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The administration of US President Donald Trump eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing tasked with detecting disease outbreaks in China several months before the coronavirus pandemic began, a report says.
The US epidemiologist, Linda Quick, was embedded in China’s disease control agency but her position was eliminated in July, Reuters reported Monday, citing four sources with knowledge of the issue.
“It was heartbreaking to watch,” Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American who served in that role between 2007 and 2011, told Reuters. “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”
The report said that after Quick left in July, no other foreign disease experts were embedded to lead the program, which was funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Zhu and the other sources said the American expert was a trainer of Chinese field epidemiologists who were deployed to the epicenter of outbreaks to help track, investigate and contain diseases.
Trump, however, dismissed the Reuters report during a White House press briefing on Sunday shortly after this story was first published, describing it as “100 percent wrong.”
“This is just like all the other stuff that you…that the press was asking,” Trump said. “Every one of those things that were said was 100 percent wrong and this sounds like another one of them.”
US health experts have sharply rebuked the Trump administration for initially downplaying the crisis and lagging behind in testing efforts.
The novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has spread rapidly worldwide, killing more than 13,600 people and infecting more than 317,000.
In the US, more than 35,000 people have gone down with the virus out of whom nearly 460 have died, according to worldometers.info.
The global pandemic has overwhelmed healthcare systems in some countries, including Italy, and threatens to do so in the United States and elsewhere.
Relations between the US and China have deteriorated since the outbreak, as Trump has labeled the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” a description the Chinese have condemned as racist and stigmatizing.
