China’s great gift to the world was the novel coronavirus now referred to as COVID-19. That this virus arose in mainland China in Wuhan is beyond dispute. The exact nature of the virus—was it manufactured or is it natural?—how it escaped and from where are still disputed. Evidence has been accumulating that the virus escaped by some means from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but we are unlikely ever to know for sure. The WHO’s initial ultra light touch investigation into the possibility of a laboratory leak concluded that there was no evidence to support this. But evidence, for example that the virus was manufactured and rumours of poor standards of containment at the Wuhan Institute, continued to emerge. A leading UK virologist, Angus Dalgleish of St George’s Hospital, London, says that there are genetic sequences in the virus that only occur in viruses that have been genetically manipulated. This is disputed by others who say that it originated in a bat. Either way, the link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the case for an escape from those premises continues to accumulate and the WHO has been forced to open up its investigations again, despite pressure from China not to pursue this line of investigation further.
It will be very surprising if the WHO pursue a further investigation. If they do then it would be miraculous if they concluded that the Wuhan Institute and, by implication, the authorities in Wuhan, Hubei Province (where Wuhan is located) and the Chinese government were found culpable. The WHO has been in the pocket of the Chinese government for decades and the sheer extent of their control over the agency has been detailed in a recent extensive and detailed report in The Sunday Times. This has mainly been achieved by ensuring that their preferred puppets are at the helm. First Margaret Chan from Hong Kong who was in office from 2006-2017 and then the present incumbent Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus from Ethiopia, a well-known ally of the Chinese government.
According to The Sunday Times report, it is Chinese government policy that epidemics arising within their borders are a state secret, until they decide or are forced—as was the case with both SARS in 2003 and COVID-19 in 2020—to tell the world. The Chinese obsession with secrecy and their wish to appear beyond reproach in the eyes of the world and, primarily, its citizens has released two novel viruses beyond its borders. I was in Hong Kong in 2003, living within sight of the shopping centre in Shatin where the first SARS cases were found there. The narrative pursued at the time was that this was the origin of SARS. We did not know that it had already arisen on the mainland and spread to Hong Kong. But where the lethality of SARS was negligible—fewer than 750 deaths worldwide in total—and it was easily contained, this was not the case with COVID-19.
At this point, and regardless of the truth surrounding the origins of the virus and the subsequent cover up that led to its worldwide dispersion, we need to stop blaming China; it is not responsible for what happened next. When China could no longer conceal the truth about COVID-19 and it was becoming clear, despite denials by China and the WHO, that human to human transmission was possible the Chinese government began to catastrophise the situation. We were treated to pictures of distressed relatives, bodies in the streets and stories of overwhelmed intensive care units in Wuhan. The Wuhan authorities built special COVID hospitals in record time—our mainstream media made sure we knew all about these—and brutally locked down its population (although they have a lot to learn from Australia).
Our response, in common with most of the rest of the world, was to panic. We unquestioningly accepted that what happened in Wuhan would happen here. While China—a health obsessed nation with no primary care—has 4.3 hospital beds to our 2.5 in the UK, it only has 3.6 intensive care beds to our 6.6 in the UK. We assumed that our intensive care units would be overwhelmed and, instead of saving the lives of people who were actually ill, we cleared out the NHS in order to save it. Nature abhors a vacuum and intensive care units in the UK rapidly filled up with COVID patients and the narrative that they were ‘overwhelmed’ began to be promoted by the mainstream media. Some were, but not all and not all at the same time and COVID patients were moved around the UK in search of intensive care beds. I know from a close family member how busy it was in critical care and how high the death rate was but the period of being ‘overwhelmed’ was relatively short. The absence of headlines in the mainstream media informing us that intensive care units were no longer overwhelmed was, palpably, absent.
Then followed the absolute farce—at a cost of over £500 million—of the Nightingale Hospitals which remained unused. A local colleague, head of the British Association for Critical Care Nurses, was interviewed regularly on local television against the backdrop of an empty Nightingale Hospital. We finally decided to close these white elephants in April 2021; nobody in the UK seemed to notice that the Chinese had closed theirs a year earlier.
The catastrophising narrative continues. The government gives with one hand and takes away with the other regarding lifting restrictions and permitting travel. NHS colleagues continue their handwringing and attention seeking. Having basked in the limelight and affections of the nation and wallowed in the cult of the ‘clap for our carers’, they seem unable to loosen their hold on the pandemic. I, frankly, sense a great deal of disappointment that the pandemic is receding and a sense of relief each time the likes of Neil Ferguson predicts another wave as he has just done. Does nobody understand that this man has never been right about anything, ever?
We need, constantly, to remind ourselves and anyone who will listen that all the above was for a virus that the vast majority of people were unlikely to become infected with, from which recovery (not dying) is approximately 99% and those who do die, tragically, are the usual suspects: the very old, the obese and the medically compromised. The outcomes of our response to COVID include a bankrupt country, record waiting lists for NHS treatment, some remarkable statistics regarding suicide and a host of other problems regarding child abuse, domestic violence and mental health problems. China did not do this to us…our own government did.
Opinions from the Unity News Network (UNN) editorial team & various contributors. | UNN always clearly distinguishes between news and opinion pieces and as an open minded outlet we publish views from a variety of people and organisation that do not necessarily reflect the views of UNN or its writers. Articles published under UNN Opinions are always opinion pieces and if published on behalf of a contributor will contain that authors name at the start of the piece.
