Republican leader calls for China to be held ‘accountable’ for causing COVID-19 pandemic
U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has sent a letter to his fellow Republicans in Congress urging that China be held accountable for failing to prevent COVID-19 from becoming a pandemic.
The letter, titled “Holding China Accountable: A Republican Call to Action & Roadmap for Covid-19 Accountability,” was posted online Monday and claims that Democrats in Congress will not hold the communist Chinese government accountable for their failure to contain the virus.
“The unfortunate reality is that countless friends and family members could have been saved had it not been for the deception of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” wrote McCarthy.
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“A March 2020 report by the University of Southampton found if interventions in China could have been conducted one, two, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent, respectively.”
McCarthy went on to list “eight pillars” aimed at delivering “transparency and justice to the American people” over China’s failure to contain COVID-19 when it was first discovered.
Under the category of “Transparency,” McCarthy sought to introduce legislation to declassify intelligence reports about COVID-19’s origins, have the U.S. discontinue funding of “any gain of function research conducted in or with China,” prohibit National Institutes of Health from funding foreign governments seeking to harm the U.S., and called on reforming the World Health Organization.
Under the category of “Justice,” McCarthy called on the continual investigation of the exact origins of COVID-19, Congress to pass new sanctions on China and other entities accused of participating in a COVID-19 cover-up, champion legislation allowing families who lost members to COVID-19 to sue the Chinese government, and to relocate the 24th Winter Olympic Games, which is scheduled to be held in Beijing in 2022.
Last month, The Washington Post wrote that while it and other media outlets reported for over a year that the accidental Wuhan lab leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory, it was now plausible and had “gained new credence.”
“How and why did this happen? For one, efforts to discover a natural source of the virus have failed. Second, early efforts to spotlight a lab leak often got mixed up with speculation that the virus was deliberately created as a bioweapon. That made it easier for many scientists to dismiss the lab scenario as tin-hat nonsense,” the Post reported.
“But a lack of transparency by China and renewed attention to the activities of the Wuhan lab have led some scientists to say they were too quick to discount a possible link at first.”
The Christian Post reported earlier this month that multiple sources told Fox News in April 2020 that they believed the COVID-19 outbreak originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where patient zero was infected. These sources also said that the World Health Organization was complicit in covering for China.
Following the initial reports and speculation of a lab leak, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly said that the virus was not man-made and was the result of an “unusual human-animal interface” in a Chinese “wet market” and that “the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
Questions surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak resurfaced in recent months after State Department documents revealed that a month before the first confirmed case of COVID-19, three researchers working at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized after becoming sick in November 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In late May, Democratic President Joe Biden announced that he was calling on U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days."
“As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China,” Biden said last month. “I have also asked that this effort include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence Community’s efforts. And I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.”
In response to Biden, Kash Patel, who worked at the U.S. National Security Council under the Trump administration and also worked under the Obama administration, said Biden doesn't need 90 days to find the origins of COVID-19 because he has 13, 14 months and more of intelligence that was gathered under his predecessor.
"There's been Presidential Daily Briefings produced by career intelligence officials every week since this outbreak occurred and before that. It doesn't take 90 days to look at it. It does take 90 days to look at it and allow people to possibly manipulate what they're finding to suit a narrative that Fauci and others have been espousing for over a year," Patel asserted in an interview with The Epoch Times last week.
