Prominent medical journal says Trump's WHO letter included 'factually incorrect' claim

Donald Trump.
(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, released a statement on Tuesday saying President Trump's letter to World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus contained falsehoods.

Trump posted a copy of the letter to Twitter on Monday. He wrote that his administration conducted a review that found the WHO made "claims about the coronavirus that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading" and "consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal."

In response, the journal released a statement saying this claim was "factually incorrect," as it "published no report in December 2019 referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China." The Lancet said its first reports about the virus were both published on Jan. 24 — one was about the first 41 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in Wuhan and the other focused on the initial scientific evidence confirming person-to-person transmission of the virus.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Trump's accusations against the WHO are "serious and damaging to efforts to strengthen international cooperation to control this pandemic," The Lancet added, and it is "essential that any review of the global response is based on a factually accurate account of what took place in December and January."

Explore More
Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.