AT 1.30AM ON 31 DECEMBER 2019,an eye doctor in Wuhan Central Hospital, Dr Li Wenliang, a member of the Communist Party, received a peremptory summons to attend an immediate interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait until 4am before being ushered into a room.
There he was questioned about his source for a We-Chat message he had sent the previous day warning colleagues of a dangerous new infection on the loose in his hospital. He was forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing “untruthful information”. He later died of the infection, which came to be called Covid.
The next day his source, Dr Ai Fen, head of emergency medicine at the Wuhan Central Hospital who had passed on the alarming news that an apparent outbreak of “SARS coronavirus” was happening in their hospital, was
