 Tom Tuggenhats, who is a Conservative MP, said on the 13th of April that the Chinese Communist Party had deliberately lied about COVID-19. That's a huge claim from a British parliamentarian. Was that true? Did China deliberately lie about aspects of COVID-19 to other members of the international community or to the WHO? I don't believe that the Chinese government in Beijing deliberately lied to the international community. No. In fact, every piece of evidence that I've seen tells me that Chinese doctors and scientists communicated rapidly with Beijing and when Beijing realised they had a crisis on their hands and they authorised publication of information about the virus at the very end of December. That's not to say that in Wuhan, when the outbreak first took place, we know that local officials in the police and local government took steps that were completely designed to suppress discussion about the outbreak and clearly that was wrong. But that's very different. That's very different from saying that the government tried to deliberately mislead the international community. The Chinese government learnt lessons from the way it handled the SARS outbreak 20 years ago where it did try to deceive the international community. It explicitly lied to the international community and it was only when the WHO called them out on that that they had to capitulate and admit the crisis that was taking place. That lesson was one that was very important. They promised themselves that they would never be humiliated on the international stage again. They actually have moved very quickly on this occasion to release information about the virus, about the disease, about the genetic sequence in those early weeks of charity. I think it's completely unfair of Tom Tugan Hart to blame China in the way that he does. I believe that the entire genome was sequenced and available to scientists around the world from mid-January, was it? Yes, I think it was January the 12th. Right, that's a level of transparency. It was technically impossible in the early 21st century. Why do you think politicians are keen to allay blame like that? I think that it's very easy to blame another country to deflect responsibility from your own government. I think there's also a sinophobia, a racism against China, which is pretty disgusting to see. I would actually say go much further and say that we owe a debt of gratitude to China for the way that it has handled this outbreak. We absolutely owe a debt of gratitude to the doctors and nurses and scientists who were on the front lines managing this outbreak in the first place. They gathered the information. Remember, they wrote up these papers that we published in this last week of January. These were Chinese authors from another country writing in a foreign language, publishing in a medical journal thousands of miles away. That was an act of full disclosure about what was taking place in their country and risked actually humiliating them, putting them under the international spotlight. But they did it because they knew they had a duty to the rest of the world to tell the story of what was taking place there, to warn the world about what was happening. In fact, if you read those papers now, you can see that the entire story of what's happened in the West over the past 12 months is described in those papers. It's just that we didn't read them. We didn't pay attention to them. So it's our failure, not their failure. Of course that sort of catchphrase you're hearing from the American alt-right, China lied. People died and you think, well, Taiwan's had eight people die. Thailand's had 77 people die. Were they telling them the truth but not the rest of the world? I think it's a very strange thing to say. Well, isn't there an irony here that now the international exemplar in terms of the way the pandemic was handled and the economic recovery is actually China? The Chinese economy is about the only one that's bounced back very, very quickly. What that shows actually is that this alleged trade-off between health and the economy is completely wrong. Actually, saving lives, protecting health, delivers you economic success. This libertarian argument that we're currently seeing that somehow by focusing on health, we're destroying the economy. Our primary motive should be to protect civil liberties, protect the economy. That means accepting a certain level of death in our society. This is completely wrong. Every piece of evidence from East Asian countries shows that actually focusing on suppressing the community transmission, protecting health, delivers you economic gains.