Vice President Mike Pence says China's lack of candor on COVID-19 crisis hurt the world
Vice President Mike Pence told 'The Brian Kilmeade Show' that China's lack of candor on the coronavirus negatively impacted the response to the virus
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Had China been more forthcoming about the coronavirus outbreak, there is "no question" that the world would have been in a better position to respond, Vice President Mike Pence stated Thursday.
In an interview on Fox News Radio's "The Brian Kilmeade Show," Pence said that China's withholding of accurate information negatively impacted emergency response.
"There's simply no question that China's lack of candor to the world impacted the way the world was able to respond," he concluded. "But, that being said Brian, I will tell you there will be a day for that discussion. And, right now we're just going to continue to lean into this effort [to combat the pandemic]."
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The Chinese outbreak was first reported late at the end of last year. It did not reach reports in the United States until mid-January when the first patient was diagnosed at an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Washington.
Now the number of confirmed cases worldwide is over 950,000 with just under 50,000 deaths. On Wednesday, the United States surpassed 210,000 reported cases with just over 5,100 deaths. China had recorded just over 82,000 cases before their numbers began to plateau.
However, in a classified report released to the White House, three U.S. intelligence officers concluded that China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, underreporting both total cases and fatalities from the disease.
Bloomberg, which first reported the news, cited the officers who they said they alerted the White House last week to Beijing's misleading numbers. Two of the three sources called the numbers flat-out fake.
National Security Adviser Robert C. O'Brien told reporters during Wednesday's daily news briefing that there is currently no way to verify the number of cases being reported by the Chinese government. That said, President Trump noted they “seem to be a little on the light side."
Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has been accused of multiple cover-ups. It has shifted its timeline on what it knew and when it knew it and has gone after critics, physicians and whistleblowers who tried to sound the alarm.
In addition, China’s National Health Commission acknowledged Wednesday that it had not been including patients without symptoms in its overall coronavirus infection count and would begin to do so. Beijing updated its data Wednesday to include 1,367 asymptomatic cases; of those,130 were reported in the last day, Fortune reported.
"And what seems evident now is that they were experiencing [a] significant outbreak of the coronavirus long before they revealed it to the world, to the World Health Organization, or certainly to the United States," Pence remarked.
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However, he told Kilmeade that "they've been more transparent than they were in the past and, frankly, we did get a team on the ground in February that looked at their data and we were able to make an assessment of what was happening at that point."
Fox News' Barnini Chakraborty contributed to this report.