With the United States surpassing 5 million cases of the coronavirus and 160,000 people dead, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro asked why more people aren’t pointing the finger at China’s cover-up of the virus when it first broke out in Wuhan in 2019.
“It continues to puzzle me eight months later,” Navarro said on Fox News’s Bill Hemmer Reports. “We know that China, the Chinese Communist Party, infected the United States with that virus. Yet, what we have now as a society seemingly divided against each other, all the anger that is out there about the virus is directed not at the Chinese Communist Party, but at each other.”
Navarro added that there’s a media element of not wanting to seem insensitive when talking about China.
“What’s weird to me, it’s like too politically correct on a lot of the left-wing media to even assign any blame to the Chinese,” Navarro said. “It’s bizarre.”
Reports of rhetoric criticizing China correlating to a growing anti-Asian American sentiment have escalated since the pandemic’s outbreak earlier in 2020. The labeling of the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus” by President Trump, some Republican lawmakers, and conservative pundits came under attack by others who felt the labels were racist.
Trump, who frequently ties the virus back to China, clarified his rhetoric on Twitter when lockdowns first started, saying the virus’s spread is not the fault of Asian Americans in “any way, shape or form.”
China has faced major international scrutiny over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak that led to a global pandemic. Navarro said tensions between the U.S. and China at the moment remain bitter due to the consequences of the pandemic.
“… In November, the Chinese Communist Party spawned that virus in December,” Navarro said. “In January, Bill, they hid it from the world behind a shield of the World Health Organization. While they did that, they bought up all the PPE, the masks, the gloves, and goggles all over the world … They denied those to the healthcare workers in Milan and New York, killed people because of that, and now they’re trying to steal our vaccines. So, we are not happy. We’re not happy with the Chinese Communist Party.”
