On Sunday, Peter Navarro, Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy for the Trump administration, appeared on Fox News with anchor Maria Bartiromo to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic and the Chinese Communist Party’s culpability in the crisis.
“Your reaction to what we saw this weekend and, broadly speaking, what China has done in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic?” Bartiromo asked Navarro.
Navarro replied by first noting that his “focus here at the White House is making sure that the people of America are safe from this virus and getting things like personal protective equipment, masks, ventilators, and things like that.”
He then broke down China’s actions during this pandemic:
But here’s what I can tell you about China. If you think about what China did over the course of this thing, they did four things that led to the deaths of many people worldwide. I mean, first of all, the virus was spawned in China. Second of all, they hid the virus behind the shield of the World Health Organization. The third thing they did was basically hoard personal protective equipment, and now they’re profiteering from it.
Navarro then spoke about the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
What we know is that the ground zero for this virus was within a few miles of that lab. If you simply do an Occam’s razor approach, that the simplest explanation is probably the most likely, I think it’s incumbent on China to prove that it wasn’t that lab. So that’s number one.
But, more importantly, we know that for a critical six-week period of time, China used its influence at the World Health Organization to hide the virus from the world. This was a time where that virus could have been contained in Wuhan. Instead, five million Chinese people went out from Wuhan and propagated the virus around the world. That was a critical time…
And then here’s what I think should be very disturbing to every American. During that period of time, that six-week interval when they were hiding this virus from the world, China went from a net exporter of personal protective equipment – they are the largest producer of that in the world – to a large net importer.
They basically went around and vacuumed up virtually all of the PPE around the world, including a lot from this country, which was, for humanitarian reasons, sharing our PPE with them. And what that did was leave people in New York, Milan, and everywhere in between defenseless when it came time to have that PPE.
Navarro added that “equally alarming” is that China is allegedly “sitting on that horde of PPE,” and attempting to profit from it.
China’s culpability in the origin and spread of the COVID-19 virus has been a topic of intense conversation in the last few weeks as lawmakers and journalists try to wrap their arms around what exactly happened, and what’s been potentially covered up by the nation’s communist government.
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