During an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) former commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb blasted the World Health Organization (WHO) for validating China’s misinformation about the coronavirus and has called for a retroactive investigation into “what China did or didn’t tell the world.”
“China was not truthful with the world at the outset of this,” Gottlieb said. “Had they been more truthful with the world, which would have enabled them to be more truthful with themselves, they might have actually been able to contain this entirely. There is some growing evidence to suggest that.”
Gottlieb then went on to criticize the WHO for its January 14 tweet which infamously claimed: “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
“As late as January 20, they were still saying that there was no human-to-human transmission, and the WHO was validating those claims on January 14, sort of enabling the obfuscation from China,” Gottlieb added. “I think going forward, the WHO needs to commit to an after-action report that specifically examines what China did or didn’t tell the world and how that stymied the global response to this.”
Gottlieb’s comments reflect the findings of multiple reports that have shown the damage caused by China’s lies and censorship of information.
Non-profit Reporters Without Borders predicted that without China’s control and censorship of information about the coronavirus, thousands of lives could have been spared and the current pandemic may have been avoided.
Beyond the human cost, China’s propaganda about the coronavirus has manipulated online conversation about the virus with many western institutions and media outlets now parroting China’s talking points by claiming that terms such as “the Chinese virus” and “the Wuhan virus” are racist.
And recently deleted censorship notices from several Chinese universities show that China is now clamping down on research into the origins of the coronavirus – a move that is likely to help China further obfuscate and deflect blame for the virus.
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