China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in what has been defined as "an assault on international transparency" that has claimed more than 238,000 lives, according to an international spy dossier put together by governments of several countries.
Did the spy dossier expose China's attempted cover-up?
The 15-page document, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, reveals that the Chinese government put other countries at risk with its cover-up of the deadly coronavirus outbreak. The Xi Jinping-led regime has also been found destroying evidence of the virus in laboratories and has refused to provide live samples to international scientists who are working on a COVID- vaccine, according to the dossier.
The dossier, from the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and New Zealand, states China's secrecy about the deadly virus is an "assault on international transparency."
China, WHO denied human to human transmission
The dossier points out that even though there was evidence of human to human transmission of the deadly virus from early December, authorities in Chine denied it until January 20. The World Health Organization, that has recently been criticised for its deference to China, also did the same, the report notes, despite repeated warnings from health officials in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
On January 14, weeks after the alleged evidence, the World Health Organization tweeted: "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."
Doctors silenced, evidence destroyed, news censored
The spy dossier also discusses how China silenced doctors and some of them even went missing for trying to speak out or raise an alarm about the outbreak, before adding that Beijing destroyed evidence in laboratories and refused to provide samples to scientists who were working to develop a vaccine against the deadly pathogen.
The file specifically points out that China started censoring news of the virus from December 31. According to the document, the country removed words like "SARS variation," "Wuhan Seafood market" and "Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia" from search engines.
Self-imposed travel ban
The report also notes China's self-imposed travel ban, while parts of the world continued to fly. "Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23," the document states.
"Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC (People's Republic of China) imposes severe restrictions at home."
Lab research on bat-derived coronaviruses in Wuhan
The report also expands on what we already know - a laboratory in Wuhan had been conducting research on bat derived coronaviruses. According to the dossier, the Wuhan lab is not far from the Wuhan wet market, which according to scientific consensus is where the virus originated from and was working with samples of coronavirus with striking genetic similarity to COVID-19, a 96 percent match.
The research dossier also references work done by the team to synthesise SARS-like coronaviruses, to analyse whether they could be transmissible from bats to mammals. This means they were altering parts of the virus to test whether it was transmissible to different species.
The lab is currently under investigation by several intelligence agencies that are looking to find clues about the origins of the global pandemic. Donald Trump on Thursday revealed he has "evidence" that links the coronavirus outbreak to a laboratory in Wuhan, as previously reported.
