Former Chinese CDC Director Gao Fu Removed from His Official Post

Gao Fu, former director of the China Centers for Disease Control, speaks during a State Council Information Office press conference in Beijing, China on Jan. 26, 2020. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

On Nov. 30, the same day that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced the death of former party leader Jiang Zemin, the State Council announced the removal of Gao Fu, deputy director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and former director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and two other officials.

Officials at the NSFC, which is under the direct jurisdiction of the CCP’s State Council, usually serve a five-year term.  Gao’s term began in 2018 and is not yet completed. The official reason for his dismissal was not published.

Gao holds a Ph.D. in pathogenic microbiology and immunology from the University of Oxford, and did postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School before returning to Oxford to teach.

In addition to being an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Gao is a foreign member of: the American Academy of Sciences, the Royal College of Science, and the Russian Academy of Sciences; and a member of: the National Academy of Medicine, the International Academy of Eurasian Sciences, and the German National Academy of Sciences.

In 2004, the CAS appointed Gao as director of the Institute of Microbiology, his first position after returning to China from abroad. The vice president of CAS at the time was Jiang Zemin’s eldest son, Jiang Mianheng, who  joined the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993 and served as its vice president for 12 years from 1999 to 2011.

In 2008, Gao served as vice president of the Beijing Institute of Life Sciences and director of the Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microorganisms and Immunology at CAS, then as president of the Cunji School of Medicine at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, and as director of the CDC in 2017.

Independent writer Zhuge Mingyang told The Epoch Times on Dec. 7 that Nov. 30 was the day the Chinese regime announced that Jiang Zemin had died. Gao Fu, had been promoted by Jiang’s family for many years, and was removed from his post that same day, which may indicate an interesting connection.

Five months ago, on July 26, China’s CDC held a meeting to announce that Gao Fu would no longer serve as director of the CDC due to his age.

However, Gao is only 61, a relatively young age for a CCP official, and there are many older people still in office.

U.S.-based China expert and political commentator Li Yanming told The Epoch Times that The National Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention and the National CDC have been taken over by Xi Jinping’s camp, Gao’s early removal from his post means that those behind him may also be the target of a purge.

Gao Fu Controversies

Gao has made several controversial statements about the COVID-19 outbreak and China’s pandemic control measures.

In March 2019, during a meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Gao said, “People often ask me,  it’s been more than a decade since the outbreak of SARS came to an end, will it come back in the future?  I’m confident that an incident like SARS  will not happen again because our country has a well-developed infectious disease surveillance system, preventing this kind of incident from happening again.”

On Jan. 19, 2020, Gao’s subordinate, Li Gang, director of the Wuhan CDC, told reporters at a press conference that “the outbreak [of the novel coronavirus] is preventable and controllable … The possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continuous human-to-human transmission is low.”

However, in an interview with Chinese state media CGTN in April of the same year, Gao said he had never said there was “no human-to-human transmission” and dodged the blame completely.

On Jan. 29, 2020, Gao, and other authors, published an online article in the American medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine titled, “Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China, of Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia,” that said, “there is evidence that human-to-human transmission has occurred among close contacts since the middle of December 2019.”

The CCP did not publicly acknowledge the existence of human-to-human transmission of the virus until Jan. 20, 2020. The statement in the article caused an uproar, with netizens accusing Gao and the CDC of keeping the evidence of human-to-human transmission a secret. Gao explained later that his conclusion was a “retrospective analysis” based on data available to him at a later point.

In an interview with China’s Financial Times magazine last April, a reporter asked Gao how he would rate himself on his response to the virus outbreak. Gao said, “I would give myself a perfect score.”

In a video that went viral on social media on April 21 of this year, Gao was shown walking down the hallway of a building, with several female reporters chasing him and asking questions. It was the time when Shanghai was under city-wide lockdown, and one reporter asked about the “epidemic control in the recent two months.” Gao scratched his head in embarrassment, then ran away and said, “I am tied up with something else.”

On June 15, 2021, two U.S. Republican representatives introduced the World Deserves To Know Act, calling for President Joe Biden to impose sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on top Chinese officials and health agency officials responsible for concealing the virus outbreak, including on Gao Fu as the former CDC Director.