China should answer for hiding crucial information about the coronavirus outbreak from the rest of the world, the former head of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service John Sawers said on Wednesday.
“There is deep anger in America at what they see as having been inflicted on us all by China and China is evading a good deal of responsibility for the origin of the virus, for failing to deal with it initially”, Sawers said.
Sawers was the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, from 2009 to 2014.
US president Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would halt funding to the World Health Organization which he said had promoted China’s disinformation about the virus.
Sawers added it would be better to hold China responsible rather than the WHO, but stressed that the WHO also faced “serious questions” for failing to scrutinise China’s activities.
“There was a brief period in December and January when the Chinese were indeed concealing this from the West”, Sawers said.
Earlier, documents leaked to the media showed that after Chinese officials secretly determined on January 14 that they were likely facing a pandemic from the coronavirus, they warned the public six days later, on January 20. In those days, the city of Wuhan hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people, and millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.
“We can’t have supply chains that are dependent for ever on China, that is exemplified by this current crisis, and we have to have regard to future technology and resources”, Sawers said.
Last month, several top UK government officials warned that China could have downplayed its number of cases of the virus “by a factor of 15 to 40 times”. They added that the government’s anger could prompt PM Boris Johnson, who himself tested positive to the virus, to abandon his decision to let the Chinese company Huawei develop the UK’s 5G mobile phone network, after previously allowing it play a limited role in the country’s 5G networks.
