US Health Minister: CCP's concealment caused a global virus outbreak

 Reporter : Ding Ling / Editor : Zhang Lili / https://www.soundofhope.org/post/464201 / Direct translation

One year after the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 (CCP virus, covi, novel coronavirus), US Health Minister Alex Azar on January 14 (Thursday) issued a speech at The Heritage Foundation, accusing the Chinese authorities of concealment and non-cooperation, which led to a global outbreak of the epidemic. Azar said that if the virus appeared in a democratic country, this pandemic might not happen at all.

In an online seminar held with The Heritage Foundation, Azar stated that China's lack of transparency and practical actions on the CCP virus has caused the United States to "fly blindly" and affected the United States' early response to the CCP virus. He talked about the positive actions taken by the Trump administration in response to the CCP virus epidemic. He said that the CCP has repeatedly rejected the help provided by the United States. Such an approach undermines the Trump administration’s efforts to learn more about the epidemic and take action. He said that the CCP only shared the genetic sequence of the CCP virus on January 9 last year, 10 days after the virus was reported by the media. "If we can investigate the virus in January, it will help the United States and the world develop scientific and data-oriented response measures. On the contrary, we did not get the exact information and have been acting blindly. We were not notified that the CCP virus can spread from person to person until January 20 (last year)." Azar told The Heritage Foundation that the United States learned of the outbreak in Wuhan, China on December 30, 2019, but the information was “not learned through official channels of the Chinese Communist Party as required by the International Health Regulations, but through our media monitoring. And the notice of Taiwan's Economic and Cultural Office in the United States." He said, “One of the first ways the US government learned that a new type of virus had emerged in China was from Taiwanese.” He said that he and other U.S. officials were still skeptical at the time, "thinking that these reports from outside China cannot be trusted." However, "Reports from the CCP show that the virus is likely to have appeared before November, and the CCP government's explanation of the epidemic is unreasonable." He said, "The Director of the China CDC Gao Fu once told the US CDC Reid Robert Redfield that the virus originated from wild animals in the Wuhan market." "But the few cluster cases in some households in China were not due to close contact with animals, which shows that the virus is transmitted from person to person." Azar said, “We need to know too much, but there is too little information from China.” He said that starting from January 3 last year, he instructed Redfield tp contact Gao Fu throughout January, expressing that the United States is willing to provide a CDC team to assist in investigating the origin of the virus. "It wasn't until January 29 that our proposal was officially received and confirmed." "Our team has also been urging the Chinese government to provide us with virus isolates from their patients. But a year later, China still did not provide us with first-generation virus isolates." He said, "Unfortunately, the WHO has never done what it should be, and it continues to praise the CCP to this day... After the return of the WHO international team, we learned of their work. The scope is limited to observing China’s response to the epidemic, not exploring the source of the virus itself..." Azar also said that Trump's restrictions on tourists from China proved to be correct. He also pointed out, "But sadly, even though the CCP has implemented a lockdown in the country, they have not taken any measures to prevent their citizens from traveling abroad, which has contributed to the outbreak of the CCP virus around the world." About a year after the virus outbreak in China, a WHO team arrived in Wuhan on January 14 and began investigating the origin of the virus. A total of 137 countries supported a motion calling for a fair, independent, and comprehensive investigation of the origin of the pandemic and global response measures. Azar is not optimistic about the results of the investigation. He said, "It is incredible that investigators were not allowed to enter China until this week." "In addition, these investigators will largely check and analyze the analysis that Chinese scientists have done." This flawed investigation is the result of several months of negotiations between the WHO and the CCP from last summer to this fall, but it did not receive the support of the WHO Executive Committee, and member states like the United States have no actual say in this." Azar encouraged the China observers of The Heritage Foundation to continue to pay close attention to the CCP's actions around this investigation. He believes that for most of 2020, the CCP has shamelessly promoted a series of Orwellian events, aimed at persuading the world that its autocratic form of government is most suitable for responding to public health crises. He finally said, "The fact is that if such a new virus appears in a democratic country, such a global outbreak may never happen."