In a brief announcing his congressional office’s closure over the novel coronavirus, Sen. Tom Cotton refused to mince words and said the United States should punish whichever nation “inflicted” the illness onto the world.
“We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world, and we will prosper in the new day,” wrote the Arkansas Republican in a statement released Thursday.
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Cotton has been one of the most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party since the outbreak of the virus, which is believed to have originated at a market in Wuhan, China. However, in statements made earlier this year, he noted that Wuhan is home to China’s “only biosafety level four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
“@TheLancet published a study demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including Patient Zero,” Cotton tweeted on Jan. 30.
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China claimed—for almost two months—that coronavirus had originated in a Wuhan seafood market. That is not the case. @TheLancet published a study demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including Patient Zero. pic.twitter.com/PdgqgHjkGy
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) January 30, 2020
In late January, Cotton was among the first American lawmakers to call for a travel ban between the U.S. and China, citing Benjamin Franklin, who once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
A month later, the Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times published a report suggesting the virus had been “introduced” to the market, which led Cotton to demand answers from the CCP about the disease’s origin and the procedures taken to mitigate its spread by the Chinese government.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda rag finally admits what I’ve said for a month: coronavirus didn’t start in Wuhan food market,” Cotton tweeted in late February. “So where did it originate? Time for answers from CCP.”
As of Thursday, COVID-19 had killed more than 4,000 people, and the virus had infected more than 110,000 people globally, with numbers rising in the U.S.
