2 and unraveling the origins of the pandemic. Unfortunately, due to censorship and data destruction, much of this critical information remains inaccessible.
The revealed order represents only one aspect of a wider crackdown on scientific research that threatens to expose the Chinese government’s failures to contain the pandemic, prioritize the control of information about lives and identify the source of the bud
Although more than 100 individuals with symptoms were sampled in December 2019, during the first days of the pandemic, only about 20 genome sequences from these patients are available to international researchers, according to Dr. Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo, evolutionary biologist at the French National Center. for scientific research.
“Having access to additional sequences from the first few days would greatly help researchers to infer what happened in Wuhan in 2019 and distinguish between different scenarios,” Courtier-Orgogozo told USRTK.
The directive to destroy samples had global repercussions, including delaying the US response to the pandemic.
Emails obtained through a public records request revealed that James Le Duc, former director of a maximum-security laboratory in Galveston, Texas, which had a research agreement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, try to get early viral samples from your contacts in the lab. at the end of January 2020, but was unsuccessful. Le Duc eventually obtained the first sample from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory.
Le Duc initially assured reporters and congressional staff that a lab accident was an unlikely source of the pandemic, even praising the Chinese government for its transparency in sharing the results with the world . However, he later discussed privately with his colleagues how an investigation into a potential lab leak could be conducted.
This order echoes the data censorship seen during the 2002 SARS epidemic when only China’s CDC had legal possession of viral samples. The Ministry of Health, which preceded the National Health Commission, closely controlled information.
The document used in this report was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department and the translation was made using Google Translate.
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