US Lawmaker Calls Out Beijing for Lying About China’s Virus Infections, Death Toll

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Oct. 15, 2019. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

In response to a classified U.S. intelligence report about China’s coverup of the virus outbreak, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for deceiving the world in order to protect its rule.

“Although the CCP has a long history of lying to their own people and the global community, I still find it shocking the lengths their regime will go to in order to protect their power,” McCaul said in a statement issued on April 1.

“Even before news of this report was released it was clear that the Chinese Communist Party is not a trustworthy partner in the fight against COVID-19,” he added.

The classified report, first reported by Bloomberg citing three unnamed U.S. officials, was submitted to the White House last week, according to the outlet. The report said that China’s reporting on confirmed cases of the CCP virus and death toll figures are intentionally incomplete.

Two of the three officials said the report made the conclusion that China’s numbers are fake.

But during a daily press briefing of the White House Coronavirus Task Force on April 1 evening, President Donald Trump denied having received this intelligence report. However, he said the Chinese regime’s figures “seem to be a little bit on the light side.”

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus as the CCP virus because the Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The escalating pandemic began in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. The CCP virus has since spread to over 200 countries and territories, and killed over 43,000 people outside of mainland China.

McCaul noted that Beijing was not forthright about the nature of the virus. “They lied to the world about the human to human transmission of the virus, silenced doctors and journalists who tried to report the truth, and are now apparently hiding the accurate number of people impacted by this disease,” he said.

The Chinese regime did not openly acknowledge that the virus could be passed between people until Jan. 20, despite the fact that its Asian neighbor Taiwan had warned the World Health Organization (WHO) about the risk of human-to-human transmission on Dec. 31.

Taiwan subsequently sent two health experts to Wuhan to investigate. After their return, they held a press conference in Taipei on Jan. 16, saying that they could not rule out the possibility of human transmission.

The WHO also initially repeated Beijing’s claim that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” for the virus.

The Chinese regime also silenced eight doctors, among them ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, after they posted on Chinese social media about a pneumonia spreading in Wuhan.

Li, who has passed away after contracting the virus from a patient, was summoned to a local police station in Wuhan in early January for “rumor-mongering,” and ordered to sign a “confession” statement.

Last week, McCaul wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, calling for a global investigation into the CCP’s coverup. He also asked the CEOs of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to ban Chinese-state-run media outlets from spreading disinformation about the CCP virus on those internet platforms.

In early March, Beijing began aggressively pushing a global propaganda campaign to deflect attention from its mishandling of the outbreak.

“We must stop the CCP from causing further damage amid this pandemic that they allowed to fester and then spill out into the world,” McCaul concluded in his recent statement.

Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, stated that the United States’ initial response to the outbreak was slow due to China’s inaccurate data.

“I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese data as, this was serious, but smaller than anyone expected. Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data,” Birx said at a March 31 briefing.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), in a statement on April 1, also questioned China’s virus data.

“The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime,” Sasse said.

He added, “Beijing’s garbage propaganda shouldn’t be taken seriously by the World Health Organization, by independent journalists, or by the American epidemiologists who are going to beat this terrible virus.”