Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said officials need to “get to the bottom” of what happened in China with the outbreak of the coronavirus, or it could happen again.
Pompeo spoke with Fox News’s Sean Hannity Wednesday night and warned that transparency on China’s part is needed, and the “disinformation campaign” from the communist country has caused the world to suffer.
Hannity asked, “Mr. Secretary, are you — do you believe now that the information, which could be valuable to the rest of the world, we can get information that would be helpful at this point — do you believe that information is accurate that they’re sending over now?”
Pompeo said that “this is one of the most important questions” but added that officials “have had an incredibly difficult time getting professional medical people in” China.
“You’ll recall early on we offered to have America’s finest experts travel there to assist them, to assist the World Health Organization,” Pompeo answered. “We weren’t permitted in. These are the kind of things that the Chinese Communist Party has done that have put the world and the world’s people at risk.”
He continued, “They haven’t been sufficiently transparent, and the risk, Sean, that you find, if we don’t get this right, if we don’t get to the bottom of this, is this could — this could be something that’s repeatable. Maybe not in this form, maybe not in this way, but transparency matters.”
Hannity asked Pompeo at the start of the interview to elaborate on his meeting with Chinese officials to discuss the country’s attempt to blame the U.S. military for the spread of the virus.
“We did, in fact, call on the Chinese ambassador, and I spoke to my counterpart in China a couple days back,” Pompeo answered.
“This disinformation campaign, which began when we began to call out this, this risk that was created, not only for the Chinese people, but now we can see people all across the world, where the Chinese government knew about this risk, had identified it, they were the first to know, and they wasted valuable days at the front-end, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to leave Wuhan to go to places like Italy that’s now suffering so badly,” he continued.
