As I noted yesterday, North Korea blamed the South for introducing Covid into the country. The way the whole wretched Covid saga played out was all about reinforcing Kim Jong-un's authority and increasing the North's isolation. The truth, or the people's health, didn't.figure:
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.
The researcher immediately reported the findings to his superiors. However, the North Korean authorities, who claimed that the country had not seen a single confirmed case of the infectious disease, believed that the researcher’s work was a flagrant defiance of the state’s anti-epidemic policy.
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.
North Korea also instilled the idea that the extreme measures taken to control the disease, including closing the national border and cutting off all contact with the outside world, actually demonstrated the state’s prioritization of individual health and safety amid the global COVID-19 crisis.
North Korean authorities emphasized that citizens faced a fateful choice: they could either endanger their children by crossing the border for materials they could live without, or they could protect their children by enduring some hardship. According to regime propaganda, the only way to maintain North Korea’s status as a “COVID-zero” country was to place complete trust in Kim Jong Un and follow his lead.
The logic of public control in COVID-era North Korea, where the top priority was to highlight Kim’s leadership in the midst of the pandemic, was used to justify the hardships that North Koreans had to endure. Numerous people lost their lives in the process, including, as we have seen, the researcher who discovered the scientific basis for positively identifying a person infected with COVID-19.
One Pyongyang resident recalled the dark days of the pandemic as follows: “When the state claimed there were no cases of COVID-19, infected people couldn’t call their condition COVID-19 and had to suffer in silence. It would have been better to die than to go through this physical, mental and financial ordeal.”
Ironically, North Korea officially admitted that COVID-19 had entered the country in May 2022, just six months after the researcher was executed behind closed doors. Then, in July, North Korea claimed that the first place the cases had appeared was in the village of Ipo, in Mt. Kumgang County, Kangwon Province, on the border with South Korea, and linked the cases to a “strange object,” understood to be a propaganda pamphlet flown across the border by balloon. In effect, the North Korean authorities blamed the COVID-19 outbreak on South Korea and attempted to exploit the disease for their own political purposes.
Ideology trumps science. We've been seeing a lot of that.
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