Until July 2019, the United States had a resident health adviser in China that consulted with Chinese health officials. That position was scrapped, Reuters reported, amid a chill in US-Chinese relations.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said one expert.

Several US health experts told Reuters that the US could have gotten an early jump on the new coronavirus outbreak if the role still existed.

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President Donald Trump’s administration slashed a public-health position in China last year that could have helped US authorities spot the novel coronavirus outbreak before it spread across the globe, according to Reuters.

Dr. Linda Quick, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a resident adviser to Chinese health officials through July 2019, when she left the role upon learning it would be discontinued in September, according to four sources who spoke to Reuters.

In the position – officially known as the resident adviser to the US Field Epidemiology Training Program in China – Quick trained field epidemiologists who helped track, investigate and contain diseases at the epicenter of outbreaks, according to Reuters.

The first case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, emerged in China’s Hubei province in November. Chinese health authorities previously believed the original case arose in December.

“If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster,” Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American who as the resident adviser from 2007 to 2011, told Reuters. “It was heartbreaking to watch.”

The position was discontinued amid a US-China political rift

The role was discontinued, according to one expert, because US-Chinese politics trumped public health. US officials had been mired in a years-long debate about whether the CDC should pay for an American health official to advise Chinese counterparts, according to Dr. George Conway, a medical epidemiologist who served as resident adviser from 2012 to 2015.

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Over the past two years, the CDC has diminished its presence in China, according to the sources.

By the time Quick’s position was cut, “we had already withdrawn many technical public health experts,” one person told Reuters.

Foto: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield speaks as U.S. President Donald Trump listens during a news conference at the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House February 29, 2020 in Washington, DC. Source: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Thomas Frieden, former director of the CDC, told Reuters that if Quick’s position still existed, “it is possible that we would know more today about how this coronavirus is spreading and what works best to stop it.”

President Trump said Sunday that the Reuters report was “100% wrong,” but did not address the now-abandoned adviser role. Robert Redfield, the current CDC director, also denied the CDC report but did not offer any details. The CDC didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

Frieden told Reuters that Trump’s effect on US-Chinese relations was a detriment to collaborative public-health efforts.

“The message from the administration was, ‘Don’t work with China, they’re our rival,'” said Frieden.

In a statement to Reuters, the CDC said the removal of the position did not change the US response to the outbreak. It “had absolutely nothing to do with CDC not learning of cases in China earlier,” the statement said.