Doctors defied official warnings to expose China’s “stomach-churning” cover-up around coronavirus – then paid for it, a new investigation reveals.
The new book and documentary What Really Happened In Wuhan, exposing the origins of Covid-19, are making headlines across a world still battered by the pandemic. In this exclusive edited extract, author SHARRI MARKSON reveals how Chinese doctors and whistleblowers first realised the enormity of the crisis – but were reprimanded, shut down and even disappeared.
January 2020, Wuhan
In December 2019 a growing number of doctors in Wuhan, overwhelmed by patients suffering from pneumonia-like symptoms and chest infections, began to realise they were dealing with a terrifying new coronavirus.
Among them was Ai Fen, the female head of emergency at Wuhan Central Hospital, who had already been reprimanded and instructed by her bosses not to release information about the coronavirus, to avoid causing panic.
At the same time, any posts mentioning the new coronavirus started disappearing online. Chinese Communist Party censorship kicked in, alarming doctors and Chinese health authorities, who endorsed precisely the opposite approach. The hashtag #WuhanSARS was blocked, along with terms related to Wuhan pandemic and seafood market.
At work, in Wuhan’s busiest hospital, it was gruelling and tragic. Ai was told there was a father who was so unwell he couldn’t get out of the car by himself. Compassionately, she walked outside the hospital to help him. By the time she reached his car, he had passed away. She will never forget watching a doctor hand an elderly father the death certificate of his son, who was just 32 years old. The father stared at the doctor, not comprehending the devastating news.
The death was unrelenting. Hospitals were overwhelmed. The mounds of bodies were so high you couldn’t climb them. A husband asked Ai if she could organise for his mother-in-law to be transferred to “in-patient care”. As concerned as he was about his mother-in-law’s state, he took the time to thank Ai for her care. By the time his mother-in-law arrived, she had passed away. “I know it was only a few seconds but that ‘thank you’ weighs heavily on me,” Ai later told Chinese magazine Renwu (People) – although her interview would be wiped from the internet within minutes.
“In the time it took to say this one sentence, could a life have been saved?” Ai then watched, and grieved, as her colleagues fell sick, some losing their lives.
Another Wuhan doctor, Wang Lei – whose name and age I’ve changed to protect his life – realised this coronavirus was far more serious than the SARS outbreak in Beijing in 2003. It would not be gone in a matter of months. It was more infectious, more transmissible. Alarmingly, he and other doctors were forbidden from officially reporting any deaths as a result of the coronavirus. The government continued to claim that hardly anyone had died from the virus, but Dr Wang knew the real state of Wuhan’s hospitals.
He spoke to one of his friends, whose wife’s sister and sister-in-law were hospitalised with the virus. Hospital wards that would normally hold a maximum of four people had 12 sick patients squashed inside – all highly contagious, spluttering and struggling to breathe. It was diabolical.
There was a blanket refusal to report any deaths related to the virus. “One of my friend’s family got sick and were treated at Wuhan Central Hospital,” Dr Wang recalls. “Back then they were not reporting any deaths, but he told me that just in the room where he was treated three people had died. They didn’t even take the bodies away, just left them lying there for days. He was terrified and messaged me to ask what could be done.
“I can’t even begin to imagine how they could put a dozen people in a room,” he adds. “It wasn’t on the news, so no one knew, but we learned about this from WeChat groups for doctors and chats between doctors and patients.
“At that time, they forbade any reporting of deaths. They just said, no, no one has died. But his family of three had two people fall ill. And one of his colleagues from work also got sick. Once we got into the middle of January, it was very apparent that something was really wrong. When I shared with colleagues what my friend had told me, they all said they had heard similar things.
“Right away, I knew this was a lot worse than we thought. There were more and more people who didn’t even have a fever but were going straight into respiratory failure. Taking patients’ temperatures was no longer enough.
“Why wouldn’t they report any of this? I remember, the head of our health centre told me there can’t be any reporting on this because they don’t want to create a panic. Another reason was probably just to suppress the real figures. They kept saying everything in Wuhan
is under control. Before they put us in lockdown on the 23rd, we weren’t even allowed to report lung issues from this illness.”
It’s stomach-churning to think how Chinese President Xi Jinping was praised by the World Health Organisation, the United States and others for his transparency when in fact a criminal cover-up of the virus was underway.
And by January, Dr Wang began to sense that a severe crisis was developing. He was alarmed when many doctors, including his friends, started to fall ill.
As the virus spread internationally, flights out of China were still allowed. Dr Wang’s director at the Community Health Centre flew to Europe in January. Dr Wang does not identify precisely which European city his director flew to, but 28 international flights from Wuhan Tianhe Airport were departing daily. Flights with hundreds of passengers went as far and wide as Paris, Tokyo, London, Dubai, New York, San Francisco and Sydney, along with regional hubs like Bangkok and Singapore.
Once Dr Wang’s director arrived in Europe, he developed a fever and respiratory problems. Instead of self-isolating straight away, he flew back to Wuhan.
“When he got to Europe, he suddenly realised he had a cough and a fever. He was terrified, worried that he wouldn’t get the treatment he needed in Europe, so he hurried back to China,” Dr Wang says.
In doing so, he exposed hundreds of people at the airport, on his flight and also, by being there in the first place, on the ground.
“His father specialises in respiratory medicine and advised him on what medicines to take. The problem is that he covered it up from everyone: he continued to work with us. We were on the same shift for quite a long time. His symptoms were really severe when he was
in Europe,” Dr Wang said.
Dr Wang was ordered by his director, once he had recovered, not to take additional precautions that might scare people and cause mass panic. This same concern about causing panic was the reason news outlets were forbidden from reporting news of the virus.
“The head of our health centre told us, and this is a direct quote: ‘You can’t wear masks.’ This idiotic advice hung over our centre day after day until [Chinese epidemiologist] Zhong Nanshan’s comments encouraging masks. I couldn’t believe they would have such a dumb policy. No matter whether we are talking about the flu or a coronavirus, how could you tell doctors not to wear masks?”
Falling sick himself was inevitable. And on January 14, Dr Wang developed a cough.
“I started having this lingering pain in my chest. I thought, oh no, am I having a heart attack at such a young age? No way, it couldn’t be. The next morning the pain got even worse. It was horrible,” he said.
“I stayed at home the entire day, checking my temperature. But I didn’t have a fever. So, the next day, I went back to work and I did a chest X-ray. The lower side of my right lung showed infection. A doctor reviewing the X-ray said to me: see, this X-ray has all of the standard clinical features of this virus. Then he said to me, I’ve already done eight X-rays today, they all had these signs of infection in the lower right lung.”
Dr Wang went back home and stayed in bed, severely unwell for three days. On the fourth day he was ordered back to the clinic; his director would not allow him to take time off work. As the day progressed, Dr Wang began feeling even worse.
“I told the head of our centre that I have some vacation time, and I can’t be coming in this state and infecting our patients and all of you, so I really should take some time off. But he told me I couldn’t take time off. Keep coming in until the New Year break (on January 24),
he told me,” Dr Wang says.
“One reason was that there was not enough staff to treat patients. Another reason was that he feared that doctors not showing up to work might create a panic. If you hadn’t been officially diagnosed, you had to come in, and without a Covid-19 Nucleic Acid PCR test there was no way to be officially diagnosed.
“If you wanted to do a test back then, the line was endless. It was impossible to be confirmed with an official diagnosis because basically our entire medical system had collapsed under the pressure. In order to be treated in the hospital, you just needed a CAT scan and blood work. But to be officially diagnosed you had to do a test.”
By January 20, the health system was inundated with infected people. Dr Wang worried he might not survive. “I remember telling friends on WeChat: it’s over for me, I got it,” he said.
“One of my friends who works in internal medicine at a hospital told me, come over to our hospital, we have space for you. I said I would continue to monitor my situation. “The next day he said, ‘It’s too late, you should have come yesterday. Today we don’t even have space to treat our own doctors.’ On the 19th, he could definitely get me in, on the 20th it was getting tight, but by the 21st there was no chance. In those two days, our entire medical system collapsed.”
Mayhem and anarchy were breaking out. There was no isolation in hospitals, no best-practice medical care. At a fever clinic that had been set up, a long line of hundreds of sick people stretched seemingly ever onward. Dr Wang says he watched as a woman, incredibly sick – and sick of waiting for treatment – broke out of the queue and begin spitting on the ground out of anger. Yelling that she wanted to infect everyone.
After Spring Festival, more and more doctors and nurses in Dr Wang’s medical centre became infected with Covid-19-like symptoms. Parents started pressuring Dr Wang to write health certificates giving their child a clean bill of health. “There were a lot of students from middle schools and primary schools who came in. It was almost time for finals at the end of the term, and parents were eager for me to write a certificate of good health for their kids. I asked why. They said it’s almost time for finals and the school is not letting our kids attend. So, we want to give the school a certificate of good health, so our kids can go to school and take their exams.”
Dr Wang’s first-hand account indicates that when China said on January 24 that it only had 830 confirmed cases and 26 deaths, in fact the number was far, far higher.
Dr Wang’s first-hand testimony of how the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan shows the extent of the cover-up – and the extreme frustration and utter helplessness of medical practitioners on the front line.
While the Chinese government insists the official date for the first Covid-19 case was in December, Dr Wang makes it clear doctors were dealing with the coronavirus from November. For there to have been community transmission in November, Covid-19 likely emerged earlier, in October or potentially September.
Dr Ai Fen would later go temporarily missing as punishment for her effort in alerting the world to the coronavirus.
Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told Associated Press of the punishment of doctors: “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession. Doctors in Wuhan were afraid.”
The true number of whistleblowers who were detained or have simply vanished may never be known — and it was not just medics. The roll-call includes people like lawyer Chen Qiushi, journalists Zang Zhan and Li Zehua, businessman Fang Bin and Professor Xu Zhangrun, whose harrowing stories are told elsewhere in What Really Happened In Wuhan.
They are each brave souls who chose to risk their life to expose the truth about the pandemic
that was being covered up by the Chinese government.
What Really Happened In Wuhan by Sharri Markson, published by HarperCollins Australia, is on sale from September 29 and is available for pre-order now.
Markson’s top-rating Sky News documentary of the same name is available on demand.
https://news.google.com/__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?oc=5
2021-09-24 19:02:20Z
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