China could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and avoided economic disasters: Pompeo
America’s chief China headkicker, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, unloads on Beijing, which says it will not cooperate with international probes until “the pandemic is over”.
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China has been lashed for failing to prevent “hundreds of thousands” of deaths by hiding the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak, according to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
His latest blast against China came as Beijing’s man in the UN, Ambassador Chen Xu, said there will be no international investigation of the virus’ origins until the pandemic is over.
Winding up for another assault on the Chinese government, Mr Pompeo said Beijing could have not only saved lives, but avoided the collapse of economies around the world.
“They knew. China could have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide,” Mr Pompeo said.
“China could have spared the world a descent into global economic malaise. They had a choice but instead China covered up the outbreak in Wuhan.”
Mr Pompeo’s has levelled sustained criticism at China over its handling of the early stages of the pandemic and continued to suggest the coronavirus came out of a lab in Wuhan - not a wet market.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said Mr Pompeo had no proof of his claim and said the question of its origins should be left to scientists.
Asked what China thought about the US allegedly putting pressure on allies such as Australia to stand up to China, the spokesperson had a harsher way of describing America’s actions.
“The United States is just threatening or coercing them to help the country to frame China together,” she said.
Mr Pompeo also said the WHO needs to demand an investigation into China’s handling of outbreak.
Meanwhile, China won’t allow international experts to investigate the source of the COVID-19 outbreak until there’s a “final victory” in the fight against the virus, the nation’s UN ambassador said.
Ambassador Chen Xu said WHO will have to wait until the virus is defeated to probe what caused the deadly pandemic to break out in Wuhan.
“The top priority, for the time being, is to focus on the fight against the pandemic until we win the final victory,” Chen said. “We need the right focus and allocation of our resources.”
Chen dismissed suggestions that China was against an independent probe, saying the country isn’t “allergic to any kind of investigations, inquiries or evaluations”.
But he claimed the current atmosphere has been sullied by “politically motivated” accusations against the nation, as well as other players “smearing, demonizing” its response to the initial outbreak.
“We need to race with time to save lives as much as we can,” Chen said. “For whether or how the invitation will take place, we need to have the right priority setting at this moment, and on the other hand, we need the right atmosphere.”
President Trump said China is to blame for failing to halt the spread of the coronavirus in December.
TRUMP’S SPY BOSS PICK VOWS US ‘WON’T LET CHINA LEAD WORLD’
China will be treated as “the greatest threat” by President Trump’s pick to lead the US intelligence community, who says the communist party is hell-bent on displacing America as the world’s sole superpower.
John Ratcliffe, in Senate hearings to decide whether he should be ratified as director of national intelligence, made it clear Beijing would constantly be in his sites if he got the job.
“I view China as the greatest threat actor right now,” said Mr Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman from Texas.
“Look with respect to COVID-19 and the role China plays; the race to 5G; cybersecurity issues: all roads lead to China.
“These are all spokes of the same initiative and that’s for China to supplant us as the world’s superpower. We very clearly don’t want an authoritarian regime like the Chinese Communist Party setting standards in the world marketplace.”
His aggressive comments came after President Trump’s ongoing assault against China for its role in allowing the COVID-19 virus to escape from Wuhan and spread across the world.
Filling this position is a vital move for Mr Trump, who has repeatedly accused the US intelligence community of plotting against him as a “deep state,” fuelling increasing resentment among the US spy community.
The DNI job requires overseeing and coordinating 16 other intelligence bodies, including the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI’s counterintelligence division.
“Let me be very clear: Regardless of what anyone wants our intelligence to reflect, the intelligence I will provide, if confirmed, will not be impacted or altered as a result of outside influence,” Mr Ratcliffe told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
CHINA’S SECRETIVE MOVE TO SECURE MEDICAL SUPPLIES
As COVID-19 took hold in China, authorities there “intentionally concealed the severity” to global health authorities according to the US Department of Homeland Security in an intelligence brief.
The delay was designed to secure medical supplies, which has included airfreight cargo from Australia in the early days of the pandemic.
The four-page intelligence report dated May 1 and marked “for official use only”, said while China was downplaying the severity of the coronavirus it increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies.
It concluded part of the cover up was “denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data”.
This continued for most of January as it held off reporting the severity and spread to WHO as it ramped up overseas orders of masks, gloves and gowns.
Those conclusions are based on the 95 per cent probability that China’s changes in imports and export behaviour were not within normal range, according to the report.
The report now leaked publicly has been used by the US administration to accuse China of actively playing down the impending crisis before it spread globally.
President Donald Trump said had the danger been made clear sooner more could have been done as he accused both China and Who or failures.
“Intelligence has just reported to me that I was correct, and that they did NOT bring up the coronavirus subject matter until late into January, just prior to my banning China from the US,” Trump wrote without citing specifics. “Also, they only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner.”
Australia has called for a full investigation into how, when and where the virus spread from China, a call that has been met with aggressive rhetoric from China including its rogue ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye who has threatened boycotts if a push for a probe persists.
The WHO has said it would conduct its own probe but given its own role in delaying a declaration of a global pandemic and constantly praising China for its role in containing the contagion, nations have dismissed the notion as wholly inadequate.
PHOTOS OF WUHAN BOFFINS AND BAT SMAPLES DELETED
Worrying photographs of scientists handling bat samples have been deleted from the website of the institute blamed for the coronavirus pandemic.
The images – which reveal a shocking lack of safety – were taken down by the Wuhan Institute of Virology after diplomats and scientists raised the alarm about its work, according to a report in The Sun.
And it appears to have also removed all reference to a visit in March 2018 by Rick Switzer, a science and technology expert from the US embassy in Beijing who then raised the alert.
As a result of his visit, cables were sent to the US State Department from the embassy warning about the risks of experiments on bats.
One read: “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
US and British intelligence officials suspect bungling scientists at the science hub spread the killer disease during risky coronavirus tests on bats.
And US President Donald Trump announced last Thursday he had seen intelligence that gave him a “high degree of confidence’” that the global crisis had its origins in the institute.
It was claimed that COVID-19 was “developed in the Wuhan lab as China hoped to prove it’s greater than the US at battling deadly diseases”.
The Sun reported that a page of the Wuhan institute’s website – deleted suddenly last month – showed no safety precautions were employed.
One worker admitted being sprayed with bat blood or urine as images showed staff brazenly collecting samples with no face masks or protective suits.
Incredibly some scientists didn’t even wear gloves as they entered caves to collect fecal bat swab samples, beaming for the camera and oblivious to the dangers.
The damning photos tell a different story to an official 2017 journal, when the institute insisted: “Bat samplings were conducted ten times from April 2011 to October 2015 at different seasons in their natural habitat at a single location (cave) in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China.
“All members of field teams wore appropriate personal protective equipment, including N95 masks, tear-resistant gloves, disposable outerwear, and safety glasses.
“Bats were trapped and fecal swab samples were collected as described previously.”
One of the party even gave an interview to state-run news agency Xinhua, admitting he forgot his protective gear and was sprayed with bat urine or blood.
Intelligence sources in the US and UK were “monitoring the deleted photos with great interest”, The Sun reported.
Matthew Henderson, director of the Asia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society, and a former British diplomat in China, said: “China has still not clearly explained how the outbreak started, without it we are obliged to draw our own conclusions.
“There is ample evidence of such a cavalier approach to biosecurity by Chinese scientists based in Wuhan laboratories that it is no surprise that western Governments are now seriously considering whether COVID-19 could have escaped from one.”
Earlier this month photos from the same Wuhan lab showed a broken seal on a store containing 1,500 virus strains – including the bat coronavirus linked to the devastating pandemic.
The images were published by the state-owned China Daily before they too were swiftly deleted.
CHINA REFUSING TO LET WHO TAKE PART IN INVESTIGATION
Earlier, the World Health Organisation’s official in China claims Beijing continues to refuse to allow the global body access to the communist nation’s investigations into the origins of the coronavirus disaster.
Dr Gauden Galea said that the UN agency was aware that Beijing was conducting a “national investigation” – but China was not interested in WHO’s requests to take part in the inquiry.
He said WHO had not been able to investigate logs at two Wuhan labs that work with coronaviruses amid concerns the virus originated in a lab and not at a wet market as is widely thought.
“We know that some national investigation is happening but at this stage we have not been invited to join,” Dr Galea said.
“Up to now we have not had an invitation. We need to know as much as possible to stop a re-occurrence. You don’t want this whole thing to happen again with a different virus.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the United States said the virus was not man-made but did not rule out that it may have been “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Meanwhile, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been accused by the US of travelling to China before refusing to declare the coronavirus a pandemic.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the UN agency had “failed in its mission” over its handling of the COVID crisis.
“We know that the leader of that organisation travelled to China and then declined to declare it a pandemic until everyone in the world knew that was already true,” Mr Pompeo told Fox News.
“It’s unfortunate, this is not the first time there has been a virus go around the world from inside of China and it’s not the first on the WHO has failed in its mission.
“We have an obligation to the American people to do our best to make sure that we fix that, that would prevent those thing from ever happening again.”
The White House has frozen US payments to the WHO and accused it of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the COVID-19 outbreak, which originated in Wuhan in December.
Canada also joined the US and Australia in saying it wanted an investigation into the agency’s handling of the pandemic.
Dr Tedros stunningly criticised President Trump when he imposed a ban on flights from China on January 31, claiming the ban would incite “fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.”
Yet COVID has now claimed more than 231,000 lives.
US PRAISES AUSTRALIA’S CALL FOR COVID INQUIRY
The US Secretary Mike Pompeo of State has praised Australia’s call for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus.
It comes after China’s ruling Communist Part angrily dismissed Canberra’s calls for an investigation into how COVID-19 spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Mr Pompeo, who has piled pressure on China over the pandemic, waded into the dispute last week as he sarcastically said that Australia upset Beijing through its “temerity” to ask questions.
“Who in the world wouldn’t want an investigation of how this happened to the world?” Pompeo told reporters in Washington.
“The solution to this crisis will come from freedom-loving people around the world. I’m very confident that authoritarian regimes are poorly designed to deal with the kind of crisis that this pandemic has engendered,” he said.
He said he was “heartened” to see Australia and other country’s joining US calls for an independent investigation.
Mr Pompeo added: “While we know this started in Wuhan, China, we don’t yet know from where it started and in spite of our best efforts to get experts on the ground, they continue to try and hide.”
DEADLY IMPACT OF CHINA’S COVID-19 COVER-UP
The global coronavirus spread could have been reduced by 95 per cent if China had revealed when it first learned the disease was infectious, according to damning new research to be published this week.
As international fury builds against the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of the pandemic and legal challenges mount against the regime, a News Corp Australia investigation shows the true impact of the cover-up.
More than a thousand Australians have now joined a global class action suing China and the lawyer leading it said the whitewash will be central to the suit, which is seeking more than $A10 trillion.
“Had they acted immediately, it would have changed the entire spectrum of the world population being affected by this. And most of the studies say between 50 and 95 per cent could have been changed,” said Jeremy Alters, head strategist at Berman Law Group.
“It’s at least 95 per cent, because had they closed the city when they first learned about the human to human transmission … it would have bought the world somewhere between six and eight extra weeks before it ever got here.
“Six to eight extra weeks in the lifetime in which we’ve been living for the last three or four months is an eternity.”
Research by Britain’s University of Southampton shows the spread would have been dramatically reduced if containment measures were in place before Wuhan and three other cities shut down on January 23.
Had containment strategies been implemented at the start of January, when China first hid the fact that the virus was contagious, the spread could have been reduced by 95 per cent, according to the research to be published in Nature in coming days.
Doctors at two hospitals in Wuhan separately reported to the Chinese CDC on December 27 and December 29 that the then-unnamed coronavirus was contagious, but it wasn’t until January 20, after weeks of trying to suppress the information, that the Chinese government announced this finding.
If the measures “could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier in China, cases could have been reduced by 66 per cent, 86 per cent, and 95 per cent, respectively, together with significantly reducing the number of affected areas”, says the research, which accords with several other studies.
Lead researcher Professor Andy Tatem said the study also showed that had China not imposed its January 23 quarantine for another month, there “would have been an outbreak of about 70 times bigger than actually happened”.
“It’s also important to emphasise that this was the most stringent and massive lockdown that any government has ever done. I know there’s a lot of focus on the early stages and maybe China could’ve stopped it,” he said.
“But also, it’s quite amazing what was actually done in terms of the lessons that are now being learned across the world and the fact that many countries have had far more time, far more information and still failed to stop it.”
The preliminary findings into “non pharmaceutical interventions” were first released last month, said Prof Tatem.
The research, which uses anonymous mobile phone tracking data supplied by telcos, has also been expanded globally, with a study to come later of the spread in Europe to be published next month. Another, that would include information on Australia, is slated for later.
Prof Andy could not confirm if Australian data was already being used, saying permissions about access were still being sought by the researchers.
As the global COVID-19 infection toll approached 3 million yesterday there were increasing calls to hold China accountable.
US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Scott Morrison are among world leaders to demand a detailed probe into the origins of the pandemic.
US intelligence officials are currently investigating whether the new coronavirus came from a high-security Wuhan lab or was naturally transmitted from bats to humans.
“We’re looking at it,” Mr Trump said this month of reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had released the virus.
“A lot of people are looking at it – it seems to make sense.”
Although conspiracists argue the virus was man-made, most scientists concur that it was biological in nature.
But this doesn’t preclude the possibility the virus was being tested at the lab and accidentally escaped.
China has repeatedly blocked efforts to investigate the virus, from disinfecting the Wuhan seafood market characterised as the inception point before any swabs could be taken, to arresting whistleblowers who tried to warn the world about what was coming.
Beijing has also orchestrated a misinformation campaign that at times has accused the US military of introducing the virus.
According to a new report by the European Union’s External Action Service, China and Russia have “targeted conspiracy narratives” to shift the blame for the outbreak.
The EU denied reports it had bowed to Chinese pressure to water down the disinformation report.
“I absolutely refute and dispute any indications or claims that in our reporting we are bowing to any kind of external pressure,” a spokesman said.
He was responding to reports that said an early version of the report referred to China running “a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image”.
China has repeatedly rejected calls for an independent investigation into the virus, saying it is “politically motivated”.
“We are fighting the virus at the moment, we are concentrating all our efforts on fighting against the virus,” top UK Chinese diplomat Chen Wen said this week.
“Why talk about an investigation into this? This will divert not only attention, it will divert resources.”
