The World Health Organization backtracked on its assertion that the Chinese government alerted the United Nations agency about the coronavirus outbreak.
The WHO quietly updated its “Timeline of WHO’s response to COVID-19” on Tuesday following the House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans’ mid-June Interim Report on Origins of COVID-19 Pandemic (led by ranking member and China task force Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas), which concluded that “despite public reporting to the contrary … China never notified the WHO about the outbreak in Wuhan.” The change was spotted by McCaul and first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
“I’m glad to see the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party have both read my interim report on the origins of the pandemic and are finally admitting to the world the truth — the CCP never reported the virus outbreak to the WHO in violation of WHO regulations,” McCaul said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The question now is whether the CCP will continue their false propaganda campaign that continues to claim they warned the world or whether they will come clean and begin to work with the world health community to get to the bottom of this deadly pandemic.”
McCaul’s June report said the WHO found out about the coronavirus outbreak when Chinese media reports about an atypical pneumonia outbreak began to leak online and that the organization also discovered a post on the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, a U.S.-based open-access platform for early intelligence about outbreaks, on the last day of 2019.
The previous iteration of the timeline said the “Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan.” The updated timeline states that the WHO’s country office in China “picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan” and that the WHO’s Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources platform “also picked up a media report on ProMED … about the same cluster of cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ in Wuhan.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sought to downplay the early warnings about the outbreak that Taiwan says it provided to the organization and stressed that the “first report” came from Wuhan, where the outbreak is believed to have originated.
“The first report came from Wuhan, from China itself, so Taiwan was only asking for clarification, and as some people were claiming, Taiwan didn’t report any human-to-human transmission; this has to be clear,” Tedros said in April, adding, “So, the report first came from China — that’s fact number one — from Wuhan itself.”
There’s evidence that China covered up the coronavirus’s spread, muzzled whistleblowers, intimidated doctors, misled the WHO, and blocked outside health experts. China knew by late 2019 that human-to-human transmission was occurring, but on Jan. 14, the WHO tweeted: “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
As Tedros and the WHO publicly praised China’s response, internal recordings show WHO leaders privately complained about China’s opacity.
In April, the U.S. Intelligence Community was reported to believe the Chinese Communist Party downplayed the outbreak and that China continued to mislead the world.
Numerous news outlets reported that China directly alerted the WHO about the coronavirus outbreak on Dec. 31, and the WHO never publicly sought to correct the record.
China repeatedly claimed it had reported the outbreak to the WHO, including as recently as early June through the state-run China Daily, but Beijing appears to have backed off this assertion.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian was asked about McCaul’s report in late June and replied that “this so-called report … spreads disinformation in an attempt to smear China.” But when the Chinese official went through a lengthy timeline of China’s alleged response, he dropped China’s claims about reporting to the WHO on Dec. 31.
The House GOP report in June said China “bears overwhelming responsibility” for the coronavirus outbreak becoming a pandemic following the country’s efforts to conceal its “spread and novel nature.” The 50-page report highlighted China’s “failures to share accurate information” and its “suppression of voices seeking to warn the world.” GOP investigators concluded Chinese President Xi Jinping was aware that a pandemic was underway weeks before the public was warned.
The WHO “enabled the CCP cover-up … while at the same time praising the CCP’s response,” according to GOP investigators, who also determined “the COVID-19 global pandemic could have been prevented if the CCP acted in a transparent and responsible manner.”
