Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sharply criticized the Chinese communist regime for the way it handled its attempts to contain the outbreak of the new coronavirus when it first broke out in its central city of Wuhan.
Nunes appeared on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” and spoke about how they handled the coronavirus crisis: “They’re a communist dictatorship,” he said. “They’re inefficient. They have people under authoritarian control.”
When the situation got out of control, information was being suppressed, and people who did speak out, like Dr. Li Wenliang, were silenced. “Think about it: the doctor that actually was the whistleblower on this ended up dead,” Nunes said.
Nunes also criticized the regime for not taking the threat seriously in the beginning. “Instead of calling people in and learning how to help and develop a way for us to know how to treat this, they downplayed it.”
“If you look back to what the Chinese did, they probably had this in the late fall, especially early winter,” he added.
Nunes also said the Committee on Intelligence has been “looking at China for a very long time” and is forging a bill at the moment to address China on these issues: “We are building legislation now that is based off of our investigation,” he said.
Similar words were spoken by National Security Adviser to President Trump, Robert O’Brien, on Wednesday at a meeting of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. “Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” he said.
O’Brien added that as a result of China’s behavior, “it probably cost the world community two months to respond.” He continued: “There’s lot of open-source reporting from China, from Chinese nationals, that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation or that sort of thing,” he added. “So that the word of this virus could not get out.”
