Why U.S. intelligence findings undermine the Trump administration's Beijing-centric coronavirus narrative

Xi Jinping.
(Image credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

American officials familiar with a new internal report conducted by U.S. intelligence agencies said the findings affirm previous claims that local officials in Wuhan and Hubei Province hid coronavirus information from Beijing at the beginning of the pandemic, The New York Times reports.

The U.S. report certainly doesn't exculpate the central government from wrongdoing, which occurred at all levels of the Chinese Communist Party, but it does make for a more nuanced reading of the pandemic's origins and complicates the Trump administration's narrative pinning the spread of the virus directly on Beijing's malfeasance.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.