Blog Post

AEIdeas

Last Friday, at the end of a long interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS’ NewsHour that was mostly about masks, “social distancing,” and other measures to fight the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci provided some important comments about China’s early lack of transparency concerning the new coronavirus.

While his comments have received relatively little public notice, they are among the strongest yet by any official in the administration or outside it. They are also the most precise about the consequences of the PRC’s misleading the world about the nature of the coronavirus.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci addresses the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 5, 2020. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Near the end of the interview, Woodruff asked, “I know you’ve said you don’t like to look back, but … when did you first have a sense that this was different? That what had happened was not just another virus?” Fauci replied:

Well, somewhere in early January when it became clear that what the Chinese had claimed originally – that this was just a virus that jumped from an animal reservoir to a human and wasn’t being transmitted from human to human – well it became very clear pretty quickly that that was not the case; that this was a virus that was being transmitted from human to human. But not only that, the nightmare that we have is that not only is it transmitted from human to human; it does it very efficiently. And when the numbers started coming in as to what the morbidity and mortality was, it was during that period from early to mid-January that it became clear to me that this was not just another SARS, it wasn’t another MERS or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, this was different. [Emphasis added]

Notice what Fauci emphasizes. While there has been much public comment (including by the present authors) about the unreliability of PRC official statistics on infection rates and morbidity, Fauci emphasized the importance of being misled about the efficient transmissibility of the disease.

Woodruff went on to ask him, “If [Chinese authorities] had been more transparent in the very beginning, would it have prevented the spread of this virus period, or would it have simply given more countries like the United States more time to prepare?” Dr. Fauci responded:

Well Judy, I don’t think anything would have prevented the spread of this virus. Once it emerged into society, with its capability of efficient spread and morbidity and mortality, that was it. But what could have been different, and this is something that people are going to reflect on when this is all over as they try and analyze what happened, is that if we had known that this was highly transmissible early on when it was just in China, I think other countries would have maybe been more quick on the trigger to try and inhibit travel from China to their country, because remember that it started in China and then…by the fact that there are so many Chinese people and travel is part of our daily existence in this planet, that there would have maybe been more attention paid to the possibility that just pure travel from China in general and certainly from Wuhan and the Hubei district is something that could start an outbreak throughout the world. So that delay in transparency I think likely had an impact on what I just said: the awareness that this could seed the rest of the world.

When Woodruff then asked him, “All that points right back to Chinese officials doesn’t it?” Fauci pulled no punches, replying, “It looks that way.”

He might have added that the PRC not only misled the world about the transmissibility of COVID-19; it silenced dissenting voices and got others to parrot its line — most importantly the WHO, which has lavishly praised China’s response to the epidemic. After briefly raising the prospect of human-to-human transmission in mid-January, WHO withdrew that warning on the same day. China didn’t acknowledge human-to-human transmission until January 20, by which point hundreds, if not thousands, of likely carriers had already traveled from Wuhan throughout China and around the world.

Yet according to the Financial Times, Taiwanese health officials alerted the WHO and Chinese authorities in December about human-to-human transmission. The WHO, which excludes Taiwan at China’s behest, failed to relay the warning to other countries. Those people who seem to have done best in responding to the epidemic are those in Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore, who have learned to distrust PRC public health reporting.

China’s claim that COVID-19 originated at a livestock animal market in Wuhan is also coming into question. According to reports last week, American intelligence officials are increasingly convinced that the coronavirus did not emerge from that market. Bats were not for sale there and, as noted in The Lancet, the first COVID-19 case had no connection to it. Instead, they have noted Wuhan CDC research that detailed scientists collecting bat coronaviruses with inadequate protective gear.

This means that the PRC’s lack of transparency about even basic data, much less the original source of this virus, is not just a question for the future. It may still affect present assessments about how best to fight this pandemic and whether the PRC can be a trustworthy partner in doing so.