Several Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent a letter to Mike Pompeo urging him to hold China accountable for its role in the coronavirus pandemic.
The letter, which was sent on Thursday, called for China to face repercussions for inaccurate reporting as it relates to the spread of the virus, which they said ultimately hampered the United States's ability to prepare for it.
"China, like many authoritarian regimes, tightly controls its internal information flow and media," the letter said. "Misinformation from China over the past several months has severely crippled global action to combat the global pandemic and undermined efforts by the State Department to work with other nations around the world to bring a swift end to this crisis."
It continued, "Chinese disinformation efforts have worsened the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and led to indescribable suffering around the world. It is essential the U.S. government works to combat this string of Chinese misinformation."
The letter was sent shortly after the U.S. intelligence community said that China is covering up the true scale of the coronavirus outbreak inside the country.
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the report, “The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false. Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime," he said.
The U.S. intelligence community long suspected that China was misleading about the spread of the coronavirus, and, on Tuesday, the Chinese government acknowledged that it had excluded any asymptomatic coronavirus cases from its figures.
Additionally, Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force response coordinator, flagged China’s incomplete coronavirus data as a factor that harmed the world’s ability to respond effectively. On the same day, Pompeo also stressed the importance of having accurate information.
“This data set matters,” he explained. “The ability to trust the data that you’re getting so that our scientists and doctors and experts at the World Health Organization and all across the world who are trying to figure out how to remediate this, how to find therapies, how to identify a solution, which will ultimately be a vaccine, to determine whether the actions that we’re taking — the social distancing, all the things that we’re doing, limiting transportation, all those things we’re doing — to figure out if they’re working so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired.”
