As the World Health Organization publicly praised the Chinese Communist Party’s response to the coronavirus, its leaders privately complained among themselves in January about China’s delays and lack of transparency, internal documents and recordings show.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that it obtained recordings from January which “suggest” “WHO officials were lauding China in public because they wanted to coax more information out of the government,” and “privately, they complained in meetings the week of Jan. 6 that China was not sharing enough data to assess how effectively the virus spread between people, or what risk it posed to the rest of the world, costing valuable time.”
“This is yet another troubling report on the ongoing cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party that led to the global spread of COVID-19,” Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the chairman of the House’s China Task Force, told the Washington Examiner. “As more information continues to be uncovered, it’s becoming crystal clear the CCP withheld vital information on this virus that started within its borders, costing the world precious time and countless lives.”
The recordings show Dr. Michael Ryan, the WHO’s chief of emergencies, told other WHO officials in the second week of January that they should “shift gears” and push China to be more transparent, concerned that China might cover up the novel coronavirus in 2020 the same way it covered up the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak that began in China back in 2002.
“This is exactly the same scenario, endlessly trying to get updates from China about what was going on,” Ryan said. “WHO barely got out of that one with its neck intact given the issues that arose around transparency in southern China … We need to see the data … It’s absolutely important at this point.”
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Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, admitted in January that “we’re going on very minimal information” from China and that “it’s clearly not enough for you to do proper planning.”
Dr. Gauden Galea, the WHO’s top official in China, lamented that the organization was only finding out about important coronavirus developments from China about the same time that they were blasted out by Chinese state-run outlets, noting that “we’re currently at the stage where, yes, they’re giving it to us 15 minutes before it appears on CCTV.”
There is evidence that China covered up the coronavirus’s spread, muzzled whistleblowers, intimidated doctors, misled the WHO, and blocked outside health experts. Studies indicated that if China had acted faster, the global spread would’ve been greatly reduced. It was reported that China knew about late December that human-to-human transmission was occurring, but on Jan. 14, the WHO tweeted that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the WHO have repeatedly praised China’s coronavirus response.
The Associated Press noted that the Chinese government delayed releasing the full genome of the coronavirus for over a week after three different labs had mapped it out and cited “tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system” as the main culprits. The recordings suggest the Chinese government then delayed giving the WHO the details about patients and cases. The outlet also reported that this was “all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed.”
On Friday, President Trump declared that China “has total control over” the WHO. “Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship” with them, he said.
The Associated Press reported the information they unearthed “does not support the narrative of either the U.S. or China, but instead portrays an agency now stuck in the middle that was urgently trying to solicit more data despite limits to its own authority,” and “the recordings suggest that rather than colluding with China, as Trump declared, WHO was kept in the dark as China gave it the minimal information required by law” but that “the agency did try to portray China in the best light, likely as a means to secure more information.”
