An unearthed video from February 2020 reveals Principal Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Anne Schuchat praising Chinese Communist Party-funded Confucius Institutes as an “asset” for America’s COVID-19 response.
Schuchat, who began the position under the Obama administration in 2015, praised the controversial initiative during a February 2020 press briefing.
During the briefing, a spokesperson from the group’s U.S. headquarters inquires “if there is a space for nonprofits like ours to get involved and help either through translation or community outreach.” “The language and cultural competence of an organization like yours can be an asset to this type of response,” Schuchat asserts in response.
The Confucius Institute U.S. Center, which was labeled a foreign mission of the Chinese Communist Party by the Trump administration, also appeared to hype Schuchat’s comment, clipping portions of her answer for a video on its YouTube channel and including them in a press release.
And just one week after the presser, the Confucius Institute’s Chinese headquarters was issuing press releases praising the Chinese Communist Party’s “comprehensive” response to the virus, adding the regime “once again creates miracles with Chinese speed”:
“After the outbreak of the epidemic, the Chinese side has, in the spirit of being responsible for people’s health and for global public health, taken the most comprehensive and strict prevention and control measures, share the information of the epidemic and the gene sequence of the novel coronavirus with the relevant parties in a timely, transparent, open and effective manner.”
The statement continues, alleging the regime’s self-proclaimed “timely, transparent, open and effective” response has been extolled by several international bodies and leaders: “The measures taken by the Chinese side have effectively prevented the spread of the epidemic worldwide, which has been fully recognized and highly valued by the World Health Organization and many countries.”
While Confucius Institutes disguise themselves as language and culture initiative, they’re replete with “undisclosed ties to Chinese institutions, and conflicted loyalties,” Chinese state propaganda, and intellectual property theft, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Confucius Institutes have also been described by Chinese government officials as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”
