Writing for Fox News, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) argued that China’s government must be held to account for its role in accelerating the coronavirus outbreak.

In his article, Senator Hawley argued that China must be subject to an international investigation for hiding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, and for the resulting “tens of thousands of lives stolen and billions of dollars lost” as a result.

“[Chinese Communist] Party officials interrogated and punished Chinese doctors who tried to warn others as the virus began to spread,” Hawley wrote, noting that “they ordered laboratories to stop testing for the virus and destroy their samples when it became clear that an outbreak was underway,” and that the CCP “even sat on evidence showing the virus could be transmitted between humans. By the time they shared that information, the virus had already spread to other nations.”

It was these decisions that allowed the coronavirus that turned the “local disease outbreak into a global pandemic,” Hawley argued. “Rather than confront the coronavirus with the help of others – including American experts, whom it denied entry in January – it kept its citizens and the world in the dark,” the senator said, adding that “it let the virus slip over its borders, and it stole precious weeks from the United States and others who could have used that time to ready our national defenses.”

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The Chinese Government Must Be Held to Account

China is currently attempting to do the classic communist trick of rewriting history. Not only are they claiming that the coronavirus actually started in Italy or America, and that the U.S. military probably started it, but that China bought the rest of the world time to stop the coronavirus that everyone else squandered.

“These are outrageous lies,” Hawley said, going on to call for a two-step plan to hold China to account. Firstly, Hawley has introduced a Senate resolution to launch an international investigation into China.

“We need to know exactly what the Party knew, when it knew it, and how the Party’s decisions to try and hide the virus allowed it to spread and kept the United States and other nations from protecting ourselves sooner,” Hawley said.

“We do not need the Communist Party to cooperate for this investigation to be effective,” he continued, as the truth would come out no matter what. “If the Party does cooperate, then the investigation will show exactly how its lies led to the pandemic. If it doesn’t, then its actions will speak for themselves.”

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Secondly, the resolution calls for the international community to find a method of quantifying the destruction wreaked by China in dollar terms, and then finding a way to extract payment. This may be far tougher to pull off, but it is one that needs doing. China has to pay for the lives they’ve ruined and the damage done to all our economies.

This piece originally appeared in ThePoliticalInsider.com and is used by permission.

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