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[Halafi Mengedi]

Researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tasked to the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva fed real-time information to the White House as the coronavirus outbreak began in China at the end of 2019, according to The Washington Post.

Citing unnamed U.S. and international officials, the Post reported that high-level health officials appointed by President Donald Trump "consulted regularly" with their WHO counterparts.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, confirmed that it had 17 staff members, 16 of them from the CDC, at WHO headquarters in January as part of a regular rotation. HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley said in a statement that they were "working on a variety of programs, including COVID-19 and Ebola."

Oakley, who called the Post report "misleading," stressed that not all of the U.S. researchers were working on the coronavirus and that they "had no role in decisions made by WHO leaders." The Post report did not claim all the CDC staffers were researching COVID-19, nor that they were involved in the United Nations health agency's decisions.

Fact check: President Donald Trump vs. the World Health Organization

Oakley objected to the Post's claim that its reporting "undercuts President Trump’s assertion about the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat."

"Just because you have Americans embedded in WHO providing technical assistance does not change the information you are getting from WHO leadership," Oakley said. "We have learned now that WHO information was incorrect and relied too heavily on China."

Oakley faulted the WHO for not getting boots on the ground in China until mid-February and for "blindly" accepting the information relayed by Chinese officials.

When asked about the Post report Monday, Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, said he was not aware of "any specific communications between U.S. government officials who are based here at WHO with ourselves and the White House." He said he was "sure there were many warnings because WHO itself was clearly putting out information on this event since the very beginning."

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