In early 2020, on the same day that the dreaded new disease was officially named COVID-19, a team of scientists from the US and China released important data showing how fast the virus is spreading and who is dying.

The study sparked health warnings around the world and became a model for international cooperation in a time of crisis.

However, within days, the researchers quietly retracted the paper, which was replaced on the Internet with a message telling the scientists not to cite it. Few observers noticed the odd move, but the entire episode quickly faded amid the frenzy of the coronavirus pandemic.

What is now clear is that the study was not removed due to faulty studies. Instead, it was withdrawn at the behest of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science. These efforts have raised a cloud of dust around the dates of the first COVID cases, similar to those given in the study.

“It was so difficult to get any information out of China,” said one of the authors, Ira Longini of the University of Florida, who first publicly described the story of the removal of the study in a recent interview: “There were so many hidden and so much hidden.”

The censorship of information in Beijing goes much deeper than even many pandemic researchers know. According to a New York Times investigation, his censorship campaign targeted international journals and scientific databases, undermining the foundations of conventional scientific knowledge.

Removal of data and tasks

Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists hidden data, they removed the genetic sequences from public databases and important details changed in studies submitted for medical examinations. According to an investigation by the Times into more than 12 retracted articles, Western review editors allowed this interference by agreeing to these edits or retracting the articles for unclear reasons.

Even the World Health Organization has been misled into trusting distorted data and inaccurate reports.

The repression continues to breed disinformation today and hamper efforts to determine the origin of the virus.

That censorship was made public recently when an international team of scientists discovered genetic sequence data that Chinese researchers had collected from a market in Wuhan in January 2020 but withheld from foreign experts for three years — a delay that international health officials called “inexcusable.” .

The sequences showed that a raccoon dog, a fox-like animal, left genetic traces in the same place where the genetic material from the virus was left, which is consistent with the scenario in which the virus spread to humans from animals illegally sold in this market. .

The World Health Organization, which should receive reliable information about the virus, has only added to the confusion about the origin of the pandemic. After errors were found in a major report by the agency and China from March 2021, agency spokesman Tarik Jasarevic promised that officials would correct the errors.

Two years later, this has not happened. An erroneous report remains online, showing an inaccurate timeline of the earliest known cases. Now, Mr. Jasarevic is relaying questions about the report to the scientists who wrote it.

“It is a deep and in many ways unforgivable mystery when the data turned out to be false,” said Lawrence Gostin, chair of the Institute for National and Global Health Law. O’Neill of Georgetown University and longtime advisor to the WHO. “Either it shows that either the WHO wasn’t pushing China hard enough, or that China just wasn’t cooperating.”