China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday slammed some U.S. politicians' "shameless" remarks doubting China's reporting of coronavirus cases in the country.
Spokesperson Hua Chunying said during a daily briefing that China has been open and transparent about the coronavirus outbreak that began in the country late last year. She said the United States should stop politicizing the health issue and instead focus on the safety of its people.
"Regarding international public health security, the most qualified judges are the World Health Organization and related experts in infectious diseases and medical control, not a few politicians who are full of lies," Hua stressed.
Some U.S. officials, including U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have questioned the accuracy of Chinese figures during the COVID-19 outbreak.
"How do we know" if they are accurate? Trump asked at a press conference. "Their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side."
"We are very sympathetic to the gravity of the situation in the United States, and we can understand that some people in the U.S. want to be rid of the responsibility, but we do not want to get into any meaningless arguments," Hua said.
"The measures taken by the Chinese government have been decisive, timely, and strong. We have worked, to the best of our capabilities, to protect the lives and welfare of the Chinese people... while buying the world valuable time to stem the pandemic. China has done its best to be open, transparent, and accountable," she underlined.
Hua said that "to slander, to discredit, to blame others or to shift responsibility cannot make up the time that has been lost." "To carry on lying will only waste more time and cause more loss of life," she said, adding that politicians who accused China of concealing information were "shameless and without morality."
Asian countries including China are contributing "fantastic" scientifically-based research publications about the COVID-19 outbreak "on a daily basis," and should not be tagged as "non-transparent," Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Program, said during a media briefing on Wednesday.
"I think we need to be very careful not to be profiling certain parts of the world as being uncooperative or non-transparent. We need to look at transparency across the board. We need to look at solidarity across the board," he added.
If China's data untrustworthy, other countries are questionable too: U.S. expert
Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations of the U.S., told the Global Times that it's meaningless to hide the true numbers as "policymakers can take correct measures only with accurate data."
If one doubts the credibility of China's data just because asymptomatic patients were not counted, the whole world's numbers are not credible as no single country could test all its population, Huang noted.
Huang said that the whole country is aware of the severity of the epidemic, so it is pointless to cover up or play down the number of confirmed cases. "In fact, the decision makers want nothing more than the most accurate and real number, so they can make the right decision; otherwise they cannot handle the pandemic properly," said Huang.
Business Insider said in a report last week that the National Health Commission (NHC) has been aggregating all of its coronavirus information on its website and releasing daily updates since February 3. Meanwhile, in the U.S., it's much harder to find data and information about the outbreak.
