Chinese Virus – China Sucks http://chinasux.com All The Reasons China Sucks Mon, 16 May 2022 15:23:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 174355876 Report: Wuhan Funeral Homes Burned Coronavirus Victims Alive http://chinasux.com/disease/report-wuhan-funeral-homes-burned-coronavirus-victims-alive/ http://chinasux.com/disease/report-wuhan-funeral-homes-burned-coronavirus-victims-alive/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:27:09 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=636 Locals in Wuhan, where the Chinese coronavirus pandemic originated, have heard screams coming from funeral home furnaces, and some treated in hospitals say they saw workers put living coronavirus patients in body bags, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Monday.

RFA noted that it could not independently verify that the Chinese Communist Party was burning coronavirus patients alive, nor has the Communist Party confirmed or denied the rumors. Yet the rumors persist that, to make room for new patients in Wuhan’s overcrowded hospitals, medical staff chose older patients less likely to survive the infection and shipped them to incinerators while they were still alive and conscious.

RFA quoted a source “close to the funeral industry” identified only as Ma who said that he had heard reports of “people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving.”

“Some people are saying that … there are video clips of screams coming from funeral homes, from inside the furnaces … which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive,” Ma added.

Ma also noted the existence of video testimony from an anonymous older woman who had been treated at a Wuhan hospital, presumably for Chinese coronavirus.

“One old lady was saying that they put one guy into … a body bag when he wasn’t even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him,” Ma told RFA.

Video of an older woman speaking anonymously to a camera began circulating on social media in February in which she said she witnessed a patient next to her at a Wuhan hospital stuffed into a body bag while still alive.

“He’s not dead, his feet and hands are still moving,” the woman says, “[They] wrapped him in a plastic body bag and zipped it up.”

According to New Tang Dynasty, a broadcaster affiliated with the persecuted Chinese Falun Gong movement, the woman spoke with a Wuhan accent, suggesting she was a native of the central Chinese city.

The Taiwanese outlet Taiwan News traced the origin of the video to a Chinese student group called “Youth Production,” who reportedly uploaded the video on February 24. Taiwan News noted that the woman claimed to have suffered from coronavirus symptoms but, as she was in her 60s, she did not suffer severe symptoms, unlike the man taken away, who she estimated was in his 70s.

“She said that the man was weak but was still breathing when medical workers ‘bound his head’ and then his hands and feet, which were ‘still moving,’” Taiwan News reported, noting that she also lamented that the hospital where she received care had no other treatments available for coronavirus patients besides oxygen. In the West, doctors have begun experimenting with several drug mixtures, one of which — a combination of antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat lupus and malaria — has generated optimism in American hospitals.

The woman said she felt older patients at the hospital were treated “like dead dogs.”

Neither Taiwan News nor RFA could independently confirm the reports of Wuhan residents being burned alive.

The Chinese Communist Party claims that, as of Tuesday, it has documented 82,718 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,335 deaths across the country. The vast majority of these, 3,212 deaths, were recorded in Hubei province. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei.

Multiple reports citing sources in Wuhan’s seven funeral homes dispute this claim, estimating that the real death toll in the city is as much as ten to forty times higher than China’s official nationwide death toll. Reports of hundreds of bodies cremated in some funeral homes began surfacing in February, at the height of the epidemic in the city. Government officials did not allow residents to pick up the remains of their relatives until late March, however, as the strict lockdown that saw government officials welding Wuhan residents in their homes was still ongoing.

When the funeral homes opened to distributed ashes two weekends ago, witnesses estimated that some funeral homes were distributing as many as 5,000 sets of remains a day. Estimates as to the number of sets of remains distributed last week in Wuhan range from 30,000 to 46,000 people.

“There are suspicions that many people died in their homes without being diagnosed and, at first, there were no kits to do the test,” an unnamed resident said in a report last week. “Nobody in Wuhan believes the official numbers. The real one, only they know.”

Ma, the funeral home source speaking to RFA in its report on Monday, said that Wuhan was cremating so many bodies at some point that some incinerators broke down, resulting in cremators placing multiple bodies in one incinerator at a time to keep up with the sheer amount of remains. The result has been several reported incidents of people receiving urns with ashes featuring items they do not recognize that clearly did not belong to their loved ones.

“A resident of Wuhan’s Jiang’an district surnamed Liu said she had found a man’s belt clasp in the urn she was given, supposedly containing her mother’s ashes,” RFA noted. “And a resident of Hongshan district said he had found the remains of ceramic dental crown, denture or implant in the urn labeled with his father’s name, even though his father had never had such a thing fitted.”

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Conspiracy: Wuhan Residents Tell Of Chilling Death Toll http://chinasux.com/disease/conspiracy-wuhan-residents-tell-of-chilling-death-toll/ Mon, 30 Mar 2020 05:46:01 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=563 Wuhan residents believe up to 18 times the number of people died in their city from coronavirus than authorities are reporting.

The seven funeral homes serving Wuhan have reportedly been running nonstop recently, prompting one resident to say “anyone with any ability to think” knows officials are lying about the death toll.

China announced 2,535 deaths in Wuhan – the initial epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic – which was locked down for two months.

But some locals believe the number is closer to 50,000.

News website Caixin.com reported that 5,000 urns had been delivered by a supplier to the Hankou Funeral Home in just one day.

“It can’t be right … because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” a Wuhan resident surnamed Zhang told Radio Free Asia.

A resident surnamed Gao said the city’s seven crematoriums should have a capacity of around 2,000 bodies a day if they work around the clock.“Anyone looking at that figure will realise, anyone with any ability to think,” Gao said. “What are they talking about [2,535] people?”

“Seven crematoriums could get through more than that [in a single day].”

Some people estimate 46,800 COVID-19 victims will have been cremated, based on the capacity of the funeral homes.

Buying silence

Residents say city officials have been buying their silence with 3,000 yuan ($685) cash handouts in “funeral allowances” to make sure cremations are completed by the grave-tending festival of Qing Ming on April 5.

“It’s to stop them keening [a traditional expression of grief]; nobody’s allowed to keen after Qing Ming has passed,” Wuhan local Chen Yaohui said.

Another resident, Hu Aizhen, lost his mother to COVID-19 and said nobody in the city believes the official death toll.

“The official number of deaths was 2,500 people … but before the epidemic began, the city’s crematoriums typically cremated around 220 people a day,” Aizhen said.

“But during the epidemic, they transferred cremation workers from around China to Wuhan keep cremating bodies around the clock.”

Stamping out second wave

Mainland China has reported a drop in new coronavirus cases for the fourth consecutive day as Beijing seeks to stamp out the risk of a second wave of infections by shutting its borders to foreign travellers and cutting international flights.

The National Health Commission said on Monday that 31 new coronavirus cases were recorded on Sunday, including one locally transmitted infection, dropping from 45 cases a day earlier.

Four new deaths were reported, taking the cumulative, reported death toll in the mainland to 3304, from 81,470 infections.

The number of new infections has fallen sharply in the mainland from the peak in February.

Reopen for business

The government is now exhorting businesses and factories to reopen for business as it rolls out various stimulus to drive a recovery from what many now expect to be an outright economic contraction in January-March.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said the government would adjust support policies for small and medium-sized firms promptly as the situation developed to protect them from the impact of the coronavirus.

Chinese firms should actively resume operations and production even as coronavirus prevention efforts continue, Xi also said during a Sunday visit to Ningbo, a major port city in eastern Zhejiang province, according to state media.

No new Hubei cases

Hubei province, where the coronavirus outbreak first emerged in late 2019, “reported” no new cases for the sixth consecutive day on Sunday after the province of 60 million people lifted its traffic restrictions and resumed some domestic flights.

Beijing remains worried about the risk of a second wave of the epidemic triggered by cases involving travellers coming to China who were infected overseas.

The virus has now spread globally, infecting hundreds of thousands outside China’s borders.

China has barred foreigners from entering the country and ordered airlines to slash the number of international flights into the country.

The vast majority of the so-called imported cases reported to date have been Chinese nationals, many of whom are students.

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Urn Deliveries In Wuhan Raise Questions About China’s Actual Coronavirus Death Toll http://chinasux.com/disease/urn-deliveries-in-wuhan-raise-questions-about-chinas-actual-coronavirus-death-toll/ http://chinasux.com/disease/urn-deliveries-in-wuhan-raise-questions-about-chinas-actual-coronavirus-death-toll/#comments Sun, 29 Mar 2020 05:16:21 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=554 Massive deliveries of urns in Wuhan have raised fresh skepticism of China’s coronavirus reporting.

As families in the central Chinese city began picking up the cremated ashes of those who have died from the virus this week, photos began circulating on social media and local media outlets showing vast numbers of urns at Wuhan funeral homes.

China has reported 3,299 coronavirus-related deaths, with most taking place in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global pandemic. But one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, according to the Chinese media outlet Caixin.

It’s not clear how many of the urns were filled.

Workers at several funeral parlors declined to provide any details to Bloomberg as to how many urns were waiting to be collected, saying they either did not know or were not authorized to share the number.

The photos surfaced after both the United States and Italy have reported significantly more cases and than China. Italy has reported just shy of three times the fatalities.

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China Claims It Beat Coronavirus But Does Anyone Believe It? http://chinasux.com/disease/china-claims-it-beat-coronavirus-but-does-anyone-believe-it/ Thu, 26 Mar 2020 04:50:55 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=550 As China and the United States race to restart their economies amid a global pandemic, foreign affairs experts say Beijing’s claim of a slowdown of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.

Analysts like Gordon Chang question why the Western world would believe Beijing since the country has been accused of multiple cover-ups and spreading misinformation that may have accelerated COVID-19, which, as of Wednesday, had infected more than 428,400 people and killed 19,120 globally.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party have touted China’s dip in new coronavirus cases, claiming that any pop-ups of the virus are “imported.”

“For China, the truth has always been a casualty,” Chang told Fox News.

He added that Beijing’s high-stakes campaign to get its people back to work and show the world that China, under the leadership of Xi and the ruling Communist Party, has beaten the coronavirus, is a dangerous, if not deadly, game.

“It’s inevitable that China will have another outbreak and it will be serious,” Chang said. “Xi has been trying to get China back to work since the first week in February. He has these ambitions of China dominating the world… and he is willing to make sure it happens at the great cost of other people’s lives.”

Since the coronavirus hit, China’s economy has been in tatters. Its services and manufacturing sectors have taken huge hits and its consumer confidence has dipped to an all-time low. Spinning positive news is a powerful way China can start to claw its way back from being seen as a global pariah responsible for the outbreak to an international hero ready to save the day.

However, he said forcing its citizens back to work before the virus is fully contained would be akin to playing Russian roulette.

“My parents and brother live in Beijing and they are scared,” Sara Sheng, who goes to graduate school in Virginia, told Fox News. “They are being told one thing but their instincts are telling them another.”

Hong Kong, once on the front lines of the war against COVID-19, thought it was in the clear last week when a relatively small number of cases were reported. The city jumped at the good news, signaling to the world that its early actions – wearing masks, social distancing and intensive hand-washing – were working. Of its 7.5 million people, Hong Kong reported only 150 cases at the beginning of March, as numbers around the world spiked. But the breakthrough for the metropolis was short-lived and the new lesson out of Hong Kong is to not celebrate beating the coronavirus too early.

As the territory began opening its borders and allowing residents who were stranded in other parts of the world back in, its number of cases suddenly doubled.

On Monday, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said all non-residents would be barred by Wednesday.

The coronavirus whiplash felt in Hong Kong is also playing out in other parts of Asia including Singapore and Taiwan.

But Chang believes Hong Kong’s cautionary tale might not mean much Xi, who is hellbent on projecting his country as indestructible.

“It’s either reckless disregard of people’s life or he knows what’s occurring and pushing forward anyway,” he said, adding that Xi believes the dominance of the Communist Party is above all else.

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China Hijacks New Mexico Mom’s Tweets For Coronavirus Propaganda Campaign http://chinasux.com/politics/china-hijacks-new-mexico-moms-tweets-for-coronavirus-propaganda-campaign/ Thu, 26 Mar 2020 04:38:14 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=547 A young mom from New Mexico has found herself at the center of China’s propaganda campaign after a notorious Chinese diplomat retweeted her messages in an attempt to further sow misinformation about coronavirus.

Lijian Zhao, a Chinese politician serving as deputy director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department, is heading a propaganda campaign to shift the blame for the worldwide coronavirus onto the United States, Italy and other countries.

He made headlines last week after taking comments from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of context, claiming the U.S. Army purposefully brought the coronavirus to China.

The State Department has vehemently denied that claim, and the World Health Organization’s investigative report on the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in February, found the novel disease originated in meat markets the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China in November.

Zhao’s latest effort to spread misinformation was highlighted Wednesday after a woman identified only by her first name, Beatrice, told the Daily Beast she wrote a three-tweet series about her “shower thoughts” earlier this month.

She is not a doctor, nurse, or epidemiologist – and said she wrote as a young mother from Albuquerque simply wondering aloud whether coronavirus had arrived in the U.S. earlier than initially detected.

“This isn’t a conspiracy tweet but I really think COVID-19 has been here in America for awhile. Do you guys remember how sick everyone was during the holidays/early January? And how everyone was saying they had the “flu” and the flu shot “didn’t work”?” the woman, whose Twitter name is “the lizard king” @mamaxbea, wrote on March 14, in the first of three tweets.

That message went viral a week later. Zhao retweeted and quoted Beatrice on March 22, sending her Twitter following skyrocketing.

Beatrice’s other two tweets in the series said:

“Most people did have flu-like symptoms combined with respiratory infections. Also I remember a lot of healthcare workers (both here and on Facebook) posting about how awful RSV was this year and how there were lots more respiratory cases than in years past.”

“Idk. I’m not an expert. I’ve just been thinking about it since a lot of people tested negative for the flu and there wasn’t a test for COVID-19 yet. Obviously it’s serious either way and please stay home/wash your hands/stop panic buying the toilet paper/etc.”

Last week, President Trump received pushback for repeatedly saying at press conferences that it was a “Chinese virus” that caused the pandemic, which prompted the Chinese state-run media to dub the worldwide outbreak the “Trump plague.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo summoned the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Communist Party, Yang Jiechi, for a conference call last week to rebuke Zhao and several other Chinese diplomats taking his lead for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus’s origin on Twitter.

Sharing a video from a congressional hearing with the CDC, Zhao wrote: “CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”

In response to his message, Pentagon press secretary Alyssa Farah condemned the Chinese Communist Party for using American media to spread conspiracy theories.

“As a global crisis, COVID-19 should be an area of cooperation between nations. Instead, the Communist Party of China has chosen to promulgate false & absurd conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 blaming U.S. service members. #ChinaPropaganda,” she said.

Chinese state-run media also reportedly has taken comments made by Italian doctor Giuseppe Remuzzi out of context. Remuzzi spoke to both NPR and Italian broadcaster La7 Attualità about the outbreak of the coronavirus in the northern Lombardy region in Italy, which is now the worst-affected country in the world. His quotes were then translated and posted to Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, to place the blame on Italy for the outbreak.

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China Using American Media To Push Coronavirus Propaganda As War Of Words Continues http://chinasux.com/politics/china-using-american-media-to-push-coronavirus-propaganda-as-war-of-words-continues/ Mon, 23 Mar 2020 17:20:19 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=525 Another day, another dig.

This time it’s from a prominent Chinese official who is using articles written by the American media to fuel Beijing’s propaganda machine as the tit-for-tat between the two superpowers escalated Monday over COVID-19’s origin and which country’s lack of action is responsible for turning the novel coronavirus into a global pandemic.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted, “US CDC admitted some #COVID19 patients were misdiagnosed as flu during the 2019 flu season. 34 million infected & 20,000 died. If #COVID19 began last September, & US has been lack of test ability, how many people would have been infected? US should find out when patient zero appeared.”

Zhao also retweeted a March 21 USA Today article that claims race and global health experts believe that describing COVID-19 as a “Chinese” virus exacerbates xenophobia and that President’s Trump’s repeated use of it, despite pressure from China to stop, only makes the situation worse as the bodies pile up worldwide.

Zhao tweeted or in some cases retweeted stories from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS News that have all reported on America’s response to the global crisis and Trump’s insistence that it’s China’s fault.

The war of words between the two governments has turned particularly dirty in recent days as China tries to reposition itself as a global leader and the U.S. struggles to find an effective way to muzzle the monster virus.

Trump, as well as other government officials in the U.S. State Department, have openly taunted China. They argue Beijing blocked news of the coronavirus for months, silencing doctors and critics whose early alarms could have saved thousands of lives.

The U.S. has also slammed the communist-run nation for trying to manipulate the narrative and grab the global spotlight as the only nation that is prepared to provide humanitarian relief to the other hard-hit COVID-19 countries.

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Satellite Video Shows China Pollution Vanishing During COVID-19 Lockdown—Then Returning http://chinasux.com/environment/satellite-video-shows-china-pollution-vanishing-during-covid-19-lockdown-then-returning/ Mon, 23 Mar 2020 06:45:56 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=480 The European Space Agency released new video this weekend that shows air pollution vanishing over China as the country goes into COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown, then returning as business resumes.

The animation, based on data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, charts nitrogen dioxide, a noxious gas produced primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, over China from Dec. 20 to March 16.


“The drop in concentrations in late January is visible, coinciding with the nationwide quarantine,” the agency reports, “and from the beginning of March, the nitrogen dioxide levels have begun to increase.”

ESA mission manager Claus Zehner estimates NO2 dropped about 40 percent during the lockdown. NO2 reacts with other chemicals in the air to form particulate matter, and ESA also documented a drop in particulate matter over China:

“By combining satellite observations with detailed computer models of the atmosphere, their studies indicated a reduction of around 20-30 percent in surface particulate matter over large parts of China,” the agency reported Friday.

Both NO2 and particulate matter have been linked to heart and lung disease. Both the EPA and the World Health Organization have identified fine particulate matter, PM2.5, as the leading cause of death from air pollution.

Air pollution causes an estimated 1.1 million deaths per year in China and costs the Chinese economy $38 billion. Earlier this month Stanford Earth Sciences Professor Marshall Burke projected that two months of coronavirus lockdown had saved the lives of 77,000 Chinese children and elderly from air pollution alone.

Worldwide, air pollution kills an estimated 7 million people annually, including about 100,ooo Americans.

Air pollution may also affect the mortality rate of COVID-19. Early analyses have identified hypertension as the leading simultaneous chronic disease (comorbidity) in patients who have died from COVID-19. Studies have linked air pollution, particularly NO2, to hypertension.

Both pollutants are known to impair lung function.

“Breathing air with a high concentration of NO2 can irritate airways in the human respiratory system,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Such exposures over short periods can aggravate respiratory diseases, particularly asthma, leading to respiratory symptoms (such as coughing, wheezing or difficulty breathing), hospital admissions and visits to emergency rooms. Longer exposures to elevated concentrations of NO2 may contribute to the development of asthma and potentially increase susceptibility to respiratory infections.”

NO2 is not a greenhouse gas, but greenhouse gases likely have seen a similar drop as lockdowns across the world shutter factories and reduce automobile traffic.

“As nitrogen dioxide is primarily produced by traffic and factories, it is a first-level indicator of industrial activity worldwide,” said Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes.

The Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite monitors air pollution by measuring a multitude of trace gases and aerosols. Last week the ESA released video of a pollution decline over northern Italy as that country entered lockdown:

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John Bolton Declares China Is Responsible For Coronavirus Outbreak http://chinasux.com/politics/john-bolton-declares-china-is-responsible-for-coronavirus-outbreak/ Sat, 21 Mar 2020 18:39:16 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=455 Former National Security Adviser John Bolton condemned China for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak and called on the rest of the world to “act” and hold the communist government accountable.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party have been accused of silencing doctors and critics in the early stages of the coronavirus, costing thousands of lives.

Now that they have seemingly turned the corner in tackling the virus at home, the communist-run nation has now positioned itself as the country ahead of the coronavirus curve, and has routinely made unsubstantiated claims that the U.S. is behind the crisis.

In turn, President Trump has routinely referred to coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”.

Despite no longer seeing eye to eye with President Trump, Bolton, a notorious hawk, took China to task Saturday morning for their role in the spread of the virus.

“China silenced coronavirus whistleblowers, expelled journalists, destroyed samples, refused CDC help, and concealed counts of deaths and infections. It’s fact there was a massive coverup. China is responsible. The world must act to hold them accountable,” the former U.N. ambassador tweeted.


China has been mounting a very public — and largely successful — humanitarian campaign to come across as a strong world leader.

China’s private and public sectors are working in lockstep to fast-track aid to countries that are in desperate need of it. Earlier this week, Xi pledged to send more medical experts to Italy, a country on track to surpass China in the number of coronavirus-related deaths when the numbers are tallied at the end of Thursday.

However, President Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric against China, blasting its government for its claim that the U.S. military planted the virus in Wuhan.

Critics have condemned the president’s rhetoric as “racist” and “xenophobic” while defenders insist it reflects the origin of the virus and how the Chinese government is responsible for mishandling the outbreak.

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How China Can Be Held Legally Accountable For Coronavirus Pandemic http://chinasux.com/disease/how-china-can-be-held-legally-accountable-for-coronavirus-pandemic/ http://chinasux.com/disease/how-china-can-be-held-legally-accountable-for-coronavirus-pandemic/#comments Sat, 21 Mar 2020 12:49:19 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=277 A cover-up and clampdown by the Chinese government in the early weeks of the coronavirus’s emergence is raising questions over whether the communist superpower can be held legally accountable.

“Generally countries like China have sovereign immunity and governments cannot be brought to regular courts or held liable regardless of their conduct,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an Israel-based attorney who has long specialized in suing terrorist regimes and state sponsors who orchestrate human rights abuses on behalf of victims, told Fox News.

“However, an argument could be made that just like support for terrorism, which is legally actionable, a government that engages in such reckless disregard and negligence and covers up an epidemic which has the potential to spread worldwide could be held legally liable ,” Darshan-Leitner said. “Cover-ups and deliberate acts to conceal a deadly medical crisis are not [among] the protected acts of a sovereign state or of responsible leaders.”

According to Darshan-Leitner, if a private party like a hospital or health care worker of a chemical company had learned of a dangerous and highly contagious disease and then deliberately covered its existence up and concealed it from the public they would clearly face criminal and civil liability.

“Why should a local or national government be any different? Clearly, China signed treaties and had a duty under international law to report the virus and not cover it up,” she continued. “China is not to blame for creating the virus but for not sounding the international alarm and trying to conceal it from the world.”

The lawsuits are already starting.

On Thursday, Florida’s The Berman Law Group filed a class-action lawsuit against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), alleging that the government’s failure to report the disease and subsequently move to quickly contain it created a “giant Petri dish.”

“The PRC and the other defendants knew that COVID-19 was dangerous and capable of causing a pandemic, yet slowly acted, proverbially put their head in the sand, and/or covered it up for their own economic self-interest,” the complaint states. “The defendants’ conduct has caused and will continue to cause personal injuries and deaths, as well as other damages.”

A study released this month by the U.K.’s University of South Hampton indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did, the geographic proliferation of the pathogen would have been significantly smaller, and the number of cases would be reduced by 95 percent.

According to a timeline compiled this week by Axios, it was Dec. 10 that the country’s first known patient started contending with strange symptoms.

Six days later, health officials in Wuhan made a connection between the unique condition – resistant to common flu medications – and a wildlife market in the city. On Dec. 27, authorities were told about the new virus, and three days later, two doctors in Wuhan were reprimanded by the Communist Party for spreading information about the SARS-like contagion in a WeChat group..

Later, an announcement was made that authorities had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus,” which was repeated by the World Health Organization (WHO), even as cases outside China’s border slowly started being identified.

The following day, the first known U.S. case from Wuhan arrived.

On Jan. 18, a massive Lunar New Year banquet was permitted to take place in Wuhan, in which tens of thousands of people gathered and potentially spread the virus exponentially. And as the disease spiraled beyond control over the ensuing days, the city – and three others – were put on lockdown, even as other regions continued to celebrate the New Year in large groups over the proceeding few days.

However, a slew of other voices have said that reports were made about the novel virus several weeks before that, but effectively silenced. The Sunday Times of London also reported that several genomics companies tested samples from ill patients in Wuhan late last year, and alerted the Chinese government to their findings on Jan. 3, only to be given gag orders.

Some reports have also underscored that the government was aware of the virus as early as November. According to the South China Morning Post, the first case was recorded on November 17 in Hubei province, with five new cases reported on average per day in the weeks thereafter.

Juliya Arbisman, an international disputes expert and partner at the New York-based Diamond McCarthy law firm, indicated that there are broad possibilities under international law, especially trade law, for State-to-State and individual investor claims against countries.

“These might boil down to the ability of preexisting legal mechanisms to deal with these sorts of modern questions,” she said. “There is also a pretty clear case for countries insisting on China to honor its obligations under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) to stop people from trading in and eating endangered species, which is likely how Covid-19 infected humans in the first place.”

It is believed coronavirus was born out of a seafood wholesale market in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan, whereby poorly regulated, live-animal markets mixed in with illicit wildlife trade, creating the environment for viruses to morph from animal hosts into the human populous.

U.S. National Security advisor Robert O’Brien, referring to the doctors who were censored, has claimed that the Beijing concealment in the early phase “cost the world community two months” and aggravated the international fallout. Moreover, the leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, has termed it “one of the worst cover-ups in human history.”

“The International Health Regulations (IHR) are rules that should prevent domestic public health emergencies from becoming international problems. This global health law requires member states to notify the WHO of events that may constitute ‘a public health emergency of international concern,'” concurred Ivana Stradner, international law and national security expert at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “China’s delay in reporting the outbreak violated international law.”

From her lens, states can sue China before international tribunals for violating its obligation to report the coronavirus outbreak under the IHR.

“Chinese behavior is a threat to global security and constitutes a violation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which authorizes the U.N. Security Council to take action to ‘maintain or restore international peace and security,'” Stradner continued. “States, and the U.S. in particular, can react to the coronavirus outbreak by invoking the principle of self-defense.”

And David Matas, a Canada-based international human rights, refugee and immigration lawyer who was appointed as a member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, emphasized that China, as a State Party, is additionally subject to the Biological Weapons Convention.

“The Convention states in Article I that each state party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to retain microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes,” he said. “In my view, non-reporting is a form of retention in violation of the Convention. The United States is also a state party to the treaty. If the U.S. found China acted in breach of its obligations deriving from the provisions of the Convention by its delay in reporting the coronavirus, the U.S. could lodge a complaint with the Security Council.”

Chinese leaders have embarked on a fervent campaign to place blame elsewhere – even going so far as to insinuate the virus was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. military.

Requests by the United States and other global bodies to investigate the origins of the deadly outbreak in China have thus far been dismissed by Beijing, who have staunchly denied any wrongdoing or mishandling of the outbreak.

Darshan-Leitner further stressed that in her view, it is “a massive breach of duty and customary international law,” and that a case could potentially be made in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) if it is proven that a cover-up was perpetuated by high-level individuals.

“The ICJ was created as a forum for countries which believe they have been grievously injured and have causes of action against other states to be able to seek redress. This would be a classic case of the reckless actions of one government impacting and severely harming nations around the world,” she explained. “The problem is China would have to agree to have the case heard by the ICJ, and with so much loss of life, so many trillions of dollars in damage and the global economic destruction the coronavirus caused Beijing would never agree to have a case heard there.”

Titus Nichols, a federal attorney, and professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, contended that, under international custom, foreign governments are immune to lawsuits from citizens. However, individual families could potentially bring a lawsuit against the Chinese government under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA).

“The act is the primary means for bringing a lawsuit against a foreign sovereign or its agencies and instrumentalities,” he said.

But even if families were successful, and financial compensation was ordered, claiming the money from China would be a steep challenge.

“Suing a government for mishandling something like the coronavirus is not likely to be a winning lawsuit in just about any country in the world,” surmised Dan Harris, the founder of the international law firm, Harris Bricken, affirming that payment collections regardless would be tough. “The Chinese government does not have much in the way of assets outside China and courts there are not going to let you pursue China government assets in China. Chinese state-owned companies have assets outside China, but most countries count that differently.”

Moreover, the issue of who and who isn’t at fault for the exacerbation of the coronavirus is still up for debate.

“There is evidence that China took steps to prevent knowledge about the virus from being shared,” Nichols added. “However, China cannot be held accountable for the actions of Americans who refuse to take heed of the government and continue to spread the virus.”

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China Demands Chinese Workers Leave U.S. News Outlets As Online Taunts Continue http://chinasux.com/business/china-demands-chinese-workers-leave-u-s-news-outlets-as-online-taunts-continue/ Fri, 20 Mar 2020 18:47:00 +0000 http://chinasux.com/?p=460 Beijing on Friday ordered at least seven Chinese nationals to walk away from their jobs at American news outlets, escalating the public spat between the superpowers over press access.

News assistants at The New York Times, Voice of America and two other outlets were dismissed from their positions and told to go home, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“China appears determined to crush the newsgathering operations of major U.S. outlets in Beijing, this time by taking punishing measures against local Chinese employees,” Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator said. “This action will not stop the ongoing tit-for-tat between China and the United States, and may escalate it. China should stop trying to control and intimidate foreign news bureaus and allow them to hire Chinese staff freely and directly.”

Butler said foreign bureaus in China are prohibited by law from hiring Chinese citizens as employees and “rely on personnel formally hired by the Personnel Service Corporation, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to the corporation’s website.

The Chinese staff, he added, “perform critical functions at foreign news outlets, providing language and research support.”

The move comes after China announced earlier in the week that it had given more than a dozen U.S. journalists from the Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and Voice of America 10 days to leave Beijing.

China justified its actions as retaliation over new rules the Trump administration placed on Chinese reporters, including a 100 reporter cap from five state-run media outlets. The outlets had 160 reporters in total, meaning 60 will be sent back to China.

The tug-of-war shows just how frayed the relationship between the U.S. and China has gotten, despite signing phase one of a trade deal in January and President Trump’s repeated reassurances that China’s Communist leader, President Xi Jinping, is his friend.

That message apparently did not make it to the U.S. State Department or its Chinese counterpart.

Both took swipes at each other Friday on Twitter, blaming the other for creating and spreading the novel coronavirus that had infected 278,136 by Saturday morning. The U.S. has 19,624 confirmed cases of COVID-19 while China has 81,304. Italy tops the list of countries with the most deaths at 4,032. China comes in second at 3,259. The United States ranks 6th with 260 deaths.

On Friday, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus tweeted that by Jan. 3, “Chinese authorities had already ordered #COVID19 virus samples destroyed, silenced Wuhan doctors, and censored public concerns online.” She added, “@SpokespersonCHN is right: This is a timeline the world must absolutely scrutinize.”

Her comments came after Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted that America was hellbent on blaming China. Hua slammed the United States, taunted the State Department and accused Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of lying on Fox News when he claimed China had allowed thousands of people to leave Wuhan and travel to places like Italy.

“Stop lying through your teeth! As WHO experts said, China’s efforts averted hundreds of thousands of infection cases,” the spokesperson tweeted.

Hua kept at it Saturday tweeting, “Lying and slander won’t make the US great, nor will it make up for the lost time. Facing the global pandemic, the right thing to do is put health ahead of public policy.”

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