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DEADLY DELAY: China Identified COVID Weeks Before Telling World; WSJ Report

By Eric Bolling Staff

(Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

According to a bombshell Wall Street Journal report, Chinese researchers identified the virus that causes COVID-19 at least two weeks before Beijing informed the world, documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reveal.

From WSJ:

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Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.

China only shared the virus’s sequence with the World Health Organization on Jan. 11, 2020, according to U.S. government timelines of the pandemic.

The new information doesn’t shed light on the debate over whether Covid emerged from an infected animal or a lab leak, but it suggests that the world still doesn’t have a full accounting of the pandemic’s origin.

The extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses and get started on an eventual vaccine, specialists have said. In late 2019, scientists and governments worldwide were racing to understand the mystery disease eventually named Covid-19 that would kill millions and sicken many more.

It “underscores how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information that the Chinese government has released,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who has reviewed the documents and the recently discovered gene sequence. “It’s important to keep in mind how little we know.”

More over at The Wall Street Journal:

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