N. Korean scientist executed in 2021 for COVID-19 research
The execution was a terrifying shock not only to the researcher's colleagues at the bioengineering laboratory, but also to the entire North Korean scientific community
In September 2021, a researcher at a bioengineering laboratory under the North Korean State Academy of Sciences in Pyongyang examined samples taken from a Pyongyang resident suspected of having COVID-19. By comparing the samples with information from an international research paper, the researcher discovered scientific grounds to confirm that the patient did indeed have COVID-19...
While the researcher deserved recognition for a research breakthrough, he was instead branded a traitor to the state and secretly executed that December. His family members disappeared without a trace around the same time...
The most important thing for the North Korean regime at the time was to strengthen Kim Jong Un’s political base under the guise of a successful campaign against the disease. That is why North Korea so vigorously claimed that Kim’s brilliant leadership had kept COVID-19 out of the North while the world was ravaged by the disease.
It may be weird and it may be curiously primitive, but it is an inflexible North Korean policy to present the supreme leader as virtually god-like in his superhuman ability to understand everything and issue infallible instructions about any issue or problem. Challenge this in any way, even inadvertently, and the consequences are insanely severe.
Yet in a milder and far less dangerous sense, our political class has laid claim to a god-like ability to predict the state of the global climate decades into the future. Not the same perhaps, but buried in there is a not dissimilar god-like claim. I'm almost surprised Welby hasn't noticed...
No I'm not.
3 comments:
North Korea could maybe learn something from our lot. Folk who go against the narrative can be cancelled by the media, ignored by the state and ridiculed by the general public, without the messiness of an execution.
Perhaps, with the right regime, we could execute all our government science advisors like Sir PV and Prf P J?
Bucko - I think they just like executing people as a message to the rest of the population.
Tammly - we certainly should have treated their advice more harshly, plus those who backed them.
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