Bombshell report reveals China's president asked WHO chief to hold back coronavirus details and delay warning
According to a new report, Chinese President Xi Jinping personally asked World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom to "delay a global warning" about the threat of Covid-19 during a conversation back in January.
The report comes from Germany's Der Speigel which cited intelligence from the country's Federal Intelligence Service, known as the 'Bundesnachrichtendienst' (BND). According to the report, "On January 21, China's leader Xi Jinping asked WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to hold back information about a human-to-human transmission and to delay a pandemic warning."
The report also said that the BND estimates that "China's information policy lost four to six weeks to fight the virus worldwide."
Shortly after the publication, the WHO released a statement on Twitter calling the allegations "unfounded and untrue." The statement continues, "They didn’t speak on 21 January and have never spoken by [phone]. Such inaccurate reports distract and detract from WHO's and the [world’s] efforts to end #COVID19."
In April, US President Donald Trump moved to halt funding for the WHO after accusing the group of mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. Trump said, “Today I’m instructing my administration to stop funding of the WHO while a review is conducted to assess the WHO’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the Coronavirus.”
“They’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” Trump said at the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing last month. “And they had a lot of information early and they didn’t want to – they seemed to be very China-centric.”
The Trump administration had been bolstering efforts to center the blame for the pandemic on China. “I think they made a horrible mistake and they didn’t want to admit it. We wanted to go in. They didn’t want us there,” Trump said during a Fox News virtual town hall last week. “This virus should not have spread all over the world. They should have put it out.”
"The World Health organization has been a disaster everything they said was wrong and they're China-centric," said Trump. "All they do is agree with China, whatever China wants to do. So our country, perhaps foolishly in retrospect has been paying $450million a year to the World Health Organisation and China's been paying $38million a year but they were more political than all of our leaders previously."
In a US Department of Homeland Security intelligence report obtained by the Associated Press earlier this month, officials believed that Chinese leaders “intentionally concealed the severity” of the pandemic from the world in early January. The report also says China held off informing the World Health Organization that the coronavirus “was a contagion” for much of January so it could order medical supplies from abroad — and that its imports of face masks and surgical gowns and gloves increased sharply.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, China reported 14 new cases of coronavirus -- its highest since April 28th and the first in more than a month in the city of Wuhan. The new Wuhan case, the first reported in the epicenter of China's outbreak since April 3, was previously asymptomatic, according to the health commission.
The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in mainland China reached 83,990 at the time of reporting, while the total death toll from the virus stood at 4,637, as per the John Hopkins tracker.