What really happened in.., p.9
What Really Happened In Wuhan, page 9
And so it was that five days after Pottinger had first begged cabinet officials to ban travel from China, the Trump administration announced the drastic move, effective from that Sunday at 5pm.
While Trump agreed to ban travel from China, he did not want to take ownership of the decision. “Why don’t you go to the podium here in the White House and announce it?” the President said to Azar. This was not Trump’s usual style, to delegate a major press conference. “I suspect this was a case of ‘Let’s let Azar get out there, hang him out there a bit and see how it goes,’” one official says.
Azar walked across from the Oval Office to the Roosevelt Room to prepare for the big press conference and to sign the national declaration of a Public Health Emergency. The White House staff refused to photograph it, so Azar’s Chief of Staff Brian Harrison recorded the historic moment on his iPhone.
The announcement was made at 5pm. US citizens who had been in China’s Hubei province in the past fortnight would have to quarantine for 14 days if they travelled back to the US. It was the first quarantine order in 50 years. But it was the travel ban that sent shockwaves. “Foreign nationals other than immediate family of US citizens and permanent residents who have travelled in China in the last 14 days will be denied entry into United States,” Azar said.
Eight hours later, Australia announced a similar travel ban on Saturday, February 1 at 5pm local time. Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt was watching his son play cricket that morning when Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, rang him with some bold advice. Murphy told him it was time to shut our borders to China to prevent coronavirus from reaching the shores.
Hunt immediately phoned Prime Minister Scott Morrison and said, “Boss, you’re not going to like this.”
They patched in Murphy and spoke about the unprecedented step of banning flights entirely from one of Australia’s largest trading partners. At the time, this was a radical move that was strongly rebuffed by major universities and the tourism sector. For two and a half hours, Hunt walked around the cricket oval making phone calls, watching the game and occasionally cheering for his son. By 9pm that night, the borders were closed to all of China.
Australia would later go a step further and ban all international travel, with the exception of returning citizens who were subject to quarantine. This succeeded in keeping the country relatively free of the virus. “Australia has taken unprecedented steps at a far earlier time in the progression of the virus than almost anyone in the world,” Hunt said. Amid the decision to shut down travel from China, Morrison and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had an unscheduled call on Saturday February 1. In the course of that call, Ardern allegedly asked Morrison what he was going to say about the origins of the virus and whether it came from a laboratory. Virologists advising the governments at that point were split 50/50 on whether Covid-19 had been genetically manipulated.
Morrison, fresh from the call with Ardern, relayed the conversation to Cabinet ministers. “Ardern was the first world leader to raise the possibility it had come from a lab,” a senior Australian Government source said. A Cabinet Minister confirmed their initial advice stated there was a 50 per cent chance the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory, but this was later downgraded substantially to 5 per cent before rising again.
Morrison doesn’t recall the nature of the conversation with Ardern, although his advisors confirmed the call took place. Ardern’s spokesman said “details of her conversations with Prime Minister Morrison are confidential”.
The day after this conversation between Morrison and Ardern, New Zealand followed Australia, announcing a travel ban from China in the afternoon of Sunday, February 2. The UK did not introduce a travel ban, and neither did Europe. Only Italy, South Africa, the Czech Republic and North Korea introduced flight suspensions from China.
O’Brien encouraged his European counterparts to similarly ban travel from China – but they refused. “I said you should do the same thing. Unfortunately, the Europeans demurred and said, ‘Oh, it’s a Brussels issue, we don’t have enough information’,” O’Brien tells me. “Ultimately, what happened is the Chinese banned travel internally but they continued to allow folks from Wuhan and Hubei to go to Europe and ultimately most of the infection that took place in the United States came from Europe through JFK, because the Europeans allowed in massive numbers of Chinese travellers. Had the Europeans taken the same approach as the US, Australia and New Zealand on the travel ban, this thing could have been contained in a much more aggressive fashion.”
After Trump banned travel from China, then Presidential hopeful Joe Biden sent a tweet he would likely live to regret. “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science – not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency,” he tweeted on February 1.
Biden’s press team later claimed he wasn’t specifically referring to the travel ban when he accused the President of racism. His campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said that Biden “has decried Trump’s xenophobia for years, and was saying that it shouldn’t influence the US approach to this outbreak. This was not in reference to coronavirus travel restrictions.”
This is a stretch, given Biden sent the tweet the day after Trump announced the travel ban from China – and this was the only big move he had made in relation to China at that point. Remember, Trump was still praising Xi Jinping.
The move to shut down flights from China was also rebuffed by the WHO, whose medical advice did not recommend travel restrictions and claimed China was on top of the unfolding health crisis. “First, there is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. WHO doesn’t recommend limiting trade and movement,” Tedros said on January 30. “We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent. WHO stands ready to provide advice to any country that is considering which measures to take.”
Australia had declared that this was a global pandemic 10 days before the WHO did.
As the US election year rolled on, the early travel ban was one of the only things Trump could point to that he had got right when it came to the pandemic. Looking back now, Mulvaney is somewhat defensive. He doesn’t accept the criticism that the administration didn’t do enough in those early days. “People say we underreacted? Well, in hindsight, I actually think we overreacted with the lockdown, because the disease turned out not to be nearly as fatal as we thought that it would be. It was less than 2 per cent fatal in this country, as opposed to the 15 to 35 per cent that we were worried about,” he said. “We never should have locked down. We should have left the economy open and protected the most at-risk populations.”
When they implemented the travel ban, the recent experience with two coronaviruses, MERS and SARS, led senior Trump administration to believe that the fatality rate would be high but transmission easily contained.
“We knew that coronaviruses generally could be very, very deadly, and we knew that SARS and MERS were sort of hard to transmit, not as easy to transmit as the flu,” Mulvaney explains. “We’ve focused exclusively at the outset on what’s called containment, to try to keep people who might be infected out of the United States. That’s what gave rise to the cessation of all travel from Wuhan, and then from Greater China, and the funnelling of international travellers through various airports.”
China’s reaction to the travel ban was fiery. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Trump’s travel ban was “certainly not a gesture of goodwill”. “A friend in need is a friend indeed. Many countries have offered China support in various means. In sharp contrast, certain US officials’ words and actions are neither factual nor appropriate. Just as the WHO recommended against travel restrictions, the US rushed to go in the opposite way,” she said.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ issued a Tweet noting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s remarks that a “certain country has turned a blind eye to WHO recommendations” by imposing “sweeping travel restrictions against China”. China also expressed its “deep regret and dissatisfaction over the Australian government’s announcement on the extension of travel restrictions over foreign nationals from Chinese mainland”.
In what can only be described as pure chutzpah, China’s Deputy Head of the Chinese Embassy in Australia, Wang Xining, called for Chinese students who could no longer travel to Australia to be financially compensated. “We are very concerned about the interests of the Chinese students who will not be able to come to Australia over the next 12 days,” he said. “We hope their rights and interests will be safeguarded, including proper expansion of visas and also maybe proper compensation for some of the financial losses during this period.” He called the travel ban “a vicious cycle of panic and [overreaction].”
China’s response to Israel was equally outrageous. On Thursday, January 30, Israeli Health Minister Yaakov Litzman announced that Israel had banned all incoming flights from China, and the following day Interior Minister Aryeh Deri barred foreign nationals who had recently been in China from entering Israel.
China’s Acting Ambassador to Israel, Dai Yuming, referencing the Holocaust, said in a press conference, “In the darkest days of the Jewish people, we didn’t close the door on them. I hope Israel will not close the door on the Chinese.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Transparency
FEBRUARY 1, 2020, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
America’s Ambassador to Geneva, Andrew Bremberg, pulled Tedros aside outside a WHO meeting in Geneva. Tedros had just returned from his one-on-one with Xi Jinping in Beijing. The pair had shaken hands, smiled and posed for photographs. Tedros had then assured the world how truly transparent and cooperative China was being, lavishing praise on Xi Jinping for his handling of the outbreak. “China identified the pathogen in record time and shared it immediately, which led to the rapid development of diagnostic tools,” he said on January 29. “They are completely committed to transparency, both internally and externally. And they have agreed to work with other countries who need their support.”
Listening carefully to every word, Bremberg was highly concerned. The reality was China had not been forthcoming. It was a month since the WHO had discovered the virus existed, but despite repeated US efforts, virus samples had not been obtained and no health officials were allowed to set foot in Wuhan.
As he stood downstairs in the modern WHO building, Bremberg’s tone was concerned. “Be very careful in what you’re saying. I fear you are saying things we hope are true but may not be,” he warned Tedros.
Tedros insisted everything was fine. He was proud of his recent visit and was content with the commitments he’d received from Xi Jinping to allow a team into China.
“You’re getting out over your skis, and if it doesn’t turn out this way your institutional and personal credibility will be at risk,” Bremberg implored Tedros.
The WHO chief insisted everything was fine. “Don’t worry, I’m not over my skis, everything is good,” he soothed.
This made Bremberg even more nervous. In the 10 days that followed, it became clear Xi Jinping’s commitments were worth little. The daily conversations between Tedros and Bremberg grew tense as the US Ambassador pushed for a plane of experts to depart for Wuhan. “If they’re slow-rolling you, you need to say this, because then we won’t blame you, it’s not your fault,” Bremberg said.
Eventually, Bremberg issued a threat of his own to Tedros, without the express permission of the President. “We are going to cut off funding all together if you don’t get this trip together,” Bremberg told Tedros. Tedros was deeply unhappy, but the ultimatum worked. A few days later, the WHO trip to China was approved.
Twenty-five health officials from nine countries flew into China for a fact-finding mission from February 10 to 24. Towards the end of the inspection, it became apparent there was a major problem. Bremberg discovered that the WHO had struck a side agreement with China to change the terms of reference, taking the origins of the virus off the table. The inspectors would simply be learning from China about how to respond to an outbreak. “They had totally caved on the terms of reference, that was supposed to examine the origins as soon as possible,” Bremberg says.
Instead, China only allowed three WHO officials to visit Wuhan and only for two days. They were Bruce Aylward, Chikwe Ihekweazu and Tim Eckmanns – none were American. They did not visit the wet market or the Wuhan laboratories. Instead, their visit included trips to hospitals and they had meetings with officials. The WHO’s excuse is that it was too difficult to visit Wuhan. “They didn’t get any real information,” Bremberg says.
When I questioned the WHO’s spokeswoman Margaret Harris on why officials did not even visit the wet market or the laboratory, she was defensive. “The focus of the mission was on learning from the response, not looking at the origin, so the wet market, lab, etc. were not on the agenda,” she told me in a May 2020 interview. “The mission was not even going to go to Wuhan because there was such intense transmission at that time and the hospitals were actually overwhelmed. The people our experts needed to speak to were their counterparts, and at that point the infection prevention and control experts in Wuhan were flat out dealing with a very large outbreak.”
There was no access to the earliest virus samples that the US felt were critical to obtain. These samples were something the Chinese government had gone to great lengths to hide. The day after China was forced to admit to the WHO it had an unknown pneumonia spreading, on December 30, 2019, authorities ordered that all viral samples be destroyed from genomics laboratories, according to investigative Chinese media outlet Caixin Global. Genomics companies were also told to stop testing samples linked to the outbreak, and were banned from releasing any results to patients or medical staff – they could only be sent to authorities. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was also blocked from sharing sample isolates with its partner laboratory, the University of Texas Biocontainment Laboratory.
The samples were crucial. “I spent weeks talking with Tedros, saying you need to ask China to share samples. We are getting ready to do not just the current diagnostics and next therapeutics, but vaccines are going to be critical. We need earliest known virus sample strains to test and pressure, to figure out the right approach,” Bremberg says.
China never shared the samples.
“I shook my end at the beginning of 2021, when the reason we had pushed so hard was in the daily news. Everyone was realising we’ve got these new variants coming out and the biggest question was: are the new vaccines going to be efficacious against the new variants. That’s exactly why we wanted the samples in the first place,” he says.
China’s cover-up at every stage of the outbreak exasperated its international counterparts. China’s official line in the early days was that the virus originated in the wet market, and only coronavirus cases linked to the wet market could be recorded, but evidence that could have proved or disproved this was eradicated. On January 1 – the day after the WHO was informed of the virus – the Huanan Seafood Market was shut. Teams of cleaners went in sanitising, disinfecting and spraying the market, destroying any forensic evidence that could have been collected.
On the same day the brave doctors like Ai Fen shared news of the virus over WeChat and the WHO became aware of a coronavirus in Wuhan, Chinese authorities started systematically removing any mention of the virus online. This began on December 31, when technology services in China censored key words linked to the pandemic. The live-streaming platform YY censored words including “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”. WeChat censored phrases related to the pandemic, banned both speculative and factual information related to the outbreak, and removed even “neutral references to Chinese government efforts to handle the outbreak that had been reported on state media”, according to the Citizen Lab’s March 2020 report. The CCP censorship alarmed doctors and Chinese health authorities, who knew the precise opposite approach should be taken in order to save lives. This crucial point clearly shows China’s deliberate, intentional and clear-eyed decision to cover up the virus; to stop their own people and those internationally from finding out about it.
The censorship order came right from the top. Xi Jinping, in a speech on February 3 published by state media, issued a directive to promote “positive energy” and “strengthen online media control to maintain social stability”. Families were left fuming as their conversations online about the deaths of loved ones were deleted, according to media reports. Images from funeral homes were censored and families in mourning were assigned minders, The New York Times found.
The most egregious of China’s cover-ups, which directly led to the spread of coronavirus globally, centred on the denial of human-to-human transmission. China had evidence the coronavirus was infectious as early as December 6, when a woman fell sick five days after her husband. She had no history of visiting the market. Yet China refused to admit there was human-to-human transmission of what has turned out to be one of the most infectious diseases in human history for another six and a half weeks.
On January 6, Xu Jianguo, the Beijing director of an expert team sent into Wuhan, said, “China has many years of disease control, there’s absolutely no chance that this will spread widely because of Spring Festival travel.” He insisted, “there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission” in comments he gave to Hong Kong news outlet Takungpao. The message was repeated just a few days later by prominent PRC government expert Wang Guangfa, who said, in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV, the outbreak was “under control” and mostly a “mild condition”. He added that there was no sign of human-to-human transmission.
