[ad_1]
On July 20, three days before the start of the Olympics, a Peruvian woman in her 30s tested positive for COVID-19 at Haneda Airport in Tokyo and was immediately reported as a likely carrier of the highly infectious Lambda variant of the COVID-19.
However, The Daily Beast has learned that the Japanese Ministry of Health, after making a final decision on the identity of the variant, omitted any mention of the new case in its regular press releases for July 30 and August 6.
The passenger’s samples were quickly sequenced and submitted to an international influenza virus database as a Lambda variant on July 26. But Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has deliberately withheld information from its press briefings and statements, according to ministry employees. who spoke with The Daily Beast; we also obtained documents released to the Japanese media. The variant, first detected in Peru in December 2020, is highly infectious and potentially resistant to vaccines.
The August 6 press briefing.
Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor
“We worked tirelessly to make the call and sound the alarm, and the ministry remained silent – and had no intention of announcing until today – when the Minister of Health had his planned press conference, “said an employee of the Japanese National Institute of Infectious Diseases. Diseases (NIID) told The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity. Norihisa Tamura, the current minister, regularly briefs members of the ministry’s press club on relevant issues. The discovery of new COVID-19 variants in Japan is usually announced at a press conference.
According to the NIID employee, since early July, Japan had strengthened its capacity to detect variants at all airports in the country. On July 17, the Lambda variant was placed on a watch list due to concerns from preliminary scientific reports that the variant could be highly transmissible and possibly resistant to the vaccine. On July 20, when the Peruvian passenger tested positive for COVID-19, the alarm bells went off.
“In Peru, nearly 90% of all new cases of COVID-19 are due to the Lambda variant,” the employee said. “When the sample arrived and we knew where the woman was coming from, we were logically already looking for the Lambda variant and expected to find it.”
Laboratory work on the samples taken from the traveler at the airport had become a top priority and on July 25 the results were conclusive. On July 26, three days after the start of the Olympics, the genome sequence of the detected Lambda variant was submitted to GISAID, an international database of influenza viruses, including variants of SARS-Cov-2.
GISAID, in response to questions from The Daily Beast, confirmed in an email, “[The] The sequence was submitted to GISAID on July 26, indicating a very fast turnaround time by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases of Japan.
“Well, it’s nice to see GISAID recognize our speed of execution, but I wonder why we rushed when the information was just going to be withheld until a convenient time. We are scientists, not politicians, so I can only speculate on the reasons, ”the NIID source said.
Daily Beast reporters working on this story first published an article about the discovery of the Lambda variant in Japan on August 6 at 12:06 a.m. Japanese time. The Ministry of Health released a press announcement on the morning of August 6 listing all variants of COVID-19 detected in Japan at airport quarantine centers. But the press release only highlighted the detection of the Alpha and Delta variants among international travelers. Additionally, the date list including passenger information begins from July 21, the day after the Lambda variant was detected, omitting the variant from the timely report altogether.
There is no mention of a female traveler in her 30s residing in Peru who tested positive for COVID-19 in Haneda. Reports of variant finds at Japanese airports are released almost weekly. A subsequent report released on July 30 also omitted any mention of the discovery of the Lambda variant.
The Department of Health did not publicly admit to finding the Lambda variant until the evening of August 6, after repeated requests from the Daily Beast. The ministry claimed that since the individual carrying the variant was spotted and isolated at the airport, the variant has not “landed” in the country.
Japan’s health ministry has a long history of concealing and modifying data to meet the needs of the ruling administration.
In the 1980s, the ministry suppressed reports that unheated blood products transmitted AIDS to patients with hemophilia and did not recommend the use of safe and readily available alternatives. Courts ruled that the reports were suppressed in favor of a Japanese pharmaceutical company, and former ministry officials involved in the scandal were convicted of criminal negligence resulting in injury and death in 2000.
More recently, in 2018, as then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party was pushing forward a labor reform bill, ministry officials submitted falsified data to the Japanese parliament, which supported Abe’s assertions that discretionary labor would benefit workers. Some of the labor data compiled by the Department of Health showed employees working more than 24 hours in a single day. The government had to remove the data and several ministry officials were sanctioned. A senior secretary to the prime minister had met with ministry officials during the period when the data had been falsified.
The Department of Health had yet to respond to questions from the Daily Beast at the time of publication.
[ad_2]
Source link