The Chinese Communist Party is once again heaping praise on Canadian Health Minister Patty Hajdu. The latest accolades came in a Friday morning press conference in Beijing.
“We noticed relevant reports and applaud the Canadian health minister’s objective and fair remarks,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin in response to Hajdu’s latest defense of China and the World Health Organization.
“China and Canada have been cooperating and giving each other valuable support during the difficult fight against COVID-19,” Hajdy said in an interview on The West Block earlier this week. “China is ready to continue working with Canada and other members of the international community so that the virus can be defeated as early as possible.”
Hajdu added that China alerted the World Health Organization to the emergence of the coronavirus strain “very early on” and shared its gene sequencing with other countries to help them detect the virus.
Hajdu has been at the receiving end of compliments from China before for her staunch defense of its coronavirus response.
In April, a bureau chief at one of China’s state media companies referred to Hajdu as a “role model” after she stood by China’s reporting of its coronavirus case data.
“Canadian Health Minister Hajdu is a role model. She is a disappointment to those paparazzi journalists and fearmongers, said China Daily EU bureau chief Chen Weihua in a tweet that was later deleted.
Chen’s compliments were directed at Hajdu’s prior comments through which she insisted there was no reason to believe that China’s coronavirus data were falsified.
“There’s no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified any way,” said Hajdu on Apr. 2.
“Your question is feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet and it’s important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic if we’re not willing to work together as a globe.”
