Ai Fen

Director of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, Ai Fen gave an interview to a Chinese magazine in March 2020 after watching several of her colleagues die from Covid-19; the interview was quickly deleted from the magazine’s website and vanished from social media websites, where it had been going viral. Social-media users tried to make the interview harder for government censors to find, translating it into emoji. Ai was censured by officials at her hospital for spreading rumors. “I am not a whistleblower,” she had told the magazine. “I am the one who provided the whistle.”