Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday that accusations that the U.S. military was involved in spreading the deadly novel coronavirus in China are "completely ridiculous," and said containment efforts would have been more successful had China been more transparent last fall.
"If the Chinese government had been more transparent early on late fall, December at least, all of us, all of the nations of the world would have been able to get our arms around this and contain it in China where it began and stop its propagation around the world," Esper told Fox News' "Fox and Friends."
He added that he has called his counterpart in China to offer the United States' assistance regarding understanding the virus and researching, supplies and such.
But to have a person from China's government accuse the United States of spreading the disease intentionally is "irresponsible and it doesn't get us to where we need to be," said Esper. "At this point, we all need to be working together. We need to be very transparent. We need to be sharing information on vaccines and therapeutics and do everything we can to get this virus under control quickly and get back to normal."
Meanwhile, Esper said that he has spoken to several governors across the country, and has spoken to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo about the use of the Army Corps of Engineers.
“What we plan on doing is working closely with them as they identify sites such as college dorms or hotels. The Army Corps of engineers will go on in, contract, renovate and then turn them over to the state," said Esper. “This is all about freeing up bed space for either a patient who is identified as having coronavirus or on the backend recovering from coronavirus,” he added.
The Air Force also has been involved in moving a half-million test kits from Italy to the United States for distribution and has another mission planned, said Esper.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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