Crime against humanity

“Excuse me, does anybody really believe this number?” Trump asked.

Birx said Trump was right to distrust China’s figures.

“I put China on there so you could see how basically unrealistic this could be,” Birx said, adding, “That’s why we keep coming back to how important in a pandemic, in a new disease, it’s really critical to have that level of transparency, because it changes how we work as a nation.”

Birx emphasized that “when you are the first country to have an outbreak, you really have a moral obligation to the world to not only talk about it, but provide that information that’s critical to the rest of the world to really respond to this credibly.”

She made clear that China had failed to live up to its responsibility and that it had cost the United States and the rest of the world.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has also pointed to China’s concealment of the true deadliness of the coronavirus as part of the reason why he didn’t immediately realize that the disease was his “worst nightmare.”

The U.S. intelligence community believes that China misled the world about the outbreak early on and that it continues to lie about its number of coronavirus cases and death toll. Wuhan, the massive capital of China’s Hubei province, with a population of more than 11 million people, became ground zero for the novel coronavirus outbreak, which soon became a global pandemic. U.S. spy agencies are investigating whether the pandemic may have originated in a Wuhan government lab through an accidental escape or inadvertent infection, rather than at a wildlife market, or “wet market,” as has been widely speculated.

Dozens of Chinese doctors, journalists, and whistleblowers attempted to raise the alarm in December and January but were silenced or intimidated by Chinese authorities. There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, misled the World Health Organization, kicked out journalists, and attempted to block outside health experts. It should’ve been clear that the coronavirus was highly contagious in December, but the Chinese government worked to bury that.

One study by the University of Southampton found that if China had acted “one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier,” then cases in the country “could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively — significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.”

Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, condemned China’s leadership, telling the Washington Examiner that “the best case you can make for Xi Jinping is that he was reckless, but whether it was reckless or deliberately malevolent, it doesn’t really matter — China is responsible for what happened.”

“China took two main actions: From about the middle of December until Jan. 20, it tried to mislead about human-to-human transmission, and at the same time, it tried to pressure other countries not to put travel bans on China,” Chang said. “You put those two together, and it is either reckless or malevolent. The result of their two actions is they took an epidemic in China and turned it into a global pandemic. And if we don’t hold them responsible, it will happen again.”

The timeline of events bears this out.

The South China Post reviewed purported Chinese government documents that suggested a man contracted COVID-19 as early as Nov. 17, but most of the earliest known cases were detected in early and mid-December.

Wuhan Central Hospital got its first coronavirus patient on Dec. 16, according to an interview Dr. Ai Fen gave to the Wall Street Journal. China’s CDC Weekly would note that Chinese doctors began tracking “a cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause” that “occurred in Wuhan” on Dec. 21.

Another coronavirus patient with similar symptoms arrived at the Wuhan Central Hospital on Dec. 27, and by the next day, the hospital had seven unexplained pneumonia-like cases, including four connected to the wet market. On Dec. 29, Ai warned the hospital’s leadership about the contagious virus, and the hospital warned China’s local CDC.

Ai received lab results on Dec. 30 that warned of a SARS-like coronavirus, and she sent a photo of the results along with a video of a patient lung scan to a former classmate. Dr. Li Wenliang, another doctor at the hospital, posted a warning on WeChat that afternoon, warning of “confirmed SARS-like cases from the wet market” and “quarantines” at their hospital. The Wuhan health commission warned area hospitals of a “pneumonia of unclear cause” the same day.

Ai was quickly reprimanded by the hospital for “spreading rumors” about the virus, though, and Li was disciplined for the “negative impact” his warnings had on China’s efforts to stop the outbreak.

Wuhan health authorities confirmed over two dozen cases on Dec. 31 and closed the nearby wet market. China alerted the WHO about a pneumonia of unknown cause, but Wuhan’s government claimed that its investigation “so far has found no obvious person-to-person transmission, and no medical personnel have been infected.” This was untrue on both counts, as there were wide suspicions that the coronavirus was contagious, and multiple doctors had fallen ill days prior. The same day, Taiwan sent an alert to the WHO warning about the possibility of human-to-human transmission, a warning the nation claims went unheeded.

Cellphone data analyzed by the New York Times revealed that 175,000 people left Wuhan on Jan. 1 alone and that 7 million people left Wuhan over the next few weeks. That same day, according to the Straits Times, an official from the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered at least one genomics company to stop testing Wuhan coronavirus samples — and to destroy them.

The Wuhan Public Security Bureau brought eight whistleblowers, including Li, in for questioning on Jan. 3 after they had posted warnings about a coronavirus outbreak on WeChat, according to the Washington Post. They were forced to sign confession letters admitting to “false comments” that “severely disturbed the social order.”

The letter from Chinese authorities read, in part: “We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice — is that understood?” Li wrote, “Yes, I do.”

In an effort to silence any other would-be truth-tellers, Chinese state-run Xinhua News warned China’s citizens that “the police call on all netizens to not fabricate rumors, not spread rumors, not believe rumors.”

A study published in the Lancet concluded that by Jan. 2, out of 41 admitted coronavirus patients, only 27 of them could be linked to the wet market. The Wuhan Institute of Virology had identified the novel coronavirus and mapped out its genetic sequence that same day, and other medical research centers in China began identifying the virus and mapping the genome, too, but that information was concealed for another week.

China’s National Health Commission directed all Chinese research institutions to cease publicly publishing any information related to the “unknown disease” on Jan. 3 and ordered them to either transfer any viral samples to state-approved testing sites or destroy them. The Wuhan government said there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” and continued to repeat that message for weeks.

No new coronavirus cases were officially confirmed in China between Jan. 5 and Jan. 17 — a near impossibility. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Hubei provincial government and Wuhan city governments held their prescheduled annual meetings during that period.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told CNN in February that the U.S. asked to send health experts into Wuhan on Jan. 6, but the Chinese government rejected the request.

“We made the offer to send the CDC experts in to assist their Chinese colleagues to get to the bottom of key scientific questions like: How transmissible is this disease? What is the severity? What is the incubation period, and can there be asymptomatic transmission?” Azar said.

A WHO team with a couple of U.S. experts on it didn’t make it into the country until mid-February.

Li, who had continued treating coronavirus patients after his warnings were stifled by Chinese authorities, fell ill on Jan. 10 and was hospitalized two days later.

Thailand reported its first coronavirus case on Jan. 13 in what was the first confirmed case outside of China — and the WHO acknowledged the next day that the woman had not visited the wet market in question. Yet Wuhan authorities still claimed on Jan. 14 that the coronavirus was not contagious between people, and the WHO repeatedly tweeted that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the coronavirus.

But an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that China knew full well just how dire the situation was by then. That same day, Ma Xiaowei, the head of China’s National Health Commission, held a secret teleconference with regional health officials. A memo shows Ma was passing along instructions from President Xi himself, and the memo cited Ma as admitting that “the epidemic situation is still severe and complex” and “is likely to develop into a major public health event.” The memo further stated that “with the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high,” and “all localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic.”

Yet the rest of the world was kept in the dark.

The very first confirmed coronavirus case arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 15 — the patient having landed in Washington state after returning from Wuhan. Wuhan’s annual Lunar New Year banquet began Jan. 18, with 40,000 families gathering together for a massive potluck in which crowds of celebrants shared food and snapped photos.

The Associated Press would report that human-to-human transmission had been confirmed on Jan. 19, but the WHO’s Western Pacific Twitter account didn’t tweet that “there may now be sustained human-to-human transmission” until Jan. 20. Xi didn’t issue his first public statement about the coronavirus until that day, telling the country that “the recent outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan and other places must be taken seriously,” according to China Central Television. Zhong Nanshan, one of China’s top doctors, also finally announced on Chinese state-run television what the Chinese government had known for days and likely weeks — that the coronavirus was transmissible from person to person.

South Korea’s first case was confirmed on Jan. 20. The first U.S. case, which had arrived a week earlier, was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Jan. 21.

At a WHO meeting on Jan. 23, WHO director Tedros Adhanom cast the deciding vote not to declare the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. That same day, a Wuhan lockdown went into effect, but not before an estimated 5 million people had left the city for other parts of the country and the world. The Wuhan lockdown largely stopped residents from traveling to other parts of China, but the airport remained open, and thousands of people flew out and seeded the disease globally. China’s weeklong Lunar New Year holiday began on Jan. 24, and hundreds of millions of people traveled across China, further seeding the disease throughout the nation.

Despite all of this, Tedros relentlessly praised China’s response to the virus, saying on Jan. 29 that the Chinese Communist Party’s transparency was “very impressive and beyond words” and that China was “actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.” Dr. Li tested positive for the coronavirus on Jan. 30.

Trump issued a proclamation on Jan. 31 imposing restrictions against travel to and from China. The New York Times concluded that at least 430,000 travelers from China had come to the U.S. between January and early April, with the vast majority of arrivals happening prior to Trump’s travel restrictions being announced. The president’s travel ban significantly slowed travel to the U.S. from China, although 40,000 people traveled from China to the U.S. after the restrictions went into effect on Feb. 2. The travel restrictions included a number of exemptions, including for U.S. citizens living in China.

The WHO bashed travel bans, but Fauci has repeatedly credited the travel restrictions with slowing the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S.

Li, who tried to blow the whistle about the dangers posed by the coronavirus at the end of December, succumbed to the disease on Feb. 7. The Chinese social media site Weibo was filled with anger toward the Chinese government, and one of the top trending hashtags was “Wuhan government owes Dr. Li Wenliang an apology.”

The WHO-China Joint Mission traveled to China on Feb. 16 and spent nine days investigating the origin and outbreak of the novel coronavirus. The WHO concluded the COVID-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan at the end of 2019, and its investigative report in February found “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source” in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

The WHO still insisted as late as Feb. 29 that it “continues to advise against the application of travel restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks.” The group finally declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, after the coronavirus had reached more than 100 countries and had resulted in over 100,000 confirmed cases. Nearly two months had passed between China’s health agency warning local health officials about a likely epidemic and the WHO warning the world about a pandemic.

Chinese diplomats and the Chinese Communist Party’s state-run media spent much of March and April attempting to spread conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, including blaming the U.S. military, in a likely effort to distract from its disastrous response to the outbreak.

As China’s deceptions and malfeasance have become clearer, lawmakers — mostly Republicans — in the House and Senate have sought to hold China accountable, calling for wet markets to be shut down, for U.S. supply chains to be moved out of China and back to the U.S., for China to be stripped of its sovereign immunity so that it can be sued, and for investigations into China’s coronavirus response and cover-up.

Congressman Michael McCaul of Texas, the GOP’s ranking member on the Foreign Affairs Committee, has called for investigations into China’s disinformation campaign and into China’s undue influence over the WHO.

“It’s clear the Chinese Communist Party engaged in the worst cover-up in human history that has led to a pandemic, costing more than 100,000 lives so far, sickening millions, and devastating the global economy,” McCaul told the Washington Examiner. “The CCP must be held accountable for the role they played for the spread of this virus and the damage it has since caused around the world.”

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calls China the “greatest geopolitical threat” facing the U.S., and he introduced legislation that would sanction the Chinese officials involved in suppressing doctors, journalists, and dissidents trying to get the truth out of China.

“We have always known China’s censorship was a direct threat to human rights. We now know it also poses a direct threat to U.S. national security, our economy, and global public health,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner. “As we defeat this pandemic, we must hold the members of the Chinese Communist Party who suppressed information about this outbreak accountable — and rethink our relationship with China.”

Jerry Dunleavy is a reporter for the Washington Examiner.