The doctor who went public over the spread of coronavirus in Wuhan has seemingly vanished after she claimed that she faced “unprecedented, extremely harsh reprimanded” by officials at Wuhan Central Hospital.
Dr. Ai Fen was among the first to alert other medics to the spread of coronavirus, and according to Daily Mail, shared a picture of a patient report labeled “SARS coronavirus.” Reports suggest that she was detained.
Her texts to coworker Dr. Li Wenliang led him to raise the concerns on social media, Daily Mail said:
The image was widely circulated and made its way to whistle-blower Li Wenliang who raised the alarm about the bug, which has killed more than 41,000 people worldwide.
Now the important doctor is gone, amid suspicions by authorities that she had been “illegally spreading untruthful information online”.
“If I had known what would have happened today, I wouldn’t have cared about the reprimand,” Dr. Ai told a Chinese magazine during an interview criticizing the hospital’s management for dismissing the early warnings of the coronavirus.
She added that “I would have told whoever and wherever I want.” But she has not been seen since, per 60 Minutes Australia.
Of the post she shared on her Weibo account:
After the show’s investigation aired, a post on the doctor’s Weibo account – a social media platform similar to Twitter – shared a picture with the caption: ‘A river. A bridge. A road. A clock chime,’ RFA reports.
Her rumored disappearance comes after criticism was levied at the Chinese government for lying and covering up key information during virtually every stage of its coronavirus response.
The news agency pointed out that the fact that the city of Beijing originally silenced the noise about the outbreak, punishing medics who discovered it, denying it could spread person-to-person and delaying a lockdown of affected regions.
That is to say, early opportunities to control the spread was lost.
The Communist Party shifted gears and started pointing the finger at US troops, saying that they could have been the initial carriers. The party also began censoring public information about it and spread disinformation overseas.
