During the early 1990s, a strange illness began to spread rapidly among villagers in central China. At that time, HIV/AIDS had already emerged in other parts of the world, including Europe and the United States, where cases were transmitted mostly through sexual contact. In China, however, people were infected after selling their blood and plasma or receiving transfusions contaminated in the trade.
Over the following decade, as many as 300,000 people in Henan province, the epicentre of the trade, were infected – a scandal exposed by local retired gynaecologist Dr Gao Yaojie.
Dr Gao was China’s best-known whistleblower, who exposed the source of China’s AIDS epidemic and spent the last 14 years of her life in exile. She died last December at the age of 95 in New York.
Despite official erasure, Chinese netizens mourned Gao’s death on the same Weibo “wailing wall” page where they commemorated Li.
Gao’s descent from national prominence to relentless official persecution exposed just how ruthless Beijing could be, even at a time when it was seen as opening up to the world.
“All she wanted was the freedom to speak out, to tell the whole world the truth behind China’s AIDS epidemic and to keep a record for history,” said former journalist Lin Shiyu, who edited most of the books Gao published while in exile in the US. “That was why she fled China.”
As the yet-unsolved origin of the COVID-19 pandemic shows, the secrecy Beijing enforces has repercussions for the rest of the world. Across the globe, more than 7 million people have died from the “mysterious virus” that first emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organization.
Gao did not set…
Post from www.aljazeera.com
