A clipping of a video of Chinese-funded NewsClick’s founder Prabir Purkayastha has made it to social media channels. Prabir and NewsClick were in the news recently after New York Times brought out the link between China, and the Chinese Communist Party and how various organisations across the world were getting paid for pushing Chinese propaganda.
We did some digging into his past videos on COVID-19 and found the below:
This first video which was shared in March 2020, from the early days of the pandemic, discusses China’s approach to handling the COVID-19 outbreak, in order to “dispel misconceptions about its methods”. In this “report”, Prabir quotes the report presented by Bruce Aylward where he claims that China’s aggressive measures had slowed down the spread of the coronavirus there. Aylward was also notably a part of the WHO-China Joint Commission.
Prabir also claims that China underwent various stages to control the epidemic, adapting policies to the evolving situation. He also claimed that China’s response included rapid identification of the virus, genome sequencing, development and distribution of test kits, a lockdown of Wuhan, centralized quarantine, and community support to control the outbreak effectively.
Titled “How did #China Handle the #COVID-19 Outbreak?”, he keeps repeating that by 31 December 2019, China had notified the WHO of the disease, and they identified it as SARS-CO-V2 in January 2020. “If you look at the period in January, you will see how quickly they moved in after that. One is they were able to identify the genome sequence in about two weeks. Now that’s a very very fast genotyping of the sequence and they were able to upload it on the international database around January 12th or 13th so you have this first genomic sequence of the Wuhan virus as Mr. Trump would like to call it, what the world calls the SARS CoV2 virus was identified within two weeks and within another week, they had already developed test kits because, please remember, without test kits, you can’t test you only have clinical symptoms. Clinical symptoms that are not very dissimilar from the standard flu that you see around you. So the first test kits were available only around June January 21st 22nd or so by which they are able to dispatch these kits into Wuhan. Now this again in three weeks, developing both the genome sequence and the test kits is a major achievement which we must credit the Chinese scientific community.”
He also goes on to explain how centralised quarantine done by Chinese authorities helped to reduce the cases in China and how the protective gear provided by China to its medical staff ensured not one of the 42000 staff got infected. He also talks that these measures brought down the effective reproductive rates of the virus below 1 and that was how the pandemic was controlled in Wuhan. He also praised the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for providing food and other delivery services to the people who were going to be housebound. He also says “It was all in society all in government effort that really stopped the coronavirus epidemic in China”. He also claimed that “instead of a coercive lock down what you need is a lockdown which is cooperative which allows the people to organize and allows the people also access to basic needs food water supplies of different kinds and unless we are organized as society as government to provide that this kind of lockdowns alone is not going to help” He ends the video by saying “China has shown the way but does the rest of the world understand what has happened and does it have the will to follow it”.
The second video we looked at, was titled “COVID-19 in India” was also shared in June 2020 where he discusses the COVID-19 situation in India with a fellow “journalist”.
In this video, he claims that at that point in time, India had the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Asia and that daily new cases were steadily rising. He said that despite the rising cases, lockdown measures were being eased. At that point, India ranked 7th globally in total cases, with a doubling rate of 14 days. He also shared concerns about the healthcare system’s capacity to handle the increasing cases.
He claimed that the lockdown strategy had not effectively curbed the epidemic’s growth and there was a lack of focus on contact tracing, testing, and isolating positive cases. He criticised the government’s ad hoc and ineffective approach.
He goes on to compare India to other countries like Malaysia where cases were supposedly better handled than India although there was an upsurge. He also claimed that several other countries had started to flatten their curves. He then goes on to praise Kerala which we must remember is a communist-ruled state.
Here’s what he said in the video:
“The three countries whose curves are still rising are Brazil, India, and at the moment Mexico too – but Russia has more or less starting to flatten its curves the US has also started to flatten its curves and the countries which have flattened their curves are Italy, France, Germany, Iran. Now one may say, well you know, India is a relatively poor country but if you look at Malaysia, these figures we have been showing from day one is Malaysia started a little ahead of India and had higher figures for some time. But after that, you can see how well it has been able to flatten the curve and that’s something which is really striking. If we come to the states in India, the only state which has done reasonably well in this period and even now it’s facing an upsurge is Kerala. This recent upsurge in Kerala is, of course, because of a large number of migrants who have come from other states already infected and Kerala is dealing with that at the moment. But even otherwise, if you look at the figures, you will see Kerala is the only state which controls its numbers earlier and is still able to provide that degree of isolation support that we need. ICMR and the Government of India were talking about avoided deaths, I think that’s a bogus concept because you don’t avoid deaths in the long term, you only postpone.”
He said India was not able to cut down infections due to low testing and poor isolation. Apart from Kerala, he said that India as a country was not successful in terms of contact tracing. He said “The Government of India looked upon this as if it’s a law and order problem, not a public health emergency. the government of India’s response to this has been what would be called the police response which is what the colonial administration engaged to put people in camps isolate them lock them down and hope that the epidemic will die by itself”.
It was reported later that Kerala had underreported deaths.
He continues to find fault with the relaxing of the lockdown and allowing people to visit places of worship, saying,
“If you remove the lockdown relaxing lockdowns as we are doing which we are bound to, but we are also allowing, for instance, places of worship and other places malls to open. So those are the kind of further risk issues that are coming up”.
The video that was shared on Twitter is from a longer video where Prabir is seen discussing the COVID-19 pandemic with a NewsClick “journalist”.
In this video clip, we can see Prabir defending China over the pandemic. Here is a transcript of the entire clipping.
“Right now both Pompeo and the state department and various intelligence agencies in the US are basically saying China did not cooperate, china did not give us ABC, did not give us information, and that is why all of this happened. Now China, if you see had diagnosed that it was a novel coronavirus by around the end of Dec 2019. they informed the who, I think on 31 Dec. On the 1st to the 3rd of Jan, the Chinese equivalent of CDC, the head talked to the director of CDC, Redford, and told him what was happening. In fact, the record says that at that point in time, he was in tears, he knew what was happening. So that was one. The second part of it which they now say is that, well they didn’t really cooperate. Now ok information you claimed you had was insufficient, China locked down Wuhan, it was a complete lockdown of an 11-million city. They locked down 15 suburban areas, other cities near Wuhan, and locked down the entire province of Hubei, they locked down entire industries in China, colleges, malls, cinema halls, and all visible gatherings, all of it was locked down in all of China. So the argument that they did not tell us, doesn’t hold good because actions speak louder than words. here they were taking action, showing how dangerous it was, in their view. So if the rest of the world did not listen, it wasn’t something you can fault them on.
Watch Prabir Purkayastha, Editor in Chief of Newsclick in 2020
He says China did not hide anything about pandemic
China reported everything timely and faithfully
It is not China's fault that others did not listen
Independent media? pic.twitter.com/iL3BYHpQr7
— Abhishek (@AbhishBanerj) August 17, 2023
This video is part of a longer video from May 2020 which is titled “COVID-19: US Blames China to Cover Up Its Own Failures”.
He claims that China with a much larger population than the US controlled the infections much better than the Americans. China has a similar climatic zone as the US and they did much better than the US. The US was trying to make China look guilty and had also said that they should pay for reparations.
He continued to say that the experience from the SARS epidemic, avian flu, and swine flu gave China the upper hand and introduced mask culture over the last 15-20 years. He claimed that they were better prepared in terms of social practice and medical systems geared to face the pandemic.
He also claims that even though Pompeo claimed that China didn’t give them the virus, the CDC nowhere claimed that they couldn’t develop test kits because there was no sample. He goes on to speak about the genomic sequence publication dates. He says, “When the genomic sequence was published, it was sent to Nature on the 5th or 7th, NCBI says this was submitted to Nature on the 5th Jan. The entire genome sequence was uploaded to GenBank (a public repository of genome sequences) on 11th or 12th Jan, to Virology, another such public database, and also the Influenza database maintained globally. all of these had the genome sequence. if you take the genome sequence why would you need something else? Because with the genome sequence both the Germans, charite, a very able team, developed a test kit as early as 16 Jan and WHO adopted it. A South Korean company also created a test kit in 3 weeks. CDC never complained about the lack of virus samples.”
These videos serve as evidence of the channel’s establishment with the intent to disseminate Chinese propaganda, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prabir’s actions closely aligned with the directives of his Chinese handlers, demonstrating his unwavering allegiance and compliance.
At the time of the New York Times expose, some emails exchanged between Neville Roy Singham and Prabir and the Indian counterparts were also made public. Those emails were more concerning the Galwan clash as reported here.
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