Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich says China’s government and the World Health Organization intentionally misled the global community and withheld critical data related to the COVID-19 virus in the early weeks of the pandemic.
“As Dr. [Deborah] Birx has said publicly at one of the White House Press briefings, [China and the WHO] just lied to people,” Gingrich told WIBC’s Hammer and Nigel, “And the result was that for a period of about six weeks, we thought this was going to be a modest, controllable event like the SARS epidemic.”
He continued: “We did not realize the scale [COVID-19] of it, the number of people involved, nor how rapidly it was spreading. And so the reality is that we lost a good six weeks’ worth of time [to prepare].”
Gingrich said the inexcusable actions of the Chinese government significantly contributed to the severity of the outbreak in Italy.
“People didn’t realize it, but there are about 100,000 Chinese living in Northern Italy, and they had three different flights from Wuhan to Northern Italy every week,” explained Gingrich. “And whereas the Trump administration stepped in and cut off the flights from China to the United States, Italy did not follow suit for reasons of political correctness.”
The result, said Gingrich, was that planeloads of people – some of whom were carrying the virus – were showing up in Italy for several weeks, which accelerated the pandemic’s spread in the county.
The former Speaker praised the Trump administration, noting that the swift and coordinated response of the Trump administration has helped to combat the devastating impact of the COVID-19 in the United States.
“The steps taken [by the administration] helped slow the spread of the virus, and while we’ve yet to reach the peak of the pandemic, my sense is that New York especially is very close to hitting that point in the next week or so,” said Gingrich.
The former Speaker did, however, direct a measure of criticism at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“I think that once [the CDC] realized the scale of the problem, they began reaction with greater and greater speed,” Gingrich diplomatically noted, “However, I think early on the CDC really screwed up, the bureaucracy there failed to develop an effective test early on, and I think they failed to properly estimate the scale of what they needed to purchase.”
He continued: “So we’re still just catching up on the testing side, and I would say that I have a different model than the epidemiologists. I think you get better results if you very, very aggressively go out, track down those who have the virus, and quarantine those individuals rather than attempting to quarantine an entire city.”
Gingrich noted that countries such as Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Sweden have achieved greater success in combating the virus by pursuing that strategy.
“But that’s a function [in the U.S.] that is not of the President but of the advice and direction of the public health services that have historically dealt with these problems,” he said.
“But I do think the President has done an extraordinary job, which is partially due to his entrepreneurial instincts,” Gingrich continued. “He just pushes and shoves as much as he has to in order to get the job done, and thanks to his leadership, I think we’ve made much more progress and we’re much further down the road than we would have been otherwise.”
In addition to offering insight on the Coronavirus pandemic during his visit with Hammer and Nigel, the former Speaker and New York Times #1 bestselling author discussed the plot of his latest novel, “Shakedown.”
Click below to hear Hammer and Nigel’s full interview with Newt Gingrich.
https://omny.fm/shows/hammer-and-nigel-show/newt-gingrich-talks-coronavirus
