The United Kingdom’s defense secretary said China must respond to allegations that it downplayed the extent of the coronavirus.
Ben Wallace was asked during an interview on LBC radio Monday whether China has questions to answer about its handling of the pandemic.
“I think it does,” he said, according to Reuters.
“China needs to be open and transparent about … its shortcomings but also its successes,” Wallace said.
The US and other nations have criticized Beijing for not being upfront with the world about the severity of the virus and for not accurately reporting the total number of cases after the initial outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December.
Wallace said the time for a “post mortem” on China’s reaction should be after “we’ve all got it under control and have come through it and our economies are back to normal.”
In separate interviews Sunday, President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed China for misleading the world about the COVID-19 pandemic that has now infected more than 3.5 million people.
“Personally, I think they made a horrible mistake, and they didn’t want to admit it,” Trump told Fox News in an interview at the Lincoln Memorial. “We wanted to go in, but they didn’t want us there. They made a mistake, they tried to cover it, like a fire … They couldn’t put out the fire.”
Beijing launched a “disinformation” campaign to avoid responsibility once the initial cases were reported in Wuhan, Pompeo said.
“China behaved like authoritarian regimes do, attempted to conceal and hide and confuse. It employed the World Health Organization as a tool to do the same. These are the kind of things that have now presented this enormous crisis, an enormous loss of life and tremendous economic cost, all across the globe,” Pompeo told ABC News’ “This Week.”
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May 05, 2020 at 12:47AM
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