US steps up criticism of China over coronavirus transparency and data
US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has hit out at Beijing again over the coronavirus outbreak and accused it of taking advantage of the pandemic to bully neighbours, even as he welcomed China’s provision of essential medical supplies.
Pompeo told a news briefing that the US “strongly believed” Beijing had failed to report the outbreak in a timely manner, in breach of World Health Organisation (WHO) rules, and had failed to report human-tohuman transmission of the virus “for a month until it was in every province inside of China”.
Pompeo said China had halted testing of new virus samples, “destroyed existing samples” and failed to share samples with the outside world, “making it impossible to track the disease’s evolution”.
The Trump administration has repeatedly criticised China’s handling of the outbreak, which began late last year in the city of Wuhan and has grown into a global pandemic.
By Thursday afternoon, the outbreak had killed about 185,000 people globally, including more than 47,000 in the US.
Even after Beijing notified the WHO of the outbreak, Pompeo said that it did not share all of the information it had.
“Instead it covered up how dangerous the disease is,” the secretary of state said.
US President Donald Trump last week suspended US funding of the WHO, accusing the UN agency of promoting China’s “disinformation” about the outbreak. WHO officials have denied this and China has said it has been transparent and open.
Pompeo said WHO directorgeneral Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus failed to use his ability “to go public” when a member state failed to follow the rules.
The WHO had an obligation to ensure safety standards were observed in virology labs in Wuhan and its director-general had “enormous authority with respect to nations that do not comply”, he said.
Pompeo repeated allegations that China is exploiting the world’s focus on the pandemic with “provocative behaviour” to erode autonomy in Hong Kong, exert military pressure on Taiwan and coerce neighbours in the South China Sea.
“The US strongly opposes
China’s bullying. We hope other nations will hold them to account,” he said.
China’s foreign ministry denied the US allegations..
“One or two people in the US are confusing right and wrong and sowing discord on these issues. These schemes will not prevail,” foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said on Thursday afternoon.
Pompeo also expressed concern over a US governmentfunded study that said China’s Mekong River dams held back large volumes of water during a drought in downstream countries last year, despite China having higher-than-average water levels upstream. Beijing has disputed the findings.
Pompeo spoke later with counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and said the US has called on China to close its wildlife wet markets permanently, citing links between the markets and zoonotic diseases, which can jump from animals to humans. The new coronavirus is believed to have emerged in such a market in Wuhan late last year.
While the Trump administration has stepped up criticism of China as the pandemic worsens, the crisis has exposed US reliance on China for essential medical supplies.
Asked about reports that supplies are being held up in China, Pompeo said: “The good news is we have seen China provide those resources; sometimes they’re from US companies that are there in China, but we’ve had success. We appreciate that.
“We are counting on China to continue to live up to its contractual obligations and international obligations to provide that assistance to us and to sell us those goods ... in a way consistent with all the international trade rules.”
White House adviser Peter Navarro, like Pompeo a persistent critic of Beijing, charged on Monday that China may be withholding data about early coronavirus infections because it wants to win the commercial race to create a vaccine.
African nations that lack ventilators for the treatment of Covid19 patients would receive some from a donation of 300 supplied by the Jack Ma Foundation, the head of the continent’s disease control body said on Thursday.
John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a branch of the AU, said last week that 10 unidentified African nations were facing the pandemic without a single ventilator.
“Those countries without ventilators will be prioritised,” he told a news conference, adding that they would arrive in the coming weeks.
Ma, the Chinese billionaire founder of Alibaba, has donated thousands of tests kits for the new coronavirus, masks and protective equipment to all African nations.
The AU was working to set up its own joint procurement system, to facilitate market access for diagnostic and medical supplies to its member states. The Covid-19 pandemic has driven up demand for those products across the world.
“We have to recognise that we as a continent are competing for the same resources that everybody else in the world is competing for,” Nkengasong said. He described the testing situation across Africa as “very disappointing”.
“As of this week in a continent of 1.3-billion people, just about 415 thousand tests have been conducted,” he said, urging governments to scale up testing to be ahead of the virus.
He said that in the coming months, the goal was to test 10million people across the continent. Africa’s 54 countries have so far reported fewer than 26,000 confirmed cases of the disease, just a fraction of the more than 2-million cases reported globally.
But the World Health Organisation warned last week that Africa could see as many as 10-million cases in three to six months, citing its own tentative model.
The African CDC is working with governments on plans for easing the restrictions placed to slow the virus.
Two West African countries, Burkina Faso and Ghana, eased some coronavirus-related restrictions this week, to test the possibility of a return to a semblance of normality after weeks of shutdowns that have hobbled both economies.
CHINA DID NOT SHARE ALL OF THE INFORMATION IT HAD. INSTEAD IT COVERED UP HOW DANGEROUS THE DISEASE IS