REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo
China’s COVID ambitions — to hide crucial data and avoid blame — could not have been accomplished without Western academics eagerly playing the useful idiot for Beijing, The New York Times (of all places!) has revealed.
Per the paper’s reporting, “Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions” while “Western journal editors enabled those efforts” — and the World Health Organization blessed it all.
Two China-pushed narratives are at stake here: that the virus did not escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that China’s murderous, totalitarian response to the pandemic was a model of success.
The degree of complicity in pushing these among leading institutions outside China astounds.
The guilty include major universities like Oxford and cutting-edge scientific journals, to say nothing of mega-powerful global nonprofits.
The journal Clinical Infectious Diseases seemingly falsely amended a paper on possible paths for COVID mutation to suggest that the data it was based on were collected later than they actually were.
The Lancet, arguably the most important academic journal going, pulled a group letter from Chinese hospital workers begging for international aid.
And WHO, the chief global health watchdog, played the role of a megaphone for China’s claims about the virus’ origin too many times to count.
The reasons are ugly and clear.
Journals don’t want to lose access to the lucrative Chinese market by offending the government; many universities rely on monies coming via various paths from China; Beijing plays hardball bureaucratic politics to dominate outfits like WHO.
And elite institutions, especially in the academy, have been utterly captured by the left and have long sought some alternative to the evil, capitalistic hegemony of the United States and found it in Beijing’s allegedly benevolent dictatorship.
One of these, of course, is the Times itself — which parroted China’s COVID nonsense avidly for much of the early pandemic.
It’s beyond time for our elite to face facts and stop bending the knee to Beijing by pretending it’s a state like any other.
It cost countless lives during the pandemic, and will cost countless more.
