Gen. Tata on China raising coronavirus death toll in Wuhan
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata joins ‘CAVUTO Live.’
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America needs to respond to the Chinese government's deliberate act of misinformation surrounding coronavirus as if they accidentally detonated a nuclear bomb killing 150,000 people, retired Army Brig. General Anthony Tata stated Saturday.
Appearing on "Cavuto LIVE" with host Neil Cavuto, Tata said that he would not trust anything that comes out of China right now.
"You know, what happened...the Chinese government deliberately withheld information, deliberately manipulated information, and the numbers...are an example of that," he remarked. "They suppressed whistleblowers who were trying to talk about how bad this was and, particularly, the human-to-human contagion aspect of this. China said it was not "H-to-H" and then the [World Health Organization] was a puppet for China and said the same thing."
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"And so," he continued, "it was a deliberate act of misinformation by the Chinese government and it is tantamount to detonating a nuclear bomb accidentally and killing 150,000 people. It's the same thing in my view."
Tata pointed out that while obtaining accurate information is paramount so that the United States can assess and appropriately respond to China's actions.
He also told Cavuto that he believes President Trump's swift actions in closing travel from China and Europe has "directly saved tens of thousands of lives."
In this March 17, 2020 photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a medical worker looks at CT scans at the Huoshenshan field hospital in Wuhan in central China's Hubei Province. Top Chinese officials secretly determined they were likely facing a pandemic from a novel coronavirus in mid-January, ordering preparations even as they downplayed it in public. Internal documents obtained by the AP show that because warnings were muffled inside China, it took a confirmed case in Thailand to jolt Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. (Wang Yuguo/Xinhua via AP)
However, because of the assessments coming from intelligence and the World Health Organization, Tata noted that clarity likely came further and further into the outbreak.
"As you get further into the situation, your information clarifies and then you have better and better responses and you're able to overcome it and then take over the situation as the president has done with his task force," he asserted.
Whatever the chain of events in the United States may have been, Tata said the blame lies exclusively with China and Chinese misinformation.
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"This is a communist dictatorship that hid the information. They shut down travel within their own country, but they allowed the virus to go to other countries," he concluded. "They intentionally allowed this to happen knowing how bad it was. And, they shut down the centers. They shut down whistleblowers. They shut down travel to protect themselves. But, they let others [who] were infected to go around the world and they've killed 150,000 people."
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