White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx echoed a statement from President Donald Trump and other White House officials that either Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or World Health Organization authorities knew about human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and misled the world months ago when reporting that only animal-to-human transmission was occurring.
In the interview, Birx suggested that numerous lives could have been saved if it were known earlier than human-to-human transmission was occurring.
“You really have to go back and ask yourself, why wasn’t there this level of transparency when this virus exploded?” she added. “I think people would have prepared differently if they had known the level of transmissibility of this virus.”
Other experts have said that the Chinese regime may have waited on informing the public about the highly contagious virus.
In the early days of the outbreak, the punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” which was broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, had a chilling effect in Chinese hospitals.
On Dec. 30, Li Wenliang, a Wuhan doctor, wrote on WeChat that patients had been diagnosed with a SARS-like illness and were quarantined in his hospital. He said the virus was a coronavirus before his message went viral in China.
Fauci noted that “clearly, it was not the right information that was given to us” by the CCP.
“The end result was that early on we did not get correct information and the incorrect information was propagated right from the beginning because, you know, when the first cases came out that were identified, I think on Dec. 31 in China, and we became aware of this,” Fauci said.
He added: “They said this was just animal to human, period. Now, we know retrospectively that there was ongoing transmission from human to human in China, probably at least a few weeks before then.”