Chinese Embassy in the Netherlands on Saturday gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the groundless claims made by U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands Peter Hoekstra, who in a recent interview accused China's "lack of transparency" for causing the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.
The embassy released a notice on its website in response to the interview published in Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (AD).
In its response, Chinese embassy kindly reminded the U.S. ambassador: "Mind your proper duties."
The embassy said none of the items listed in The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations include this kind of actions that "undermine relations between the receiving country and a third country."
In the AD article, Hoekstra argued that "the world could have responded to this much more efficiently if China had been more transparent," something that the Trump administration has mentioned before on many occasions.
The Chinese embassy used numbers and facts in the article to tumble his argument, including details of what information was shared with the U.S. about COVID-19 and when and why China decided to expel certain U.S. journalists.
The embassy also quoted top American medical expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying he "reportedly said he refused to let others push him to say that China should have warned the U.S. three months beforehand, because it just didn't comport with facts."
Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of medical journal The Lancet, also said," We knew in the last week of January that this was coming. The message from China was absolutely clear, that a new virus, with pandemic potential, was hitting cities," the embassy mentioned in the article.
The Chinese embassy also expressed concerns regarding the current outbreak situation in the U.S., with the largest number of confirmed cases in the world.
"At this critical moment, shouldn't the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands also focus on promoting and participating in international cooperation in the fight against the pandemic? " the embassy questioned the senior U.S. diplomat.
