As the coronavirus death toll surpasses 2,000 people worldwide, one senator is warning about the lack of transparency from Chinese officials regarding the mystery illness.
Sen. Tom Cotton, who has repeatedly chastised the Chinese Communist Party for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, said, “I have very low confidence in the state of Chinese politics because their government is still lying to the world about this deadly matter,” during an interview Friday on Fox News.
As the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus grows around the world, the Chinese government has been criticized for its failure to act quickly and openly about the magnitude of the disease, which the World Health Organization labeled a “global emergency” two weeks ago.
“I don’t disagree that China’s scientists and doctors can, in some cases, be world-class and very professional. However, they have sitting next to them at every level of government a minder from the Chinese Communist Party, and I do not have any confidence in those party apparatchiks allowing China’s scientists or their doctors to speak freely to anyone outside of China, especially officials in the United States government,” the Arkansas Republican said.
Chinese authorities have been accused of cracking down on scientists, doctors, and citizen journalists who attempted to sound the alarm about the epidemic, which has its epicenter in the city of Wuhan. One whistleblower, who warned of the disease on Dec. 30 and was reprimanded for doing so, fell ill and died from the disease only weeks after his first messages about the mystery illness.
Early reports from China claimed the disease started in the Wuhan wildlife market and videos of Chinese cuisine, such as bat soup, circulated on Twitter, promoting the idea that dietary habits could have played a role in the outbreak. But as the disease has spread, Cotton and others have noted that Wuhan contains China’s “only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens.”
“We know that it didn’t start in the Wuhan food market. That was the original story of the Chinese Communist Party, so it’s only responsible to ask where it did start,” Cotton said. “I still think the most likely hypothesis is it was naturally occurring, but given the proximity of that laboratory to the food market, it is only reasonable that we ask the Chinese Communist Party to be open and transparent about the kind of research they were conducting there and the safety, protocols, and practices they had in place.”
On Thursday, the State Department transported 14 infected American travelers who had been quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Japan.
Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention downplayed concerns about what she called a “rapidly changing situation.”
“It is really early days, and we’re continuing to get information every day that is better helping us understand this virus,” Messonnier said during a CDC briefing in late January.
