Leaked emails reveal China manipulated WHO’s early report on COVID pandemic

Emails dug out through the Freedom of Information Act have exposed that China manipulated an early report of the World Health Organization (WHO) on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bruce Aylward, a senior advisor at the World Health Organization (WHO), and Wannian Liang, an epidemiologist, representing the People’s Republic of China, had led a World Health Organization mission comprising of 13 international experts and 12 Chinese experts, which prepared the initial report on COVID-19 in February 2020, at the time the world knew little about SARS-CoV-2. The emails revealed that the WHO report was influenced by political considerations in China.

New emails exposed that the authorities in China enforced tight control of a second WHO mission in January 2021. Wannian Liang, an epidemiologist, representative of the People’s Republic of China, was in both missions.

The email exposed that the Chinese authorities insisted that the WHO’s first mission must shift from the main emphasis and meet China’s need for an admiring assessment of its COVID-19 response and plans.

Bruce Aylward, a senior advisor at the World Health Organization (WHO), had revealed: “In an excellent and encouraging discussion with Liang on the train, we agreed that the best way to ensure we meet China’s need for a strong assessment of its response and where it plans to go next, would be to add [REDACTED].”

The emails indicated that the report is a glowing paean of China’s mitigation measures and its data sharing.

The WHO’s report number one, read: “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.” The report ignored the real origin of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Aylward’s email had suggested this section, the report’s “major conclusions”, may have been added to “accommodate” the Chinese scientists.

Other international members of the mission were said to have recommended that Aylward “dial it back a bit for a public audience and at least hint at shortcomings.”

Alyward, the Senior Advisor to the WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, may have expected pushback on the laudatory section and attempted to protect himself that “it is the opinions of the Internationals that matter most here.”

The email further exposed that Wang Bin, deputy director-general of China’s Disease Prevention and Control Bureau of the National Health Commission, sought to nix certain recommendations in a section dedicated to the public, but they are not specified.

Director of the CDC’s Global Disease Detection Operations Center, Ray Arthur, was said to have revealed to colleagues, that Aylward and Dale Fisher, mission member and infectious-diseases physician at the National University Hospital in Singapore, in communications with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), were “highly complementary” and “did not question the data coming from China.”

Aylward and Fisher were said to have flagged some concerns about China’s response or data to CDC but the nature of those concerns is redacted. They were not discussed publicly by Aylward at the press conference that followed the report’s release, during which Aylward repeatedly applauded China’s response to the pandemic.

Aylward was cited to have said: “It’s the opinion of the joint mission, after looking at it very closely and in different ways, that there is no question that China’s bold approach to the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of what was a rapidly escalating and continues to be a deadly epidemic.”

It was exposed that the pressure to appease Chinese authorities may have impacted the mission’s report in other ways.

For example, Aylward refused to sign his name to the report unless references to “SARS-CoV-2” were removed.

Aylward had written: “Definitely do not use SARS-COV2— I’m not signing anything with that in it. I’m not going to be part of that mess.”

Aylward had maintained that his concerns surrounded the “deep history of this country with SARS.”

It was highlighted that SARS-CoV-2, the now widely accepted name for the virus that causes COVID-19, was initially resisted by Chinese virologists and the WHO because it linked COVID-19 to the 2003 SARS outbreak and therefore, to China.

Wuhan Institute of Virology Coronavirus Researcher Shi Zhengli was reported in 2021 by the U.S. Right to Know to have made an appeal to the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses for the virus to be renamed to something like TARS-CoV or HARS-CoV.

The international mission was, therefore, misguided into premature conclusions and misinformation of the entire world of the basic data of COVID-19 by the influence of China.