Sen. Tom Cotton Monday accused the director of a Wuhan, China lab for his denials that the coronavirus spreading around the world was accidentally released from his facility of "toeing the party line."
“Let’s take a look at that laboratory director," the Arkansas Republican said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "He’s not just some independent, truth-seeking scientist; he is an official in the Chinese Communist Party who is toeing the party line. We all know, and we’ve known since January, that that food market in Wuhan was not the source of this virus.”
Saturday, Yuan Zhiming, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, told state media that there was "no way" the virus came from his lab or another in the Chinese city, reports The New York Post.
According to Chinese officials, the virus likely came from a "wet market" in Wuhan.
"Chinese scientists established that more than a third of all the original cases had no contact with the food market," Cotton argued Monday. "The best evidence suggests that the kind of bat from which this virus jumped to humans wasn’t even present there."
Further, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence pointing at the Wuhan labs, said Cotton.
"They did have those bats (and) they did research these coronaviruses," said Cotton. "Our diplomats in China were worried about laboratory safety there. China has a history of bad laboratory safety. All that circumstantial evidence points towards the labs and then, of course, you have the Chinese coverups, the lies, the disinformation and intimidation of any whistle-blowers. That’s why the most plausible explanation for the origins of these viruses is one of those two labs in Wuhan.”
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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