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Post and Courier(NC): China shuns doctor who told SARS truth, WHO says
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Chicago Tribune
BEIJING--The World Health Organization said Tuesday that China is sharing
more information in the fight against SARS, but on one richly symbolic issue the
government here continues to shun the truth: how a maverick doctor exposed the
official cover-up of Beijing's epidemic.
When Beijing authorities were asked at a news conference about recognizing
the contribution of the semi-retired military surgeon, who revealed to the world
in April that scores of cases of SARS were being kept hidden, a Health Ministry
official evaded the question. Pinned down, he said he had no information to
share about Dr. Jiang Yanyong.
"We have not acquired any information about him in a direct way," Han Demin,
deputy chief of the Beijing Health Bureau, said Tuesday. "I think after getting
some direct information, I can further answer your question at (next week's)
press conference."
In the foreign press, and in one article in a Chinese magazine called Caijing,
Jiang gets much of the credit for blowing the whistle on the scandalous cover-up
that led to the firing of the health minister and mayor. His tip also led to the
WHO's aggressive efforts to investigate what was really happening in Beijing's
hospitals, and, ultimately, to the promises made by the highest levels of the
Chinese government to deal openly with the epidemic of severe acute respiratory
syndrome.
The Chinese magazine declared in its current issue: "We have to say it isn't
only Dr. Jiang who made reports on the SARS epidemic in China more transparent
but we should admit he was one of the key people to accelerate the speed."
It concluded: "He saved many people's lives."
But most people in China don't read Caijing, a business biweekly with a small
circulation and a reputation for daring reportage. And they don't have access to
newspapers like the Singapore Straits Times, which said in a recent column, "In
other countries, Dr. Jiang would probably have been lauded as a national hero." Instead, Jiang remains an unknown figure in China, neither praised nor
punished, but who has been asked by the government not to talk to the press
without prior permission, though he spoke briefly with a reporter on Tuesday. Jiang said he didn't know why the government pretended that he didn't exist.
Ask at the next press conference, he said.
Without wide dissemination of Jiang's story in China, the government has been
able to shift gears to wage a public health war against SARS without needing to
acknowledge fully the extent of the cover-up and the other bureaucratic failings
that have led Beijing to become the world's most SARS-infected city.
http://www.charleston.net/stories/051403/wor_14sars.shtml
Posting date: 5/15/2003 |