Claim: Chinese officials are seeking approval to start the mass killing of 20,000 people in order to stop the spread of new coronavirus. 
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Coronavirus
text: 2013, a case of contamination from human to human in France was confirmed by the French Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. In addition, cases of person-to-person transmission have been reported by the Ministry of Health in Tunisia. Two confirmed cases seem to have caught the disease from their late father, who became ill after a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. By Oct. 30 2013, there were 124 cases and 52 deaths in Saudi Arabia. After the Dutch Erasmus Medical Centre sequenced the virus, the virus was given a new name, Human Corona Virus-Erasmus Medical Centre (HCoV-EMC). The final

title: Wake (Sawyer novel)
text: senior member of the Communist Party, recommends the President order a culling of ten to eleven thousand people in the infected area with an airborne chemical. The President agrees and launches the Changcheng Strategy, cutting off all telephone, satellite, and wireless communication with the rest of the world, so that word of the culling does not spread beyond China's borders. Wong Wai-Jeng, a freedom blogger who is known online as Sinanthropus, attempts to circumvent Internet censorship in China along with many other hackers. Collectively they learn about the bird flu outbreak. Many days after enacting the Changcheng Strategy, Zhang Bo,

title: Influenza A virus subtype H7N9
text: and no [bird] exposure history is elicited, this does point slightly more to the possibility that H7N9 may be more transmissible between humans than H5N1". On January 28, 2014, it was reported by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention that the virus had killed 20 people in China in 2014, with the total number of human infections at 102. That is comparable to 144 confirmed cases, including 46 deaths, in the whole of 2013. At the end of January, more than half of the cases in 2014 had been in Zhejiang, with another 24 in Guangdong, and eight

title: Fujian flu
text: oseltamivir, the first-choice antiviral drug for H5N1 infection. In addition, only six of the viruses had a mutation that confers resistance to amantadine, an older antiviral drug used to treat flu." "China's official Xinhua news agency says a new bird flu outbreak has killed more than 3,000 chickens in the northwest. The Ministry of Agriculture told Xinhua that the July 14 outbreak in Xinjiang region's Aksu city is under control. No human infections have been reported. Saturday's report says the deadly H5N1 virus killed 3,045 chickens, and nearly 357,000 more were destroyed in an emergency response. Xinhua says the local

title: SARS coronavirus
text: as human SARS victims. In late May 2003, studies from samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China, found the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets ("Paguma" sp.), but the animals did not always show clinical signs. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from palm civet to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. Virus was also later found in raccoon dogs ("Nyctereuteus" sp.), ferret badgers ("Melogale" spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like

title: 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak
text: MERS had infected at least 60 people with cases reported in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Tunisia, Germany, the United Kingdom (UK), France and Italy, with a death toll of 38. Saudi officials expressed great concern that millions of Muslims from around the world would potentially be exposed to the virus during the autumn Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. In May 2014, the WHO said it was monitoring the situation as global cases of MERS appeared to be on the rise, but said the situation did not yet constitute a health emergency. On 3 June 2014,

title: Virus (novel)
text: papers. Another disease also kills off chickens and their eggs just when scientists needed to acquire large stocks of eggs for developing vaccines. The outbreaks of something called Tibetan flu begin to inflict massive casualties, with a number of countries reporting hundreds of thousands killed from random heart attacks. The Soviet Union's premier and vice-premier die of the illness, and Meyer is forcibly committed to the Sloan-Kettering Institute to prevent revealing the truth about the virus. Things are also worse in the scientific community; the fact that no one except the now-dead Porton Down researchers know of the existence of

title: Health in China
text: to emerge. Obsessive secrecy seriously delayed the isolation of SARS by Chinese scientists. On 18 May 2004, the World Health Organization announced the PRC free of further cases of SARS. Work with the CDC has created goals of decelerating the spread of Hepatitis B through Immunization efforts The AIDS disaster of Henan in the mid-1990s is estimated to be the largest man-made health catastrophe, affecting five-hundred thousand to one million persons. It was also in Hebei, Anhui, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hubei and Guizhou. HIV was transmitted via blood sale. Blood plasma mixture from several persons was returned so that same person

title: Timeline of the SARS outbreak
text: 16, the WHO issued a press release stating that the coronavirus identified by a number of laboratories was the official cause of SARS. The virus was officially named the SARS virus. Doctors were surprised to discover the occurrence of at least two cases of SARS in Dinner, a village near Bangalore, India. Poor hygiene and a lack of adequate trash disposal seemed to have hastened the spread of the deadly disease. On April 19, Premier of the People's Republic of China Wen Jiabao announced that there would be severe consequences for local officials who do not report SARS cases in

title: 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak
text: United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates. According to a European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) publication, on April 2014, Tunisia had a total of 3 cases with 1 fatality. In May 2015, the first case in South Korea was confirmed in a man who had visited several Middle Eastern countries. As of 16 June 2015, a total of 150 cases has been infected, including 18 deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). As of 29 June 2015, 32 people in South Korea have died from this outbreak, with 182 confirmed cases of infection. There

title: Jiang Yanyong
text: aware of the actual situation in China. This letter forced the resignation of the Mayor of Beijing and the Minister of Public Health on April 21, 2003. The Chinese government began to actively deal with the growing epidemic. Most public health experts believe that this act prevented the disease from reaching pandemic proportions. In February 2004, Jiang wrote an open letter to the Premier Wen Jiabao, several deputy premiers, the Politburo and many other members of the Chinese government. The letter asked for a re-examination of the responsibility borne by the Chinese government for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A number

title: Severe acute respiratory syndrome
text: strain of a particular virus known as a coronavirus. This strain has all the genetic building blocks of the type that triggered the global outbreak of SARS in 2002." The research was "published in the journal "Public Library of Science Pathogens"" and "was led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China... In their paper, the Chinese team warn that another deadly outbreak of SARS could emerge at any time. As they point out, the cave where they discovered their strain is only a kilometre from the nearest village." The World Health Organization declared severe

title: Severe acute respiratory syndrome
text: SARS victims. In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets ("Paguma" sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from asian palm civet to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs ("Nyctereuteus" sp.), ferret badgers ("Melogale" spp.), and domestic cats. In

title: 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak
text: have been at least 3800 quarantined. On 16 April 2014, Malaysia reported its first MERS-COV related death. The person was a 54-year-old man who had traveled to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, together with pilgrimage group composed of 18 people, from 15–28 March 2014. He became ill by 4 April, and sought remedy at a clinic in Johor on 7 April. He was hospitalized by 9 April and died on 13 April. On May 11, 2014, two persons on Medan were suspected infected by MERS-Cov (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome-Corona Virus). On 31 October 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that one

title: The SARS Network
text: disease originating in southern China eventually infecting 8,273 and killing 775 people worldwide, between November 2002 and July 2003. On 16 November 2002, the first official case of SARS was recorded in Guangdong Province, China. The People's Republic of China (PRC) notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak four months later, on February 10, after 305 recorded cases and 5 deaths; In those four months, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was thought to be the first new, easily transmissible infectious disease of the twenty-first century. The severity of the symptoms and the infection of hospital staff alarmed global

title: Arkankergen mass murder
text: Arkankergen mass murder The Arqanqergen mass murder occurred in the Almaty Region of Kazakhstan on the border with China. Arqanqergen is a military post on the border with China, near the village of Usharal. Fifteen people were killed. A border guard, Vladislav Chelakh, initially confessed to the deed, but later rescinded his confession. () is a border post between Kazakhstan and China. At 5 a.m. on 28 May 2012, communication with the border post was lost. When police from a nearby post came to investigate, they discovered the charred quarters and 14 corpses, also burned; a body of a local

title: Oncolytic virus
text: be approved by a regulatory agency was a genetically modified adenovirus named H101 by Shanghai Sunway Biotech. It gained regulatory approval in 2005 from China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) for the treatment of head and neck cancer. Sunway's H101 and the very similar Onyx-15 have been engineered to remove a viral defense mechanism that interacts with a normal human gene "p53", which is very frequently dysregulated in cancer cells. Despite the promises of early "in vivo" lab work, these viruses do not specifically infect cancer cells, but they still kill cancer cells preferentially. While overall survival rates are

title: 2009 Shaanxi dog-free zone
text: government ordered all dogs within a radius range of 3206 square kilometres to be killed, including registered and vaccinated dogs. In a statement to China Daily, Dang Zhengqing stated this was the only way they could stop the spread of rabies. People who are already pet owners were advised to register their dogs and vaccinate them. These vaccinations were offered for free. Stray and wild dogs within the region were also put down by the government. It was reported that over 20,000 dogs had been killed in the city of Hanzhong alone. Free leashes were also provided to allow citizens

title: SARS coronavirus
text: coronaviruses in Chinese bats. Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets. The bats did not show any visible signs of disease, but are the likely natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses. In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the disease had jumped across species. The

title: Influenza A virus subtype H7N9
text: the new viral strain, and supplied these synthesized genes to the CDC. The scientific community has praised China for its transparency and rapid response to the outbreak of H7N9. In an editorial on April 24, 2013, the journal "Nature" said "China deserves credit for its rapid response to the outbreaks of H7N9 avian influenza, and its early openness in the reporting and sharing of data." This, in spite of initial worries by Chinese scientists and officials that they might lose credit for their work in isolating and sequencing the novel H7N9 virus, after learning that pharmaceutical company Novartis and the