A team of international experts led by WHO recently visited China to investigate the source of the 2019 coronavirus disease outbreak. U.S. national security adviser Sullivan was interviewed, arguing that China has not provided enough raw data to explain how the outbreak spread in China and around the world.
The CBS political program “Face the Nation” aired an interview with Jake Sullivan on Sunday that included the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.
We need a credible, open and transparent international investigation led by the World health Organization,” Sullivan said. They are about to produce a report on the source of the outbreak in Wuhan, China.” He continued, “But we have doubts because we don’t think China is providing enough raw data that would explain how the outbreak spread in China and around the world. And we think that the WHO and China should have worked harder on this.”
When the moderator asked U.S. President Joe Biden if he specifically asked China to provide this data when he spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping recently, Sullivan replied that Biden did raise the topic of 2019 coronavirus disease, adding that all countries must take responsibility and assume responsibility for protecting the world, and that includes China.
The United States is currently the country most severely affected by the New coronavirus outbreak, with the cumulative total number of confirmed cases notified by U.S. authorities to date exceeding 28 million and the number of deaths approaching 500,000, according to Johns Hopkins University outbreak data.
The previous U.S. administration said in January 2021 that the U.S. had evidence that a similar new coronavirus had circulated in Wuhan, China, as early as the fall of 2019 and that the Chinese military was conducting secret experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sullivan did not respond positively to this hypothesis in the interview, but reiterated the new administration’s insistence that the WHO investigation must be left to scientists and experts, and that there should be no government intervention. He also called for a “credible, open and transparent international investigation” led by the WHO.
Last April, former U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would suspend funding to the WHO and in July notified the United Nations that he was withdrawing from the international body because he was unhappy with the WHO’s failure to hold China accountable for the new coronavirus. But the executive order signed by the Biden Administration the day it took office included rejoining WHO, followed by an announcement of more than $200 million in disbursements from WHO by the end of February.
The WHO expert mission said at a press conference at the end of a two-week mission to trace the source to Wuhan that the possibility of the virus leaking from the Virus Research Institute was largely ruled out, before news later broke that they were focusing on two animals sold in South China seafood markets, skunks and rabbits, as possible intermediate hosts.
Matt Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser who served under former President Trump, argued on the same program that China tried to cover up the new coronavirus in the early stages of the outbreak by cutting off the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and relying instead on the military to contain the deadly virus. Boming noted that the WHO team of experts sent to China to investigate the origin of the virus was “very contradictory” and that the team was composed of people hand-picked by the Chinese government.
Commenting on the WHO’s actions in the early stages of the pandemic, Bomin said, “The WHO made all sorts of untrue or false claims about the virus – that it was not human-to-human and that it was not asymptomatic. They praise the Chinese government for shutting down domestic travel while criticizing the U.S. for shutting down international travel, which is a morally and logically untenable position.”
Bomen said, “The Chinese government has made it very difficult to check out and track down hard evidence. But if you consider the circumstantial evidence, the circumstantial evidence that this was caused by some sort of human error far outweighs the claim that this was some sort of natural outbreak.”
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