China acknowledges that early coronavirus samples have been destroyed, says action has been taken due to health concerns
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month
accused the Asian superpower of not being transparent about spread of the
coronavirus.
The Chinese Communist Party still has not shared
the virus sample from inside of China with the outside world, making it
impossible to track the disease’s evolution,’ Pompeo stated at a briefing on
April 22.
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 Organization, he added.
Even after the CCP did notify the WHO of the
coronavirus outbreak, China didn’t share all of the information that it had.
However, China has acknowledged it destroyed early
samples of COVID-19, confirming a claim put forward by U.S. Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo late last month.
On Friday, Liu Dengfeng, a supervisor with China’s
National Health Commission, admitted that ‘the Chinese government issued an
order on January 3 to dispose of coronavirus samples’ at unauthorized
laboratories, according to Newsweek.
But Liu denied that the samples were destroyed as
part of a cover-up, insisting that they were disposed of so as to ‘prevent risk
to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused by
unidentified pathogens.
He stated that the labs were ‘unauthorized’ to
handle such samples, and they had to be terminated in order to comply with
Chinese public health laws.
Liu did not specify how many
labs destroyed coronavirus samples.
China
has come under pressure to contain the severity of its early epidemic, which
did not give other nations time to respond until the disease reached its
shores.
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