China has questions to answer over the information it shared about the novel coronavirus outbreak, but a post mortem over its role should come later, British Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace said yesterday.
Asked by LBC radio if China had questions to answer over how quickly it made the world aware of the extent of the crisis, Wallace said: “I think it does.”
“The time for the post mortem on this is after we’ve all got it under control and have come through it and our economies are back to normal,” Wallace said.
Photo: Bloomberg
“China needs to be open and transparent about what it learnt, its short comings but also it’s successes,” he said.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said that there was “a significant amount of evidence” that the novel coronavirus emerged from a Chinese laboratory, but did not dispute US intelligence agencies’ conclusion that it “was not man-made.”
“There is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo told ABC’s This Week.
“Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories,” he said.
“These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab,” Pompeo said, briefly contradicting a statement on Thursday by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which said that the virus did not appear to be man-made or genetically modified.
Meanwhile, a four-page US Department of Homeland Security intelligence report dated on Friday and obtained by The Associated Press said that Chinese leaders “intentionally concealed the severity” of the pandemic from the world in early January to stock up on medical supplies needed to respond to it.
Not classified, but marked “for official use only,” the analysis states that, while downplaying the severity of the coronavirus, China increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies.
It attempted to cover up doing so by “denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data,” the analysis states.
The analysis also says China held off informing the WHO that the coronavirus “was a contagion” for much of January so that it could order medical supplies from abroad — and that its imports of masks and surgical gowns and gloves increased sharply.
China has repeatedly denied that it covered up any details about the COVID-19 outbreak.
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