New information on Wuhan researchers’ illness fuels suspicion on origin of Covid
A US intelligence report found that several researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalised, a new detail about the severity of their symptoms that could fuel further debate about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two people briefed...
New report accuses China of serious crimes against humanity in Xinjiang region
The Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the northwest region of Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Friday. The Chinese leadership is responsible for widespread and systematic policies of mass detention, torture, and cultural persecution, among other offenses....
China’s five-year plan focuses on scientific self-reliance
Scientific and technological self-reliance takes centre stage in China’s latest five-year plan — a result of recent tensions with the United States and other Western nations spilling over into the realm of science, say researchers. The 14th five-year plan, which sets out China’s vision for social and economic development over...
Espionage: It’ll take years for US, Europe to unpack China’s and Russia’s spying sprees
First it was SolarWinds, a reportedly Russian hacking campaign that stretches back almost a year and has felled at least nine US government agencies and countless private companies. Now it’s Hafnium, a Chinese group that’s been attacking a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server to sneak into victims’ email inboxes and...
Chinese scientists are caught between Western bias and pro-government messaging
Shortly after the World Health Organization visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology on February 3, a reporter from an international newspaper asked me whether China’s censorship would present an ‘insurmountable’ barrier to reaching an impartial conclusion on Covid-19’s origins. At the same time, my phone displayed headlines from a nationalist...
WHO mission revisits theory that coronavirus is spread through frozen meat
Momentum is growing for the suggestion that the coronavirus can spread from infected frozen wildlife. A World Health Organization (WHO) fact-finding mission in China did not rule out the idea that this mode of transmission contributed to early outbreaks of Covid-19 – although investigators say it is unlikely to have...
After years of defying Cites, China finally has its own list of endangered species
Thirty-two years after first publishing its List of Wild Animals Under State Priority Conservation, China has finally made an update, more than doubling the size of the list. Key additions include wolves and many endangered bird species. “At last,” the post began, “I hope in the years to come, they...
How China built databases to track US flights, passenger lists for espionage purposes
The discovery by China that US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seriously compromised telecommunications company Huawei’s China-based servers and jarred Chinese officials, touched off a ferocious response that left the former groping in the dark with one eye open. According to Foreign Policy magazine expose, the retaliation by the Chinese intelligence...
Billions poured into Covid vaccine facilitated multiple tests at the same time
The slowest part of vaccine development isn’t finding candidate treatments, but testing them. This often takes years, with companies running efficacy and safety tests on animals and then in humans. Human testing requires three phases that involve increasing numbers of people and proportionately escalating costs. The Covid-19 vaccines went through...
Fast quest for coronavirus vaccines and what it means for other diseases
When scientists began seeking a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in early 2020, they were careful not to promise quick success. The fastest any vaccine had previously been developed, from viral sampling to approval, was four years, for mumps in the 1960s. To hope for one even by the summer...
