Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, O’Brien echoed other administration officials in saying President Trump’s “courageous decision” in late January to block air travel from China “bought the United States six to eight weeks to prepare for the virus.”
“It probably cost the world community two months to respond,” O’Brien continued, reports The Hill.
Chinese scientists knew about the COVID-19 virus, which originated in Wuhan, and also were aware of its severity way back in December 2019. In late December, a number of genomics companies tested samples from sick patients in Wuhan and noticed alarming similarities between their illnesses and the 2002 SARS virus.
And yes, Beijing was immediately notified. The researchers received a gag-order on January 3, from China’s National Health Commission, with instructions to destroy the samples.
It appears to be obvious that the cover-up was going on even when officials from the CDC visited Wuhan on January 8, where officials intentionally withheld information that hospital workers had been infected by patients — a telltale sign of contagion.
And O’Brien points out that if China had been cooperative and open about the scale of the coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could have had teams on the ground in China earlier to analyze the virus’s sequence.
Interestingly, O’Brien either doesn’t know or maybe just forgot that back in mid-January, geneticists around the world had already done gene sequencing on the different strains of the COVID-19 virus and that monitoring the rate at which new cases were appearing was being done.
As for the delayed rollout of tests for the disease here in the U.S. being caused by a coverup, O’Brien must also be completely ignorant of the fact that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was working with the pharmaceutical company Regeneron to develop a treatment for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus, per Digital Journal on February 4.
Bottom line? It’s not like the United States didn’t know the outbreak was spreading around the world as far back as late January. So why wasn’t the government looking at developing a test kit?
Rewriting history and controlling the narrative
Today, two of the world’s most powerful countries are pointing fingers at each other – and it is really too late to be doing this. While China is trying to rewrite the historical narrative on the coronavirus, the U.S. has taken to doing the same with its own version of history.
“The [Chinese Communist Party] is masterful at rewriting history and we’re watching them do it in real-time,” Bill Bishop, author of the Sinocism newsletter, told Axios.
Strangely enough, everyone just has to inject politics into everything today. Trump administration officials have been condemned for making the COVID-19 virus a “racial insult,” calling it the Wuhan or even China virus. We really don’t need the unnecessary stigma and antagonism inherent with this kind of talk.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a CNBC interview last week, “Remember, this is the Wuhan coronavirus that’s caused this, and the information that we got at the front end of this thing wasn’t perfect and has led us now to a place where much of the challenge we face today has put us behind the curve.”
“That’s not the way infectious disease doctors tell me it should work. It’s not the way America works with transparency and openness and the sharing of the information that needs to take place,” the secretary of State continued.
Ah, yes, transparency. So why did the CDC reportedly remove the number of people tested for COVID-19 from its official website?
This is unacceptable.
I just sent a letter to CDCDirector demanding answers to why their website removed public data on the number of patients tested in the United States.
The American people deserve answers. Sh6JRYBjRz
— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) March 3, 2020
Well, the CDC has updated its official website, as of today. The agency also says the page will be updated regularly at noon Mondays through Fridays. Data close out at 4 p.m. the day before reporting.
