The US has accused China of lying about the extent of its COVID-19 outbreak, US lawmakers said on Wednesday, citing an intelligence report presented to the White House.
Republican lawmakers, pointing to a report by Bloomberg citing US intelligence officials, expressed outrage that Beijing apparently misled the international community on China’s infections and deaths, which began late last year in the city of Wuhan.
China’s reporting has been intentionally incomplete, with some intelligence officials describing Beijing’s numbers as fake, said the Bloomberg report, which highlighted the classified intelligence document sent last week to the White House.
Photo: AFP
China had publicly reported 82,361 confirmed cases and 3,316 deaths as of Wednesday, according to a rolling tracker by Johns Hopkins University.
That compared with 206,207 cases and 4,542 deaths in the US, the country with the world’s largest reported outbreak.
US Senator Ben Sasse attacked Beijing’s numbers as “garbage propaganda.”
“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Sasse said in a statement. “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.”
In a statement responding to the report, US Representative Michael McCaul, top Republican on the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs, said China is “not a trustworthy partner” in the fight against COVID-19.
“They lied to the world about the human-to-human transmission of the virus, silenced doctors and journalists who tried to report the truth, and are now apparently hiding the accurate number of people impacted by this disease,” McCaul said.
He and other lawmakers have called on the US Department of State to launch an investigation into what he called China’s “cover-up” about the pandemic.
US President Donald Trump in recent weeks has accused Beijing of not fully sharing data sooner about the virus outbreak once it started in China.
“The world is paying a very big price for what they did,” Trump said on March 19.
On Tuesday, White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx said the medical community saw China’s outbreak as “serious, but smaller than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data.”
In related news, a US lawmaker is calling on the State Department to urge China to investigate the disappearance of three Chinese citizen journalists who sought to expose the impact of the coronavirus on Wuhan.
US Representative Jim Banks asked the US government to seek a probe into the fates of Fang Bin (方斌), Chen Qiushi (陳秋實) and Li Zehua (李澤華).
According to media reports, they went missing after taking videos and publishing them online, including images of overwhelmed hospitals and corpses piled in a minibus.
“All three of these men understood the personal risk associated with independently reporting on coronavirus in China, but they did it anyway,” Banks wrote, alleging that the Chinese government “imprisoned them — or worse.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) yesterday said she did not quite understand the accusation about the three individuals and that China has acted in an “open and transparent” manner throughout the virus crisis.
“I am so curious why these lawmakers are focusing on matters of other countries when the US is facing such a pandemic. And what they said is totally based on trumped up messages and information,” Hua said at a daily press briefing in Beijing.
“They had better use their time to do something concrete for their people, save their lives, protect their safety,” she added.
Additional reporting by Reuters
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS