Coronavirus: Emmanuel Macron has reservations about the management of China

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In an interview with the Financial Times, French President Emmanuel Macron estimated on Thursday April 16 that there were gray areas in the management of the coronavirus epidemic by China.

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No question for Emmanuel Macron to show a "  kind of naive é" in thinking that China is managing the coronavirus epidemic much better. "  We don't know  ," said the French president in an interview with the Financial Times, who asked him whether authoritarian regimes were better able to manage these crises. "  And even, there are obviously things that have happened that we don't know  ," he continues.

Emmanuel Macron stressed that in democracies, which guarantee freedom of information and expression, the management of the crisis was transparent and was the subject of debates, unlike regimes where information and expression are controlled, specifies the Elysée this Thursday evening. The head of state considers that it is "  false to say that the democracies manage the crisis less well, because transparency, the free flow of information are on the contrary a considerable asset to be more effective  ", adds the presidency .

These reservations on the management of the crisis by Beijing join those expressed by London and Washington. The United Kingdom has indeed warned China on Thursday that it should answer "  difficult questions about the appearance of the virus, and why it was not stopped earlier  ". The new coronavirus is believed to have appeared in an open-air market in Wuhan where exotic animals were sold alive. Of animal origin and close to a virus present in bats, it could have been transmitted to humans and mutated.

A laboratory error?

But American media has opened up another path. According to the Washington Post , the U.S. Embassy in Beijing alerted Washington two years ago about insufficient security measures at a local laboratory studying coronaviruses in bats. And according to Fox News, the current coronavirus would emanate from this laboratory, even if it is indeed a natural virus - and not a pathogenic agent created by the Chinese -, and that its "leak" would be involuntary, consequence bad security protocols. Charges swept aside by a spokesperson for Chinese diplomacy: "  Many renowned medical experts around the world believe that the hypothesis of an alleged leak has no scientific basis.  "

The Trump administration, for its part, accused Beijing of having "  concealed  " the gravity of the epidemic at its beginning in China, and on Tuesday froze the American financial contribution to the functioning of the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing him of having aligned himself with the Chinese positions.

Russia in turn intervened Thursday evening, to defend Beijing. During a conversation with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin described  the accusations against Beijing, suspected of misinformation about the new coronavirus, which appeared in China, as "  counterproductive ".

(With AFP )

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• Coronavirus
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• Emmanuel Macron