Birx: China Has ‘Moral Obligation’ to be Transparent About CCP Virus

Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a Coronavirus Task Force press briefing at the White House in Washington on April 18, 2020. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx suggested on Sunday that China has a “moral obligation” to be more transparent in its reporting of CCP virus cases.

Birx responded to a question about whether she believed it was “fair” that President Donald Trump said he would halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the pandemic. At the same time, his administration is reviewing its response to the global crisis.

The task force coordinator said that “after this is over,” an investigation should be launched into how the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, was able to spread across the globe.

“It’s always the first country that gets exposed to the pandemic that has really, a higher moral obligation on communicating, on transparency, because all of the other countries around the world are making decisions on that,” Birx said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “And that’s something we can look into after this is over.”

Birx expressed doubts about the accuracy of China’s official CCP virus case and death toll statistics.

“I think early on ... the level of transparency and communication that you need, you have to over-communicate. You have to communicate even the small nuances,“ Birx said. ”When you look at the outbreak that’s been reported in China, and you look at the outbreak that was able to be contained in South Korea and a series of Asian countries—you didn’t see that kind of doubling rate ... that you see all throughout the developed countries of Europe and certainly in the United States.”

In the interview, Birx suggested that Beijing’s lack of transparency meant that the U.S. couldn’t until the start of March “… fully see how contagious this virus was.”

Her comments came just days after she echoed a statement from President Donald Trump and other White House officials that either the CCP or WHO authorities knew about the human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and misled the world months ago when reporting that only animal-to-human transmission was occurring.

“I think once this is over, we’ll be able to look back and see, ‘Did China and the WHO say and do everything to alert the rest of the world to the nuances of this virus’—because when it first explodes someone had to have known that there was human-to-human transmission,'” Birx told ABC’s “The View” on Wednesday.

Birx suggested that numerous lives could have been saved if it were known earlier that human-to-human transmission was occurring.

“You really have to go back and ask yourself, why wasn’t there this level of transparency when this virus exploded?” she added. “I think people would have prepared differently if they had known the level of transmissibility of this virus.”

Other experts have said that the Chinese regime may have waited on informing the public about the highly contagious virus.

Internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times have highlighted how the Chinese regime purposefully underreported cases of the CCP virus—which causes the disease COVID-19—and censored discussions of the outbreak, fueling the spread of the disease.

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.