While the Washington Post is reporting the Biden administration has no real plans to hold China accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic, a leading Republican is calling for immediate punitive measures against the communist regime, arguing it’s the only way to make them pay.
“China’s chances of ever conceding that they’re responsible for this virus is zero,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., in an interview Tuesday with Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
He’s urging the United States to revoke China’s most-favored-nation status, remove its favorable terms with global financial institutions, and revoke the visas of Communist Party members and children who are being educated at American schools.
Cotton began taking flak from establishment politicians and media one year ago for suggesting the novel coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. Now, the circumstantial evidence is mounting that the virus was manipulated in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The Arkansas senator referenced a study last year by the Lawrence Livermore Lab reported Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal that “confirms what I’ve been saying from the very beginning.”
“Just use your common sense,” he said. “This virus emerged in a city larger than New York, just a few blocks down the road from the lab where they research these viruses. Every bit of evidence we have points to those labs.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that a May 2020 study prepared by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found the lab-leak theory plausible and warranted further investigation. The conclusion was based on genomic analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
Cotton said “it’s past time to hold China accountable for their negligence and their deceitfulness in unleashing this plague on the world.”
He suggest a number of actions.
“We could revoke their permanent most-favored-nation status, a bad mistake that we made 20 years ago,” Cotton said. “We could team up with our allies and take back the very favorable financing terms they get from international financial institutions like the World Bank. We could take away visas from Chinese Communist Party members and their kids so they can’t send their kids to American schools anymore.”
Cotton added that the federal government should not be subsidizing colleges and universities “when they turn around and accept the princeling kids of all these Chinese communists.”
“There’s no end to the things we can do to make China pay for unleashing this plague, and we should start right now,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports Fauci, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Biden administration are insisting it’s in China’s interest to get to the bottom of the origin of the pandemic.
But HotAir.com’s John Sexton notes Post writer Aaron Blake acknowledges how hollow those assurances are. No one in the Biden administration seems to have an answer to the obvious question: What do you do if China decides its interests are in covering up the truth?
See Cotton’s interview with Fox News:
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