“The Chinese did what authoritarians do,” she said. “They silenced those who were trying to sound the alarm, they wanted time to create the narrative that would be blessed by the Communist Party of China, which means it probably had to go to Beijing before you could say anything. It is just the nature of the system. It is a real problem.”

“Can you imagine those people being silenced in the United States or Germany or Brazil?” she asked. “No… it would have been known that there was a problem.”

“The Chinese and trying to create a counter-narrative… to shift the narrative from their initial responsibility for not fessing up to what was happening, to ‘We got on top of it and this is how we helped the world.’ That’s how they’re going to shift the narrative. Don’t let it happen.”