The report was penned by Republicans on the Democrat-led committee, and it states that there is no doubt that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world.”
It cites research that indicates the CCP could have lowered the number of coronavirus cases in China by as much as 95 percent if it had followed international law and responded appropriately to the outbreak. In fact, the report states that it's likely the pandemic could have been prevented if the CCP had been more transparent when it first learned of the virus. Instead, the Chinese government destroyed evidence related to the virus and hid data in the early days of the illness.
As we know, China was aided by the World Health Organization in covering up the disease. Internal documents from the WHO show that officials were frustrated by the Chinese government's refusal to share data with them, even as WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus publicly praised the country for its response. The report calls on Tedros to resign.
The WHO also ignored whistleblower warnings from the Hong Kong government and the Taiwan Centers of Disease Control about human-to-human transmission of the virus, claiming incorrectly for weeks that the Chinese authorities did not have any evidence it was spread that way. In addition, the report says that the CCP nationalized supply chains and limited exports of American firms like General Motors and 3M to keep key goods in the country.
“It is beyond doubt that the CCP actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world,” the document states.
How many people would be alive today had China and the WHO acted more responsibly?
We now know that CCP officials closed and sanitized the wet market in Wuhan that they claim the contagion came from on January 1, destroying potential forensic evidence that could have provided insight on where the outbreak began. The following day, scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology finished a full genetic sequence of COVID-19 that showed the disease was highly contagious but failed to share that valuable piece of information with the WHO.
The committee’s ranking member, Representative Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) told the New York Post: “It is crystal clear that had the CCP been transparent, and had the head of the WHO cared more about global health than appeasing the CCP, lives could have been spared and widespread economic devastation could have been mitigated.”
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, there were more than 30 million cases of coronavirus worldwide and a million deaths as of Sunday. How many of these illnesses and deaths could have been prevented had China acted in an honorable way? How many people have lost their jobs and homes as a result of the economic damage caused by the pandemic? Those who unleashed this illness on the world and those who conspired to cover it up and prevented a proper response should be held accountable for all the devastation they have caused.
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