Despite earlier claims and countless defenses made by World Health Organization officials, an updated timeline by the international health body shows China never self-reported the COVID-19 outbreak that led to drastic economic and health consequences across the world.

A quiet change to a timeline of COVID events in late June shows what many mainstream media outlets and government officials have denied for months: China didn’t inform the WHO about the outbreak. Instead, on December 31, “a translation of a Chinese media report about the outbreak is posted to ProMED, a U.S.-based open-access platform for early intelligence about infectious disease outbreaks,” according to a U.S. Naval Institute report.

The first inklings of the impending pandemic, and the first time the WHO heard about it, came from this U.S. report — the WHO then sent officials to investigate its validity in China the next day.

This runs contrary to a previous version of the timeline that falsely claimed on December 31: “Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province. A novel coronavirus was eventually identified.” This did not happen.

Rather, the updated June 30 truthful version now says that on December 31 the WHO “picked up a media report on ProMED” about the mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. The new timeline admits that ProMED is run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases — a U.S. based organization headquartered in Brookline, Massachusetts.

The now-eerie Dec. 31 ProMED report says, “It is understood that the 1st patient with unexplained pneumonia that appeared in Wuhan this time came from Wuhan South China Seafood Market.”

This newly admitted information disrupts the countless defenses given by Chinese officials and allies at the WHO.

A June 4 article by China Daily said there “is no legal basis” for faulting China for the spread of the virus.

“What we’ve done is strictly obey the international rules and fulfill our international obligations,” Huang Jin, a law professor specializing in international law at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing falsely said in the propaganda article. “For example, we took the initiative to evaluate the pandemic situation and reported it in a timely fashion to the World Health Organization as well as other countries and regions, and we also accepted inspections from the WHO.”

Now that it’s admitted China didn’t report in a timely fashion, but rather the U.S. did, the Chinese have dropped this false talking point, as reported by the Free Beacon.