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The first scientist to publish a sequence of the COVID-19 virus in China was staging a sit-in protest after authorities locked him out of his lab.
Virologist Zhang Yongzhen wrote in an online post Monday that he and his team had been suddenly notified they were being evicted from their lab, the latest in a series of setbacks, demotions and ousters since Zhang published the sequence in January 2020 without state approval. The move shows how the Chinese state continues to pressure and control scientists conducting research on the coronavirus.
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From an article linked within the article:
Despite the plaudits, China in fact sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. Tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents.
Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11.
If it weren’t for this scientist it would have taken even longer to get the dna sequence (and even longer for the life saving vaccines). And the whole time Chinese government labs already had the sequence and were refusing to share it with the world despite the World Health organization and scientists around the world begging them to.
The fact that he’s still being harassed about this tells me that the “tight controls and competition within the Chinese public health system” aren’t actually to blame for this. Otherwise he would have been commended for doing the right thing when everyone else was holding back due to bureaucracy.
China did a lot of sketchy shit in early 2020. I can’t think of any explanations that don’t involve them wanting covid to spread to the rest of the world once they realized it was a problem there.
Wow. How many more people might have died if that brave man hadn’t published it without approval?
And now if another pandemic starts in China, how many scientists will be willing to do the work to sequence it?
I get that the world’s leadership just doesn’t care if people die in general, but viruses don’t care how rich or powerful you are, so this just just fucking stupid.
Would have been nice if they’d stopped conducting research on it before 2019. Close the barn door after the horse has bolted much?
