A senior Chinese official denounced White House trade adviser Peter Navarro by name after he rebuked Beijing for allowing the export of faulty testing kits during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Navarro is a habitual liar,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters Tuesday. “He has no credibility to speak of.”
Navarro accused China of “profiteering” during the coronavirus pandemic, alleging that Chinese companies have sold “fake tests and counterfeit tests” to foreign buyers. The dispute erupted in parallel with a similar controversy involving China and India, where national and provincial officials also have angered the Chinese Communist Party by complaining that they were sold faulty test kits.
“It is unfair and irresponsible for certain individuals to label Chinese products as ‘faulty’ and look at issues with preemptive prejudice,” a spokeswoman at China’s embassy in New Delhi said Tuesday.
China issued that allegation one day after the Indian Council of Medical Research advised local officials to return the antibody test kits purchased from two Chinese companies on the grounds that the tests are unreliable. That decision was made one week after a regional health minister reported that the tests “gave only 5.4 percent accurate results against the expectation of 90 percent accuracy,” according to local media.
“We hope India will strengthen communication and coordination with the Chinese companies, deal with this issue properly, and do more to promote bilateral anti-epidemic cooperation,” Geng said at the Tuesday briefing.
Navarro echoed the Indian concerns while warning that faulty Chinese equipment could make it harder to identify people who may have already endured a mild case of the novel coronavirus and thus developed an immunity.
“We can’t have China, for example, bringing in those fake tests and counterfeit tests, because that’s going to be very disruptive,” Navarro said Monday on Fox and Friends. “There’s a lot of these antibody tests coming in from China now that are low quality, false readings, and things like that.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry insisted those claims are false. “He used to cite a so-called professional named ‘Ron Vara’ in many of his books to attack China, a person who turned out to be fictional, as publicly admitted by Mr. Navarro himself,” Geng said, referring to an alter ego that Navarro has featured in his books. “In the same vein, what he said this time was nothing but lies.”
