Investigating China in the year of the Ox

By Alper Ali Riza

Good riddance to 2020, the year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac. Welcome to the year of the Ox and hopefully a universal pan corona vaccine.

The worldwide death toll of Covid-19 is 2.3 million compared with 774 caused by the Sars –  severe acute respiratory syndrome – outbreak in Guangdong in China in 2002.

Apparently the 2002 Sars outbreak was a more virulent version of Covid-19. Fortunately, it was nipped in the bud, but it was a shot across the bows of humanity that was not lost on countries in Asia.

Humanity’s susceptibility to killer pandemics of the coronavirus genus is now a fact of life, but fortunately so also are a number of vaccines that have been developed at breakneck speed to fight the virus and its variants. There are rumours in the scientific community that a universal vaccine called pan corona vaccine is now on the cards as an antidote to the whole corona genus, from Sars at one extreme to the common cold on the other and, moreover, that a cure is not too far off either, probably by the end of this year inshallah!

Pandemics, like wars, are terrifying but they produce quantum leaps in science and medicine. This does not, however, mean that science and medicine are the only tools and procedures at humanity’s disposal. It is just as important to discover the source of viruses to prevent recurrence.

Like the 2002 Sars outbreak before it, Covid-19 is associated with China – Chinese food markets in particular. So the World Health Organisation (WHO) sent a fact finding mission to Wuhan in China to find out what happened there in December 2019.

WHO is the UN agency concerned with international public health that ex-president Donald Trump got the US to leave in the middle of a pandemic that killed half a million Americans. President Joe Biden rejoined it on the first day of his presidency on January 20, 2021 as America’s absence was clearly prejudicial to international as well as American public health.

WHO addressed a number of questions and came to conclusions consistent with the terms on which it was allowed to embark on its mission.  Did the virus escape the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Was Covid-19 contracted locally from wild animals sold at wet markets in Wuhan? Did the virus arrive in Wuhan in the course of trade in frozen foods from China or overseas?

WHO discounted American intelligence that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as plainly wrong. They inclined in favour of the hypothesis that coronavirus passed from bats to an intermediary animal host and thence to humans, but came to no concluded view about where it originated.

Further investigation was required on whether it was imported from outside China in December 2019.  However, WHO appears to have accepted that the virus did not exist in China earlier than December 2019, which begs the question whether it was imported from outside China.

This was left hanging with some speculative comments that it might have arrived in Wuhan embedded in imported frozen sea food; they relied on evidence of the presence of the virus on surfaces at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, presumably provided by the Chinese authorities in the city.

I gleaned all this information, most of it favourable to China, from BBC World Service, which was banned last week from broadcasting in China and Hong Kong for allegedly spreading fake news about among other things the origins of coronavirus .

I do not know if samples of virus were properly lifted from the Huanan market by reliable officers and whether WHO was provided with unimpeachable evidence of continuity to the lab that identified it as Covid-19;  and importantly whether the lab was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The overall impression of WHO seems to be that the virus came from bats that somehow became embedded in imported seafood, which it concluded was plausible; except for one important consideration: the authorities in Wuhan had initially tried to suppress information about the outbreak.

I wonder if any member of the WHO mission asked about Dr Li Wenliang who died of coronavirus overload about this time last year who was persecuted for exposing the new mystery illness. I wrote about this brave young doctor in my column of Sunday Mail of February 9, 2020 under the heading “Coronavirus: keep vigilant and wash your hands,” and his desperate efforts to warn the world of the new killer virus.

He was harassed and detained in Wuhan for telling the truth the authorities wanted to hide; his death caused a heady mixture of sympathy for his passing and outrage at the treatment meted out to him by the authorities.

The communist party line peddled by the Chinese government including its ambassador in UK, however, was that Covid-19 was no more serious than seasonal flu, whereas the truth is that it is a lot more virulent and deadly.

The credibility of the Chinese authorities is dented because they sought to suppress unfavourable evidence. China is a totalitarian communist country operating a capitalist system with access to markets worldwide that increased exponentially after she was allowed to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001.

Where a totalitarian communist state is allowed access to trade with open societies with market economies, certain market distortions are inevitable since the economy in totalitarian communist states is under the political control of communist party apparatchiks.

China was allowed to join WTO under certain economic conditions which she was able to satisfy, but no one it seems insisted that she mellow her totalitarianism in line with vital freedoms obtaining in market economies, including freedom of expression. Curtailing the freedom of BBC World News to broadcast in China as the Chinese government did last week was unwise but understandable given the British curtailed the Chinese broadcaster in UK.  However, detaining and harassing a medical doctor to prevent him from imparting information about the outbreak of a deadly disease that killed millions needs to be fully investigated both by WHO and WTO.

Alper Ali Riza is a queen’s counsel in the UK and a retired part time judge