Several members of Congress suspect Chinese officials are hiding details of the disease spreading in their country.
Representatives raised suspicions during an oversight panel held Wednesday on the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, despite assurances from global health officials, raising the prospect of exacerbated tensions between the two countries.
The new coronavirus has infected at least 24,363 people in China and has resulted in 490 deaths, though it’s possible the incidents could be far higher, given that some people may have only mild symptoms and therefore don’t seek medical attention. The outbreak has spread to 24 other countries, some with only a handful of cases, and caused massive disruptions in travel around the world.
Suspicions against Chinese officials intensified this week after several news reports from Western publications uncovered secrecy surrounding the early days of the infection. On top of that, U.S. officials have asked to send scientists to China for weeks to assist with efforts but were blocked until just recently.
“The slow-walking of information and assessments not only hurts the credibility of China but also hinders our ability as an international community to prevent the further loss of life and spread of the disease,” said Republican Ted Yoho of Florida during the oversight panel hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Democrat Brad Sherman of California expressed similar frustrations, saying that “the Chinese have not involved the U.S. experts to the degree they should.” Democrat Eliot Engel of New York said that the way the Chinese Communist Party treated its citizens amid the outbreak was “horrifying.” He criticized officials for cracking down on information, alluding to reports that said officials punished doctors and citizens for talking about the outbreak.
“It’s unacceptable and must come to an end,” he said.
The situation is reminiscent of the SARS outbreak in China in 2003, when officials received widespread criticism for withholding information about the deadly illness. Jennifer Bouey, a policy researcher in China Policy Studies at the RAND Corporation, testified at the hearing that China had improved since that outbreak but raised concerns about how officials downplayed the potential severity of the coronavirus at the beginning.
Trump administration officials haven’t accused the Chinese of hiding information but have said they want to help the country fight its outbreak, which would mean assisting with a vaccine and a treatment. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who is leading the task force against the coronavirus on behalf of the Trump administration, said on Fox’s Lou Dobbs Tonight on Tuesday that U.S. officials had to take Chinese officials at their word about the toll until it could get its own experts on the ground.
Sharing in the skepticism about China was Ron Klain, an expert invited to testify and who oversaw efforts against Ebola during the Obama administration. He called the holdup in getting U.S. scientists to China “hard to explain and hard to justify.”
“I don’t think so,” Klain said, of whether the World Health Organization could be trusted to make an independent assessment of the situation in China, noting that there had been a delay in calling the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” which he said “reflected Chinese influence.”
“The Chinese have failed the test of transparency and cooperation, and they definitely need to do better,” Klain said. “We should be very concerned about that.”
The comments clashed with those from WHO officials. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s leader, said in a press conference Wednesday that the idea that China is hiding its cases “defies logic” because the virus would have spread to many other neighboring countries.
“If something was hidden, then you would expect more cases to be exported from China to the rest of the world,” he said.
Jennifer Nuzzo, senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, was less quick to attribute motives in her testimony before the panel, saying that every country handling a massive outbreak struggles with how to respond.
“In every situation we have looked at, there have always been challenges, there have always been missteps, there have always been mistakes,” she said, of what she has learned studying how infectious diseases spread.
She worried instead that the restrictions on travel the United States put on people from China and the quarantine of its citizens would worsen the outbreak.
“I am concerned by our singling out China for travel bans [that] we are effectively penalizing it for reporting cases,” she said. “This may diminish its willingness to further share data and chill other countries’ willingness to be transparent about their own outbreaks.”