27 Nov From the Archives
We will return tomorrow with fresh commentary. In the meantime, what follows here is a piece we published just before the COVID pandemic broke wide open, on January 21, 2020. With news reports about an outbreak of respiratory infections in China again this past week, we thought it worth remembering that the People’s Republic of China is NOT a normal country with normal leaders. Experts tell us that the chances are pretty good that the current outbreak is not going to cause a global problem, but as you’ll see, the chances were pretty good that the outbreak was not going to cause a global problem almost four years ago as well. And if anything, the PRC is even more dysfunctional today than it was when this was written and is, therefore, less likely to be honest in its communications with the WHO and others..
Remain Calm. All is well!
Unless you happen to have been heavily invested in Chinese pharmaceuticals, it’s unlikely that you remember the following story, which was published nearly a year-and-a-half ago by the South China Morning Post. We remember it, though, but not because we were interested in Chinese drugs. Rather, we remember it because it serves as another data point in our case that the People’s Republic of China is NOT like the other countries in the world and that it does, in fact, pose a SERIOUS RISK TO THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY. The SCMP put it this way:
China’s vaccine production and distribution system is beset by fake data and fraudulent labelling, raising the risk of outbreaks of highly transmissible diseases, according to industry insiders and health experts.
The assessment comes after Changchun Changsheng Bio-technology last week became the latest Chinese pharmaceutical company to embroiled in a vaccine scandal.
According to the State Drug Administration, Changsheng Bio-tech forged data on the effectiveness of its rabies vaccines and sold substandard DPT (diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus) shots for children as young as three months old.
The revelations undermine China’s claims to have established a world-class “whole-life cycle regulation system”, controlling the research, production, distribution and administration of vaccines….
While there are no official figures or reliable independent assessments about the full extent of the problems, past cases have pointed to fraud throughout the vaccine supply chain in China, from laboratories to vaccination centres.
The head of one disease control centre for about half a million people said problems with the quality of vaccines had existed for a long time and “everyone inside the loop knows it”….
Beijing is trying to assure the public that the scandals are isolated cases and the consequences are under management.
But health experts said ineffective vaccines presented major dangers for the population as a whole….
In one extreme case, a staff member at the centre filled a syringe with water and sold it to a patient as a rabies shot, the source said….
It was also common practice to sweep the numbers for some diseases under the carpet rather than treat them, the source said.
“Basically, we did not do anything to prevent malaria and many medicines are stored in our station too long and they pass their expiry date,” he said.
“We dare not openly report malaria cases because once the number is known by others, we will surely be punished.”
Now, for the record, the “staff member” in question is a Chinese government employee. And he admitted – in PRINT – that he and others commit fraud on a regular basis, either by providing fraudulent medications or by falsifying disease numbers. And did we mention that this guy is a Chinese government employee?
When we read this piece – nearly 18 months ago – we were immediately reminded of two things. First, the Chinese government is completely untrustworthy about anything, but especially about that which it thinks will make it look weak, inefficient, or otherwise unlikely to rule the world in the twenty-first century. Second, nearly seventeen years ago, when The Political Forum was still in diapers, we wrote the following about that government and its congenital dishonesty and corruption:
Even if one overlooks the longstanding public health problems associated with the continued economic and sanitary backwardness of the Chinese province of Guangdong (in which SARS, like many virulent strains of influenza and other communicable diseases, had its birth), the Chinese government played a significant role both in spreading the disease and in impeding research into its causes and possible cures. The Chinese government was slow to recognize the problem, was blatantly dishonest about the number of cases and potential speed of the disease’s spread, and was obstreperous to those researchers seeking to identify and isolate the virus.
Last week, Dr. David Heymann, executive director of communicable diseases for the World Health Organization, declared that if the Chinese government had been open and honest and had implemented basic measures to control the disease when it first appeared in November, “the disease may never have spread.”
According to Time magazine’s Asia bureau, as of early last week, the Chinese regime was still lying to the world about SARS. The magazine reported that “a doctor and party member,” indeed, “a physician at Beijing’s Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital (No. 301),” (in short, one who would know best) had contacted them and confirmed that the Chinese government was continuing to deceive the world about the prevalence of SARS.
According to Time, on April 3, the Chinese Minister of Health Zhang Wenkang “announced to the press that China’s capital had seen just 12 cases of SARS of whom three had died.” On April 8, the official China Daily “put the number of SARS infections in Beijing at 19 with four dead.” But, the magazine noted, it had received a signed statement from Dr. Jiang Yanyoung, who told a different story, namely that the government was grossly underreporting the number of SARS cases and deaths….
Moreover, Time reported that doctors in the Chinese capital (including Dr. Jiang) had been briefed about the disease in early March, but had been told to shut their mouths about it for fear that any honest discussion of SARS could screw up the National People’s Congress. Dr. Jiang told Time that the doctors were warned “not to publicize what they’d learned lest it interfere with the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp legislative body.” The magazine also noted that this last allegation “has been confirmed by another physician at a Beijing-area hospital.”
Over the next several days – and perhaps weeks or months – keep in mind that we all got pretty lucky with SARS. It just sorta petered out, but only AFTER KILLING MORE THAN 700 PEOPLE.
We don’t want to freak anybody out, and chances are pretty good that the Chinese government is right that there is “no need to panic” about the current new coronavirus outbreak causing pneumonia and killing people in China – and now other parts of Asia. But that’s IN SPITE OF, not because of the government’s reassurances. Yesterday, the Global Times, the Communist Party’s English-language daily newspaper, editorialized that “In the early days of SARS, reports were delayed and covered up. That kind of thing must not happen again in China….We have made great strides in medicine, social affairs management and public opinion since 2003.”
Maybe it’s just us, but that sounds precisely like something that someone who is trying to cover stuff up would say. As for the “great strides” in medicine, we suspect that the family of the guy who died of rabies because he was given a shot of water instead of the vaccine EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO might disagree.
But again, maybe that’s just us.
