Coronavirus: Mapping a deadly secret trail

As confirmed cases of coronavirus approach four million, with 270,000 deaths worldwide, calls for an independent inquiry into the origins of the disease transcend politics and strategic considerations. Those calls, led by Scott Morrison and backed by the US, EU and New Zealand, are about avoiding a repeat of a deadly pandemic that also has destroyed much of the world economy and that will consign countless millions of people to abject poverty. In The Weekend Australian, Washington correspondent Cameron Stewart and China correspondent Will Glasgow trace weeks of obfuscation by the Chinese Communist Party as the virus emerged from late last year onwards. Their investigation is not about conspiracy theories or whether the virus arose from a laboratory or from Wuhan’s virulent wet markets.

What it uncovers is the culpability of the CCP. Its fanatical secrecy, a hallmark of totalitarianism, combined with reckless malice towards the rest of the world, saw the virus unleashed. The article’s discoveries would serve as a useful road map for an international investigation. And the sooner the better. As Scott Morrison said on Friday, we “can’t let the trail go cold”. Australia, the US, Britain and other countries around the world “would like to know what happened because we don’t want to see it happen again”.

Stewart and Glasgow pinpoint decisive moments in the saga. By Chinese New Year, January 25, for example, CCP censors had introduced 45 coronavirus keywords to block online discussion about the outbreak. Wuhan was locked down on January 23. Despite the virus being on the rampage with 17 dead and about 500 infections, the CCP waited until January 27 to suspend group travel overseas — immediately after the mass exodus of Chinese travellers around the world for the Lunar New Year break. Yet as the first cases appeared in the US and Australia, Beijing castigated both nations for barring Chinese travellers.

But the problems started far earlier. On January 6, the US offered to send a team of its best disease experts to assist their Chinese colleagues find answers to key questions about the severity and transmission patterns of the virus. The answer over the next month was a polite, firm no. Within China, doctors and reporters who tried to sound a warning were punished. An international academic study found that if China had acted “one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier in China, cases could have been reduced by 66, 86 and 95 per cent”.

What shines through the expose is that China’s command and control of every aspect of life appears to be as culpable for the deaths, disease and economic hardship afflicting the world as Wuhan’s grotesque wet markets. The CCP forces Chinese medicos to put “political stability” ahead of their professionalism. Even the rare Chinese media outfits with the courage to step around the orders of the Central Propaganda Department buckle when ordered to take down reports of health authorities ordering samples of the virus to be destroyed. How such repressions play out among the Chinese people, especially those who are well educated with experience of life in the West, will be worth watching. China has suffered its gravest loss of reputation since the Tiananmen Square massacre 31 years ago.

The Prime Minister’s call for an inquiry showed leadership the world needs. But it cut too close to the bone for Beijing, which responded by threatening a trade boycott. The real problem is not politics; it is survival. The G20 must take up Mr Morrison’s lead and give China no alternative but transparency. It remains to be seen what might be found in a laboratory or a now cleaned-up market. Safeguarding medicos and others, who must be free to speak openly and privately, would be vital. Leaving the trail to run cold would be a deadly risk to this and future generations.