Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Thursday highlighted the distrust of the Chinese leadership, offering an almost daily account of federal measures taken to control the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, while authorities dealt with the non-communist counterpart. cooperative.
Azar said the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 was not shared until January 9, 10 days after the virus was reported in the media, and probably about two months after its emergence.
“Being able to investigate the virus in January would have helped the United States and the world to develop a response based on science and data,” said Azar. “Instead, we were flying blind, with the transmission of the virus from human to human not officially confirmed until January 20th.”
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“We learned of an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown origin in Wuhan, China, on December 30, not through official channels in that country, as required by international health regulations, but through monitoring the media we do, as well as through a notification from the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office here in the United States, “said Azar during a virtual discussion with The Heritage Foundation. “One of the first ways in which the US government was notified of a new virus in mainland China was by people from Taiwan.”
“Even as we passed on what we knew to the American people, we suspected that we could not trust the reports coming from China,” continued Azar. “Reports from China suggested that the virus probably appeared there in November, and the Chinese government’s explanation for the outbreak made no sense.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar speaks during a press conference in the White House meeting room in Washington on Friday, November 20, 2020.
(AP Photo / Susan Walsh)
Although Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was informed by the CDC of China that the virus originated in animals in a Wuhan market, several groups of cases emerged among families in the first week of January. Azar said these clusters are unlikely to have occurred in close encounters with animals, suggesting transmission from person to person.
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“There was so much we needed to know and so little information from China,” continued the secretary. He detailed how China failed to comply with requests to send a team of CDC technical experts to assist in the investigation by the end of January.
A team from the World Health Organization also delayed implementation until the end of February.
“Our teams were also putting pressure on the Chinese government to send us viral isolates from patients there, and China still, a year later, was unable to supply the first generation of viral isolates.”
Azar said the United States did not have an opportunity to learn about COVID-19 from the country from which it probably originated. He also defended the government’s first praise for China, saying it was necessary to get some cooperation, with US officials allegedly putting particular pressure on them. Azar criticized the WHO for continuing to praise China, saying: “Unfortunately, WHO has never made the change we have made, continuing to praise China to this day.”
However, months of diplomatic disputes with Chinese officials led the head of the United Nations health agency to express rare criticism of China, saying he was “very disappointed” that the Chinese government did not authorize the visit now underway on 5 January. This investigation will work to explore the origins of the virus, including a visit to Wuhan, where a team of 13 WHO employees is now under two-week quarantine.
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“In May, member states of the World Health Organization had to authorize by resolution an investigation specifically on the origins of the virus. Incredibly, it was only this week that investigators were allowed to enter China. In addition, these investigators will thoroughly examine the analyzes already made by Chinese scientists, “he said.” This defective scope of investigation is the result of months of negotiations during the past summer and autumn between WHO and China, without any contribution from the WHO Executive Board. “
Azar suggested that if a new virus emerged in a democratic nation, a global outbreak could have been prevented – as opposed to an authoritarian government in China.