Nope:
A Chinese court on Monday handed down a four-year jail term to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year’s coronavirus outbreak on the grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said.
Zhang Zhan, 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic epicenter than the official narrative.
I'll just leave this right here:
In an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Hajdu was asked about her comments earlier in the year when she dismissed as a conspiracy theory a question about whether China had underreported their cases and the severity of the new, highly contagious disease.
“You had dismissed that as a conspiracy theory. In retrospect, do you think that China was honest and was forthcoming in the intelligence it shared with the global community and with Canada about the risks?” Stephenson asked.
“Look, very early on China alerted the World Health Organization to the emergence of a novel coronavirus and also shared the sequencing of the gene which allowed countries to be able to rapidly produce tests to be able to detect it in their own countries,” Hajdu said.
They alerted people after they got caught but whatever.
Also:
Fifty doctors, scientists and healthcare entrepreneurs earned billionaire status this year — the majority of whom are from China, where the virus first emerged in December 2019, Forbes reported.
Of the new cohort, there were 28 “pandemic billionaires” who hailed from China, the outlet reported.
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Merry Xmas folks!
— not inklessPW 💎 (@inklessPW) December 25, 2020
Here's a searchable data base of every organization in Canada that received the CEWS wage subsidy benefit all 368,240 businesses, charities and non-profits. https://t.co/UUPiLseK1p
Like the $30 billion Rogers media empire where Mayor @JohnTOry has senior roles pic.twitter.com/URiFwzcUPr
More here.
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Canadian officials seemed to agree, since no steps were taken to restrict or prohibit travel. To the federal government, China appeared to have the situation under control and the risk to Canada was low. Before ending the call, Mr. Heng thanked Ottawa for its “science and fact-based approach.”
Around the same time, with the death toll rising and the virus spreading internationally, preparations were made for a phone call between Minister of Foreign Affairs François-Philippe Champagne and his Chinese counterpart. According to speaking notes prepared in advance of that discussion, Canada’s key messages were to “express sympathy” and to convey how “impressed” Ottawa was with “efforts deployed to contain the outbreak, and the transparent approach taken by China thus far.”
The government had “full confidence” in China’s ability to contain the virus. ...
By late February, Ottawa seemed to be taking the official reports from China at their word, stating often in its own internal risk assessments that the threat to Canada remained low. But inside the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), rank-and-file doctors and epidemiologists were growing increasingly alarmed at how the department and the government were responding.
“The team was outraged,” one public-health scientist told a colleague in early April, in an internal e-mail obtained by The Globe and Mail, criticizing the lack of urgency shown by Canada’s response during January, February and early March. “We knew this was going to be around for a long time, and it’s serious.”
China had locked down cities and restricted travel within its borders. Staff inside the Public Health Agency believed Beijing wasn’t disclosing the whole truth about the danger of the virus and how easily it was transmitted. “The agency was just too slow to respond,” the scientist said. “A sane person would know China was lying.”
It would later be revealed that China’s infection and mortality rates were played down in official records, along with key details about how the virus was spreading.
But the Public Health Agency, which was created after the 2003 SARS crisis to bolster the country against emerging disease threats, had been stripped of much of its capacity to gather outbreak intelligence and provide advance warning by the time the pandemic hit.
The Global Public Health Intelligence Network, an early warning system known as GPHIN that was once considered a cornerstone of Canada’s preparedness strategy, had been scaled back over the past several years, with resources shifted into projects that didn’t involve outbreak surveillance.
However, a series of documents obtained by The Globe during the past four months, from inside the department and through numerous Access to Information requests, show the problems that weakened Canada’s pandemic readiness run deeper than originally thought. Pleas from the international health community for Canada to take outbreak detection and surveillance much more seriously were ignored by mid-level managers inside the department. A new federal pandemic preparedness plan – key to gauging the country’s readiness for an emergency – was never fully tested. And on the global stage, the agency stopped sending experts to international meetings on pandemic preparedness, instead choosing senior civil servants with little or no public-health background to represent Canada at high-level talks, The Globe found.
An internal study obtained by The Globe suggests people inside the department were aware of some of these issues. Meanwhile, documents and interviews with current and former employees who have come forward in recent months indicate the mishandling of the pandemic early warning system was a symptom of broader problems affecting the agency. A cascade of decisions over the past decade, each critically important in their own right, left Canada struggling to effectively process what was happening in China in real time early this year, which hampered its ability to respond quickly.
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A doctor in Boston with a shellfish allergy developed a severe allergic reaction after receiving Moderna's coronavirus vaccine on Thursday, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing the doctor.
Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh, a geriatric oncology fellow at Boston Medical Center, said he had a severe reaction almost immediately after being vaccinated, feeling dizzy and with a racing heart, the NYT reported.
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Tenant after tenant addressed the virtual meeting, describing how COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on their lives and finances over the last year.
A Toronto mother said she struggled to keep up with bills after losing work in the restaurant industry. A Hamilton man behind on rent payments said he was staying in touch with his landlord about his financial situation after being laid off.
“It’s COVID, people struggle,” he appealed to Landlord and Tenant Board member John Mazzilli during the Dec. 18 block of hearings — all of which involved non-payment of rent.
Similar scenes playing out over the last several weeks have raised concern among Ontario advocates who say the pickup of evictions in the pandemic’s second wave coincides with a shift to online-only hearings that stack the deck against tenants.
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They should have torn down a statue:
Police have laid charges after they say large gatherings were held two days in a row in a Wheatley, Ont., church this weekend.
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