How Western propaganda against China created a Covid-19 catastrophe

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By K.J. Noh (People's Daily Online) 16:58, January 20, 2022

A COVID-19 testing site is seen in New York, the United States, Dec. 13, 2021. The number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 50 million on Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

There is little doubt that the Western media is engaging in a full-scale propaganda war against China. There is a non-stop barrage of lies weaponized to undermine China's accomplishments and global standing, to delegitimate its system of governance, to tar its people and policies, and ultimately, to manufacture consent for cold--and possibly hot--war against China.

Yet the lies are breath-takingly and self-evidently wrong to anyone who exercises a modicum of critical thinking. These lies against China dissolve under the slightest scrutiny. But they are also dangerous. Not only in that they escalate the risk of war, but in that misinformation itself can cause deaths. The blowback from these lies is clearest in the catastrophic outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic in the West. Although this information warfare is systemic and everywhere in the western media--a systemic carpet bombing of the public with lies—few papers can match the New York Times in the sheer audacity, absurdity, and consistent mendacity of its reporting.

Systemic failure

The NY Times claimed that "China had created a fail-safe system to track contagions. It failed". It claimed that China had created a state-of-the-art system to track infection that was failure-proof, but this system failed because the Chinese failed to use it. It claimed--without a shred of evidence--that this was because workers were afraid of the consequences of reporting an outbreak, afraid of retribution for reporting bad news up the system. The implication of this claim was that the Chinese have an endemic culture of dishonesty--that the system encourages dishonesty--and that they will lie or cover up in order to save their face and their skins. In short, the Chinese are cowardly and dishonest. This racist slander was a violation of the most basic standards of journalistic integrity and logic.

To begin with, contrary to the strawman set up by the NYT, there is no such thing in science, engineering, or public health, a system that is "fail-safe" the way the NY Times portrays it--i.e. failure proof. All man-made systems will fail eventually. (A fail-safe system is based on the premise that when failure happens in a system, it can be designed and prepared for in a way that minimizes harm). Thus, for the NY Times to claim in its headline that a "fail-safe system failed" is already a linguistic and logical absurdity. Second, we know that workers would be sanctioned for not reporting disease outbreaks rather than for reporting them, so this lie fails the most basic common sense analysis and corroboration. Third, and most importantly, the system actually did work: within days of alerts being sounded on December 27th, 2019, a field investigation commenced, rapidly rendered conclusions, and the WHO was alerted on Jan 1st, 2020. Five days later, on Jan 5th, 2020, the entire genome sequence was uploaded to the public global database GenBank by Chinese government researchers, and then republished again on Jan 11th. This astonishingly rapid reporting, analysis, sequencing and sharing enabled the rapid development of Covid-19 testing, which then facilitated the effective implementation of testing, tracking, tracing, and targeted isolation. These test-facilitated public health measures resulted in millions of lives saved in countries that focused on non-pharmaceutical interventions such as South Korea. It also enabled rapid vaccine development.

This gives the lie to the claim that "the reporting system failed", or that "Chinese cover up" led to harm and death. Rather these outrageous claims are a slander that serve to distract from, and cover up US and Western incompetence, denial, and indifference to public health to protect their populations.

The reporting, editing, fact-checking system of the NY Times clearly failed, as did common sense.

The Deadly Cost of Lying

This malicious inversion of truth, this unending barrage of disinformation focuses on exploiting every aspect of the Covid-19 outbreak to as a pretext to attack China as incompetent, ill-intentioned, and illegitimate. These reports also distract from domestic failures and fail to report on or inform on useful information about the pandemic. These lies extend to reports on China's vaccines, China's vaccine distribution, China's PPE sharing, China's Covid-19 statistics, and China's prior virus research.

This type of ideological thuggery masquerading as journalism undermines public health as a cooperative global project, and in doing so, it threatens the health and welfare of everyone. In these particular cases, as in many others, the NY Times has often been the index culprit in this epidemic of diseased disinformation.