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1. FIRST THINGS FIRST – COVID, AND FAUCI-BACKED WUHAN LAB.
   Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the coronavirus task force, had previously backed funding for a controversial lab in Wuhan, China, that has been studying the coronavirus in bats, reports said.

   Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had shelled out a total of $7.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab — which has become the focus of theories about the origin of COVID-19, according to Newsweek.

   The National Institutes of Health, which oversees the NIAID, shut down all funding to the lab last week.

   “At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities,” a deputy director at the agency wrote in a letter obtained by Politico.

   There is “increasing confidence” among officials in the Trump administration that the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab is the original site of the virus. A report by Fox News said embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety there.

   The NIH defended its funding of the lab in a statement to Newsweek.

   “Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally,” the statement read.

   “Scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory.”

   YOUTUBE: Gravitas: The interview China tried to hide | Wuhan Coronavirus | Dr. Ai Fen
   4,149,490 views
   •Apr 3, 2020
   WION
   2.88M subscribers
   Dr. Ai Fen is a doctor at the Wuhan Central Hospital. She was perhaps among the first doctors to discover the Wuhan virus. After speaking out against the authorities, Dr. Ai Fen has gone missing. WION’s Palki Sharma brings you the Ai Fen revelations.
   This article is more than 1 year old
   Coronavirus: Wuhan doctor speaks out against authorities
   This article is more than 1 year old
   Ai Fen says in interview, which censors are trying to erase, how superiors reprimanded her for warning about outbreak
   · Coronavirus – latest updates
   Description: Ai Fen, director of the emergency at Wuhan Central hospital.
   Ai Fen, director of the emergency at Wuhan Central hospital. Photograph: Renwu/Handout
   Lily Kuo in Hong Kong
   Wed 11 Mar 2020 08.50 GMT
   Last modified on Wed 1 Jul 2020 18.18 BST
   A doctor in Wuhan has spoken out after seeing several of her colleagues die from the coronavirus, criticising hospital authorities for suppressing early warnings of the outbreak in an interview censors have been trying to erase from the internet.
   In an interview with the Chinese magazine, Renwu, or People, Ai Fen, director of the emergency at Wuhan Central hospital, said she was reprimanded after alerting her superiors and colleagues of a Sars-like virus seen in patients in December.

   Now that the virus has claimed more than 3,000 lives inside China, including four doctors at her hospital, one of which was the whistleblower ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, Ai has joined other critics risking their jobs, as well as detention, to speak out about conditions in Wuhan.

   “If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared about the reprimand. I would have fucking talked about it to whoever, where ever I could,” she said in the interview.

   Since Tuesday, Ai’s interview has been posted and quickly deleted from Chinese social media sites. Renwu has removed the article and Ai could not be reached over the phone. Internet users have moved quickly to save the article, posting screenshots of it.
   New versions of the article, in attempts to evade censors, have proliferated, from one partly written in emojis to another done in morse code, as well as pinyin, the romanisation system for Mandarin.

   On 30 December, after seeing several patients with flu-like symptoms and resistant to usual treatment methods, Ai received the lab results of one case, which contained the word: “Sars coronavirus.” Ai, reading the report several times, says she broke out into a cold sweat.

   She circled the words Sars, took a photo and sent it to a former medical school classmate, now a doctor at another hospital in Wuhan. By that evening, the photo had spread throughout medical circles in Wuhan, where it was also shared by Li Wenliang, becoming the first piece of evidence of the outbreak.
   That night Ai said she received a message from her hospital saying information about this mysterious disease should not be arbitrarily released in order to avoid causing panic. Two days later, she told the magazine, she was summoned by the head of the hospital’s disciplinary inspection committee and reprimanded for “spreading rumours” and “harming stability”.

   The staff were forbidden from passing messages or images related to the virus, she said. All Ai could do was ask her staff to wear protective clothing and masks – even as hospital authorities told them not to. She told her department to wear protective jackets under their doctor coats.

   “We watched more and more patients come in as the radius of the spread of infection became larger,” she said, as they began to see patients with no connection to the seafood market, believed to be the source of the first cases.

   Meanwhile, Chinese officials were still insisting there was no reason to believe the virus was being passed between people. “I knew there must be human to human transmission,” Ai said.
   On 21 January, the day after Chinese officials finally confirmed there was human to human transmission of the virus, the number of sick residents coming to the emergency room had already reached 1,523 in a day – three times the normal volume.

   In the interview, Ai described moments that she will never forget: an elderly man staring blankly at a doctor giving him the death certificate of his 32-year-old son, or a father who was too sick to get out of the car outside of the hospital. By the time she walked to the car, he had died.
   Q&A
   How can I protect myself and others from the coronavirus outbreak?
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   Once, when she arranged for the transfer of a man’s mother-in-law to in-patient care, the man took a moment to thank Ai. The mother-in-law died upon arrival. “I know it was only a few seconds but that ‘thank you’ weighs heavily on me. In the time it took to say this one sentence, could a life have been saved?”

   Over the last two months, Ai said she has also seen many of her colleagues fall sick and four die from the virus. One of those was Li Wenliang, whose death prompted an unprecedented wave of national anger and mourning.

   Early on during the outbreak, public security officials in Wuhan said eight people had been punished for “spreading rumours”. It is not clear if Li was one of those and Ai said her reprimand came from her hospital. Still, several friends have asked Ai if she was one of those whistleblowers.
   “I am not a whistleblower,” Ai told Renwu. “I am the one who provided the whistle.”

   AsiaNews.it
   Ai Fen: Authorities gagged me over coronavirus
   The Wuhan doctor first mentioned the coronavirus in a WeChat post on December 30th. First suspected cases since mid-December. Her superiors ordered her to keep quiet so as not to create panic. The hospital changed the diagnoses of the first patients from “viral pneumonia” to “generic infection”. Ai’s information shared by Li Wenliang. The authorities did not act in a timely manner.

   Rome (AsiaNews) – Ai Fen, head of the emergency department of Wuhan’s central hospital, said in an interview with People magazine that the authorities prevented her from raising the alarm at the beginning of the epidemic crisis. The article, published on March 10, the day of President Xi Jinping’s visit to Wuhan, was immediately censored, arousing widespread indignation.

   Ai reveals that on December 30 she posted on WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging site, the image of a diagnostic folder of a patient suffering from a lung infection similar to Sars. However, the first suspected cases date back to December 16, coming from another hospital. Patients had high fever and did not respond to medication.

   Ai immediately informed her superiors of what was happening. They replied that the city health commission had ordered them to say nothing about the virus so as not to panic the population. The hospital management itself then reminded staff that publishing information about the disease was prohibited.

   On January 1, a hospital supervisor gave her a “dressing down” for creating havoc with her revelations, accusing her of being an informer. A week later, a nurse contracted Covid-19. However, the hospital management decided to change the description of the disease from “viral pneumonia” to “generic infection”.
   The doctor also expressed doubts about where the disease started to spread from. “Patients continued to increase after the closure of the Huanan fish market on January 1, initially indicated by the authorities as the likely epicenter of the infection.” It was now clear that the transmission took place from man to man, but the authorities did not give this information until January 18.

   Ai had not received any official authorization to disseminate this news. The doctor is convinced that she is not at fault and that she has simply done her job, sharing sensitive information with colleagues from the hospital. Among them was Li Wenliang, the doctor arrested by the police for launching the alert. Li died of the infection on February 7, followed by three other doctors.

   According to her, city officials could have intervened in a more timely manner and saved many human lives, including those of her colleagues: “If these doctors had been made aware of the real situation immediately, they would not have died now. My great regret is that I was unable to notify more people.”
   Description: Ai_Fen.jpg
   12/03/2020 12:56:00 – East Asia China

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