Three days after Beijing officially acknowledged a cluster of an unknown pneumonia disease in 2020, then-head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Robert Redfield asked his Chinese counterpart George Gao to get on the phone.
“I’ve been trying to reach you and will try again in a few hours,” he wrote, according to emails obtained by The Epoch Times. It was Jan. 3, 2020.
This would be the first of a series of efforts from the United States to engage with China and offer assistance over the next few weeks.
“Unfortunately, that assistance wasn’t accepted by the Chinese government,” Redfield later recounted. “I think it could have made a big difference.”
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