The reports also say that when the Chinese Communist Party learned about the virus, it sought to hide the full extent of that knowledge from the rest of the world – painting a general picture of a dangerously mysterious political system, they said. the U.S. officials. The Trump administration has made this accusation several times, and U.S. officials said Chinese behavior and behavior fit a pattern that was also seen in the outbreak of SARS, as a severe acute respiratory syndrome, in 2003.
While the U.S. continues to gather information about the new outbreak of coronavirus in China, intelligence contains undisputed evidence of local cover-up attempts, officials say.
The New York Times first revealed that US intelligence had reported on efforts to cover information about the virus at the local level in Wuhan.
President Donald Trump and his senior officials have aggressively attacked China for the pandemic, with Trump at one point suggesting that Beijing has deliberately allowed the virus to spread outside its borders to harm other nations’ economies. The criticism marked a sharp over-face to Trump’s initial praise for President Xi Jinping’s handling of the virus – part of a strategy for an election campaign to remove guilt for a pandemic that killed 175,000 Americans and now more than 5.5 million infects in the US.
Local government in Wuhan includes both state officials and Chinese Communist Party officials, and U.S. intelligence shows that even within the party, officials do not share information with their servants in Beijing, one official said.
The Chinese consulate in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Unused resources
The U.S. intelligence community is not yet able to inform all sources about the origin of the virus, said three U.S. officials, adding that intelligence agencies are still hoping to learn more. The latest official statement from the intelligence community on the origin of the virus, in April, said it would “strictly investigate emerging information and intelligence to determine if the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident”. at a laboratory in Wuhan. ”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA declined to comment.
Even before Americans began searching sick, the U.S. intelligence community had followed that officials in Wuhan initially did not give Beijing the full picture of the seriousness of the situation there. But U.S. officials also believe that there came a point where Xi became aware of the full extent of the outbreak in Wuhan and realized that the virus was spreading, but continued to limit the situation in public.
It is not clear when US intelligence officials observed that Beijing was fully aware of the situation. A US official told CNN that in February there was a point where Xi’s public remarks and actions seemed to indicate that the Chinese leader was realizing that the virus would pose bigger problems than he initially thought, because he demanded to take more action.
The Trump administration has looked into the possibility of the new coronavirus spreading from a Chinese laboratory instead of a market, according to several sources familiar with the matter, but it has not presented any evidence to support this theory. Many reputable medical experts have said that there is very little scientific evidence that the virus came from a laboratory as if it were human.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has suggested that the blame for the global death toll lies with China and its political system, and accuses Beijing’s senior leaders of not intending to come to terms with the world, even over a global health issue. .
Skepticism
Some current and former national security officials are skeptical about reports that Beijing was unaware of the potential dangers of the new virus.
A U.S. national security official working closely with China’s officials claimed that Beijing was responsible for any delays in communicating vital information about the virus to the world.
“I do not think Wuhan officials hid it from Beijing,” the official told CNN. “From my experience, there were no efforts at all to make things public as soon as they could. There were also efforts, after all, to try to lay the groundwork so that the investors would take the fall for it. . “
The way China works, says former senior CIA official Daniel Hoffman, would make it very difficult for officials in Wuhan to keep news of the spreading virus to themselves. President Xi “has his own boys all over China, so you can not keep information from him,” Hoffman said. “That is not entirely possible there. He is carrying out a brutal dictatorship; his spies are everywhere.”
“The idea that some local officials could hide this from Xi is fancy. It punishes common sense,” Hoffman said.
CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to reflect the exact number of coronavirus deaths in the US.
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