Foreign Property News | Posted by Shwe Zin Win
China has furiously hit back at what it dubbed 'preposterous allegations' made by the US over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The 30-page, 11,000-word article came as a report claimed Chinese President Xi Jinping personally asked World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom to 'delay a global warning' about the threat of Covid-19 during a conversation in January.
Germany's Der Spiegel published the allegations this weekend, citing intelligence from the country's Federal Intelligence Service, known as the 'Bundesnachrichtendienst' (BND).
But WHO insisted the shock reports are 'unfounded and untrue' shortly afterwards, claiming Dr Tedros and President Xi 'did not speak on January 21 and they have never spoken by phone.'
On Saturday, Beijing issued a lengthy rebuttal of what it claimed were 24 'preposterous allegations' made by the US concerning its handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
The Chinese foreign ministry has fiercely rejected accusations made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Beijing concealed information about the deadly virus at the start of the pandemic.
Pompeo has also accused China of withholding virus samples he said were needed for vaccine research - as President Donald Trump insisted earlier this week there is enough evidence to prove President Xi's regime misled the global community.
'As Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all the time and fool all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,' the article's prologue said.
The lengthy rebuttal gave a timeline of how China had reportedly provided information to the world in a 'timely', 'open and transparent' manner to rebuke suggestions it had been slow to sound the alarm.
Keen to dispel suggestions the virus was deliberately created or somehow leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it claimed all evidence shows Covid-19 is not man-made while insisting the institute is not capable of synthesising a new virus.
The article cited media reports which claimed US citizens had been infected with the virus before the first cases were confirmed in Wuhan, although there is no evidence to suggest this is the case.
It also rejected criticism of Bejing's handling of the case of Li Wenliang, the doctor who first attempted to raise the alarm over the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan.
The article asserted that Mr Wenliang was not a 'whistle-blower' and he was never arrested, despite Western reports to the contrary.
It came as the bombshell Bundesnachrichtendienst report claimed President Xi asked WHO Director-General Adhanom to 'delay a global warning' about the threat of Covid-19.
According to the BND: 'On January 21, China's leader Xi Jinping asked WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to hold back information about a human-to-human transmission and to delay a pandemic warning.
'The BND estimates that China's information policy lost four to six weeks to fight the virus worldwide'.
The WHO released a statement shortly after the publication of the shock claims, calling them 'unfounded and untrue'.
'Dr Tedros and President Xi did not speak on January 21 and they have never spoken by phone. Such inaccurate reports distract and detract from WHO's and the world's efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic,' the statement read.
It continued: 'China confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus on January 20 [prior to the alleged phone conversation].
'The WHO publicly declared on January 22 that 'data collected … suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan.''
If the claims were true, they would bolster President Trump's assertion that the WHO is 'China-centric'.
Back in April, the Trump Administration alleged the WHO was becoming a tool of 'Chinese propaganda', and the president moved to halt funding of the organisation.
Last week, the President launched a fresh attack on the organisation during a Fox News virtual town hall meeting.
'The World Health organisation has been a disaster everything they said was wrong and they're China-centric,' he stated at the event, held last Monday.
'All they do is agree with China, whatever China wants to do. So our country, perhaps foolishly in retrospect has been paying $450million a year to the World Health Organisation and China's been paying $38million a year but they were more political than all of our leaders previously.
'What they did, what World Health did, was they missed every single call and we're not going to put up with it.'
Relations between Washington and the WHO has soured throughout the crisis after Trump consistently accused the body of siding with China, saying it has been hand-in-glove with Xi Jinping in covering up the outbreak.
Director-general Adhanom has hailed China as an exemplar of how to handle an emergency despite widespread skepticism of the country's official coronavirus death toll.
Earlier this week, Trump also said there was enough evidence to prove President Xi Jinping's regime misled the global community.
'Well, I don't think there's any question about it. We wanted to go in, they didn't want us to go in. Things are coming out that are pretty compelling. I don't think there's any question,' the president said Sunday.
'Personally, I think they made a horrible mistake, and they didn't want to admit it,' he added.
His comments came as a Department of Homeland Security report shared on Sunday revealed US officials believe China 'intentionally concealed the severity' of the pandemic in early January and hoarded medical supplies.
The four-page report dated May 1 that was obtained by the Associated Press notes that China downplayed the virus publicly but increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies.
The document accuses China of covering their tracks by 'denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data.'
It lends weight to a leaked dossier drawn up by the Five Eyes intelligence alliance which describes how Beijing made whistleblowers 'disappear', destroyed early virus samples and scrubbed the internet of any mention of the disease in the early stages.
The 15-page document brands Beijing's secrecy over the pandemic an 'assault on international transparency' and points to cover-up tactics deployed by the regime.
It claims that the Chinese government silenced its most vocal critics and scrubbed any online scepticism about its handling of the health emergency from the internet.
China has roundly come under fire for suppressing the scale of its early outbreak which did not afford other nations time to react before the disease hit their shores.
Five Eyes - the pooling of intelligence by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - laid bare its scathing assessment of the Xi Jinping administration in a memo obtained by the Australian Saturday Telegraph.
It describes how Beijing was outwardly downplaying the outbreak on the world stage while secretly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease.
More than four million people around the world have contracted the highly contagious virus, and at least 279,000 have died.
There are currently at least 1.3 million cases of coronavirus in the US and more than 79,000 deaths.
Last month, British MPs warned China had cost lives by spreading disinformation about the coronavirus outbreak.
The Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said that as the country where the outbreak originated, China should have played a central role in collecting data on its spread.
But it accused Beijing of seeking to 'obfuscate' over what was really happening form the outset.
Ref: Daily Mail
