Remember when we were told to not buy masks because they didn't work?[Telegraph] China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say
China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
PPE exports to the US fell by around 50 per cent between August and September of 2019, in a significant drop which raised alarm bells at key US government agencies.
China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts said.
The fall in PPE supplies exiting China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of PPE, raises new questions about the true timeline of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
The anomaly was uncovered by former US government officials including Dr Tom McGinn, a Senior Health Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Colonel John Hoffman, a Senior Research Fellow with the Food Protection and Defence Institute whose career spans decades in US government and military.
The pair were unconvinced that the virus had started at the Wuhan Wet Market in December 2019, after and began looking for an alternative theory.
After scouring a Customs and Border Protection database which tracks goods entering the US, they noticed China had started hoarding PPE far earlier than the initial date of the outbreak.
"You can go and look about three years back [at import data]", said Colonel Hoffman. "This is not the normal up and down that occurs"
The pair presented the information to DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, which declined to investigate, saying the drop reflected normal supply fluctuations.
However when Col Hoffman contacted one of America’s biggest hospital networks, HCA Healthcare, the organisation confirmed it was highly unusual.
Surgical gowns on backorder in September 2019....