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
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