The Chinese journalist who fearlessly reported about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, where the sometimes-deadly pathogen escaped from a laboratory, will spend four years in prison.
A “court of law” sentenced 37-year-old Zhang Zhan on Monday because her reporting criticized the communist government for not containing the virus and for silencing journalists such as herself.
The Chinese Reds arrested her in May.
The World Health Organization will soon land in China to investigate the outbreak and, if all goes well, completely detail the facts that Zhang couldn’t: how China failed to control the outbreak, and why it occurred in the first place.
Troublemaker
Zhan was making trouble for the government from the beginnings of the pandemic, as CBS News reported:
During the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Zhang Zhan’s live reports and essays were widely shared on social media, grabbing the attention of authorities. She was fiercely critical of the government for its virus containment measures and eagerly sought answers to the silencing of whistleblowers and other citizen journalists.
That’s not a smart idea in China if one wants to stay clear of a communist prison.
After a three-hour trial, the court convicted her of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” CBS reported, “a vague charge often brought against activists and critics of the government in China.”
The sentence “was quite rare and unexpected,” her attorney said, and “has something to do with the holiday timing in the West.”
Chinese “have a history of putting dissidents on trial in opaque courts between Christmas and New Year’s to minimize Western scrutiny.”
Zhan attended the sham proceeding in a wheelchair.
In protest of her arrest and indictment, Zhang Zhan began a prolonged hunger strike in June. To punish her and keep her alive, the authorities force-fed her through a feeding tube and restrained her hands 24 hours a day so she could not pull it out. Lawyer Zhang described her as “out of phase” when he visited her on Christmas Day, noting that she has lost 20 kg (about 44 pounds) since the beginning of detention in May.
The prosecutor showed little of the evidence against Zhan and instead merely read from a list to explain it.
WHO to Probe Outbreak
Yet what Zhan couldn’t accomplish, WHO might. It will head to China soon to probe the outbreak in Wuhan, site of the Virus Institute that released the virus.
As The New American reported in April, citing Fox News, the Chinese government blamed the outbreak on the city’s repellent wet markets, which sell exotic wildlife for human consumption, including bats that carry coronavirus. But that was false:
The [o]utbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of China’s attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States….
Documents detail early efforts by doctors at the lab and early efforts at containment. The Wuhan wet market initially identified as a possible point of origin never sold bats, and the sources tell Fox News that blaming the wet market was an effort by China to deflect blame from the laboratory, along with the country’s propaganda efforts targeting the U.S. and Italy.
Those viruses included bat coronaviruses, which greatly concerned U.S. officials, as the Washington Post reported. They worried that the lab “has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” The lab was conducting “risky studies” on viruses that might jump to humans.
And that, officials told Fox, is what happened. They believed “the initial transmission of the virus — a naturally occurring strain that was being studied there — was bat-to-human and that ‘patient zero’ worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.”
Worst thing is, Newsweek disclosed, U.S. taxpayers — via Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases — subsidized that lab, which conducted dangerous gene forwarding experiments on bat coronavirus. Canadian taxpayers were on the hook, too.
Once the contagion began, journalists such as Zhan tried their best to document the government’s failure to contain it. But the communist authorities silenced the critical reporting.
The question is whether WHO will finally uncover the whole truth, given that the globalist organization is heavily influenced and funded by China.
