Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called for an international investigation into the Chinese Communist Party’s response to the coronavirus.
During a Thursday morning appearance on CNBC, Bannon claimed Beijing engaged in a cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak, which began in Wuhan in late 2019, and called the Chinese government the “enemy” of the rest of humanity.
“The Chinese Communist Party knew about this. They turned a blind eye to it, and particularly when they had it in their own country, they tried to protect it going around the rest of China, but they didn’t care about it going around the rest of the world,” Bannon said. “They’re the enemy of the Chinese people, they’re the enemy of the citizens of the United States, and they’re an enemy of mankind.”
“We’ve got 30 million people unemployed. You have, what, hundreds of thousands of people around the world dead, you have economic carnage everywhere, and remember, it’s not just the cash we put in, it’s the opportunity cost of what we’ve had to forgo,” Bannon said. “The Chinese Communist Party … they are knowingly responsible for this, as the president said.”
China has denied orchestrating a cover-up of its coronavirus response, even as its official death toll numbers are in doubt.
The White House reportedly ordered spy agencies to dig through intelligence communications to assess whether the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization worked together to cover up the extent of damage posed by the coronavirus. Earlier in the month, Fox News reported the U.S. intelligence community was instructed to investigate whether the outbreak began with an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Trump administration has sought to blame the Chinese government for its slow response to the crisis, accusing Beijing of hiding the extent of the outbreak. Trump also said he was suspending U.S. funding for the WHO, claiming the “China-centric” organization hid evidence of human-to-human transmission.
“Let’s leave aside the fact of what they’ve been doing in these labs. Let’s leave aside the fact of do they have a biological weapons program or not. Investigations at the intelligence level with all these nations combined, at the health level, at the public health services, that will be full investigations of that. We know for a fact they knew they had human transmission and community spread in mid-to-late-December. They knew this, and they lied,” Bannon said.
Bannon accused leaders in the Chinese Communist Party of failing to alert health officials to the danger posed by the coronavirus early on while simultaneously buying up protective gear that other nations would need to fight the virus.
“They’re directly responsible. The people of the world are going to demand an accounting. They’re going to demand a responsibility, and the Chinese Communist Party is going to have to pay,” Bannon said. “I think the world’s going to hold them in judgment, and that judgment is not going to be pretty. They owe trillions, if not tens of trillions, of dollars.”
