A demonstração por
Shah Gilani dessa importância de muitos triliões de dólares
COVID-19 Is Being Called “Wuhan Virus” and “Chinese
Coronavirus” For Two Very Big Reasons
Here is why, in politics and law, sometimes names
matter…
Just because the
World Health Organization (WHO) officially named the novel coronavirus
“COVID-19” doesn’t mean it’s not going to be referred to as the “Wuhan Virus,”
the “Chinese Coronavirus,” or other names that stamp the origin of the virus
into the public lexicon.
One reason for what
some observers see as politically incorrect name-calling is, in fact, pure
politics.
The President of
the United States, some members of his Administration, and other politicians
are stamping “Made in China” all over the virus because identifying China as
the virus’s place of origin stigmatizes China geopolitically, with the
intention of undermining China’s increasing global influence.
Another reason the
world’s going to be hearing more about the Wuhan or Chinese Virus is lawsuits
are being filed blaming China for accidental or deliberate gross economic
destruction.
A $20 trillion
class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District
of Texas alleges the COVID-19 virus is a biological weapon designed by China.
And, by releasing it, China violated U.S. law, international laws, treaties,
and norms and caused massive economic damage to U.S. individuals and
businesses.
Here is why, in
politics and law, sometimes names matter…
Origin Story
In 2015, the WHO issued new guidelines for naming new infectious diseases
in humans. According to the WHO, they are meant to “minimize unnecessary
negative effects on nations, economies and people,” and should consist of
generic terms that describe the disease’s symptoms, or, if the pathogen that
causes the disease is known, it should be part of the disease name.
On February 11, 2020, the WHO officially named the recently identified
novel coronavirus “COVID-19.” CO stands for corona, VI for virus, D for
disease, and 19 for 2019, the year it was discovered.
What the WHO did not do was sound a global alarm when Chinese health
officials alerted them on December 31, 2019, that patients in Wuhan, a city of
11 million in the Hubei province, were exhibiting unusual, pneumonia-like
symptoms.
Perhaps the WHO wasn’t aware or didn’t demand more information from
Chinese health officials who already knew what has subsequently been revealed.
According to official reports, on December 10, 2019, a 57-year-old man
who worked at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, the wet market (a
wet market, as opposed to a market for dry goods, is a public marketplace where
produce, fish, meat, and live animals are sold and slaughtered), started
feeling ill, was admitted on December 16, 2019, to Wuhan Central Hospital with
a “flu-like infection” in both lungs and was treated with anti-flu drugs which
the virus proved resistant to.
What the WHO may not have known, which the world knows now thanks to a
report accessed by the South China Morning Post and corroborated by The Wall
Street Journal, Washington Post, AXIOS, and other sources, is that a 55-year
old man, later confirmed having coronavirus, likely contracted it on or around
November 17, 2019. He started exhibiting symptoms on December 1, 2019, had not
been to the wet market, and though he is considered the earliest traceable
patient, Chinese officials say there was no epidemiological link between his
case and later cases.
The WHO may not have known that a 51-year-old doctor in Dongguan, an
industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta, was hospitalized on December 2,
2019; the first known hospitalization caused by the “pneumonia with unknown
etiology.” He was diagnosed with a lung infection, severe pneumonia, acute
respiratory distress syndrome, and allergic purpura. Not surprisingly,
according to subsequent Chinese reports, no epidemiological link could be found
between his case and later cases.
As patients presented symptoms at Wuhan area hospitals, between December
18 and 29, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BAL) was collected and used for viral
genome sequencing. During that period, members of the Wuhan Institute of
Virology published a report on seven cases of people with severe pneumonia who
were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) of the Wuhan Jin Yin-Tan
Hospital. Their samples were sent to the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology for the diagnosis of the causative pathogen. Patient ICU-01 was not
proven to be linked to the Wuhan Seafood Market, but the other six were either
sellers or deliverymen at the market.
Meanwhile, on December 24, 2019, doctors from Central Hospital of Wuhan
took fluid samples from the lungs of a 65-year-old deliveryman who worked at
the Wuhan Seafood Market and sent them to Vision Medicals in Guangzhou for
testing. Visual Medicals is a Chinese infectious-disease startup, founded in
May 2018, and focuses on precision medicine for infectious diseases, including
respiratory and bloodstream infections. They developed a CRISPR-based rapid
diagnostics platform for pathogen detection and said it sequenced most of the
virus from fluid samples on December 27. The results showed an alarming
similarity to the deadly SARS coronavirus between 2002 and 2003.
After receiving the test results, multiple doctors in Wuhan shared the
information via the internet, including Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at
Wuhan Central Hospital, who posted a warning to alumni from his medical school
class, via a WeChat group, that a cluster of seven patients within the
ophthalmology department had been unsuccessfully treated for symptoms of viral
pneumonia and diagnosed with SARS.
In the WeChat post, Li posted that the hospital had confirmed cases of
SARS and posted a snippet of an RNA analysis finding “SARS coronavirus” and
extensive bacteria colonies in a patient’s airways.
Li, called in for questioning and detained by authorities, contracted the
coronavirus from a patient he treated, was hospitalized on January 12, 2020,
and died on February 7, 2020.
News of an outbreak of “pneumonia of unknown origin” started circulating
on social media on the evening of December 30, 2019. The social media reports
stated that 27 patients in Wuhan – most of them stallholders at the Huanan
Seafood Market – had been treated for the mystery illness.
During the following two days, December 28 and 29, 2019, Hubei Provincial
Hospital received three similar cases, all associated with the Seafood Market.
On December 29, hospital administrators convened a multi-departmental panel of
doctors who concluded the cases were unusual and required special attention.
They reported their findings to the provincial CCDC, Chinese Centers for
Disease Control, not affiliated with the U.S. CDC.
Wuhan CDC staff initiated a field investigation and found additional
patients with similar symptoms who were linked to the market. According to a
CCDC publication, the initial admissions to Hubei Provincial Hospital occurred
on December 29.
On December 30, 2019, an “urgent notice on the treatment of pneumonia of
unknown cause” was issued by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee on its Weibo
social media account. The post said there had been “a successive series of
patients with unexplained pneumonia recently” – 27 suspected cases in total,
seven of which were in critical condition and 18 were stable. Two of those were
on the verge of being discharged.
On December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee reported to
the WHO that 27 people had been diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown cause.”
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission also made a public announcement
regarding the outbreak.
On January 5, 2020, Professor Zhang Yongzhen and his team at the Shanghai
Public Health Clinical Centre announced they had mapped the world’s first
genome sequence of the deadly novel coronavirus.
The Shanghai Centre reported its discovery to the National Health
Commission on the same day and recommended “relevant prevention and control
measures” be taken in public places because the patient from whom the sample
was collected had suffered very severe symptoms and the virus resembled a group
previously found in bats.
China’s National Health Commission announced hours after the release by
Zhang’s team that it would share the genome sequence with the WHO. It later
emerged that the information had been sent through the officially designated
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At the time, the public was told that no new cases had been reported in
Wuhan since January 3 and there was no clear evidence of human-to-human
transmission.
According to the South China Morning Post, Professor Zhang’s team “made
their finding public on January 11 after it saw that the authorities had taken
no obvious action to warn the public about the coronavirus.” The Centre shared
its genome data on virological.org, an open platform for discussions, and
GenBank, an open-access data repository, and said researchers were welcome to
download, share, use, and analyze the data.
A day after Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre published the world’s
first genome of the virus, it was ordered to close for “rectification.” It
closed the following day.
The findings by Zhang’s team were published in the scientific journal
Nature on February 3. The research said the virus sample was collected from a
patient who showed symptoms of fever, dizziness, and coughing and was admitted
to a Wuhan hospital on December 26.
Subsequently, researchers led by Dr. Wang Jianwei at the Chinese Academy
of Medical Sciences, Institute of Pathogen Biology, used next-generation
sequencing (NGS) to definitively identify the pathogen causing illness in
Wuhan. They focused on five patients admitted to Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan,
most of whom were workers in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan.
The researchers constructed the whole genomic sequence of the new virus
and found that its genome sequence is 79% similar to the SARS-CoV, about 51.8%
similar to the MERS-CoV, and about 87.6% to 87.7% similar to other SARS-like
CoVs from Chinese horseshoe bats (called ZC45 and ZXC21).
Understandably, the late Dr. Li Wenliang misdiagnosed the novel
coronavirus as SARS, given the remarkably close RNA structure COVID-19 has to
it.
The WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
Seeking Political
and Legal High Ground
Since the virus is almost indisputably from somewhere in China, probably
the Wuhan wet market or maybe the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Chinese
health officials, authorities, and politicians, more than likely all the way up
to the President Xi Jinping, knew about the exploding epidemic and covered it
up for as long as they could, they’ve put themselves and the country in the
line of fire politically and legally.
Politically, the Chinese are vulnerable on all fronts.
Domestically, as more Chinese question what the government knew and
didn’t tell them, the ruling party will be disparaged and possibly challenged
if further pain is inflicted on the Chinese population.
Internationally, China faces mounting criticism that will only grow
exponentially louder once the crisis passes and health concerns are superseded
by political and economic concerns.
Legally, the $20 trillion class-action lawsuit filed in Texas was only
the first such suit. Already, another suit has been filed in a Federal Court in
Florida and lawsuits are also being filed in other countries – most recently in
India, who reportedly filed this past Saturday, April 4, to the United Nations
Human Rights Council.
So, get used to COVID-19 being called the “Wuhan Virus” or “Chinese
Coronavirus” because those names have a political and legal ring to them.
Sincerely,
