The Chinese Communist Party – widely criticized for downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak – said Monday it would cooperate with an independent investigation into the World Health Organization’s response to the pandemic.
The 27 members of the European Union, along with Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and New Zealand, are on board with Australia for an independent inquiry into the pandemic that has killed more than 316,000 people worldwide and infected more than 4.7 million.
President Trump said he was behind the investigation, tweeting: “We are with them!”
The president has cut US funding for the WHO until a review is completed into its relationship with China in the early days of the outbreak.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar didn’t mention China by name in his video speech to the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s annual summit, but denounced the “apparent attempt to conceal this outbreak by at least one member state.”
He also said the WHO has to be held accountable for why “this outbreak spun out of control.”
“There was a failure by this organization to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives,” Azar said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said he backs an investigation into the “global response” once the pandemic subsides.
“China supports a comprehensive evaluation of the global response to the epidemic after the global epidemic is under control, to sum up experiences and remedy deficiencies,” Xi said in his video speech to the assembly in Geneva.
Xi also defended his country’s response to the coronavirus outbreak following the first reported cases in Wuhan, China, in December and said Beijing would provide $2 billion over the next two years to fight the pandemic.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he would launch an independent inquiry “at the earliest appropriate moment.”
But he claimed the UN agency had “sounded the alarm early, and we sounded it often,” noting that when it declared a global emergency on Jan. 30, there were fewer than 100 cases outside China and no reported deaths.
On March 11, the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic.
With wires