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| Early in 2020, on the same day that a frightening new illness officially got the name Covid-19, a team of scientists from the United States and China released critical data showing how quickly the virus was spreading, and who was dying. | 2020年初，在一种可怕的新疾病被正式命名为“Covid-19”的同一天，一个由美国和中国科学家组成的团队发布了关键数据，显示该病毒的传播速度以及对哪些人最致命。 |
| The study was cited in health warnings around the world and appeared to be a model of international collaboration in a moment of crisis. | 世界各地发布的健康警告都在援引该研究，它似乎成为了危机时刻国际合作的典范。 |
| Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it. A few observers took note of the peculiar move, but the whole episode quickly faded amid the frenzy of the coronavirus pandemic. | 然而，几天之内，研究人员悄悄撤回了这篇论文，以一条信息取代，告诉科学家们不要引用该论文。一些观察人士注意到了这个异常的举动，但整件事在新冠大流行病的恐慌中很快就消失了。 |
| What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science. That effort kicked up a cloud of dust around the dates of early Covid cases, like those reported in the study. | 现在我们很清楚的是，这项研究并不是因为研究错误而被删除，而是在一项对科学的打压行动中，在中国卫生官员的指示下被删除的。这一努力为早期新冠病例，例如那些该研究提到的病例的出现时间蒙上了一层阴影。 |
| “It was so hard to get any information out of China,” said one of the authors, Ira Longini, of the University of Florida, who described the back story of the removal publicly for the first time in a recent interview. “There was so much covered up, and so much hidden.” | “从中国获得任何信息都很难，”其中一位论文合著者、佛罗里达大学的艾拉·朗吉尼说。他在最近的一次采访中首次公开描述了该研究被撤回背后的故事。“太多信息被掩盖，被隐藏。” |
| That the Chinese government muzzled scientists, hindered international investigations and censored online discussion of the pandemic is well documented. But Beijing’s stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found. | 中国政府让科学家封口、阻碍国际调查，以及对关于大流行病的在线讨论加以审查，这些均有据可查。但北京对信息的控制比许多流行病研究人员所意识到的要更为深入。《纽约时报》的一项调查发现，其审查活动将目标对准国际期刊和科学数据库，动摇了共享科学知识的基础。 |
| Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found. | 中国科学家因政府的压力而隐瞒了数据，从公共数据库中撤回了基因序列，并修改了向期刊提交的论文的关键细节。时报对十几篇被撤回的论文进行审查后发现，西方期刊编辑出于不明原因同意了修改或撤回了论文，从而给这些行为提供了帮助。 |
| Groups including the World Health Organization have given credence to muddled data and inaccurate timelines. | 包括世界卫生组织在内的团体让混乱的数据和不准确的时间线有了可信度。 |
| This scientific censorship has not universally succeeded: The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging. But the campaign starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus at the moment the world needed it most. It bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted. | 这种对科学研究的审查并没有全面奏效：例如，仔细检阅后，仍然可以在网上找到2020年2月论文的原始版本。但这场运动使医生和政策制定者在世界最需要的时候无法获得有关该病毒的关键信息。它在欧洲和美国滋生了对科学的不信任，因为卫生官员引用了来自中国的论文，而这些论文随后被撤回。 |
| The crackdown continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus. | 这场压制行动至今仍在持续滋生错误信息，并阻碍了确定病毒来源的努力。 |
| Such censorship spilled into public view recently, when an international group of scientists discovered genetic sequence data that Chinese researchers had collected from a Wuhan market in January 2020 but withheld from foreign experts for three years — a delay that global health officials called “inexcusable.” | 近日，这样的审查进入了公众视野，一个国际科学家小组发现了中国研究人员于2020年1月从武汉市场收集到的、但对外国专家隐瞒了三年的基因序列数据——全球卫生官员称这一延迟是“不可原谅的”。 |
| The sequences showed that raccoon dogs, a fox-like animal, had deposited genetic signatures in the same place that genetic material from the virus was left, a finding consistent with a scenario in which the virus spread to people from illegally traded market animals. | 序列显示，在病毒基因物质留存的同一位置发现了一种类似狐狸的动物貉留下的基因特征，这一发现与病毒从市场上非法交易的动物传播给人类的情况相符。 |
| The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment. At a news conference this month, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention called such criticism “intolerable.” | 中国驻华盛顿大使馆没有回应置评请求。在本月的新闻发布会上，中国疾控中心的科学家称这种批评是“无法容忍的”。 |
| It is impossible to ascribe a single motive to the crackdown. Beijing controls and shapes information as a matter of course, particularly in moments of crisis. But some of the censorship changed the timeline of early infections, a delicate topic as the government faced criticism over whether it responded to the outbreak quickly enough. | 几乎无法将这种信息压制归咎于单一动机。对北京来说，控制和塑造信息是理所当然的事，尤其是在危机时刻。但一些审查改变了早期感染的时间线，早期的感染是一个敏感话题，因为中国政府在应对疫情是否足够迅速方面面临批评。 |
| There is no evidence that the censorship is designed to conceal a specific scenario for the origins of the pandemic. Some scientists believe that Covid-19 spread naturally from animals to humans. Others argue that it may have spread from a Chinese laboratory. Both sides have pointed to censored data to support their theories. | 没有证据表明审查制度旨在掩盖大流行起源的某个场景。一些科学家认为，新冠从动物自然传播到人类。另一些人则认为可能是从中国实验室传播的。双方都指向那些被审查的数据以支持他们的理论。 |
| But they have come to agree on one point: The Chinese government’s grip on science has stifled the search for truth. | 但他们在一点上达成了一致：中国政府对科学的控制扼杀了对真相的探索。 |
| “I think there’s a major political agenda that is impacting the science,” said Edward Holmes, a University of Sydney biologist who was part of the group that analyzed the sequences containing raccoon dog DNA. | “我认为有一个严重的政治议程正在影响科学，”悉尼大学生物学家爱德华·霍姆斯说，他是分析了含有貉DNA序列的小组的成员。 |
| Soon after the group alerted Chinese researchers to their findings, the genetic sequences temporarily disappeared from a global database. “It’s just pathetic that we’re in this stage where we’re having cloak-and-dagger conversations about deleted data,” Dr. Holmes said. | 该小组将他们的发现告知中国研究人员，不久后这些基因序列一度从全球数据库中消失。霍姆斯表示：“我们在偷偷摸摸讨论被删除的数据，走到这一步实在是可悲。” |
| Ever-Changing Dates | 不断变化的日期 |
| For a brief moment, the coronavirus appeared to challenge China’s notoriously tough hold on information. On Feb. 6, 2020, when averting a pandemic still seemed possible, the Chinese internet lit up with the death of Li Wenliang, a Wuhan doctor who had been punished for warning about the outbreak before falling ill himself. | 在一段短暂的时期里，新冠病毒似乎挑战了中国臭名昭著的严格信息控制。2020年2月6日，当避免一场大流行似乎仍有可能的时候，中国互联网因李文亮去世的消息而沸腾了。李文亮是一名武汉医生，在生病前因就疫情发出警告而受到惩罚。 |
| Anger boiled over. People sensed that officials had withheld lifesaving information. Across China, they asked: How many had caught the virus in December? Who had known? Why hadn’t more been done? | 愤怒爆发了。人们感觉到官员在隐瞒能拯救生命的信息。在中国各地，人们质问：有多少人在12月感染了病毒？谁知道这些情况？为什么没有采取更多措施？ |
| Around that time, researchers confirmed that the virus had been spreading for weeks from human to human, a fact that Chinese officials had initially dismissed. | 大约在那个时候，研究人员证实，这种病毒已经在人与人之间传播了数周，中国官员最初否认了这一事实。 |
| The Chinese government reacted by tightening online censorship and wresting control of research. The censorship was piecemeal at first. The Ministry of Science and Technology told scientists to prioritize handling the outbreak, not publishing papers. One European scientist recalled his Chinese collaborators asking him to sign a nondisclosure agreement promising not to share data — on research that had already been published. | 中国政府的反应是加强网络审查，并夺取对研究的控制权。起初的审查是零散的。科技部要求科学家优先处理疫情，而不是发表论文。一位欧洲科学家回忆道，他的中国合作者要求他签署一份保密协议，承诺不分享已经发表的研究数据。 |
| Soon, Chinese researchers were asking journals to retract their work. Journals can withdraw papers for a number of legitimate reasons, like flawed data. But a review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers and how widely the virus had spread — topics that could make the government look bad. The retracted papers reviewed by The Times had been flagged by Retraction Watch, a group that tracks withdrawn research. | 很快，中国研究人员要求期刊撤下自己的论文。期刊可以出于一些合理的原因撤回论文，比如有缺陷的数据。但是，对来自中国的十几篇撤回论文的回顾显示，中国存在一种模式，即修改或压制有关早期病例、医务工作者条件及病毒传播范围的研究——这些话题可能会有损政府形象。时报审查的撤稿论文都已经被追踪撤稿研究的组织“撤稿观察”标记出来。 |
| Among them were a study that included infected children in southern China; a survey of depression and anxiety among Chinese medical workers who had been treating Covid-19 patients; and even a letter published in The Lancet Global Health by two nurses who described the desperation they felt while working in hospitals in Wuhan. | 其中包括对中国南方受感染儿童的研究；对治疗新冠患者的中国医务人员抑郁和焦虑情况的调查；甚至还有两名护士在《柳叶刀全球健康》上发表的一封信，描述了她们在武汉医院工作时的绝望。 |
| “Even experienced nurses may also cry,” they wrote. | “即使是经验丰富的护士也会哭，”她们写道。 |
| Journals are typically slow to retract papers, even when they are shown to be fraudulent or unethical. But in China, the calculus is different, said Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch. Journals that want to sell subscriptions in China or publish Chinese research often bend to the government’s demands. “Scientific publishers have really gone out of their way to placate the censorship requests,” he said. | 期刊撤回论文的速度通常很慢，即使它们被证明存在欺诈或有违伦理。但“撤稿观察”的创始人之一伊万·奥兰斯基说，在中国，情况有所不同。想要在中国征订或发表中国研究成果的期刊往往屈从于政府的要求。他说：“科学出版商确实竭尽全力去取悦审查要求。” |
| As the virus spread, China formalized its controls. A government task force was put in charge of all coronavirus research. Officials in the eastern province of Zhejiang discussed “strengthening the management” of scientific results, records show. | 随着病毒的传播，中国采取了固定的信息控制措施，将所有的新冠病毒研究纳入一个政府工作组的统一管理。有记载显示，浙江省的官员讨论了“加强科研成果信息发布管理”。 |
| Then on March 9, scientists from top Chinese laboratories published a paper about how the coronavirus might be mutating. The research appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, a prestigious journal published by Oxford University Press. | 在那之后的3月9日，来自中国顶级实验室的科学家们发表了一篇关于新冠病毒可能如何变异的论文。这项研究发表在牛津大学出版社旗下的著名期刊《临床传染病》上。 |
| The topic was seemingly apolitical, but it relied on samples collected from patients in Wuhan starting in mid-December 2019. That added to evidence that the virus was spreading widely before the Chinese government took action. | 虽然这个研究课题看似与政治无关，但它用的是从2019年12月中旬起从武汉患者身上采集的样本。这进一步证明了新冠病毒在中国政府采取行动之前就已经广泛传播。 |
| The paper landed just as the government formalized its censorship policy. The following day, China’s Ministry of Education ordered universities to submit research topics to the government task force for approval, according to a directive posted on a university’s website. | 这篇论文出来时正是政府将审查政策正规化之际。第二天，据出现在一所大学网站上的通知，中国教育部要求高等学校如要发表研究信息需提交政府工作组审核同意。 |
| Those who did not vet their scientific projects or who caused “serious adverse social impacts” would be punished, the directive said. | 通知说，未按规定报批或造成“严重不良社会影响的”科研人员将受到惩罚。 |
| The move sent a chill through Chinese science. Schools tightened restrictions on faculty media interviews and instructed professors to comply with the directive, university notices show. | 此举令中国科学界不寒而栗。大学网站上的信息显示，学校加强了对教学人员接受媒体采访的限制，并发通知要求教授按照教育部的规定去做。 |
| The journal retractions continued, and for unusual reasons. | 从期刊上撤稿仍在继续，而且原因不同寻常。 |
| One group of authors noted that “our data is not perfect enough.” Another warned that its paper “cannot be used as the basis for the origin and evolution of SARS-CoV-2.” A third said its findings were “incomplete and not ready for publication.” Several scientists promised in retraction notices to update their findings but never did. | 一个作者团队给出的原因是，“我们的数据还不够完善。”另一团队警告，其论文“不能作为SARS-CoV-2起源和演化的依据”。第三个团队表示，其研究结果“不完整，还没有准备要发表”。有几名科学家在撤稿声明中承诺更新他们的研究结果，但一直没有那样做。 |
| Because Chinese scientists have been muzzled, it is difficult to neatly distinguish between censored papers and those retracted for legitimate scientific reasons. | 因为中国科学家被封口，所以很难清楚地区分哪些论文撤稿是因为审查，哪些是出于正当合理的科学原因。 |
| The censorship helped the government tell a story. | 这些审查帮助了政府的叙事。 |
| “China emerged from the pandemic as an early winner,” said Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at Seton Hall University. “They started to present a new narrative on the outbreak, in terms of not just the origin, but also in terms of the government’s role in responding to the pandemic.” | “中国很早就以优胜者的形象走出了大流行，”西顿霍尔大学全球卫生专家黄严忠说。“他们开始对疫情做出新的叙事，不仅从病毒起源的角度，而且从政府应对大流行的作用的角度。” |
| Two months after posting the paper on coronavirus mutations, Clinical Infectious Diseases published an update. The new version said that the Wuhan samples were not collected in December after all, but weeks later, in January. | 在发表了有关新冠病毒变异的论文两个月后，《临床传染病》刊登了一个更新。更新的版本称，武汉的病毒样本总归不是2019年12月采集的，而是在几周后的次年1月采集的。 |
| The paper’s corresponding author, Li Mingkun of the Beijing Institute of Genomics, did not respond to requests for comment. | 该论文的通讯作者、北京基因组研究所的李明锟没有回应置评请求。 |
| After Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle tweeted about the discrepancy, the journal’s editors posted a third version of the paper, adding yet another timeline. This revision says the samples were collected between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1. | 西雅图弗雷德·哈钦森癌症中心的杰西·布鲁姆在Twitter上指出了这个差异后，期刊编辑发布了这篇论文的第三个版本，添加了又一个时间线。这次修改称，样本的采集时间是12月30日至1月1日。 |
| A correction merely says that the previous dates had been “unclear.” | 该期刊刊登的更正只是说之前的日期“不明确”。 |
| In an email to The Times, the journal editors said the correction was “the most appropriate approach to clarify the scientific record.” | 该期刊的编辑在发给时报的一封电子邮件中写道，发表更正是“澄清科学记录的最合适做法”。 |
| An Origin Mystery | 起源之谜 |
| Chinese scientists ignored requests for years to release information about swabs taken from surfaces at the Wuhan market. That refusal has hindered efforts to determine how the pandemic began. | 中国科学家多年来一直不理睬外界提出的公布从武汉市场各个表面采集的样本信息的要求。这种拒绝阻碍了明确大流行起源的努力。 |
| Dr. Holmes, the University of Sydney biologist, said that as far back as two years ago, he stressed to Chinese researchers the importance of those samples. He even sent them a raccoon dog genome sequence, hoping they would compare it with samples from the market. The researchers did not make the data public until this year. | 悉尼大学生物学家霍姆斯表示，早在两年前，他就向中国研究人员强调了这些样本的重要性。他甚至将貉的基因组序列发给了他们，希望他们能用这个基因组序列与市场上采集的样本进行比较。研究人员直到今年才将数据公开。 |
| The World Health Organization, the supposed repository for reliable information about the virus, has only added to confusion about the pandemic’s origins. After errors were found in a major March 2021 report from the organization and China, an agency spokesman, Tarik Jasarevic, promised that officials would correct the mistakes. | 世界卫生组织本应是有关该病毒的可靠信息存放处，但它反而增加了人们对大流行起源的困惑。人们在2021年3月来自世卫组织和中国的一份重要报告中发现了一些错误后，世卫组织发言人塔里克·亚沙雷维奇曾承诺，官员们将纠正这些错误。 |
| Two years later, they have not. The flawed report remains online, painting an inaccurate timeline of the earliest known cases. Mr. Jasarevic now refers questions about the report to the scientists who prepared it. | 两年过去了，他们并没有纠正。那份存在错误的报告仍在网上，继续提供一个不准确的最早已知病例时间表。亚沙雷维奇现在把有关报告的问题送交给那些拟定报告的科学家们来回答。 |
| “That’s a deep and in many ways unforgivable mystery, when the data were demonstrated to be false,” said Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and a longtime W.H.O. adviser. “It either shows that W.H.O. wasn’t insistent enough with China, or that China simply didn’t cooperate.” | “当数据被证明不正确时，那是一个很大的、在许多方面都无法原谅的谜，”乔治城大学奥尼尔国家和全球卫生法研究所所长劳伦斯·戈斯汀说，他长期担任世卫组织的顾问。“这要么表明世卫组织对中国的要求不够坚决，要么表明中国根本就不合作。” |
| Some scientists have become similarly suspicious that China’s censorship has affected the genetic databases that underpin worldwide research. | 一些科学家也同样怀疑，中国的审查制度影响了支撑全球研究的基因数据库。 |
| Dr. Bloom, the Seattle evolutionary virologist, was poring over tables in a scientific paper in June 2021 when he discovered that dozens of gene sequences had been deleted from the Sequence Read Archive, a U.S. government database. The sequences, from early 2020, had been submitted by scientists from Wuhan University. But they had curiously vanished. | 2021年6月，西雅图的病毒演化专家布鲁姆在研读一篇科学论文中的表格时，发现数十个基因序列已从美国政府的数据库Sequence Read Archive中被删除。这些来自2020年初的序列由武汉大学科学家提交，但后来奇怪地消失了。 |
| The U.S. government’s National Library of Medicine, which manages the database, said at the time that the Wuhan researchers had asked that the sequences be withdrawn — and implied that it was the only instance during the pandemic in which data was removed at the request of scientists in China. | 管理该数据库的是美国政府的国家医学图书馆，它当时表示，这些序列是武汉的研究人员要求撤回的，并暗示，在大流行期间应中国科学家要求删除数据仅此一例。 |
| But a March 2022 review by an outside consultant showed that the scientists withdrew another, unrelated sequence on the same day. After Dr. Bloom published a paper about the deleted Wuhan University sequences, they reappeared online — but most had been moved to a database affiliated with the Chinese government. | 但一名外部顾问2022年3月的审查显示，武汉的科学家们在同一天撤回了另一组不相关的序列。在布鲁姆博士发表了一篇关于被删除的武汉大学序列的论文后，它们重新出现在网上——但大部分已被转移到与一个中国政府有关联的数据库中。 |
| This controversy and the recent dust-up over the discovered-then-deleted-then-recovered raccoon dog DNA from a separate database have prompted calls for transparency from these genetic archives. | 这个争议，以及最近有关另一个数据库中发现、删除然后又恢复的貉DNA引发的争吵促使人们呼吁这些基因数据库保持透明。 |
| Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said all pandemic-related sequences should be released to global health experts, particularly from early samples. “Among people who were sick in December, we have less than 20 sequences,” she said. (The National Library of Medicine said that sharing withdrawn data was against its policy.) | 法国国家科学研究中心的进化生物学家维尔日妮·库尔捷-奥尔戈戈佐表示，所有与大流行相关的序列都应该向全球卫生专家公开，尤其是早期样本的序列。“我们只有来自2019年12月的患者的不到20个序列，”她说。（国家医学图书馆表示，共享撤回的数据违反其政策。） |
| The Chinese government’s grip on science continues. | 中国政府对科学研究的控制仍在继续。 |
| The laboratory of a Chinese scientist who studies the wildlife trade was recently shuttered while the authorities investigated unfounded concerns that its research related to the origins of the pandemic, according to a scientist outside China who collaborated on the work. | 一名研究野生动物贸易的中国科学家的实验室最近被关闭，当局毫无根据地担心这个实验室的研究与大流行病的起源有关，正在对其进行调查，据一名参与该研究的境外科学家表示。 |
| On April 1, Beijing limited foreign access to the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, an academic portal, curtailing insight into research there. Leaders have urged Chinese scientists to publish in domestic journals rather than international publications. | 今年4月1日，中国政府对从海外访问学术门户网站中国知网进行了限制，限制了外界对那里的学术成果的了解。领导人敦促中国科学家把研究论文发表在国内期刊上，而不是国际出版物上。 |
| And this month, Chinese government scientists said it was time to start investigating outside China for the virus’s origins. | 本月，中国政府的科学家表示，是时候开始在中国境外调查新冠病毒的起源了。 |
| It was a nod to the widely refuted claim that the pandemic began somewhere else. | 这是对受到广泛驳斥的大流行源于其他地方这一说法的认同。 |
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