COVID-19 and Ireland – Part 11

In the last article in this series we saw that there was little or no evidence of a dangerous new respiratory illness in China at the end of 2019. None of the cases of so-called PUE—pneumonia of unknown etiology—which were subsequently implicated in the COVID-19 outbreak displayed any unusual symptoms, and the number of cases was not out of the ordinary. At no time were the emergency services in Wuhan City or Hubei Province stretched to the limit.

How, then, did the Chinese authorities convince their own people and the rest of the world that a deadly epidemic of a dangerous new SARS-like illness was spreading throughout Hubei Province?

Show: Don’t Tell

On 31 December 2019, the Chinese medical authorities issued an epidemiologic alert, bringing the situation in China to the attention of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). This marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (Allam 2).

A few weeks later a number of disturbing videos went viral on Chinese social media purporting to show victims of this new disease collapsing in the streets and other public spaces of Wuhan City. Medical officials wearing hazmat suits and gas masks were seen patrolling the streets, collecting the prostrate bodies:

Coronavirus Has People Keeling over in Streets - TomoNews

That these videos were pieces of state propaganda carried out with the participation of crisis actors is now obvious. In the twenty-one months that have passed since these videos were first broadcast, nothing like this has been observed in any other country. This alone ought to alert us to the dubious nature of the videos. But surely a modicum of critical thinking at the outset would have been sufficient to refute the message being presented to us. Are we really to believe that the alleged epidemic was so deadly that victims were collapsing in the streets at the very moment that passers-by were filming them with their video cameras? And was it just a fortunate coincidence that these helpful passers-by were accompanied by health officials in hazmat suits and gas masks?

Although these videos do not pass the smell test, many of them were still rebroadcast by several outlets of the mainstream media in the West. Some of these outlets questioned them, when they ought to have recognized them immediately for what they were—blatant pieces of fake news—and dismissed them out of hand. Most outlets did not even raise any doubts, but compared the scenes depicted in the videos to The Walking Dead or something out of a Hollywood zombie movie:

Not even the fact-checking site Snopes refuted these ridiculous videos, merely labelling the claim that they depicted people collapsing in the street from coronavirus Unproven.

A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies

The official narrative of the pandemic was further cemented by another grim story that spread like a virus among the world’s media. This story was duly illustrated with emotionally charged images and a text that read like something out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales or E T A Hoffmann:

This Man’s Mask Didn’t Work

It was the image that became a symbol of the chaos enveloping coronavirus-hit Wuhan: the body of a man lying for hours on the pavement. The grim scene, captured a year ago by AFP news agency, was around the corner from a hospital in the Chinese metropolis – now known as the pandemic’s “ground zero”. But the corpse was left untouched until nervous and overwhelmed rescue workers carried it away. Although the cause of his death has never been established, the unknown man lying on his back has nevertheless become the morbid illustration of a city submerged by the mysterious killer virus. The neighbourhood where he took his last breath resembled a ghost town last year, as terrified residents were ordered to stay at home in the world’s first COVID-19 lockdown. (Al Jazeera)

Nowhere in this article on Al Jazeera’s website does the author question this story or raise even the slightest doubt as to its veracity. This article was posted in January 2021, one year after the alleged event took place. In the course of that year, nothing similar to this occurred anywhere else in the world. There are no images of dead bodies lying in the streets of Paris or London or New York, wearing face masks and waiting for the medics in hazmat suits to pick them up and take them to the morgue. But we are still expected to believe that it did happen in Wuhan in January 2020. We are expected to believe that the corpse of a covid victim lay on a public street for two hours, one block from a major hospital, while international press photographers were in the vicinity.

Even supposedly respectable broadsheets fanned the flames by republishing these images, which were taken by Héctor Retamal, a photographer working for the French press agency Agence France-Presse (AFP):

It is an image that captures the chilling reality of the coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan: a grey-haired man wearing a face mask lies dead on the pavement, a plastic shopping bag in one hand, as police and medical staff in full protective suits and masks prepare to take him away. On what would typically be a crowded street in Wuhan, an industrial city of 11 million people under quarantine, there are only a few passersby—but they dare not go near him. Journalists from Agence France-Presse saw the body on Thursday morning, not long before a vehicle arrived carrying emergency workers. AFP could not determine how the man, who appeared to be aged in his 60s, had died. But the reaction of the police and medical staff in hazmat suits, as well as some of the bystanders, highlighted the fear pervading the city. AFP contacted police and local health officials afterwards but could not get details on his case. (The Guardian)

Wuhan Number Six Hospital

The gruesome photograph was published on 31 January 2020, so the author did not have the benefit of hindsight, which shows us how unique this event was in the course of the pandemic. Nevertheless, not the slightest trace of skepticism is expressed in the accompany text:

The dead man on the street on Thursday lay one block from the Wuhan Number Six Hospital, one of the main medical centres for treating those with virus symptoms. A team of forensic experts who examined him were immediately sprayed with disinfectant by colleagues after removing their hazardous material suits. In the two hours that AFP observed the scene, at least 15 ambulances passed by, attending other calls. Finally, a white van with blacked-out windows arrived to take away the man. The body was zipped into a yellow surgical bag, and carried into the van on a stretcher. Staff immediately began to clean the ground as the van drove away, disinfecting the streets where the body had lain. (The Guardian 31 January 2020)

The whole thing sounds like a carefully choreographed piece of state propaganda. There was a time when Western media outlets would have questioned everything coming out of Communist China. Totalitarian states are not known for their honesty or their openness. But during the covid-19 pandemic, skepticism and due diligence have been discarded by the mainstream media to make way for public service announcements.

In view of these viral stories, it is difficult not to suspect that the authorities in the East and the West are working hand in glove to promote the official pandemic narrative and to stir panic among a clueless populace. If there really was a deadly disease called COVID-19, what need would there be for street theatre like this?

And that’s a good place to stop.

References

Zaheer Allam, Surveying the Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Implications: Urban Health, Data Technology and Political Economy, Elsevier, Amsterdam (2020)
WHO, WHO-Convened Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2, World Health Organization, Geneva (2021)
Xiao Xiao, Chris Newman, Christina D Buesching et al, Animal Sales from Wuhan Wet Markets Immediately Prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Scientific Reports, Volume 11, Article 11898, Nature Research, Online (2021)
Na Zhu et al, _A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019 _, The New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 382, Number 8, Pages 727-733, Massachusetts Medical Society, Waltham, MA (2020)

Chinese Propaganda

Show: Don’t Tell

A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies

References

Image Credits

Video Credits

Online Resources