EXCLUSIVE: China Stonewalled US Offers of COVID-19 Assistance During Early Days of Pandemic, Emails Show

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. Thomas Peter/Reuters

Three days after Beijing officially acknowledged a cluster of an unknown pneumonia disease on the last day of 2019, then-head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr. Robert Redfield invited his Chinese counterpart, George Gao, for a call.

“I’ve been trying to reach you and will try again in a few hours,” he wrote, according to emails sent on Jan. 3, 2020, and obtained by The Epoch Times.