PandemicFeds Unprepared to Meet First U.S. Evacuees from Wuhan Last Year

Federal officials at a California military base last year who met with the first American evacuees from Wuhan, China, the place where the coronavirus emerged, were not prepared for their mission, according to the Washington Post.   

They did not wear masks and had “no virus prevention plan or infection-control training” when they met with the evacuees, the Post said, according to two federal reports the newspaper said it has obtained. 

The newspaper reported on its website late Thursday that the reports supported “a whistleblower’s account of the chaos as U.S. officials scrambled to greet nearly 200 evacuees” who eventually did not test positive for the coronavirus.

The whistleblower’s complaint, however, resulted in “internal reviews by the Health and Human Services Department and an investigation overseen by the Office of Special Counsel,” the Post said. 

According to the newspaper’s account, the federal officials who first interacted with the Wuhan evacuees at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, California, were instructed to remove their protective gear when meeting with the evacuees to avoid “bad optics.” (bad appearances)

The Health and Human Services general counsel’s office, headed by Robert Charrow, a Trump appointee, conducted a campaign against the whistleblower among members of Congress who received from HHS an account of what the agency said was the whistleblower’s conflicting information.  That HHS move was “reprehensible,” Special Counsel Henry Kerner said in a letter to President Joe Biden on Thursday.  Kerner praised the whistleblower’s “tremendous courage in bringing these allegations forward.”  

There are more than 101 million global COVID-19 infections, the disease caused by the coronavirus, Johns Hopkings Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday.  The U.S. tops the list with more than 25 million cases, followed by India with 10.7 million infections and Brazil with 9 million.  More than 2 million people have died from the disease, Hopkins said. 

A World Health Organization team of investigators, having completed a14-day quarantine, began working Friday in China on their mission to uncover the origins of the coronavirus. 

One of the investigators’ first stops was the hospital in Wuhan where some of the first COVID patients were treated. 

The WHO team is also expected to visit a Wuhan seafood market associated with the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a lab of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019 and has since spread around the world.