Chinese Communist Party officials have begun to cast doubt on the origins of the coronavirus outbreak, which generated backlash from Washington.
“This is the Wuhan coronavirus,” Pompeo said during a televised interview on Friday. “It has proven incredibly frustrating to work with the Chinese Communist Party to get our hands around the data set, which will ultimately be the solution to both getting the vaccine and attacking this risk.”
That rebuke continues a diplomatic dispute that has percolated ever since the contagion came into the public eye as Chinese officials have tried to avoid any geopolitical backlash. With more than 100,000 confirmed cases globally, Beijing’s envoys are raising questions about whether the outbreak actually began in Wuhan, a major city in China’s Hubei province.
“No conclusion has been reached yet on the origin of the virus, as relevant tracing work is still underway,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday. “By calling it ‘China virus’ and thus suggesting its origin without any supporting facts or evidence, some media clearly want China to take the blame, and their ulterior motives are laid bare.”
Pompeo dismissed such complaints Friday. “No less authority than the Chinese Communist Party said it came from Wuhan,” he said in a separate televised interview.
China alerted the World Health Organization to the emergence of the virus in early January, with local health officials tying the outbreak to a seafood market in the city. Wuhan’s mayor soon apologized for failing to share information about the outbreak quickly, but senior Chinese officials pivoted to touting the rapid quarantine of roughly 50 million people as a testament to the strength of their political system.
“China’s speed, scale, and efficiency all reflect the advantage of China’s system,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi insisted last month.
Those comments were belied by rebukes from academics and dissidents in mainland China who faulted the government for censoring the early warnings about the outbreak. “If every citizen was allowed to practice their right to voice the truth, we would not be in such a mess. We would not have a national catastrophe with an international impact,” a classics professor in Wuhan wrote in an open letter last month.
Pompeo, who said last week that the virus had exposed a “governance issue … namely, censorship” that causes perennial problems, returned to that theme Friday.
“We have pretty high confidence that we know where this began, and we have high confidence too that there was information that could have been made available more quickly and data that could have been provided and shared among health professionals across the world,” he said. “It’s most unfortunate.”
