Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on Sunday accused China of covering up the origin and severity of the new fast-spreading coronavirus.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Cotton said the United States must “get to the bottom” of suspicions that the virus is linked to a nearby lab that researches infectious diseases.
“They have not been transparent at all, and they need to be,” Cotton said of China, where COVID-19 first broke out.
There’s been “a pattern of Chinese dishonesty from the very beginning which continues to this very day,” he charged.
“Just a few days ago we went from a situation where they were reporting only a couple hundred more cases to almost 14,000 cases in a single day,” he said. “That wasn't the result of a scientific discovery, that was a political decision to finally reveal what they knew to be true. Yet they are still covering up and in all likely another the number of cases and deaths of coronavirus inside of China.”
He declared the “virus did not originate in the Wuhan.”
“Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who have published or studied in the international journal of the Lancet have demonstrated several of the original cases did not have contact with [a food market],” he claimed.
“The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market. We don't know where it originated but we do know we have to get to the bottom of that. A few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level IV super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.
“We don't have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says.”
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