[OFF TOPIC] Coronavirus Pandemic

[dcro 10,179]

 

[dcro 10,179]

Faroe Islands went from 18 to 47 in one day.

[nitinsanker 179]

Faroe Islands.... 30 cases? ..... What's happening.... 

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/09/truth-coronavirus-china-trump-pence/

 

 

As the coronavirus spreads, another dangerous virus has followed closely behind: the scourge of government leaders and official authorities obfuscating data, suppressing information, and misinforming citizens about the outbreak. With the crisis likely to get worse before it gets better, many countries’ citizens are increasingly unsure just whom or what to believe. This not only increases the threat to public health, but it also undermines trust in the very institutions on which we rely to fight the virus.

 

This new virus of disinformation also has its origin in China, has spread to other authoritarian states such as Iran and Russia, and has now infected the highest levels of government in the United States.

 

The disease of disinformation first broke out in Wuhan. Its most prominent victim is a Wuhan doctor, Li Wenliang, who first posted an alert about a mysterious illness to a group chat of medical colleagues in late December. Accused of spreading rumors, he was summoned by health authorities in the middle of the night and forced to confess to making “false comments.” His warning went unheeded, and by early February he was dead from the virus.

 

As the epidemic began to take hold, Wuhan became a jarring tale of two different stories: a sanitized, government-approved version of events—and a very different reality on the ground. Private citizens posted cellphone videos as the quarantine was being imposed through brute force: neighbors and passersby being dragged kicking and screaming down corridors and into vans, or of workers hammering boards over the doors of apartment buildings. Meanwhile, state-controlled media posted a steady stream of cheery snippets showing what were allegedly virus patients, dancing beside their hospital beds, and happy health care workers shaving their hair to promote hygiene.

 

It got worse from there. At least three Chinese citizen journalists reporting on the virus have disappeared into detention, their whereabouts unknown. One, a former Chinese government television journalist, filmed his own arrest; his video has now been seen by more than 375,000 viewers on YouTube (though likely censored inside China). After criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s response to the virus, the essayist and activist Xu Zhiyong is being held in secret detention and faces a potential 15-year prison sentence for “subversion.”

 

China and Iran stand out for muzzling doctors who tried to warn about the coronavirus, and for downplaying the number of cases and deaths as the epidemic progressed.

 

After several panicky weeks of lying low, Chinese President Xi Jinping has mounted a propaganda offensive aimed at burnishing China’s image to both an increasingly angry populace and a skeptical world. Widely criticized for delaying and dissembling, Xi is aggressively pushing a counternarrative that touts his handling of the virus as exemplary and a testament to the virtues of the authoritarian system. Many in the West have fallen for this narrative, Xi will be happy to know. Despite still-rising numbers of cases and drastic lockdowns still in place, Xi’s government is already planning to publish a book, translated from Mandarin into five languages, that trumpets his victory over the virus.

 

Shameless puffery coupled with ruthless suppression of dissent is nothing new in China. Nor is it any surprise that Iran, the worst-hit country outside East Asia, has its own government’s suppression of information to blame for a rapid spread of the virus. The BBC reports that 24 Iranians have been arrested for “spreading rumors” while another 118 have received warnings. For reporting on the health crisis in Iran based on sources in the country’s hospitals, Tehran has accused the BBC of spreading falsehoods. With no reliable information to be had, Iranian social media and messaging apps are rife with false information, as well as genuine leaks aimed to counter misleading government narratives.

 

China and Iran stand out for muzzling doctors who tried to warn about the coronavirus, downplaying the number of cases and deaths as the epidemic progressed, and inflating the success of their containment efforts. The predictable result was that the virus spread more quickly and widely than if these governments had been forthright from the start. Russia, whose government has weaponized disinformation at home and abroad, is up to its usual antics of spreading conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus (no, coronavirus was not bioengineered by the CIA).

 

That authoritarian states would engage in such practices is not exactly surprising. What’s new and deeply disturbing is that the virus of disinformation has infected the highest levels of a Western government like the United States’.What’s new and deeply disturbing is that the virus of disinformation has infected the highest levels of a Western government like the United States’. U.S. President Donald Trump’s public downplaying of the outbreak—and his administration’s muzzling of scientists, attacks on journalists, and lashing out at critics—have slowed and obstructed the U.S. response to the coronavirus, and risk undermining efforts to control the virus as it spreads. What’s more, the administration’s actions risk fatally undermining citizens’ trust in public health authorities, scientists, and doctors—the very people on whose information and judgment any effective epidemic response depends.

 

As the first cases of the coronavirus showed up in the United States and Americans were thirsting for information, the administration treated legitimate questions about the country’s public health response as personal or partisan attacks. Mick Mulvaney, then the acting White House chief of staff, accused the media of reporting on the virus in order to attack Trump. “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to [the coronavirus] today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president,” Mulvaney told a conservative conference audience. “That’s what this is all about.” More frighteningly, Trump is using the language of conspiracy theories to discredit criticism of his handling of the outbreak, claiming the coronavirus is the Democrats’ “new hoax.”

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What we are seeing now is those fake news and fake data. A lot of countries such as China have decided to cover up cases and cover up deaths of their onw citizens. Well what we are seeing is the dwindling cases in China as if the Corona virus patient have reduced a lot in China. Actual fact is it is not. The cover up has gotten quite serious. People who tried to tell the truth and expose the true facts have been caught and detained in prisons. This is really not helping to combat the Corona virus. The last thing we ever want is a lying politician up there who always try his level best to portray his country is the best in the whole world when the actual fact it is not.

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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/15/coronavirus-lies-pushed-china-blame-virus-us-biowe/

 

EXCLUSIVE

 

China, Russia and Iran are flooding the global information space with false claims about the new coronavirus, according to U.S. officials, who say one of the biggest lies — that the virus that causes COVID-19 is a U.S. bioweapon and was brought to China by U.S. Army personnel — is just the latest in a “surge of propaganda” aimed at undermining America’s image on the world stage.

 

Beijing, Moscow and Tehran are using a vast web of social media accounts, fake news outlets and state-controlled global satellite media to promote false claims by academics and, at times, government officials to blame Washington for the crisis now gripping most of humanity.

 

The head of a key State Department counterdisinformation office said U.S. officials are ramping up their own efforts to counter lies about the new coronavirus that were first seeded by Russia in January and that China is now pushing in a bid to make Beijing appear as a superior global power to the United States.

 

U.S. Special Envoy Lea Gabrielle, who leads the department’s Global Engagement Center, told The Washington Times on Sunday that the Chinese are “engaged in an all-out aggressive campaign to try to reshape the global narrative around the coronavirus, essentially to the degree of trying to provide an alternate reality of what has actually happened since December.”

Ms. Gabrielle made the assertion in an exclusive interview amid a widening row between Washington and Beijing that burst into public view last week when the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry suggested on Twitter that the U.S. military might have brought the coronavirus to the Chinese city of Wuhan.

 

Teams of international scientists, including several from inside China, have agreed for more than a month that the virus came from a “wet market” in Wuhan — where fish, poultry and other animals are slaughtered on the premises — and that any other claims about the virus’ origins are bogus.

 

But Ms. Gabrielle and other U.S. officials say that has not stopped three of the world’s top purveyors of state-sponsored propaganda, led by China, from pouncing in a moment of global panic to try to sully America’s image.

 

“Two narrative tracks that we’re seeing advanced by China is malign information trying to finger the U.S. as the origin of the coronavirus, and then the second narrative track is what we call ‘Brand China,’ which is the [Chinese government’s] effort to try and turn the crisis into a news story about the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party as opposed to democratic systems that have allegedly mishandled the crisis,” Ms. Gabrielle told The Times. “So [it’s] basically a ‘China good, everyone else bad’ narrative.”

 

“We’ve seen China mobilize its global messaging apparatus, and this includes state media, Chinese diplomats writing articles in local or overseas media to basically push out the overall narrative that depicts China as the world’s model and global leader under the Chinese Communist Party,” she said. “This has caused us to have to react with a full-spectrum activation of our own public messaging and diplomatic engagement, and really just having to push access to fact-based information by our own communicators so they’re able to counter these false narratives with local audiences.”

 

The Global Engagement Center is spearheading the effort, with a goal of reminding audiences that authoritarian regimes clamp down on the free flow of truthful information and use government-controlled organs to spread lies.

 

Inside the U.S. response

 

It’s anything but easy.

 

The risk is always there that U.S.-government information operations can backfire and draw accusations of using propaganda. There is also concern that drawing attention to false narratives might serve to promote those lies.

 

“Once a false narrative is out there, it’s almost impossible to undo, and repeating that false narrative when trying to correct it reinforces it,” said Ms. Gabrielle. “So it makes it very tricky.”

 

The Global Engagement Center operates mainly behind the scenes at the State Department, which does not publicize the number of people working inside the center. It grew in recent years from the now-dissolved Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications.

 

In the Obama-era, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications was a hub through which U.S. officials used Facebook and Twitter to disseminate anti-jihadi messaging worldwide. Then came the 2016 U.S. elections.

 

American intelligence findings that Russia used social media to meddle in U.S. democracy prompted Congress to reconstitute the Global Engagement Center with a broader mission: to expose and counter foreign state and nonstate propaganda aimed at undermining the U.S. and its allies around the world.

 

A core tenet was the establishment of an “Information Access Fund,” a mechanism that can be used to channel funding to outside organizations that engage in a range of counterdisinformation efforts in several countries.

 

By 2018, U.S. officials were comparing the Global Engagement Center’s mission to that of a Cold War-era initiative pushed by the Reagan administration, the Active Measures Working Group. U.S. officials used the operation to expose and undermine Soviet propaganda and subversion in Europe.

 

The circle of lies

 

On the novel coronavirus, the Global Engagement Center’s radar went up in January around a Russian government-backed effort to “seed the disinformation space with the notion that the virus was created by Americans,” Ms. Gabrielle said. The center, she added, discovered a “Kremlin-sponsored” push to spread lies that the virus was created either by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or in a U.S. government lab.

 

U.S. officials responded by circulating information showing how the lies began with Russian officials and were promoted in a coordinated effort via Russian state-sponsored social media accounts and Russian government-owned global media such as Sputnik and RT, as well as through swarms of fake personas online and conspiracy websites pretending to be news outlets.

 

Some international media initially ran big with the information, but the Chinese and Iranians have doubled down with their own disinformation campaigns built from the original claims seeded by the Russians, Ms. Gabrielle said.

 

“We’ve tracked a surge in their disinformation and propaganda operations, and they’re picking up and promoting what were originally false claims pushed by the Kremlin,” she said. “They are mutually reinforcing each other in efforts to flood the information space with false narratives. So it’s basically a convergence of Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation operations.”

 

The Russians have also ramped up their efforts, with RT promoting false claims by military commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps about the origins of the coronavirus based on Russia’s earlier disinformation campaign.

 

“So Russia pushes out a false narrative, the IRGC then parrots that narrative, then RT tweets it out as though it came from the IRGC chief in the first place,” Ms. Gabrielle said. “Another example we’ve seen is the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, who used Twitter to highlight a false narrative from a source that’s already been identified as a supporter of Russia’s disinformation ecosystem.”

 

Mr. Zhao tweeted Thursday in English that it “might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” and that the “US owe us an explanation!” He also promoted the “Centre for Research on Globalization” or “GlobalResearch.ca,” a discredited Canada-based operation that published an article under the headline “Further Evidence That the Virus Originated in the U.S.”

 

U.S. officials were outraged by the tweet. “GlobalResearch.ca is a disinformation outlet based in Canada that we’ve seen pushing out Kremlin narratives,” said Ms. Gabrielle, who added that disinformation promotion by Russia, Iran and China converged before the coronavirus outbreak but has now taken on expanded momentum.

 

Murky waters ahead

 

The Zhao episode has added tension to an already fraught U.S.-Chinese relationship.

 

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman’s tweet may have been a response to comments last week by National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, who chastised Beijing for initially covering up the coronavirus outbreak. He said the cover-up “probably cost the world community two months.”

 

The Zhao tweet may also have been an attempt to subversively respond to President Trump’s assertion Wednesday that COVID-19 is caused by a “foreign virus” and “we all know where it came from.”

 

Either way, the administration’s response to Mr. Zhao was swift. Chinese Ambassador to Washington Cui Tiankai was summoned Friday to the State Department, where David R. Stillwell, the top U.S. diplomat for East Asia, expressed strong disappointment with the Chinese disinformation.

 

A senior U.S. official told The Times on background that the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman’s tweet “was a tipping point for us at a very senior level within the State Department [and] we decided we’re not going to let this continue further.”

 

The official said U.S. officials decided to draw a “line in the sand.”

 

“We are going to make a concerted and public effort to counter disinformation by any regime on this because there are lasting consequences. The Chinese and Russians and Iranians are putting out these conspiracy theories and false narratives. It is deeply irresponsible, not just for America, but for the world. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic that is unprecedented. The fact that these regimes are taking the time to deflect blame from their own actions is deeply irresponsible.”

The question is whether the damage has been done.

 

“Once a lie is out there in the information space, there’s no silver bullet. I don’t have a false-information-zapping bazooka. I wish I did,” said Ms. Gabrielle. “What we do have are best practices and, in the case of the lies that are out there right now, that means engaging through our official platforms to counter them.”

 

She stressed that the Global Engagement Center is playing “the long game,” and that means engaging credible voices that can support truthful narratives worldwide.

 

What you want to do is essentially create an environment where populations and audiences are less vulnerable to disinformation in general,” Ms. Gabrielle said. “Best practices for countering false narratives long term are more strategic in nature.”

 

“We’ve also supported things like the development of secure networks for investigative journalists in sensitive environments to help enable them to share information,” she said.

 

Exposing previous examples of disinformation by questionable sources, she said, is part of the effort to “flood the space” with accurate information. That, she said, can involve “engaging third-party credible voices, for example, non-U.S. government voices to be able to get the truth out there.”

 

Third-party voices can include fact-checking organizations, nongovernment organizations, investigative journalists, other governments, local community leaders or social media influencers, she said. “We work with organizations worldwide to do that long-term approach of increasing resiliency, decreasing vulnerability and then inoculating audiences to disinformation.”

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Now things worsen with China side accusing America for spearing the Corona virus to China. I find this as rather absurd and horrible. Why will America want to spread such a deadly virus to China? What benefits will they get? Instead of solving the problem the China government is now trying to push the blame to America.

[nitinsanker 179]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-us-panic-buying-guns-ammo-nra-a9403886.html

 

Don't worry about corona virus any longer folks..... America is now well armed ?

Edited March 17, 2020 by nitinsanker

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https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/01/asia/china-coronavirus-truth-rumors-intl-hnk/index.html

 

 

Coronavirus disinformation creates challenges for China's government

 

Hong Kong (CNN)The word "rumor" has taken on a different meaning in China since the death of Li Wenliang, the doctor who was punished for trying to warn others about the spread of coronavirus.

 

Instead of doubtful hearsay, for many the word has come to suggest the inconvenient truths that authorities are trying to hide -- just like Li's attempt to expose a dangerous outbreak that has to date claimed more than 2,900 lives, including his own.

 

"Rumor is just a prophecy far ahead of our times," says a quote widely shared online in China in recent weeks.

 

The idea speaks to the mounting anger among many Chinese people over what they see as heavy-handed government censorship, with unpleasant truths written off as "rumors" and truth tellers threatened or faced with punishment.

 

On Chinese social media platforms, authorities have paid a price for silencing the truth. In many posts, if the warnings of Li and other medical workers had not been muzzled, they could have raised more awareness among the public and perhaps better prepared them for the deadly outbreak, which has now sickened over 84,000 people and placed hundreds of millions under varying forms of lockdown.

 

But the overwhelming narrative on social media is that concealing the truth has caused another problem. Amid dwindling public trust, authorities are finding it increasingly difficult to combat potentially harmful disinformation.

Doctor Li Wenliang, who was punished by police for "rumor-mongering," was hailed as a hero by many in China for trying to blow the whistle on the coronavirus outbreak in late December.

 

Struggling with disinformation

 

Almost as soon as the outbreak spiraled into a public health crisis in late January, a dubious fringe theory started to spread: that the virus did not come from nature, but was man-made in a lab.

 

The conspiracy has been widely dismissed by scientists in China and the West, who point to research indicating that the virus is likely to have originated in bats and jumped to humans from an intermediate host -- just like its cousin that caused the SARS epidemic.

 

The scientific findings, however, did not prevent the rumor mill from spinning, nor did the repeated attempts by authorities to stamp out the wholly groundless accusations.

 

As the virus continued to spread and kill, conspiracy theories became more elaborate, with many pointing to a high-level virology lab known to study bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, the ground-zero of the outbreak.

 

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, an affiliate of the central government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, runs the only lab on the Chinese mainland equipped for the highest level of biocontainment to research easily transmitted pathogens, such as coronaviruses.

 

The common gist of various rumors lies with the suspicion that the novel coronavirus might have escaped from the lab. In one version, a researcher was bitten by the bat he was studying and became infected with the virus; in another version, a graduate student at the institute was the "patient zero"; in an even more outlandish theory, that has since been popularized overseas, the lab was covertly working for the Chinese military to make bioweapons, and the virus was unwittingly leaked in the process.

 

No credible evidence was offered for the theories, which originated from unverified social media accounts.

 

The rumors were so rife in China that a lead virologist on bat-related viruses at the lab took to social media on February 2 to declare that she "guaranteed with her own life" that the facility had nothing to do with the outbreak. But that too failed to quell the rumors. The institute followed up by issuing a statement two weeks later to denounce the accusations. But still suspicions persisted.

 

Four days later, the facility issued yet another all-encompassing statement that listed and rebutted all the rumors that had swirled around the lab in one sweep.
The rumors, which continue to proliferate, have since drawn the rebuke of scientists around the world.

 

"We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," wrote 27 prominent public health scientists in a joint statement published in the medical journal The Lancet on February 19.

 

Citing studies of the virus' genetic makeup, they said scientific findings "overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens."

 

"Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus," the scientists wrote.
Nevertheless, some in China remained unconvinced, posting on Weibo that they suspected a government cover-up.

 

Separately, another unfounded theory taking aim at the US has gained traction among groups of Chinese nationalists.

 

Last month, a man in Inner Mongolia was detained for 10 days and fined 500 yuan ($71) for spreading the rumor that the coronavirus is a genetic weapon made by the US government. His detention was broadcast on state-run television, making it clear how rumormongers like him would be treated. But many remain undeterred, seeing his arrest as further proof of an alleged cover-up, while continuing to share and discuss the rumor online.

 

Another new, unfounded variation claims the coronavirus is not a man-made bioweapon, but did originate in the US -- and many Americans thought to have died of the flu this season were actually killed by COVID-19.

"What is the truth?"

 

While diehard conspiracy theorists can be found in every country, it's clear from social media that the plunge in public trust in the Chinese government following its alleged mishandling and censorship of the outbreak has made it much harder for authorities there to dispel rumors.

 

"What is the truth?" wondered a user on Weibo on February 17, commenting on the Wuhan lab's attempt to end the rumors. "The collapse of credibility of the government and the media is not only a woe for them, but also for us citizens."

 

The erosion of trust is centered around cases such as Li, the Wuhan doctor, where so-called "rumors" were later deemed to be inconvenient truths authorities wanted to suppress.

 

Li was summoned by the Wuhan police on January 3 and reprimanded for "spreading rumors," over a message he sent to his medical school alumni warning of the emergence of a SARS-like coronavirus. He later contracted the virus from a patient and died last month.

 

And Li was not alone. On January 1, Wuhan police announced they had "taken legal measures" against eight people for spreading rumors about the coronavirus.

 

Chinese media later reported that some of them were also healthcare workers trying to sound the alarm, and several of them have come forward in the Chinese press to recount how they got into trouble for trying to warn colleagues and friends about the outbreak.

 

That deep-rooted frustration was summed up in a poignant joke that made the rounds on social media in late January, when the outbreak seemed to be spiraling out of control: "If someone can go back in time to return to the Wuhan of a month ago, can they save us all from this catastrophe?" "Nope," the answer goes. "They would just become the ninth rumor-monger."

 

To the dismay and fury of many in China, the swift rebuttal of well-meaning "rumors" -- or in fact unpleasant truths -- did not stop with Li's death.

 

The whistle-blower's passing set off a remarkable storm of calls for free speech across the country. In response, the government has doubled down on its attempts to control the narrative.

 

Accounts and reports that fall outside the official line are promptly scrubbed from the internet and replaced with a constant flow of heroic tales of self-sacrifice. Independent voices describing the grim reality on the ground, meanwhile, have been silenced.

 

Chen Qiushi, a citizen journalist who documented the agony and heartbreak of residents in Wuhan, was forcefully quarantined by authorities last month, according to his friends.

 

Meanwhile, some propaganda attempts have backfired. In northwestern Gansu province, a state-run newspaper recently published a video of female medical workers having their heads shaved before setting off to join the front lines in Hubei, with some crying in front of the camera. The video, meant to show their admirable devotion, drew backlash online, with many questioning its necessity and whether the medics were pressured into shaving.

 

To be honest, it would be better if they don't dispel rumors. When I see a rumor refuted I would basically assume it is the truth.

 

A user on Weibo

 

Over the past few weeks, Chinese social media has been alight with outrage at the propaganda and censorship, with the censors themselves having to work overtime to stay on top of it.

 

"To be honest, it would be better if they don't dispel rumors. When I see a rumor refuted I would basically assume it is the truth," said one popular Weibo comment, that itself was later censored.

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25 minutes ago, up and down said:

Now things worsen with China side accusing America for spearing the Corona virus to China. I find this as rather absurd and horrible. Why will America want to spread such a deadly virus to China? What benefits will they get? Instead of solving the problem the China government is now trying to push the blame to America.

 

Well. Less than a month ago it was american politicians calling it a leak from Wuhan biological laboratory. Doesn't help the slightest, but it has been going both ways (even saw the idea of it being american back when it was still pretty much only in China)

 

It's sad that some people use it for political purpose, but some things never change.