In statements during an online course with the Heritage Foundation, Azar spoke about the Trump Administration’s actions in response to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes the disease COVID-19. He said that the CCP had regularly rejected offers of help from the United States, and in doing so barred attempts from the Trump administration to learn more about the virus and progress.
“The genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in China was not shared until Jan. 9, 10 days after the virus was reported to the media, and likely one or two months after it had actually appeared,” he said.
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“Being able to investigate the virus in January would have helped the United States and the world develop a science- and data-driven response. Instead, we were flying blind with human to human transmission of the virus not officially confirmed until Jan. 20.”
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Azar told the Heritage Foundation that the United States heard of an outbreak in Wuhan, China on Dec. 30, 2019, “not through that country’s official channels as required under the international health regulations, but through media monitoring that we do as well as through notification from Taiwan’s Economic and Cultural office here in the United States.”
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“That’s right. One of the very first ways that the U.S. government was notified of a novel virus in Mainland China was by people from Taiwan,” he emphasized.
Azar said that he and other U.S. officials “suspected we could not trust the reports out of China.”
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“Reports from China suggested that the virus had likely emerged there by November and the Chinese government’s explanation for the outbreak did not make sense,” he said, noting how the Chinese CDC Director Gao Fu had told U.S. CDC Director Robert Redfield that the virus started from animals in the Wuhan market.
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“Yet in the first week of January there were several clusters of cases within families which were very unlikely to have come from close encounters with animals, suggesting human to human transmission,” Azar said. “There was so much that we needed to know and so little information that was coming out of China.”
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Azar said that starting on Jan. 3 and throughout the month, he led Redfield to reach out to Gao to offer to present a CDC team to assist with research into the origins of the virus. This included Redfield sending a formal letter to the Chinese CDC offering full assistance on Jan. 6.
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“It was not until Jan. 29 that our offer was even officially acknowledged,” Azar said. “By that time, one major focus was pushing for an immediate deployment of an international team through WHO as is customary for potentially concerning outbreaks.”
Only on Feb. 16, 2020, a team from the World Health Organization was deployed.
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