Medical journal accuses Trump of inventing false 'report' to claim WHO ignored COVID-19 in Wuhan

A medical journal on Tuesday contradicted President Donald Trump's claim that it had published a report stating that the World Health Organization (WHO) ignored the coronavirus epidemic in China.

The Lancet issued the statement a day after Trump wrote a letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom to complain about its response to COVID-19.

According to Trump, WHO “consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal.”

“The World Health Organization failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts, even those that came from sources within Wuhan itself,” the letter said.

But on Tuesday, the journal insisted that the president's claim is "factually incorrect."

“The Lancet published no report in December, 2019, referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China. The first reports the journal published were on January 24, 2020,” the statement noted.

Read the entire statement below.