James Morrow: China concealed the severity of COVID-19 while it stocked up on medical equipment
China “intentionally concealed the severity” of the coronavirus and hid information that it could be transmitted from person to person for most of January to allow itself time to buy medical equipment from around the world, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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It’s looking more and more likely that the deadly coronavirus that has killed 250,000 people around the world originated in a lab – and that the Chinese government sat on news of its severity to allow itself time to buy up much-needed medical equipment from around the world.
That’s the conclusion of an internal report by the US Department of Homeland security obtained by the Associated Press which says that China “intentionally concealed the severity” of the outbreak so China left other countries dangerously short of medicines and personal protective gear as the disease spread to their shores.
What’s more, the report confirms what many have already suspected, namely that Beijing enlisted an unwitting World Health Organisation into its scheme, hiding information that the disease could be transmitted from person to person for much of the month of January.
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The Homeland Security report looked at Chinese imports of medical equipment and found that while the Chinese Communist Party was hiding news of the deadly nature of the disease, figures show a remarkable upsurge in China’s imports of equipment including face masks, surgical gowns, and gloves.
According to the report, there was a 95 per cent probability that the surge in imports was “not within normal range”.
The news comes as evidence builds that the coronavirus did not originate in a Wuhan wet market, as originally suspected, but escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Chinese scientists were reportedly studying bat coronaviruses and whether they could set off pandemics in human populations.
On Saturday, The Daily Telegraph’s Sharri Markson broke the news of a 15-page research document showing that China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in what was called an “assault on international transparency’’.
Last week, Markson further reported that “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US were looking at the work of two Chinese scientists who had studied deadly bat pathogens in Australia in research funded jointly by Australia and China.
It has also been reported that in Australia, local companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party stripped shelves of equipment and supplies, sending several planeloads of cargo back to China at the height of the pandemic there.
Since then, countries including Australia have struggled to obtain necessary gear, equipment, and tests for the disease.
Locally, this quest took a bizarre turn last week when mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest blindsided Health Minister Greg Hunt by inviting China’s Victorian consul-general Long Zhou to make a speech at a press conference to announce that Forrest had obtained 10 million test kits from China for use in Australia.
Meanwhile, the notion that the virus escaped from a lab was further bolstered by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was interviewed on the American ABC’s This Week program Sunday morning and said that there is “enormous evidence” that the virus originated in a lab.
“That that’s where this began”, Pompeo said.
“We’ve said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outside, but I think the whole world can see now.
“Remember, China has a history of infecting the world and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab”, the Secretary of State said.