North Korea has long claimed that it defeated the Covid-19 pandemic without vaccines, losing only 74 lives in what it called “a miracle unprecedented in the world’s public health history.” But a report released on Tuesday said the government lied and left many of its people to die without proper health care or access to outside help.
As the pandemic raged, the already woeful economic and public health conditions of ordinary North Koreans rapidly worsened as a result of their government’s efforts, especially in the first two years, to deny that the virus was spreading, according to a report compiled by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and the George W. Bush Institute. Pyongyang’s repeated rejections of international help and its draconian crackdown on the movement of people made their suffering worse, the report said.
The authors said their report was based on rare interviews with 100 people inside isolated North Korea — conducted by an outside intermediary that engaged them in “casual, in-person conversations.” Their findings provide a rare glimpse into the scale of human distress inside the country during the pandemic. One woman interviewed for the report said that there were so many deaths in nursing homes in the winter of 2020 that “there weren’t enough coffins.”
“Deaths and suffering due to suspected Covid-19 cases were widespread in North Korea starting in 2020,” well before it reported its first outbreak in May 2022, the report said.
“The government’s negligence was nothing short of abominable,” it noted.
Citizens had virtually no access to vaccines, no antiviral medications, and minimal supply of personal protective equipment, although they had been available globally for more than a year, the report said. Nearly 90 of the 100 interviewees said they had not been tested for Covid. Nearly 40 reported not having received a vaccine during the pandemic. And 92 said they suspected that they or people they knew had been infected, though there was no way to be sure.
Local health officials misreported Covid deaths and diagnoses because of fear of punishment for not aligning with the government’s claim that there were no cases, it said. So did citizens, because reporting that they were sick did not bring help from the government but rather forced detention or even collective lockdowns, either of which would have worsened already-acute food shortages.
“This resulted in a doubling of misinformation whereby the government and citizenry each lied to the other, creating further spread of the pandemic,” the report said.
When the virus began spreading globally in early 2020, North Korea shut its borders and ordered troops to shoot to kill anyone trying to cross them. It reported “zero cases” of the virus until it admitted to an outbreak in May 2022. But three months after that, North Korean state media declared a “brilliant victory” in “exterminating” the virus, thanking its leader, Kim Jong-un, for “his death-defying will for the people’s happiness and well-being.”
Some nations like China helped contain infections, at least initially, by closing borders and enforcing lockdowns, as North Korea tried to. But experts outside North Korea have long cast doubt on the North’s pandemic-beating claims, in part because it lacked testing kits and laboratories to accurately track a major outbreak. They have warned that the pandemic provided Mr. Kim with excuses to tighten surveillance and control on his people even as his pandemic-related crackdown was bound to worsen the scarcity of food and medicine.
The report by the U.S. research groups said that the interviews took place in the second half of 2023 through “an organization that has a successful track record of managing discrete and careful questionnaires in North Korea.” Several nongovernmental groups, some of them run by defectors from the North, gather information through informants inside North Korea.
The interviewees’ accounts could not be independently verified in the famously closed-off country, but the assessment that the North’s government shirked its responsibility echoed findings in a human rights report published by the South Korean government last year.
That report, based on the accounts of recent North Korean defectors, said that when North Korea began vaccinating pockets of its population starting in June 2022, health officials told them to thank Mr. Kim’s generosity because they said the vaccine “cost as much as a cow.”
Mr. Kim’s regime sought to use the pandemic as political propaganda, the report by the two U.S. research institutes also indicated. Interviewees reported that state media reports often emphasized how bad outbreaks were in other countries, while claiming that North Korea was safe thanks to Mr. Kim’s leadership. After finally admitting to an outbreak, North Korea accused South Korea of spreading the virus across the border.
More than one-third of the 100 interviewees still believed that South Korea sent the virus to their country, the report said.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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