The NY Times seems very upset over all the censorship surrounding Wuhan Flu from the Chinese government (forgetting all the censorship from social media companies, the US government, and the NY Times)
Chinese Censorship Is Quietly Rewriting the COVID-19 Story
Early in 2020, on the same day that a frightening new illness officially got the name COVID-19, a team of scientists from the United States and China released critical data showing how quickly the virus was spreading, and who was dying.
The study was cited in health warnings around the world and appeared to be a model of international collaboration in a moment of crisis.
Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it. A few observers took note of the peculiar move, but the whole episode quickly faded amid the frenzy of the coronavirus pandemic.
What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science. That effort kicked up a cloud of dust around the dates of early COVID cases, like those reported in the study.
“It was so hard to get any information out of China,” said one of the authors, Ira Longini, of the University of Florida, who described the backstory of the removal publicly for the first time in a recent interview. “There was so much covered up, and so much hidden.”
The NY Times is just noticing this?
That the Chinese government muzzled scientists, hindered international investigations and censored online discussion of the pandemic is well documented. But Beijing’s stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found.
Well, gee wiz, Willard, y’all at the Times might have tried doing some Journalism during the pandemic years, looking for information, facts, and what was actually happening, rather than towing the “just shut up and take it, peasants” line. It might have been a lot easier to find the information early on
Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by the Times of over a dozen retracted papers found.
The NY Times follow right along.
It is impossible to ascribe a single motive to the crackdown. Beijing controls and shapes information as a matter of course, particularly in moments of crisis. But some of the censorship changed the timeline of early infections, a delicate topic as the government faced criticism over whether it responded to the outbreak quickly enough.
There is no evidence that the censorship is designed to conceal a specific scenario for the origins of the pandemic. Some scientists believe that COVID-19 spread naturally from animals to humans. Others argue that it may have spread from a Chinese laboratory. Both sides have pointed to censored data to support their theories.
Right, right, no reason for this to hide the origins. Couldn’t possibly happen. Question: why in the hell would the Chinese government hide anything if it was 100% naturally occurring? A long, long piece, more open then we saw during the pandemic, and one person in the Yahoo News reprint notes
According to this story,”The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging”. I just did some digging and found it. The last paragraph in the paper states: “In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places“. I added the bold type. So in February of 2020 the Chinese had already concluded themselves that the covid-19 virus had most likely originated in one of two laboratories in Wuhan. Shortly after it was published the paper was quietly withdrawn, and governments around the world hammered away at the narrative that the origin for covid-19 was the wet market in Wuhan, not the laboratories in Wuhan. Liars.
Huh.
Redundant since we now know that social media companies were acting as agents of the U.S. Government.