China Seeks to Use WHO Pandemic Treaty to Expand Its Social Credit System Globally: Advocate

By Hannah Ng and Tiffany Meier

April 24, 2023  Updated: April 24, 2023

 A sign outside World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva on Aug. 17, 2020. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

According to Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, China seeks to use the WHO’s proposed amendments and pandemic treaty to expand its social credit system globally.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is pushing for a pandemic treaty and changes to the current International Health Regulations (IHR) to strengthen its position during medical emergencies. Additionally, these suggestions expand the definition of emergencies to encompass prospective danger, not just actual injury. A definition of “One Health” that includes all occurrences in the biosphere that might affect human well-being is provided in the draft treaty. The WHO director-general will have sole authority to make decisions on this matter. Countries will be required to ratify the WHO accords.

Littlejohn said that if the amendments and the pandemic treaty are passed in the form they are currently in, “the WHO would move from being an advisory body to being a compulsory body that the words nonbinding is suggested to be deleted.”

“So there would be a regulatory body and an enforcement body,” Littlejohn told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister outlet of the Epoch Times.

Wipe Out Sovereignty

Littlejohn pointed to the One Health approach, saying that it would destroy national sovereignty as it allows the UN organization to determine if there’s a health risk based on their assessment that there’s a pandemic or a potential pandemic.

In that case, the WHO could move in the concerned country not just based on a human pandemic or germ but also animals, plants, or the environment, according to Littlejohn.

“So it basically covers every facet of life on Earth, and they would have the power to declare a potential health risk, and then they would have the power to tell us how to handle it” regarding requirements for quarantine, vaccination, etc.

“So that is where our personal medical freedom or personal sovereignty would be destroyed,” she noted.

Littlejohn said there’s a section in the treaty about censorship of misinformation and disinformation, that is, anything that counters what the WHO is saying, enabling the agency to identify people who disagree with them.

“So they will be surveilling us. And they also want to censor us,” she said.

“This surveillance system is very similar to a new vaccine passport or a digital ID, which is being pushed out by the UN and also the World Economic Forum (WEF),” she added.

Expand China’s Social Credit System

In her opinion, it also resembles China’s social credit system that was in place during the pandemic.

The health QR-code system in use throughout China’s three years of extreme zero-COVID measures is seen as a surveillance tool of the regime.

The color of a code on your phone determines whether you are allowed to leave the community grounds, eat in restaurants, or even be admitted to a hospital to give birth.

Codes were allegedly turned yellow or even red (indicating infection) for citizens who complained about the strict pandemic measures.

The rights advocate further noted that the WHO had downplayed information that could reflect negatively on China.

“They followed China’s lies, that there was no human-to-human transmission, that we should not stop flights from China because that’s somehow racist, etc. … They just parroted China’s lies, and so many people got sick. And so many people died because of the mismanagement of the World Health Organization,” she said.

Given the communist regime’s power over global organizations, China could seek to duplicate its surveillance approach in other countries worldwide.

“China has way outsized power in the World Health Organization, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum; and so, of course, they want to impose the China model, which is the social credit system on the entire world,” she said.

“And [CCP leader] Xi Jinping has said that he wants to have a major hand in constructing some kind of global governance. And I believe that they’re doing that through the World Health Organization, and this parallel track of China’s social credit system through the surveillance, and the social listening, and the central bank digital currency, trying to track the entire world in like a Chinese style Gulag,” she added.

American Sovereignty Declaration

As all 194 nations in the WHO will vote on the amendments by May 2024, Littlejohn urged concerned American citizens to sign the American Sovereignty Declaration at sovereigntycoalition.org. She said that it is an effort to defend our national sovereignty and our personal medical freedom from threats posed by the World Health Organization.

Littlejohn also suggested that citizens alert their senators and congressional representatives about the scheme “because this is something that our legislature really is asleep to; so it’s really important to wake them up,” she said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-seeks-to-use-who-pandemic-treaty-to-expand-its-social-credit-system-globally-advocate_5217080.html

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Senate GOP report raises possibility of two lab leaks triggering COVID

By 

Steven Nelson

April 17, 2023

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

AFP via Getty Image 

WASHINGTON — The COVID-19 pandemic may have started with two separate leaks at Chinese labs doing risky “gain of function” research, a Republican senator said Monday.

A report released by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) raises the prospect that millions of lives could have been saved — including those of more than 1 million Americans — if not for a “coverup” by the Chinese government during a theorized initial outbreak.

“This report concludes most likely this was two leaks [including] a lab leak in the September-October [2019] timeframe, even as early as July or August,” the medical doctor turned senator told a small group of journalists ahead of the release of the 301-page document.

“We’ve concluded that [China] started vaccine development in November 2019. And then another lab leak seems to be most sensible explanation,” he said. “There are key data points that are being held back that could help us prove that.”

Dr. Robert Kadlec, a cofounder of the Operation Warp Speed program that rapidly developed US COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, drafted the report titled “Muddy Waters: The Origins of COVID-19” with about a dozen Republican aides on the Senate Health Committee and additional outside consultants.

The theory that there were two lab leaks, with the first one’s effect going unrecognized by the global community as the Chinese government raced ahead with early vaccine development, is unproven and Marshall says he welcomes debate and the exploration of other possibilities.

The theory rests on scientific conjecture about some previously reported details — including an assessment of the amount of work that would have had to predate a Feb. 24, 2020, vaccine patent filed by Dr. Zhou Yusen, a Chinese military scientist who later died under mysterious circumstances. Investigators concluded that the vaccine development would have had to start in November 2019, using Operation Warp Speed’s course as a benchmark.

A pre-November series of additional events adds weight to the theory, Marshall said, including the deaths of 11 Iranian athletes, publicly reported in 2020. Some of the athletes reportedly attended the Olympics-style World Military Games in held Wuhan, China, in October 2019.

There are additional scientific clues, according to the report.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) says COVID-19 may have leaked twice from Chinese labs.

Steven Nelson

“Epidemiological and genetic molecular analyses of the early published circulating Wuhan [COVID-19] strains supported the possibility of two spillover events two or more weeks apart,” the report says.

“This assessment was made based on minor genetic differences in early circulating strains suggesting that two lineages of the same virus may have emerged simultaneously and progressed on different paths or sequentially separated by some period of time. One lineage showing more mutations than the other implying it had been circulated longer than the other or had potentially passed through more individuals.”

The document goes on: “A recently published study analyzed data from existing WHO global influenza surveillance networks early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis could identify outliers in influenza-negative influenza-like illness (ILI) that served as potential early indicator of COVID-19 community
transmission.”

The report noted “[a] noticeable increase of Wuhan adult ILI cases during week 46 (November 11-17, 2019) corresponded to negative influenza testing that same week. This occurrence is similar to the epidemiological outlier identified in the published study. It occurs approximately 13 weeks before the recorded surge of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in late January, early February 2020.”

Further fueling suspicions, the Wuhan Institute of Virology deleted an online database of coronavirus samples on Sept. 12, 2019, which Marshall said likely would have shown “cousins” of COVID-19 if it was indeed from nature.

COVID-19 killed more than 1 million Americans and caused massive social and economic upheaval.

Getty Images

“There are a lot of events around this timeline, then it gets a little quiet, and then — boom, something else happens,” Marshall said.

But Marshall concedes there may be alternative explanations for the outbreak, which Chinese authorities first publicly acknowledged on Dec. 31, 2019.

Pressed by The Post on whether the vaccine patent could have been quickly filed due to some other reason, the senator said, “I’m inviting that [challenge]. I think that’s the whole purpose of science, to shoot down [competing] theories.”

Marshall said he hopes the report will build momentum to establish a 9/11 Commission-style investigation of the origins of the virus to understand the reason for the devastating pandemic and to prevent a recurrence.

“I don’t think anyone can conclude that this is a ‘get [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’ paper,” said Marshall, who has clashed with the former top US infectious disease expert at hearings focused on American funding for the Wuhan lab that modified viruses to make them more contagious.

Marshall said that he believes Democratic colleagues are warming to an investigation of the pandemic’s origins and “I’ll be curious as to how the White House responds.”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was reputed to have poor safety measures in place.

AFP via Getty Images

The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

President Biden on March 20 signed a bipartisan bill that mandates the declassification of records on the pandemic’s origins, though it’s unclear what material will be redacted.

Marshall said the US government hasn’t yet been very forthcoming so far — and that he hopes especially to further investigate the money trail flowing to Wuhan for research that modified coronavirus.

“Every time I pick on China, we should look in the mirror because our own federal government has kept data from us, they wouldn’t show us information. They wouldn’t let us talk to the right people. So much of it is redacted,” said Marshall, who took on leadership of the Health Committee’s GOP inquiry following the retirement in January of former Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC).

The senator also ridiculed an effort by what he called the “gain of function mafia” to push a theory that raccoon dogs farmed for their fur caused the pandemic, saying they would have been shipped around China — leading to outbreaks in geographically distinct areas, rather than concentrated in Wuhan, where no animal or animal handler responsible for its origin has been put forward by the Chinese government.

In addition to safety issues reported at Wuhan labs, documents published in late 2021 by The Intercept revealed that EcoHealth Alliance used US grants to fund Wuhan Institute of Virology experiments that modified three bat coronaviruses distinct from COVID-19. The research found the viruses became much more infectious among “humanized” mice when human-type receptors were added to them. 

Kadlec, who led the investigation, was assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services from 2017-2021. He previously worked as deputy staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The “lab leak” theory has gradually gained acceptance since 2020, when it was derided as a conspiracy theory.

The Wall Street Journal in February revealed that the Energy Department, which operates the US National Laboratories, now believes the pandemic began with a Chinese lab leak.

FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed the same month that the FBI also believes COVID-19 leaked from a lab.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.” 

The US intelligence community is divided on the likely origins of the coronavirus.

AP

Under political pressure, Biden in May 2021 ordered a US intelligence community assessment of the origins of COVID-19, after previously saying the US would defer to the World Health Organization to get answers.

US spy agencies assessed in August 2021 that it was “plausible” that the virus came either from a lab release in Wuhan or from a natural origin via animal-to-human transmission.

At the time, a written statement attributed to Biden said: “The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.”

“Responsible nations do not shirk these kinds of responsibilities to the rest of the world,” the statement said. “Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”

But Biden, who campaigned heavily in 2020 on mourning pandemic deaths and slamming then-President Donald Trump’s management of the crisis, has hardly mentioned the origins question since then — even walking away from reporters on the White House lawn March 3 when asked about holding China accountable for the outbreak.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/17/senate-gop-report-raises-possibility-of-two-covid-lab-leaks/

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Ignoring Experts, China's Sudden Zero-COVID Exit Cost Lives, AP Finds

March 26, 2023 3:08 AM

• Associated Press

FILE - A man wearing groves pulls his mask for his throat swabbed for a COVID-19 test at a coronavirus testing site in Beijing, Nov. 13, 2022

 

BEIJING — When China suddenly scrapped onerous zero-COVID measures in December, the country wasn't ready for a massive onslaught of cases, with hospitals turning away ambulances and crematoriums burning bodies around the clock.

Chinese state media claimed the decision to open up was based on "scientific analysis and shrewd calculation," and was "by no means impulsive." But in reality, China's ruling Communist Party ignored repeated efforts by top medical experts to kickstart exit plans until it was too late, The Associated Press found.

Instead, the reopening came suddenly at the onset of winter, when the virus spreads most easily. Many older people weren't vaccinated, pharmacies lacked antivirals, and hospitals didn't have adequate supplies or staff — leading to as many as hundreds of thousands of deaths that may have been avoided, according to academic modeling, more than 20 interviews with current and former China Center for Disease Control and Prevention employees, experts and government advisers, and internal reports and directives obtained by the AP.

"If they had a real plan to exit earlier, so many things could have been avoided," said Zhang Zuo-Feng, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Many deaths could have been prevented."

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Experts estimate that many hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, may have died in China's wave of COVID-19 — far higher than the official toll of fewer than 90,000, but still a much lower death rate than in Western countries. However, 200,000 to 300,000 deaths could have been prevented if the country was better vaccinated and stocked with antivirals, according to modeling by the University of Hong Kong. Some scientists estimate even more lives could have been saved.

"It wasn't a sound public health decision at all," said a China CDC official, declining to be named to speak candidly on a sensitive matter. "It's absolutely bad timing … this was not a prepared opening."

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For two years, China stood out for its tough but successful controls against the virus, credited with saving millions of lives as other countries struggled with stop-and-start lockdowns. But with the emergence of the highly infectious omicron variant in late 2021, many of China's top medical experts and officials worried zero-COVID was unsustainable.

In late 2021, China's leaders began discussing how to lift restrictions. As early as March 2022, top medical experts submitted a detailed reopening strategy to the State Council, China's cabinet. The existence of the document is being reported for the first time by the AP.

But discussions were silenced after an outbreak the same month in Shanghai, which prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to lock the city down. Chinese public health experts stopped speaking publicly about preparing for an exit, as they were wary of openly challenging a policy supported by Xi.

FILE - A worker in a protective suit walks at an entrance to a tunnel leading to the Pudong area across the Huangpu river, after restrictions on highway traffic amid the lockdown in Shanghai, China March 28, 2022.

By the time the Shanghai outbreak was under control, China was months away from the 20th Party Congress, the country's most important political meeting in a decade, making reopening politically difficult. So the country stuck to mass testing and quarantining millions of people.

"Everybody waits for the party congress," said one medical expert, declining to be named to comment on a sensitive topic. "There's inevitably a degree of everyone being very cautious."

At the Congress in mid-October, top officials differing with Xi were sidelined. Instead, six loyalists followed Xi onstage in a new leadership lineup, signaling his total domination of the party.

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With the congress over, some voices in the public health sector finally piped up. In an internal document published October 28, obtained by The Associated Press and reported here for the first time, Wu Zunyou, China's CDC chief epidemiologist, criticized the Beijing city government for excessive COVID-19 controls, saying it had "no scientific basis." He called it a distortion of the central government's zero-COVID policy, which risked "intensifying public sentiment and causing social dissatisfaction."

At the same time, he called the virus policies of the central government "absolutely correct." One former CDC official said Wu felt helpless because he was ordered to advocate for zero-COVID in public, even as he disagreed at times with its excesses in private.

Wu did not respond to an email requesting comment. A person acquainted with Wu confirmed he wrote the internal report.

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Another who spoke up was Zhong Nanshan, a doctor renowned for raising the alarm about the original COVID outbreak in Wuhan. He wrote to Xi personally, telling him that zero-COVID was not sustainable and urging a gradual reopening, said a person acquainted with Zhong.

In early November, then-Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, China's COVID czar, summoned experts from sectors including health, travel and the economy to discuss adjusting Beijing's virus policies, according to three people with direct knowledge of the meetings. On November 10, Xi ordered adjustments.

The next day, Beijing announced 20 new measures tweaking restrictions, such as reclassifying risk zones and reducing quarantine times. But at the same time, Xi made clear, China was sticking to zero-COVID.

FILE - Pandemic prevention workers leave for their shift to look after buildings where residents do home quarantine, as coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreaks continue in Beijing, Dec. 8, 2022.

The government wanted order. Instead, the measures caused chaos.

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Chinese Communist Party to Overhaul Government, Bolster Control

With conflicting signals from the top, local governments weren't sure whether to lock down or open up. Policies changed by the day.

In late November, public frustration boiled over. A deadly apartment fire in China's far west Xinjiang region sparked nationwide protests over locked doors and other virus control measures. Some called on Xi to resign, the most direct challenge to the Communist Party's power since pro-democracy protests in 1989.

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Three From Tiananmen Vigil Group Convicted of Security Charge

Riot police moved in, and the protests were swiftly quelled. But behind the scenes, the mood was shifting.

References to zero-COVID vanished from government statements. State newswire Xinhua said the pandemic was causing "fatigue, anxiety and tension," and that the cost of controlling it was increasing day by day.

Days after the protests, Sun held meetings where she told medical experts the state planned to "walk briskly" out of zero-COVID. The final decision was made suddenly, and with little direct input from public health experts, several told the AP.

"None of us expected the 180-degree turn," a government adviser said.

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China to Reopen Borders to All Foreign Visitors Wednesday

Many in the Chinese government believe the protests accelerated Xi's decision to scrap virus controls entirely, according to three current and former state employees.

"It was the trigger," said one, not identified because they weren't authorized to speak to the media.

On December 6, Xi instructed officials to change COVID-19 controls, Xinhua reported.

The next day, Chinese health authorities announced 10 sweeping measures that effectively scrapped controls, canceling virus test requirements, mandatory centralized quarantine and location-tracking health QR codes. The decision to reopen so suddenly caught the country by surprise.

"Even three days' notice would have been good," said a former China CDC official. "The way this happened was just unbelievable."

https://www.voanews.com/a/ignoring-experts-china-s-sudden-zero-covid-exit-cost-lives-ap-finds/7015872.html

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