China jails citizen-journalist for four years over Wuhan virus reporting

World News/Covid-19 : A Chinese court on Monday handed down a four-year jail term to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of this year’s coronavirus outbreak on the grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, her lawyer said.

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Zhang Zhan, 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic epicentre than the official narrative.

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“I don’t understand. All she did was say a few true words, and for that she got four years,” said Shao Wenxia, Zhang’s mother, who attended the trial with her husband.

Zhang’s lawyer Ren Quanniu told Reuters: “We will probably appeal.”

The trial was held at a court in Pudong, a district of the business hub of Shanghai.“Ms Zhang believes she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech,” Ren had said before the trial.

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Critics say that China deliberately arranged for Zhang’s trial to take place during the Western holiday season to minimize Western attention and scrutiny. U.S. President Donald Trump has regularly criticised Beijing for covering up the emergence of what he calls the “China virus”.

The United Nations human rights office called in a tweet for Zhang’s release.

“We raised her case with the authorities throughout 2020 as an example of the excessive clampdown on freedom of expression linked to #COVID19 & continue to call for her release,” it said.

Criticism of China’s early handling of the crisis has been censored, and whistle-blowers such as doctors warned. State media have credited the country’s success in reining in the virus to the leadership of President Xi Jinping.

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The virus has spread worldwide to infect more than 80 million people and kill more than 1.76 million, paralysing air travel as nations threw up barriers that have disrupted industries and livelihoods.

In Shanghai, police enforced tight security outside the court where the trial opened seven months after Zhang’s detention, although some supporters were undeterred.

A man in a wheelchair, who told Reuters he came from the central province of Henan to demonstrate support for Zhang as a fellow Christian, wrote her name on a poster before police escorted him away.

Foreign journalists were denied entry to the court “due to the epidemic”, court security officials said.

A former lawyer, Zhang arrived in Wuhan on Feb. 1 from her home in Shanghai.

Her short video clips uploaded to YouTube consist of interviews with residents, commentary and footage of a crematorium, train stations, hospitals and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Detained in mid-May, she went on hunger strike in late June, court documents seen by Reuters say. Her lawyers told the court that police strapped her hands and force-fed her with a tube. By December, she was suffering headaches, giddiness, stomach ache, low blood pressure and a throat infection.

Requests to the court to release Zhang on bail before the trial and livestream the trial were ignored, her lawyer said.

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Other citizen-journalists who have disappeared in China without explanation include Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua.

While there has been no news of Fang, Li re-emerged in a YouTube video in April to say he was forcibly quarantined, while Chen, although released, is under surveillance and has not spoken publicly, a friend has said.

News Source: Reuters

Chinese virologist claims Covid-19 Came From Government Lab In Wuhan

 Dr Li-Meng Yan said she was assigned to research "new pneumonia" in Wuhan. She said that she discovered a cover-up operation regarding coronavirus during her investigation.

In a stunning revelation, a Chinese virologist has claimed that the coronavirus was created in a government-controlled laboratory in Wuhan, the first epicentre of the outbreak.

The scientist also offered scientific evidence to back her claims.

In an exclusive conversation with ''Loose Women'', a British chat show , scientist Dr Li-Meng Yan said she was assigned to research "new pneumonia" in Wuhan. She said that she discovered a cover-up operation regarding coronavirus during her investigation.

Dr Li-Meng, who specialised in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, said she conducted two researches on new pneumonia in China - first between December and early January, and the other in mid-January, before fleeing to the US from Hong Kong .

"I decided to report this development to my supervisor, who is also a World Health Organisation (WHO) consultant. There was no response from the WHO and my supervisor. Everyone warned me that do not cross the right line and keep silence or else i would be made to disappear," she said.

The virologist said she had expected her supervisor to "do the right thing on behalf of the Chinese government and WHO".

Several countries, including the US, have criticised both China and WHO for covering-up the severity of the coronavirus outbreak.

Dr Li-Meng revealed she had contacted a famous Chinese YouTuber in the US. The expose, which was in Chinese, said that the Chinese Communist Party was covering up the COVID-19 crisis and there was a human-to-human transmission of the virus.

She also said that coronavirus may be a "high-mutant virus" which can become an epidemic soon and also the seafood market in Wuhan and the virus's intermediate hosts were just a "smokescreen".

The doctor then made the stunning revelation that the "virus is not from nature" and it had been from a "laboratory controlled by the Chinese government in Wuhan".

"This is based on the China Military Institute that discovered and owned some bad coronavirus named CC45 and ZXC41. based on that, after lab modification becomes a novel virus," she said.

Asked if she had scientific proof about the revelation, Dr Li-Meng said she has intelligence from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), local doctors and people across China. "These are the truths and all other things were covered up," she added.

The virologist said she is working on a scientific report with a small group of top scientists across the planet and therefore the same are going to be published soon.

"There are two reports. the first one will come in several days and it will tell the people all the evidence," she said, adding that the coronavirus is a highly contagious and a dangerous virus.

Asked whether she was worried about her safety after fleeing Hong Kong , the doctor remarked she wanted to deliver the message as soon as possible to the globe.

"It was very scary at that time. But I had to do it because i am a doctor and i cannot see it happen. If I do not tell the truth to the world, i will be regretful. So, this foundation which is based in new york, helped me to secretly leave Hong Kong . they help people who are against the Chinese government," she added.

Giving an insight into her unpublished scientific report, Dr Li-Meng said anyone, even those who don't have knowledge of biology, can read it.

"The genome sequence is like our human fingerprint. So, based on this you can recognise and identify this thing. So, I used the evidence existing in the genome sequence of Sars-CoV-2 to tell people why this came from China and why they are the only ones who made it," she stated.

She further said, "You can check, identify and verify it by yourself. it is a critical thing for us to know the origins of the virus. If not, it'll be life-threatening for everyone."

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