Dr. Deborah Birx said China’s hesitation to share vital details on the coronavirus early on made the global pandemic worse than it would have been otherwise.
“Wherever that first jump occurs, whether that’s from animal to human or lab to human, it doesn’t really matter … you have to over-communicate,” Birx said on Fox News Sunday. “That’s when you get the first instance of how transmittable this virus is … that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen until late, and, you know, until even mid-January … and when you see how many countries are now infected, that did fan the flames of the virus across the globe.”
Birx, a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, was responding to a recent report on a leaked dossier compiled by the “Five Eyes” intelligence community, which claimed China either hid key information about the virus or outright lied to the world about the danger it posed to global public health.
Citing anonymous sources, Fox News reported a majority of U.S. intelligence agencies believe China intentionally lied to worldwide health officials in an effort to avoid blame for the pandemic. President Trump has been critical of China for its role in the virus’s outbreak, and leading congressional Republicans have threatened consequences in response.
The president has also mobilized the State Department and directed American spy agencies to investigate reports that the virus could have originated in a state-run Chinese lab, rather than at a Wuhan “wet market,” as was first reported.
Birx said last month if China had been more transparent during the early days of the virus’s outbreak, the United States could have been more prepared to respond to the resulting public health emergency.
“You really have to go back and ask yourself, ‘Why wasn’t there this level of transparency when this virus exploded?'” Birx said on April 15. “I think people would have prepared differently if they had known the level of transmissibility of this virus.”
More than 200 countries have reported cases of the virus, and over 1 million people in the U.S. have been infected.
