Canadian Doctor Says It’s ‘Unlikely’ Coronavirus Whistleblower in China Died from COVID-19 Days After Arrest

A Canadian doctor says he thinks it’s “quite unlikely” that the coronavirus whistleblower, Dr. Li Wenliang, died of COVID-19 days after he was arrested by Chinese police for warning the public about a “SARS-like” outbreak.Li alerted his friends and classmates about the novel coronavirus in a post on WeChat, a popular social media platform in China, on Dec. 30, 2019. Shortly after, officials in Wuhan city said on Jan. 1, 2020, that they had “taken legal measures” against eight individuals including Li, who allegedly “spread rumours” about the disease, and had “caused adverse impacts on society.” Two days later, Wuhan police reprimanded Li for “rumour-mongering.” In early February 2020, the 34-year-old ophthalmologist was reportedly diagnosed with COVID-19 and died on Feb. 7 at Wuhan Central Hospital, where he worked. Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang. (Courtesy of Li Wenliang) Dr. Matthew Strauss, a Canadian doctor, said he thinks it’s unlikely that the coronavirus whistleblower died of COVID-19, pointing to a study that said the infection fatality rate for people in the age group of 30 to 39 was just 0.011 percent. This means Li had a nearly “99.99%” chance of survival, Strauss said on social media. “I think it is quite unlikely that Li Wenliang died of Covid days after his arrest by a brutal dictatorship,” Strauss wrote in a Twitter post on Jan. 2. “It is irresponsible to parrot CCP [Chinese Communist Party] reports without independent verification,” he added, referring to another Twitter user’s post that attributed Li’s cause of death to COVID-19. The Epoch Times reached out to Strauss for comment but didn’t hear back by publication time. ‘Thought Criminal’ In subsequent Twitter posts, Strauss substantiated his speculation about the cause of Li’s death with reports of people in China who were forced to retract their criticisms of the CCP and senior party officials, and even faced “forced disappearance” for actions deemed unacceptable by the authoritarian regime. He gave the example of Peng Shuai, a well-known Chinese tennis player who accused China’s former vice premier, Zhang Gaoli, of sexually assaulting her. Peng, who made the allegation on Nov. 2, 2021, on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, subsequently disappeared from the public eye for nearly three weeks. Her post was also quickly removed from the internet. Peng’s disappearance sparked concern from the international tennis community and rights groups that she was either placed under house arrest or jailed in secret, and that she might be tortured during her detention. When Peng later reappeared in public, she walked back her claims of sexual assault in a Dec. 19 interview with Lianhe Zaobao, a pro-Beijing Chinese-language media in Singapore. She also denied being under house arrest. “It just isn’t inconceivable to me that they [the CCP] might brutalize a thoughtcriminal and lie about it afterwards,” Strauss wrote, adding that the Canadian parliamentarians in 2021 voted to unanimously support a motion that recognizes the CCP’s incarceration of millions of Uyghurs and other Muslims to be an act of genocide. The term “thoughtcrime,” coined by English novelist George Orwell, in his dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” describes a citizen holding political beliefs that contradict that of his government. Strauss quoted his grandfather, who he said in 1959 “turned down promotion” and “requisite communist party membership” in the Yugoslav Partisans, a communist-led guerrilla force that occupied Yugoslavia during World War II under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. “If you join the party, and they say ‘this is black,’ then you have to say it is black, even though it is white,” Strauss wrote, citing his grandfather. Nicole Hao contributed to this report Andrew Chen is an Epoch Times reporter based in Toronto.