White House national security adviser slams China and compares COVID ‘cover-up’ to Soviet Union’s response to Chernobyl
NATIONAL Security Adviser Robert O'Brien has compared China's response to the coronavirus pandemic to the Soviet Union's response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster decades ago.
O'Brien said on NBC on Sunday China's handling of the and their "cover-up ... is going to go down in history, along with Chernobyl."
The former hostage negotiator was responding to a question on the show Meet the Press about whether the was tough on China while they tried to work out a trade deal.
O'Brien said: “We want good relations with China and with the Chinese people, but unfortunately we’re seeing just action after action by the Chinese Communist Party that makes it difficult."
“It’s a terrible thing that happened,” Trump said. “Whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose.”
Scientists have suggested the most likely place the virus originated was natural, and that it spread from an infected animal to a human.
But Trump claims to have seen evidence to support the theory that it was created in an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of China's outbreak.
On April 26, 1986, the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and caused a massive fire — the worst nuclear accident in the world.
The state-controlled Soviet Union news media waited nearly three days to acknowledge anything had gone wrong, and even then downplayed the severity of what happened.
Around 600,000 people who were sent in to clean up the fire and contamination were exposed to elevated radiation levels, and around 350,000 people were evacuated from the area in the early days after the accident.
Thirty nuclear plant workers died in the explosion or from radiation sickness within months, and at least 9,000 people died from the explosion altogether, but the number is in dispute, with some saying at least 90,000 could have died from it.
O'Brien on Sunday said Trump's January 30 order placing travel restrictions on China was “profile in courage” that “saved countless lives.”
He added that China has been blocks doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from going to China to gather information on the virus.
“Unfortunately, China did none of that. And so, look, we’re in a very different place with China right now, and the president’s made that clear."
He continued: "But, you know, the Chinese didn’t do what they said."
"We’ve also learned that at the time, that they cracked down internally and refused to allow people from Hubei and Wuhan to travel throughout China, they allowed those folks to travel to Europe."