South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham claimed that punishing China for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic is one area in which Republicans and Democrats see eye to eye.
Graham joined Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, and dozens of other senators in demanding that the World Health Organization force China to ban wet markets, which are believed to be the cause of the coronavirus pandemic. During an interview on Hannity, Graham said this could be the first of several bipartisan efforts to punish China for its handling of the outbreak.
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“The first thing I want to do is get the United States Senate on the record where we, we don’t blame Trump, we blame China,” Graham explained. “The Chinese government is responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million Americans being unemployed. It’s the Chinese government and the way they behave that led to this pandemic.”
He later added, “I want to make our response to this so overwhelming that China will change its behavior. I want to get the medical supply chain back in the United States, and I want to stop canceling some debt that we owe to China because they should be paying us, not us paying China. I think you’re going to see a bipartisan pushback against China to punish them so severely to deter them in the future.”
The Chinese Communist Party has been criticized for covering up the pandemic and pushing falsehoods about the virus before it became a global crisis. China claimed that the disease could not spread between humans and then barred international inspectors from entering the country when the outbreak began in Wuhan. U.S. intelligence officials also believe China has underreported its death toll.
As of Thursday, the U.S. had more than 462,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 16,513 related deaths.
