Coronavirus: Mike Pompeo calls on China to share early virus samples, accuses Beijing of destroying some
- US secretary of state reiterates allegation that China tried to cover up coronavirus spread, says samples are needed to understand evolution
- Briefing also addresses arrests of Hong Kong pro-democracy leaders and South China Sea incident
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday accused Beijing of destroying samples of the novel coronavirus it gathered during the early stages of the outbreak in China, and called on the Chinese government to share more data to help health authorities elsewhere better understand the pathogen that causes Covid-19.
“We strongly believe that the Chinese Communist Party did not report the outbreak of the new coronavirus in a timely fashion to the World Health Organisation,” Pompeo said in a briefing in Washington. “Even after the CCP did notify the WHO of the coronavirus outbreak, China didn't share all of the information that it had.
“Instead it covered up how dangerous the disease is,” Pompeo continued. “It didn't report sustained human-to-human transmission for a month until it was in every province inside of China. It censored those who tried to warn the world in order to halt the testing of new samples, and it destroyed existing samples.
“The CCP still has not shared the virus sample from inside of China with the outside world, making it impossible to track the disease's evolution.”
The WHO, the United Nations’ public health agency, also came in for criticism in the briefing as John Barsa, the acting administrator for United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID), said that an investigation of WHO would “get into all manners of management operation questions”.