With the number of confirmed cases of, and deaths from coronavirus in Italy, a nation of 63 million people having now surpassed the number of infections officially admitted by the government of China, a nation of 1.4 billion and the nation where the news strain of coronavirus, COVID – 19 was first observed, it was obvious to the realists among us that the Chinese government’s claims to have contained the virus were deeply suspect and further claims that the outbreak were under control were as reliable as reported sightings of The Tooth Fairy. To call the official narrative into question by suggesting China may have covered up the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak, despite being denied by government officials and mainstream media talking heads, was being put on a par with questioning the climate change narrative, saying there is no evidence that Donald Trump is a Russian collaborator or predicting that post Brexit, Britain will boom once free of the suffocating blanket of EU bureaucracy.
That may all be about to change because a report published today reveals an app supported by the government of China has been censoring keywords since January 1 this year. An investigation carried out by Toronto-based cybersecurity research company Citizen Lab found the WeChat app blocked combinations of keywords on the virus and any material critical of President Xi Jinping’s response. WeChat is the most popular messaging app in the China was created by entrepreneur Allen Zhang. The Chinese government government is known to have supported its development and uses it as a data source for mass surveillance programs in China. Such is the reality of life in socialist dictatorships, although the way governments use technology to control information is not so different in the liberal democracies.
The Chinese government has censored what its people read and say online for years, aided and abetted in some cases by Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook but the CitizenLab report suggests they began blocking discussions on the mystery disease epidemic weeks before officials acknowledged the scale severity of the outbreak.
As I commented under and article by Cailtlin Johnson a few days ago, “Firstly, the unofficial reports I’m hearing through my network of business contacts is that the Chinese government is lying through its teeth, the infection is still rampant in China, there have been upwards of 100,000 fatalities and many millions of infections, the stories of hospitals built from scratch being fully operational 30 seconds after work on the foundations is begun are typical of the bullshit that always comes out of socialist governments to mask the fact that is a crisis bureaucrats never have a clue how to deal with the problems…” (Read full comment.) Looking back on China’s track record for dealing with humanitarian crises, it is on a par with the communist government’s track record on human rights, so it’s rather disconcerting to see liberal and progressive commentators in the free world jumping on the fear-and-panic bandwagon by heaping praise on a brutal, opp[ressive and incompetent tyranny.
For governments of course, to profess belief in China’s incredible claims about its success in containing COVID – 19 provides justification for the kind of executive power grabs we are seeing around the world in response to a relatively minor illness with a very high recovery rate. Because in spite of all the scaremongering, so far this strain of coronavirus is killing far less people that seasonal flu.
The damning report on China’s misinformation campaign also found that WeChat’s algorithm was updated to block progressively more significant words as the outbreak grew. Thus the Chinese government tried to keep it secret even when they knew the disease was out of control and pose a serious threat to certain demographic groups.
On December 31, China first alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to the outbreak, but information was initially withheld over the number of people infected, the risks downplayed, and timely information overseen, leading some to claim at that time the government was lying about the true extent of the virus.
Then, almost a month later, on January 20, President Xi publicly addressed the issue of the virus, saying it had to be “resolutely contained”.
It is not clear if WeChat’s keyword-blocking in this period was based on government directives, or if it was done of its own accord, as the report suggests it could be the result of companies “over-censoring in order to avoid being sanctioned by the authorities”.
WeChat was found to have censored 132 keyword combinations between January 1 and 31. Among words identified were the terms “Unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “SARS outbreak in Wuhan” An additional 384 keywords were added between February 1 and 15.
China and some other non – democratic nations have a toxic attitude to freedom of speech and information, instead of being open about it when problems occur these authoritarian regimes try to hide what is happening and pretend to the outside world that everything is, if not quite normal, then at least under control. The governments in liberal democracies are not much better, but find it harder to get away with such blatant malfeasance as, at the time of writing, we still have a few ways available to us of calling those who rule us to account.
The CitizensLab report illustrates perfectly why governments and global corporations should be kept away from control of the internet, it is the last bastion of free speech and unfortunately the bastion is crumbling under constant bombardment.
We have all seen how alternative news sites and social media platforms have fallen into a biased propaganda left wing echo chamber, how censorship and Orwellian controls on information would be imposed on entire internet should it completely ever fall into the hands of the government or corporate globalists.
Yet in spite of warnings and concerns being raised by free speech activists, Boris Johnson in the UK appears determined to involve Huawei, the main corporate collaborator in China’s mass surveillance and information control policy, in building the UK’s 5G network, while in the USA the Trump administration continue to use Google and Facebook as collaborators in spite of the record of those companies in abusing their market position and manipulating information to their own advantage.
For most of us there is little to fear from COVID – 19 coronavirus if we take sensible precautions, the fear and panic being promoted by governments and mass media is a bigger threat. But as F. D. Roosvelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” If we give in to the artificially generated mass panic we are likely to find we have been stripped of most of our civil liberties. And for what? Fear of an infection far less dangerous that the seasonal influenza outbreaks that occur each year. Why has Italy been badly affected? Because the regions of Italy the virus has hit hardest have a very high proportion of old people. Why has China been hit? Because despite official reports of China’s rapid progress from third world poverty, much of the country is still poor and backward and vulnerability is increased by poor nutrition, sub standard civic sanitation and some bizarre dietary choices.
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Coronavirus deaths: Are The Authorities Deceiving Us?
/>Picture: Buzzfeed
Yes we know we’ve used it before but we like it
SHOCK! HORROR! A socialist government lying to cover up its failures, incompetence and illegal activities in developing biological weapons. How could any reasonable person have suspected such a thing?
Well it seems the governments of the liberal democracies are not avese to playing the same game. The extreme measures introduced in the UK to tackle coronavirus by virtually putting the entire nation in lockdown have been justified because of the need to save lives, but if we look a little way below the surface, these measures are based on some very dubious evidence.
Mathematical Modelling (yes that old demon again) carried out by Imperial College London has been used by “scientists” and “experts” to inform government that unless new powers were enacted and used to curtail freedom of movement, social interaction and necessary activities like food shopping as many as 500,000 could die in our epidemic. That is a worst case scenario of course, but the best case scenario, that for the majority of people who are healthy, well nourished and living in a reasonably good environment, Coronavirus will be a relatively minor infection, in fact many of us will be unaware we have been infected with the virus.
The 500,000 dead being quoted as if it is the most likely outcome, although it is a worst case scenario, has the sticky fingerprints of the deep state (i.e. the civil, military and security services all over it, these agencies have a long track record of using fear and panic to reassert their authority when they feel control is slipping away from them. Even the government’s previous, more gentle strategy to slow the spread was likely to lead to 250,000 deaths, the research suggested. But where did these figures come from?
The warnings based on output from mathematical models remember, prompted ministers to announce on Monday the biggest assault on personal freedom in the UK since World War 2, with the public being told to stay in their homes as much as possible, not reduce shopping trips to a minimum, not to go to pubs, clubs or theatres, and to work from home if possible. Sporting events had been shut down the previous wee
The move has hit the economy, putting jobs at risk and prompting schools to be closed and exams cancelled. In other words chaos rules, but then as author Terry Pratchett said, “In any conflict between order and chaos, chaos will win because it’s better organised.”
But is there any substance in those figures or are they plucked out of the air as previous estimates of the threat of pandemic diseases were. It was predicted millions would die, in reality a few people here ad there felt a bit poorly. Professor Neil Ferguson, a senior academic involved in modelling the course of the epidemic told the BBC’s Today Programme earlier this week there was “no alternative” to the curtailment of personal liberty if 250,000 lives were not to be risked. Not the weasel words there, if lives were not to be put at risk. Everything we do carries some degree of risk, whether we drive to work, take a bus or walk there is always the risk of us being involved in an accident. If we eat at a restaurant there is a risk of food poisoning and if we cok at home there could be a house fire or an electrical fault could kill us. Lives being put at risk is a universe away from lives being put in danger.
Another expert, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program he had advised The House Of Commons Health Select Committee, the parliamentary overseer of health issues, that the hope was to keep the death toll below 20,000 by suppressing the virus.
That would still be worse than those killed by flu, he said, giving a number of 8,000 per year. But again there is no evidence to suggest this figure is in any way accurate. In fact there is strong evidence, when we analyse the modelling techniques, that the figures they produce are not only unreliable but are simply made up to grab headlines. The question the “scientits” and “experts” don’t want us to ask is
Would these people be dying anyway?
The quoted figures for likely deaths from coronavirus are astounding but what is not clear because to put it bluntly, the modellers deliberately avoided factoring into the alogrithms is, to what extent the deaths predicted would occur without coronavirus?The answer to that question can never truly be known or predicted with any degree of accuracy until the pandemic is over, which is why modelling is pointless unless qualified by numerous caveats. Given that the old and chronically ill are most vulnerable, would these people be dying anyway, of seasonal ‘flu, common colds, breathing problems brought on by extremes of cold or hot weather? My wife’s final illness was triggered by a very cold spell in the winter of 2019 although she survived some months. There was no infection; scoliosis – a lifelong condition – put pressure on her lungs, the cold spell exacerbated that and … well several months later we are still waiting for the hospital to tell us exactly what happened. But whatever it was, it was neither the cold itself nor a cold weather infection, our home is well heated and Teri did not have to go outside.
Every year over 500,000 people die in England and Wales: inclide Scotland and Northern Ireland, and that goes up to over 600,000. The models being used to predict coronavirus deaths are not on top of this but included in the figure. Many of those deaths assigned to “The Corona Virus pandemic would be within this “normal” number of expected deaths. In short, they would have died anyway.
It was a point conceded by Sir Patrick at a press conference on Thursday when he said there would be “some overlap” between coronavirus deaths and expected deaths – he just did not know how much of an overlap. To put it another way the numbers of deaths likely to occur because of Coronavirus infection are expected quite small, but in a time of pandemic almost every death can be described as coronavirus related as most of us will have been in contact with someone carrying the virus, or in a public building that infected people of people who have been in contact with others carrying the virus have passed through.
As the 19th century British Prime Minister George Canning said: “I can make statistics tell me anything except the truth.
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