The U.S. Intelligence Community reportedly presented President Donald Trump with a highly classified report last week that confirmed that communist China lied to the world about the number of cases and deaths it’s suffered from the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, which originated in China.

“China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete,” Bloomberg News reported, according to three U.S. officials that it spoke to. “Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.”

“The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,” Vice President Mike Pence told CNN in an interview on Wednesday. “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper highlighted a report yesterday from Radio Free Asia that stated that the number of deaths that China reported is significantly lower than the truth. RFA reported:

Wuhan resident Chen Yaohui told RFA that city officials have been handing out 3,000 yuan in “funeral allowances” to the families of the dead in exchange for their silence. “There have been a lot of funerals in the past few days, and the authorities are handing out 3,000 yuan in hush money to families who get their loved ones’ remains laid to rest ahead of Qing Ming,” he said, in a reference to the traditional grave tending festival on . … Chen said nobody in the city believes the official death toll. “The official number of deaths was 2,500 people … but before the epidemic began, the city’s crematoriums typically cremated around 220 people a day,” he said. “But during the epidemic, they transferred cremation workers from around China to Wuhan keep cremate bodies around the clock,” he said.

Bloomberg News’ report comes after The Daily Mail reported last week that scientific advisers reportedly told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that the communist China downplayed the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak in their country and that the real number could be “15 to 40 times” higher than what China has reported.

“Mr Johnson has been warned by scientific advisers that China’s officially declared statistics on the number of cases of coronavirus could be ‘downplayed by a factor of 15 to 40 times,’” The Daily Mail reported. “And [the British government] believes China is seeking to build its economic power during the pandemic with ‘predatory offers of help’ [to] countries around the world.’”

A recent Washington Post analysis warned against viewing the numbers out of China as being truthful. The Washington Post reported:

An article in the journal Science estimates that 86 percent of Hubei’s cases were undocumented by the time authorities extended the lockdown to Wuhan and other cities on Jan. 23. It is also likely that officials reported lower numbers of deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Especially once the central government’s propaganda mission to win the “people’s war” against the virus became clear, numbers shifted to achieve that vision. Such shifts would probably be subtle — not hundreds or thousands of hidden deaths, but instead excluding deaths that could be attributed to other types of pneumonia or heart failure, for instance.

China also has a history of lying about epidemics that originate within its borders.

On April 21, 2003, during the SARS outbreak, The New York Times reported that China admitted to under-reporting the total number of SARS cases:

In a rare public admission of failure, if not deception, the Chinese government disclosed today that cases of a dangerous new respiratory disease were many times higher than previously reported, and stripped two top officials of their power. […] Admitting to the existence of more than 200 previously undisclosed SARS patients in military hospitals, the official, Deputy Health Minister Gao Qiang, said that as of Friday Beijing had 339 confirmed cases of SARS and an additional 402 suspected cases. Ten days ago, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang said there were only 22 confirmed SARS cases in Beijing. Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization caused a stir here by estimating that there could be as many as 100 to 200 cases.

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