Last Updated on March 1, 2021
The Japanese government has asked China to stop directing its officials to perform COVID anal swab tests on Japanese, citing “great psychological pain” and “distress” caused by the humiliating and invasive procedure.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told reporters Monday that “Some Japanese reported to our embassy in China that they received anal swab tests, which caused a great psychologial pain.”
Kato added that the use of anal swabs to detect COVID “has not been confirmed anywhere else in the world,” and noted that the Japanese government would continue to pressure China to halt anal swabbing of Japanese until an affirmative response is received from Beijing.
As National File reported last month, the Chinese government has taken to forcibly swabbing the anuses of Biden State Department officials, prompting the Biden administration to beg China to halt the “undignified” procedure:
The Chinese government forcibly anally swabbed U.S. diplomatic officials as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s new Covid testing protocols “in error,” prompting Joe Biden’s U.S. State Department to beg China to stop violating the “dignity” of Biden officials.
VICE and the Washington Post were among the first outlets to report the story, in which China originally promised to stop anally swabbing State Department officials after complaints from the Biden administration, but has now reversed course and denied forcibly applying the test in the first place.
“The State Department never agreed to this kind of testing and protested directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when we learned that some staff were subject to it,” a spokesperson from Biden’s State Department reported to VICE on Wednesday.
According to Chinese health guidelines, anal swabs are inserted up to five inches deep in the rectum, and then rotated for maximum effect before removal.
