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AHF to China: Free Zhang Zhan, Stop the Cover-up!
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the world’s largest AIDS organization, condemned the recent jailing of Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan for her reporting on COVID-19 in Wuhan as another example of Chinese authorities’ efforts to impede and obscure global investigations into the origins of the coronavirus and its spread in the early days of the pandemic.
Zhang’s prison sentence of four years has been met with sharp criticism from advocates globally, including the European Union, which has demanded that Zhang be released.
“Zhang Zhan is a hero for courageously trying to expose a deadly cover-up that crippled the world. It’s not acceptable that China is being allowed to continue the false narrative, and now it is boldly blocking the World Health Organization (WHO) investigators from going to Wuhan to study the outbreak,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein. “It’s shameful that [WHO Director-General] Tedros was praising China’s response from the beginning, and now his own scientists cannot enter the country. With the COVID-19 death toll approaching two million people, the entire system of global public health is at stake. We are one world – which China is a part of, and it has a responsibility to protect it – not to perpetuate a cover-up which is costing millions of lives.”