We were all outraged when Dr Li Wanliang was reprimanded by the Chinese authorities for telling the truth about the onset of an unknown disease in Wuhan last December. Dr Li was doing his duty and wanted to warn the public about an imminent threat to public health. Instead he was investigated by the police for allegedly spreading false rumours.
In the end Dr Li was proved right as Covid-19 was identified as a new disease. But tragically he later died after contracting the virus while working to help patients in Wuhan. Today he is remembered across the world as an icon – someone who spoke truth to power.
Sadly, Dr Li is not the only person who has been victimised for telling the truth about Covid-19. I can think of several examples just in the United States and the UK where I have been closely following the growth of the pandemic. There may well be countless others across the world who have spoken out but have suffered in silence.
One of the first American public health figures to raise the alarm about the threat of the virus was Dr Nancy Messionnier. She is the top expert on viral respiratory diseases at the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the end of February she gave what is now an infamous press briefing in which she said she wanted to make sure the American public was prepared for the disruption the virus would cause. She said parents should ask the heads of their children’s schools about their plans for closing them down as the pandemic grew worse.
Her comments caused uproar and led to a fall in the stock market. President Trump was reportedly furious. His business adviser, Larry Kudlow, replied to Dr Messionnier’s comments by falsely saying the virus was contained – not airtight but pretty close to airtight.
Recent reports have indicated that the President even wanted to fire Dr Messionnier for her truthful warning. That did not happen but her role in public briefings has since disappeared.
Even last week the Director of the whole of the CDC, Robert Redfield, also uttered an inconvenient truth. He was forced by President Trump to walk back his comments that the assault of the virus on the nation next winter would cause more difficulties than this past one.
In the UK, we are also seeing the government being discomfited by inconvenient truths. There is evidence that the authorities have been trying to silence doctors and nurses, who have rightly been complaining about the lack of adequate protection equipment on Covid-19 wards.
In this excellent must-see BBC Panorama documentary this week, one senior nurse said she was prepared to speak about this issue as she was a union rep. She said didn’t want any more health workers to come to harm.
The UK government’s strategy over the handling of the pandemic has been criticised in the past few weeks by several prominent public health experts. One of them is Devi Sridhar, the Professor and Chair of Global Health at Edinburgh University’s Medical School.
She has spoken out in support of countries like South Korea which have put a lot of emphasis on pre-emptive community testing and contact tracing. Here is one of her opinion pieces last month accusing the UK government of dithering and lack of transparency. On national television a few days ago she said bluntly that Britain had made a mess of its pandemic response.
Earlier this week the Professor revealed on her twitter feed that she had been getting into trouble for her tweets. She said she would be taking a break for a while to share baking recipes and cat videos – hopefully that would be more acceptable.
However, she later indicated that she had been overwhelmed by messages of support for her views and analysis. The Professor now said she had changed her mind about being quiet and keeping her head low. She is once again seeking to tell truth to power, though this may come at a cost in the possible loss of future grants.
Many politicians around the world have said we are now in a war against the virus. As the famous saying goes, the first casualty in any war is truth. It’s no different in this pandemic as inconvenient truth-tellers come under increasing pressure.
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