In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was taking hold around the world, a team of scientists from the US and China released a critical study showing how quickly the virus was spreading and who was dying. The study was cited in health warnings globally and seemed like a model of international collaboration during a crisis. But just days later, the researchers withdrew the paper under the direction of Chinese health officials. The censorship has been part of a crackdown on science, and it has stymied efforts to understand the virus.
The Chinese government has muzzled scientists, hindered international investigations, and censored online discussions of the pandemic, according to a New York Times investigation. The censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge. Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases, and altered crucial details in journal submissions under government pressure. Western journal editors have enabled these efforts by agreeing to edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons.
This scientific censorship has starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus when they needed it the most. The crackdown has bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted. The Chinese government's grip on science has stifled the search for truth.
The censorship has spilled into public view recently, as an international group of scientists discovered genetic sequence data that Chinese researchers had collected from a Wuhan market in January 2020 but withheld from foreign experts for three years. The sequences showed that raccoon dogs, a fox-like animal, had deposited genetic signatures in the same place that genetic material from the virus was left, consistent with a scenario in which the virus spread to people from illegally traded market animals.
It is impossible to ascribe a single motive to the censorship, but some of it changed the timeline of early infections, a delicate topic as the government faced criticism over whether it responded to the outbreak quickly enough. There is no evidence that the censorship is designed to conceal a specific scenario for the origins of the pandemic. Some scientists believe that COVID-19 spread naturally from animals to humans, while others argue that it may have spread from a Chinese laboratory. Both sides have pointed to censored data to support their theories.
For a brief moment, the coronavirus appeared to challenge China's notoriously tough hold on information. But the Chinese government reacted by tightening online censorship and wresting control of research. The censorship was piecemeal at first, but Chinese researchers soon began asking journals to retract their work. A review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers, and how widely the virus had spread. These are topics that could make the government look bad.
The censorship campaign continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus. The Chinese government's grip on science has come under scrutiny, as it has stifled the search for truth and starved doctors and policymakers of critical information.