Leading US manufacturers of medical safety gear told the White House that China prohibited them from exporting their products from the country as the coronavirus pandemic mounted — even as Beijing was trying to “corner the world market” in personal protective equipment, The Post has learned.
Now, the Trump administration is weighing legal action against China over its alleged actions, a lawyer for President Trump said Sunday.
“In criminal law, compare this to the levels that we have for murder,” said Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump’s re-election campaign.
“People are dying. When you have intentional, cold-blooded, premeditated action like you have with China, this would be considered first-degree murder.”
Ellis said the options under consideration include filing a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights or working “through the United Nations.”
Executives from 3M and Honeywell told US officials that the Chinese government in January began blocking exports of N95 respirators, booties, gloves and other supplies produced by their factories in China, according to a senior White House official.
China paid the manufacturers their standard wholesale rates, but prohibited the vital items from being sold to anyone else, the official said.
Around the same time that China cracked down on PPE exports, official data posted online shows that it imported 2.46 billion pieces of “epidemic prevention and control materials” between Jan. 24 and Feb. 29, the White House official said.
The gear, valued at nearly $1.2 billion, included more than 2 billion masks and more than 25 million “protective clothing” items that came from countries in the European Union, as well as Australia, Brazil and Cambodia, the official said.
“Data from China’s own customs agency points to an attempt to corner the world market in PPE like gloves, goggles, and masks through massive increased purchases — even as China, the world’s largest PPE manufacturer, was restricting exports,” the official said.
Last week, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to order St. Paul, Minnesota-based 3M to prioritize production of N95 respirators for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Michael Wessell, a founding member of the federal US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, confirmed the situation and said the Chinese maneuvering had left American hospitals “starved of PPE to fight this crisis.”
“We understand that China has engaged in policies to try and not only develop its own capabilities, but to do so at expense of producers around the world,” said Wessell, formerly a top staffer to ex-US Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Missouri).
“At a time when demand was rising to deal with the crisis, China was marshaling all of the products for its own use.”
Wessell said that “some of China’s actions are probably illegal, but to bring cases when you’re in the middle of the crisis does little good for the patients who are in the hospital on ventilators — and might not have been there had they had access to PPE.”
Wessell also said that while China had recently begun easing exports of PPE, “they’re using it for soft power, essentially saying it’s a humanitarian gesture to try to curry goodwill with American people when some of the problems we’re facing are the direct result of Chinese policies.”
Christian Whiton, a former senior diplomacy and trade adviser to the George W. Bush and Trump administrations, described Chinese control of PPE as “political warfare.”
“It looks like a coordinated effort between the Chinese government and industry where they used to be nothing but exporters of this stuff but now they turned around and they’re importing it while banning all exports,” said Whiton, now a senior fellow for strategy and trade at the Center for National Interest.
“What is most interesting to me, when we get through this crisis I think there’s rage, not just concern, but rage in Congress about China and from the American people that China is culpable one way or the other,” he added.
Honeywell said in a statement: “For the majority of the first quarter, China was experiencing the most acute effects of the COVID-19 crisis, so all of the masks from the facility in question were utilized for local consumption. Production at the facility in question remained under Honeywell management’s control throughout the coronavirus outbreak.”
3M did not respond to requests for comment Sunday, but in a statement issued last week, noted that it had just “secured approval from China to export to the U.S. 10 million N95 respirators manufactured by 3M in China.”
Steven Bannon, a former White House chief strategist under Trump and the host of the podcast “War Room: Pandemic,” said the behavior of the Chinese government was equivalent to a “biological Chernobyl.”
“The same people that understood this virus had human-to-human transmission and was going to be a pandemic were at the same time vacuuming up every piece of PPE from the US, Brazil and Europe,” said Bannon, who formerly lived in Shanghai when he ran on an online gaming company.
“They’re at war with the West. This story shows the world what Chinese citizens are dealing with,” he said.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The UK government’s new testing chief has admitted that none of the 3.5 million antibody tests ordered from China are fit for widespread use.
Professor John Newton, who was appointed by health secretary Matt Hancock to oversee testing, reportedly said the tests were only able to identify immunity in people who had been severely sick with coronavirus.
The tests did not pass the evaluation stage, and he was quoted by The Times as saying they were “not good enough to be worth rolling out in very large scale”.
Prof Newton, director of public health improvement for Public Health England (PHE) said three “mega labs” for testing NHS staff was his top priority and did not expect university and commercial labs to be able to help.
He said: “We are not relying on lots of people coming forward to help us to achieve what’s required and we shouldn’t get too distracted by that.
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“There’s a big, big ask at the moment which is quite specific [on testing NHS staff]. So a lot of these companies who are offering their capacity may not be directly related to that ask and therefore they might not be as helpful at the moment.”
Mr Hancock has also acknowledged that early analysis of the tests showed “some of them have not performed well”.
He added, speaking on Thursday, that: “We’re hopeful that they [the tests] will improve and that the later tests that we’ve got our hands on will be able to be reliable enough for people to use them with confidence.”
Last month, a PHE director told ministers the 15-minute home test kits would be available “within days” once they have been cleared – but doubt was cast over the accuracy of the tests just days after.
But eight days after Professor Sharon Peacock said the tests would “absolutely” become available, Downing Street was unable to give any timetable for the introduction of the tests.
A spokesperson for Boris Johnson also warned that the use of unreliable tests could have “significant adverse consequences” if people were given false confidence in their own immunity.
Antibody testing, which Boris Johnson called a “gamechanger”, is regarded as crucial to eventually lifting the lockdown measures in place across the country.
Prof Newton has poured cold water on the idea the government may be able to make millions of home test kits in days, and said the idea was “based on the fact that we might just buy the existing test, and at the moment the judgement is that that wouldn’t be the best thing to do”.
He added he was “optimistic” that commercial partners wiling to work with scientists who had been evaluating the tests would be able to improve them.
Meanwhile, the president of the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) raised concerns that labs around the country lack the vital materials needed to meet the government’s promise to test 100,000 people for coronavirus a day by the end of April.
Allan Wilson said during an interview with Sky News: “My main concern is that we do not have the capacity to meet the targets set by Mr Hancock. We’re still struggling to meet that target. We have staff around the country, biomedical scientists and equipment ready and staff trained to carry out the testing, but we are really struggling to get the consumables, the chemicals and testing kits we need to carry out these tests.”
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In a statement, IBMS said there were “huge issues” regarding the reliability of the millions of antibody tests bought by the UK government.
“At least one in 10 people who test positive on the antibody test (and are therefore considered to have immunity) will be “false positives” and will not have immunity,” it said.
“Using the skilled workforce we have at our disposal and doing the tests that we know work is currently the best strategy. This will require the NHS to further expand its testing approach to ensure the right tests are performed at the right time on the right people to successfully tackle this worldwide pandemic, supporting and protecting those at most risk from this virus.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “Antibody tests offer the hope that people who think they have had the disease will know they are immune and get back to life as normal. We are currently working with several companies who are offering these tests and are evaluating their effectiveness.
“The Covid[-19] scientific advisory panel, led by Prof Sir John Bell, is currently undertaking a rapid evaluation process to establish their reliability. We will publish the results of this evaluation once it is completed.”
What started as a catastrophe for China is shaping up to be a moment of strategic opportunity, a rare turning point in the flow of history. Suddenly, the protests in Hong Kong, carrying a mortal threat to political stability in the mainland, became a physical impossibility. More important, the pandemic set in motion a global competition, to contain the virus, for which China and the Chinese Communist Party seem uniquely prepared.
As the virus spread to the whole world, it became apparent that Western societies — Beijing’s true rivals — did not have the ability to quickly organize every citizen around a single goal. As opposed to China, which remains to a large extent a revolutionary society, their political systems were built for normal times. Chinese society is a mobilized army, which can quickly drop everything else and march in one direction.
Mao once said, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos, the situation is excellent.” And so it seems at present, as seen from Beijing. Chinese diplomats stationed all over the world spend their time raising the stakes to a dangerous level. Following instructions from the very top, they have taken to the media to issue a challenge to America, to point out its failure, and to compare the chaos in American cities and hospitals with what they see as a singular success in stopping the epidemic in China.
Several commentators have suggested that China may be winning the coronavirus battle by stepping forward in providing medical help to affected countries, mostly in Europe, at a time when the United States is consumed with its own difficulties. This misses the point.
The cases have been multiplying where the medical equipment provided by Chinese companies and even the Chinese state turned out to be faulty, provoking justified ire in, for example, Spain, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Moreover, medical help is a normal occurrence in a crisis. China has done nothing different, except perhaps in the clumsy way it publicizes those efforts.
Forget about “mask diplomacy.” It is no more than a distraction. There are other ways for China to use the coronavirus pandemic to upturn the existing global order. I see three main levers.
The first one is the direct comparison between the situation in China and elsewhere. The numbers of cases and fatalities provided by Chinese authorities almost certainly misrepresent the real figures by more than an order of magnitude, but the fact remains that a semblance of normalcy was achieved in a small period of time. If the United States fails to do the same, its prestige will suffer a severe blow. People all over the world will quickly change their perceptions about relative power and capacity.
The second lever resides with industrial value chains. Last month General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler closed all their automotive production plants across the United States and Canada. Other sectors have followed. In the meantime, China contained the worst of the pandemic to one province, allowing economic activity to quickly resume elsewhere. The most recent data show renewed activity in the flow of goods across the country, as well as at ports worldwide that do business with China. If the freeze in Europe and America continues for much longer, Chinese companies will be able to dramatically expand market share and replace Western-led value chains. Just yesterday Chinese authorities announced that manufacturing activity expanded in March, defying expectations of a contraction. In February the official Purchasing Managers’ Index hit a record low of 35.7. It bounced back to 52.0 in March. Prepare for a worldwide wave of Chinese acquisitions at knockdown prices.
Finally, in a more extreme scenario, important countries could experience the kind of economic shock that leads to widespread social and political collapse. At that point, China would have a unique opportunity to step in, provide aid, and refashion these countries in its image. It would look like a repeat of the Marshall Plan and the beginning of the American world order after the ravages of World War II. Indonesia, South Asia, and even Russia might be of special interest in such a scenario.
We knew that a generalized race or competition between alternative geopolitical models had started, but it was never clear what the background for such a competition would be. If the clash took place within the existing global trade and financial system, which was of course built according to Western rules and principles, the United States was confident the battle could be decisively won. But what if it took place on neutral ground? What if it took place in a kind of neutral landscape, a state of nature with few or no rules, against a chaotic and quickly evolving background? The outcome would become considerably more uncertain.
To put it more bluntly: There was always an argument that the existing world order cannot change because only a momentous war has done that in the past and world wars have become impossible. But in pandemics — and soon in climate change — we may have found two functional equivalents of war.
Mixed martial arts star “The Notorious” Conor McGregor slammed the Chinese government for selling batches of faulty medical gear to Ireland that are completely unusable by hospital staff and medical personnel.
McGregor quote-tweeted a video Friday in which Irish Health Services Executive CEO Paul Reid discussed how the Chinese protective equipment “isn’t to the specification of what we actually need before we would deploy it to the front line.”
“Truly horrendous,” McGregor said. “Not only are the prices being raised by these people on all our items. Masks, visors, gloves, ventilators, respirators, oxygen containers, screen monitors, you name it. All jacked in price. The batches coming in are now of no use!”
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McGregor finished by describing the Chinese lack of quality control as “ludicrously inhumane behavior.”
Conor McGregor✔@TheNotoriousMMA
Truly horrendous. Not only are the prices being raised by these people on all our items. Masks, visors, gloves, ventilators, respirators, oxygen containers, screen monitors, you name it. All jacked in price. The batches coming in are now of no use!Ludicrously inhumane behaviour. https://twitter.com/rtenews/status/1246129873669758976 …
RTé News✔@rtenews
HSE Chief Executive Paul Reid says some of the Personal Protective Equipment delivered from China is not to the specification required, and says they will not be distributing something to healthcare staff if it is not suitable
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National File reported earlier this week on reports that China has sent contaminated personal protective equipment to multiple countries.
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Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic have all reported receiving faulty medical supplies from China.
China has also come under criticism for marking medical gear prices up significantly.
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Despite the many serious allegations surrounding the Chinese response to the pandemic, the World Health Organization continues to insist that China holds no blame for the world’s current economic and medical crisis.
Last week, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso scolded the WHO, suggesting that it should be renamed the Chinese Health Organization.
“People think the World Health Organization should change its name. It shouldn’t be called the WHO, it should be renamed the Chinese Health Organization (CHO). This appeal is truly resonating with the people,” the vice PM said.
“Early on, if the WHO had not insisted to the world that China had no pneumonia epidemic, then everybody would have taken precautions. The WHO, which is a global organization, does not even include Taiwan, and then precisely because Taiwan is not a member of the WHO, it becomes a world leader in fighting the epidemic,” Taro Aso continued.
“After that statement is made, the CCP jumps out to correct it, it says Taiwan is a region, not a country.”
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