On Friday, after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused the Chinese government of having “wasted valuable days” after discovering the coronavirus by permitting “hundreds of thousands” to leave Wuhan and travel abroad, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying ranted on Twitter at Pompeo, “Stop lying through your teeth!” She added, “As WHO experts said, China’s efforts averted hundreds of thousands of infection cases.”

Pompeo stated, “The Chinese Communist Party didn’t get it right and put countless lives at risk as a result of that,” as France 24 noted.

Chunying claimed China had alerted the United States regarding the coronavirus outbreak on January 3 and the State Department told Americans in Wuhan on January 15. She wrote, “And now blame China for delay? Seriously?”

But State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus responded, “By Jan. 3, Chinese authorities had already ordered #COVID19 virus samples destroyed, silenced Wuhan doctors, and censored public concerns online.” Ortagus added that Hua “is right: This is a timeline the world must absolutely scrutinize.”

By Jan. 3, Chinese authorities had already ordered #COVID19 virus samples destroyed, silenced Wuhan doctors, and censored public concerns online. @SpokespersonCHN is right: This is a timeline the world must absolutely scrutinize. pic.twitter.com/W3se645U2Y — Morgan Ortagus (@statedeptspox) March 20, 2020

On Thursday, Ortagus told Guy Benson of Fox News that the Chinese government was “Holding the match. They lit the world on fire with this virus.”

Benson asked, “Officials in Wuhan saying there are no new cases as of today. Should we believe that information from the Chinese government and relatedly, what do you make of this tempest over people saying it’s racist of the president or anyone else to talk about the Chinese roots of this disease, calling it the ‘China virus,’ ‘Chinese virus,’ what have you?”

Ortagus answered:

In terms of the validity of the information that China’s reporting … I’ll leave that up to my CDC colleagues; I’m not a scientist, not a doctor. Let’s just say that China, in general, whether it has to do with this crisis or not, doesn’t have a track record of being truthful, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. Listen, remember where this line of ‘racism’ comes from? This is actually a Chinese Communist Party line a few weeks ago. The Wall Street Journal’s Russell Mead, whom you and I both know and respect quite well, had an editorial, one of his columns. And in that column, I don’t even remember the exact headline at the moment, but that column and that headline, the Chinese decided to kick out Wall Street Journal reporters, three of them at the time, and they have since kicked out more. But at the time they kicked out three of them, and their excuse was that the Wall Street Journal’s headline was racist.

She continued:

And so this is a line of propaganda that we have heard the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) say, and they use this as a justification for kicking reporters out of China. Now just this week they’ve gone even further with The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, kicking American journalists out of China. And when this is happening, Guy, why does it matter that they’re kicking journalists out of China? Well, you have to remember that the media outlets there are state media outlets, right? And they are not reporting truth. They’re censored; they’re not reporting the full truth of what’s going on. So we had pretty amazing investigative journalists that were telling the world what was actually going on in Wuhan; telling the world what was going on with Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, and the CCP has specifically decided to kick out these reporters and in essence they’re kicking out the truth. And this should send a chill down everyone’s back.

Benson noted that China had been lying about the disease, adding that the Chinese government had been interning and torturing ethnic minorities, and thus had no ground to accuse others of racism.

Ortagus responded, “This is a regime that has by our estimates, at least a million people in jail for their faith, simply for being Muslims. And we even have reports that recently, I was just looking today, that some of these people are being starved to death. So before people unwisely give the Chinese Communist Party the high ground, remember that they are holding the match. They lit the world on fire with this virus.”