Hiding Information: Pompeo Said China May Have Known about the Coronavirus in November

At an interview with the Larry O’Connor Show on April 23, Secretary of State Pompeo said that China may have known about the coronavirus “maybe as early as November, but certainly by mid-December.”

QUESTION: It’s been well documented that the State Department very early on, the first week of January, started putting out alerts, precautions about this mysterious virus in this Wuhan region of China. How soon were there official requests to the Government of China for information about this virus or perhaps a sample of the virus so that we could do research?

And a secondary question to that: Are those requests made directly to the Chinese Government or through the World Health Organization?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Those are great requests. Let me try and – really, three questions. They’re all important.

First, as soon as we came to have a concern about this, you’ll recall that the first cases of this were known by the Chinese Government in – maybe as early as November, but certainly by mid-December, and they were slow to identify this for anyone in the world, including the World Health Organization.

Once the United States came to understand what was potentially taking place there, we immediately turned both to the World Health Organization and to the Chinese Government directly, not just through the State Department but through our health and technical experts as well, and asked for access, for understanding, for transparency.

Frankly, Larry, we are still trying to get an actual sample of the virus. They have given us the breakdown of it.

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