Mike Pompeo urges China to share accurate information on Covid-19

In an interview given to CBS on Friday Pompeo said that sharing accurate information by China would help in saving lives "..it’s incredibly important, even as we sit here today, that we get to the bottom of what transpired and that the Chinese Communist Party come clean about how this all began. Look, we know it started in Wuhan, China; that’s the origination of the virus. We need to figure out how it happened.

It’s not just about political retribution or accountability. It’s important today. We need to know this so we can save lives going forward. We need our scientists, our academics, our epidemiologists all to have access to the data, access to a sample of the virus, access to the places it might have come to. Those are all things that matter so that we can solve this problem, get our country back to work, and save lives."

Pompeo accused China of preventing foreign health workers from entering Wuhan to help in the effort to contain the pandemic "First, this President(Donald Trump) and this administration worked diligently to work to get Americans on the ground there in China, to help to the World Health Organization try to get in there as well. We were rebuffed. The Chinese Government wouldn’t let it happen, indeed just the opposite of transparency. They kicked American journalists out and denied access to American and other Western scientists at the time that it was frankly most critical that we understand what was going on there."

China's lack of transparency while dealing with the pandemic has invited critisism from various quarters as German Angela Merkel too had appealed to China to be more transparent about the origin of the virus.

French President Emanuel Macron had refused to accept the view that China had dealt better with the pandemic than other countries saying that it would be 'naive' to compare official Chinese data with countries that have more transparency.

China has had an appalling record as far as transparency is concerned the recently released '2020 World Press Freedom Index'(compiled by Reporters Without Borders) ranks China 177 out of 180 countries surveyed.