In a speech Thursday (Jan. 14), U.S. health Secretary Alex Azar reminded Americans how the Communist government concealed the outbreak of a Chinese Communist virus (Wuhan pneumonia) about a year ago, allowing it to turn into a global crisis.
In a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Azar said the early U.S. response to the virus was difficult because it emerged in China, but because of the nature of the Communist regime, outside access to information about it was “severely limited.
“Let’s think back to when and how the United States became aware of the virus,” Azar said. “We learned of the outbreak of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 30, not through official channels in that country, as required by the International Health Regulations, but through media monitoring that we did and notification from the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in the United States.
Indeed, one of the first ways the U.S. government learned of the new virus in mainland China was through notifications from the Taiwanese,” he continued, noting that Beijing did not publicly acknowledge the first death caused by the CCP virus until Jan. 11. And this came nearly two weeks after the U.S. CDC developed its outbreak report.
Azar said the World Health Organization (WHO) was still repeating Beijing’s now-debunked claim that the CCP virus could not be transmitted from person to person.
It didn’t take long for U.S. health officials to become skeptical that reports from China could no longer be trusted, Azar recalled, noting that the Communist regime’s explanation for the outbreak “didn’t make sense.
“Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, heard Dr. Gao Fu, director of the Chinese CDC, say that the virus originated from animals in the Wuhan market,” Azar said, adding, “Yet in the first week of January, there were several cluster infections in several families, and it is unlikely that these cases came from close contact with animals, but apparently from human-to-human transmission.
Azar went on to cite additional examples to show that Beijing and the WHO confused international efforts to understand and control the CCP virus before its global outbreak. For example, a team of foreign experts was not allowed to conduct a field trip to China until Feb. 16, when the global number of infected cases reached nearly 70,000.
“By that time, the opportunity had been missed because the Chinese Communist Party was unwilling to budge,” Azar said, “and the virus was in full swing, spreading around the world. We were denied the opportunity to understand the virus by the country where it originated,” Azar said.
Azar revealed another example. He said that although he has repeatedly urged the Chinese Communist authorities to send in viral isolates from Chinese patients since last January, his department, to date, has not received a single sample.
Obtaining accurate numbers of cases or deaths related to the virus since the outbreak has been nearly impossible, and the numbers released by the Chinese Communist Party authorities are considered highly suspect by experts.
Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping announced at a grand ceremony last September that China had successfully eradicated the virus nationwide while it raged in other parts of the world, which he claimed was proof of the remarkable advantages of so-called ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.
By 2021, however, a series of major outbreaks had emerged in China’s northern heartland. Eleven million residents have been placed under strict lockdown following a new cluster of infections in Shijiazhuang, located about 160 miles southwest of Beijing.
“For most of 2020, China (the Chinese Communist Party) has shamelessly propagated Orwellian events designed to convince the world that authoritarian governments are best suited to respond to public health crises,” Azar said, “but the truth is that if this new virus had emerged in a democracy, a global outbreak might never have occurred.
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