On Wednesday, after a meeting between representatives of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the World Health Organization (WHO), the WHO finally issued a statement condemning China for its suppression of information regarding the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Daily Caller, the WHO issued the statement after the meeting on Tuesday, declaring that it would “continue to closely monitor the situation in the People’s Republic of China,” while adding that there was a “critical need for and importance of additional analysis as well as sharing of sequence data.”
Specifically, the CCP has not reported the full number of coronavirus casualties in recent weeks and months due to a resurgence of the disease there, which led to the government implementing a strict lockdown policy known as “zero COVID.” China claimed only a small number of deaths in recent days, while outside observers claim that there could be tens of millions of people infected and well over 10,000 deaths per day.
“The current numbers being published from China underestimate the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions and ICU admissions and in terms of deaths,” said Mike Ryan, the emergencies director for the WHO. “The state should be the primary source of credible, accurate information relating to people’s health of which they can take appropriate action.”
The government’s decision to rescind the zero COVID policy in December appears to not have changed the rate of infection and death, as the ongoing stonewalling by the CCP prevents the outside world from learning the true numbers. Some have observed that factors contributing to the rise may include the inefficiency of vaccines developed in China, as well as a low level of natural immunity among the population due to the strict lockdown measures.
Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, the WHO has faced widespread criticism for not being tougher on China, which has suppressed information regarding the possible origins of COVID-19. Although the WHO claimed that the coronavirus was formed naturally in a “wet market” in Wuhan, evidence has continued to point to the likely theory that it was deliberately developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and ultimately released in an accident, known as the “lab leak” theory. Since then, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has publicly admitted that the lab leak theory is possible.