Public health experts, including a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official, told the U.K. Telegraph in a report this weekend that customs data shows China hoarding personal protective equipment (PPE) months before the first known cases of Chinese coronavirus.
The experts claimed a sharp decline in exports of gowns, masks, gloves, and other critical supplies to protect health workers from infectious diseases out of China as early as August 2019, corresponding with a major increase in Chinese companies buying up stocks of the product from America — suggesting the Communist Party was stockpiling the supplies, expecting to need them.
The evidence suggests that the Chinese government appeared to be aware of an impending, dramatic increase in need for PPE in the months preceding the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. The Telegraph suggests that this information may indicate that Beijing had reason to know of the spread of an infectious disease long before it decided to alert global health authorities, potentially squandering valuable time for pandemic preparedness that could have saved a prodigious number of lives.
The Chinese coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. The Chinese government has adamantly denied this fact and now claims officially that the virus originated in a U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland, alleging that cases of lung injury from using e-cigarettes were secretly coronavirus infections. Beijing has not presented any meaningful evidence for this claim and has not presented proof of a single case of human-to-human infection of lung injuries.
“PPE exports to the US fell by around 50 per cent between August and September of 2019, in a significant drop which raised alarm bells at key US government agencies,” the Telegraph claimed. “China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts said.”
The report echoed allegations made in the early months of 2020 by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro that China had “vacuumed up all the PPE, particularly the masks, the gloves, the goggles, in the world” between late December 2019 and late January 2020. Subsequent reports by agencies such as the Associated Press also accused China of greatly expanding imports of PPE while dramatically slowing down exports — only to later boast that it had become the PPE capital of the world.
A significant difference between those reports on the halt of PPE exports in the early days of the pandemic and the Telegraph allegations is that the latter, citing “Dr Tom McGinn, a Senior Health Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Colonel John Hoffman, a Senior Research Fellow with the Food Protection and Defence Institute,” suggests the stockpiling process began long before studies suggested previously that the Communist Party should have known about the spread of a novel infectious disease.
Hoffman told the Telegraph that he attempted to corroborate the unusual nature of the drop in exports of PPE out of China at the time and found that one of America’s largest hospital networks, HCA Healthcare, had experienced a sudden inability to acquire basic PPE such as medical gowns in September 2019. Hoffman claimed that hospital officials described the shortages as unprecedented.
The British newspaper cited another on-the-record source, former State Department official David Asher, asserting that the data also showed China hoarding supplies from abroad while dramatically limiting its own exports.
This photo taken on February 17, 2020, shows medical staff members working at an exhibition centre converted into a hospital in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province. (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)
The Telegraph report accelerates the timeline of a phenomenon that had already been documented in much of 2020.
“As the pandemic rolled into the U.S., Asian factories shut down, halting exports of medical supplies to the U.S.,” the Associated Press reported in October 2020. “Meanwhile, government stockpiles were depleted from a flu outbreak a decade earlier, and there was no way to rapidly restock. The federal government dangerously advised people not to wear masks, looking to preserve the supply for health care workers. Counterfeits flooded the market.”
Taiwanese intelligence authorities first alerted the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), citing information from central Wuhan, China, of the emergence of a novel infectious disease in China on December 31, 2019. According to Communist Party data leaked to the South China Morning Post, the government confirmed its first official human infection of the Chinese coronavirus on November 17, 2019. Some studies have suggested, however, that the virus began circulating in Wuhan as early as October 2019.
As late as January 14, 2020, the W.H.O. was claiming publicly that the Chinese coronavirus was not infectious from person to person. On January 18, Wuhan officials attempted to host the world’s largest banquet, inviting 130,000 people to share food for the Lunar New Year.
“China knows there’s human-to-human transmission in early December, but for six weeks, they hide that from the world behind the shield of the World Health Organization,” Navarro, the former White House trade adviser, explained in May 2020. “What did they do during that? According to their own Chinese customs data, they went from a net exporter of personal protective equipment to a huge net importer. They basically vacuumed up all the PPE, particularly the masks, the gloves, the goggles, in the world.”
Navarro posited at the time that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a laboratory known to have been studying bat coronaviruses in the city at the time. The Telegraph echoed those allegations this weekend, suggesting that the timeline for PPE stockpiling suggests months of preparation for a known crisis.
The U.S. State Department revealed in a fact sheet published in January 2021 that it had evidence “that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both [Chinese coronavirus] and seasonal illnesses.” This timeline would still place the first cases ahead of the August 2019 PPE hoarding that the Telegraph reported.
China has effusively denied that the WIV played any role in the pandemic. Investigations by the W.H.O., strongly monitored by the Chinese government, have proven inconclusive.
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