One year after the outbreak of the Chinese communist virus (New Coronavirus), U.S. health Secretary Alex Azar spoke at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday, Jan. 14, blaming the Chinese authorities for the cover-up and lack of cooperation that led to the global outbreak. Azar said that if the virus had appeared in a democratic country, the global plague might not have happened at all.
In a webinar with the Heritage Foundation, Azar said China’s lack of transparency and practical action on the Communist virus allowed the U.S. to “fly blind” and compromised the early U.S. response to the virus. He spoke about the aggressive actions taken by the Trump administration in response to the CCP virus outbreak. He said the Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly denied U.S. help, and in doing so, has undermined the Trump administration’s efforts to learn more about the outbreak and take action.
He said the Chinese Communist Party shared the genetic sequence of the CCP virus only on Jan. 9 of last year, 10 days after the virus was reported in the media, and that “if we could have launched an investigation into the virus in January, it would have helped the U.S. and the world develop a science- and data-driven response. Instead, we were not given definitive information and have been acting blindly until January 20 (last year), when we were notified that the CCP virus could be transmitted from person to person.”
Azar told the Heritage Foundation that the U.S. learned of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 30, 2019, but that information “was not learned through official Chinese Communist Party channels as required by international health regulations, but through our media monitoring and notification from the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in the United States.” He said “one of the first ways the U.S. government learned of the emergence of a new virus in mainland China was from the Taiwanese.”
He spoke of how he and other U.S. officials were still skeptical at the time, “believing that these reports from outside China could not be trusted.” However, “reports from the Chinese Communist Party indicate that the virus likely emerged before November, and the Chinese government’s explanation for the outbreak does not make sense.” He said that “Gao Fu, director of the Chinese CDC, had told Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, that the virus originated from wild animals in the Wuhan market.” “But several clusters of cases in some families in China were not due to close contact with animals, suggesting human-to-human transmission of the virus.”
Azar said, “There is so much we need to know, and so little information coming from China.” He talked about how he instructed Redfield to contact Gough throughout January, beginning last Jan. 3, indicating that the U.S. was willing to provide a CDC team to assist in the investigation of the origin of the virus. “And it wasn’t until Jan. 29 that our offer was officially received and confirmed.” “Our team has also been pressing the Chinese government to provide us with virus isolates from their patients. But a year later, China still has not provided us with a first-generation virus isolate.”
He said, “Unfortunately, the WHO never acted as it should have and continues to praise the CCP to this day …… Upon the return of the WHO’s international team, we learned that the scope of their work was limited to observing China’s response to the outbreak rather than exploring the source of the virus itself ……”
Azar also said that Trump’s imposition of restrictions on visitors from China ultimately proved to be the right thing to do. He also noted, “But the sad fact is that despite the city closures imposed by the Chinese Communist Party at home, they did nothing to stop their own citizens from traveling abroad, thus contributing to a major outbreak of the Communist virus around the world.”
A WHO team arrived in Wuhan on Jan. 14, about a year after the major outbreak of the CCP virus, to begin investigating the origins of the virus. A total of 137 countries supported a motion calling for an impartial, independent and comprehensive investigation into the origins of the pandemic outbreak and the global response.
Azar is not optimistic about the outcome of the investigation. He said, “It’s incredible that investigators were not allowed into China until this week.” “In addition, these investigators will be largely examining and analyzing analyses that have already been done by Chinese scientists.” “But this flawed investigative action, the result of months of negotiations between WHO and the Chinese Communist Party from last summer to this fall, has not been supported by the WHO Executive Board, and member states like the United States have no real say in the matter.”
Azar encourages the Heritage Foundation’s China watchers to continue to closely monitor the CCP’s actions surrounding this investigation. He argues that for much of 2020, the CCP has been shamelessly promoting a series of Orwellian events designed to convince the world that its authoritarian form of government is best suited to respond to public health crises.
He concludes, “The truth is that if a new virus like this had emerged in a democracy, such a global pandemic might never have occurred.”
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