A full-page advertisement that called for the world to hold the Chinese communist regime to account for the COVID-19 pandemic was pulled at the last moment by The New York Times in March 2020. The paper said the ad didn’t meet its standards, but the ad was pulled after it had already passed the paper’s vetting process. The businessman who paid for the ad suspects the paper’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played a role. He only revealed the details of the incident to The Epoch Times earlier this year.
The ad was scheduled to run on March 22, 2020. It was already approved, paid for, and even printed and distributed in some locations when the paper pulled the plug in the middle of the night, preventing the ad from being published in some of the paper’s main markets, including New York and Florida.
The decision was so abrupt that the sales representative responsible for the ad wasn’t informed, and the client only found out the next morning when he couldn’t find the ad in the paper.
The client, Brett Kingstone, is a real estate developer in Florida. He backed up his story with email threads documenting his correspondence with the newspaper as well as images of the contract he signed, details about the payment and subsequent refund of the $55,000 ad fee, and photos of the ad as it ran in some locales.
New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said the ad ran in “an early edition of Sunday’s paper and was removed from all later editions, which account for the vast majority of copies.”
“The ad in question did not meet our standards and should not have appeared in The New York Times,” she told The Epoch Times via email.
She didn’t respond to a question about whether the paper faced any CCP pressure regarding the ad.
“It was removed after being flagged internally by [New York] Times staff,” she said.
By Petr Svab
Read Full Article on TheEpochTimes.com
China Must Pay for the Coronavirus
The CoronaVirus has wreaked havoc on our nation. Thousands of our citizens are now infected, over one hundred are dead and potentially millions will be out of work..…and they all did nothing wrong.
This virus was the direct result of the incompetence and irresponsibility of the Chinese Government. They showed as much disregard for their own population as they have for ours. The Chinese government threatened their own doctors with penalties and even jail time for sounding the alarm about this pending pandemic. They even ordered some of them, including Dr. Li Wenliang, to write public apologies for publishing “false comments”. They should be liable for the damage that they have caused not only to our citizens but to the citizens of all countries that they infected.
For years China has been engaged in a war of theft and plunder of our nation’s intellectual property. They stole technology from our industries. They counterfeited them and sold them back to us with cheap labor, destroying millions of our manufacturing jobs. It is time we hold China accountable not only with high tariffs but by unleashing the power of our legal industry in filing massive liability lawsuits against China. Our judiciary should freeze China’s assets in the United States pending the outcome of these decisions.
Further investigation should be made into the two virus labs in Wuhan that were actively experimenting with CoronaVirus, one located just 280 meters from the wildlife market where the virus started. One of these labs, Wuhan Institute of Virology, even tried to file a patent on a possible treatment for this virus, Remdesivir, which was already patented and manufactured by Gilead Sciences, an American pharmaceutical company. Gilead is also the inventor of the Tamiflu medicine for influenza. Even during this crisis, China is trying to steal our technology in order to profit at our expense.
China is now trying to blame the US government for starting the virus and threatening to withhold supplies of critical medicines. We must hold China accountable in courtrooms throughout the world and demand reparations not only for the money we lost in this pandemic but also for technology stolen from our industries. Our government should organize and support these efforts. It is the only way the American taxpayer will not be held liable for what may be in excess of a trillion dollars of aid and expense programs required to counter this threat to our nation.
