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U.S. Intel: China ‘Intentionally Concealed The Severity’ Of Pandemic To Hoard Supplies, Report Suggests

   DailyWire.com
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at a news conference at the State Department on April 29, 2020, in Washington,DC.
ANDREW HARNIK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

A new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report from this month states that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “intentionally concealed the severity” of the coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan because they wanted to hoard the medical supplies that they needed to respond to the pandemic.

“The analysis states that, while downplaying the severity of the coronavirus, China increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies,” The Associated Press reported. “It attempted to cover up doing so by ‘denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data,’ the analysis states.”

The AP added, “The report also says China held off informing the World Health Organization that the coronavirus ‘was a contagion’ for much of January so it could order medical supplies from abroad — and that its imports of face masks and surgical gowns and gloves increased sharply.”

The DHS report said that its conclusions were based on a 95% probability that China’s changes in its import and export levels did not fall within a normal variance range.

The New York Times reported in March:

As hospitals and governments hunt desperately for respirators and surgical masks to protect doctors and nurses from the coronavirus pandemic, they face a difficult reality: The world depends on China to make them, and the country is only beginning to share.

China made half the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and it has expanded production nearly 12-fold since then. But it has claimed mask factory output for itself. Purchases and donations also brought China a big chunk of the world’s supply from elsewhere.

Now, worries about mask supplies are rising. As the virus’s global spread escalates, governments around the world are restricting exports of protective gear, which experts say could worsen the pandemic.

Reports state that China hoarded 2.46 billion pieces of medical materials, including over 2 billion masks, and Chinese companies allegedly instructed employees in foreign countries to buy up local supplies of masks.

The New York Post reported in April:

Executives from 3M and Honeywell told US officials that the Chinese government in January began blocking exports of N95 respirators, booties, gloves and other supplies produced by their factories in China, according to a senior White House official.

China paid the manufacturers their standard wholesale rates, but prohibited the vital items from being sold to anyone else, the official said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday that China had a history of pandemics originating within its borders and “have a history of running substandard laboratories.”

“These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab,” Pompeo said. “I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.”

“The Chinese communist party had the opportunity to prevent all of the calamity that has befallen the world,” Pompeo continued. “This is an enormous crisis created by the fact that the Chinese communist party reverted to form, reverted to the kinds of disinformation, the kinds of concealment that authoritarian regimes do. Had those scientists been operating in America, they would have put this out.”

“Instead, China behaved like authoritarian regimes do, attempted to conceal and hide and confuse. It employed the World Health Organization as a tool to do the same. These are the kind of things that have now presented this enormous crisis, an enormous loss of life and tremendous economic cost all across the globe,” Pompeo continued. “The Australians agree with that. You hear the Europeans beginning to say the same thing. I think the whole world is united in understanding that China brought this virus to the world.”

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