"When police arrested the middle-aged Uighur woman at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak... she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous..."

"... guards watching as she gulped. She and the others also had to strip naked once a week and cover their faces as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant 'like firemen,' she said. 'It was scalding,' recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. '“My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.'... [I]n what experts call a breach of medical ethics, some residents [of the Xinjiang region] are being coerced into swallowing traditional Chinese medicine.... There is a lack of rigorous clinical data showing traditional Chinese medicine works against the virus, and one of the herbal remedies used in Xinjiang, Qingfei Paidu, includes ingredients banned in Germany, Switzerland, the U.S. and other countries for high levels of toxins and carcinogens.... [T]he Xinjiang lockdown is especially striking because of its severity, and because there hasn’t been a single new case of local transmission in over a week.... Even as Wuhan and the rest of China has mostly returned to ordinary life, Xinjiang’s lockdown is backed by a vast surveillance apparatus that has turned the region into a digital police state... 'Xinjiang is a police state, so it’s basically martial law,' says Darren Byler, a researcher on the Uighurs at the University of Colorado. 'They think Uighurs can’t really police themselves, they have to be forced to comply in order for a quarantine to be effective.'... In March, the World Health Organization removed guidance on its site saying that herbal remedies were not effective against the virus and could be harmful, saying it was 'too broad.'"

From "In China’s Xinjiang, forced medication accompanies lockdown" (AP).