Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said the novel coronavirus outbreak requires a new approach to U.S.-China relations, calling the country our “greatest geopolitical threat,” Washington Examiner reports.
On Friday night, Cruz sent out a thread of tweets with new information obtained from the National Institutes of Health, which shows the United States is funding labs where the COVID-19 outbreak may have begun.
“Today @NIH confirmed to me 76,000 US taxpayer dollars in FY2019 went to one of the Chinese virology labs in Wuhan at the center of the #CoronavirusOutbreak,” Cruz said in the tweets. “This deeply troubling grant transfer to the growing list of reasons why the U.S. needs to rethink its approach to China. China is our greatest geopolitical threat. We need to start acting like it.”
Cruz elaborated on his findings with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles during his podcast. “It was part of an overall $3.7 million funding program that went to six years in sites in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar,” said Cruz.
Cruz then read off two statements from the NIH, but noted it is not yet confirmed that the COVID-19 virus began in a lab in Wuhan, China.
“The project included studying viral diversity in animal parentheses, bats, reservoirs, surveying people that live in high-risk communities for evidence of bat, coronavirus infection, and conducting laboratory experiments to analyze and predict which newly discovered viruses pose the greatest threats to human health,” one statement read.
The other one read: “The project supported the following activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, coronavirus screening and serology of non-human samples, viral pathogenesis, serological testing, host receptor binding, spike S protein sequencing, and in vitro and in viva virus characterization.”
The novel coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated in Wuhan late last year. The World Health Organization’s investigative report in February concluded that “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source as many reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.” However, reports this week said U.S. officials are increasingly considering the possibility that the outbreak began in a Wuhan laboratory and not in a market.
The first confirmed case of the coronavirus in the United States was reported in Washington state on Jan. 21.
In early 2020, members of the U.S. intelligence community reportedly informed Trump that China was lying about the seriousness of the virus, which has since infected more than 2.26 million people worldwide. Officials informed the president that China “appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak” and was “not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”
Evidence has indicated China also misled the WHO about the severity of COVID-19 to prevent investigations in Wuhan, where the first case of the coronavirus was reported, and blocked foreign medical health experts from assisting the containment of the disease. One study indicated that if China hadn’t misled the world about the virus’s severity, the coronavirus would have been significantly less widespread.
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