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A group of frontline medical workers, likely exhausted, stand huddled together on a video-conference call as China's most powerful man raises his hand in greeting. It is February 10 in Beijing and President Xi Jinping, who for weeks has been absent from public view, is addressing hospital staff in the city of Wuhan as they battle to contain the spread of a still officially unnamed novel coronavirus. (Walsh, 12/1)

Leaked documents from China show the country mishandled the early COVID-19 pandemic through misleading public data and three-week delays in test results, CNN reported Monday. A whistleblower, who worked in the Chinese health care system, provided 117 pages of internal documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to CNN. (Coleman, 11/30)

China has provided North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his family with an experimental coronavirus vaccine, a U.S. analyst said on Tuesday, citing two unidentified Japanese intelligence sources. Harry Kazianis, a North Korea expert at the Center for the National Interest think tank in Washington, said the Kims and several senior North Korean officials had been vaccinated. (Shin, 11/30 )

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled a 40% increase in the number of people needing humanitarian assistance around the globe, the United Nations said on Tuesday, as it appealed for roughly $35 billion to help many of those expected to be in need next year. “If everyone who will need humanitarian aid next year lived in one country, it would be the world’s fifth largest nation,” U.N. aid chief Mark Lowcock said. (Nichols, 12/1)