White House official: Beijing allowed Chinese nationalists ‘to seed and spread’ coronavirus in US

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White House economic adviser Peter Navarro claimed that the Chinese government knowingly allowed people who had contracted the coronavirus to travel overseas before the virus was declared a pandemic.

Navarro, who is on the coronavirus response team for the White House, sparred with Ali Velshi in a Saturday afternoon interview on MSNBC about the Chinese Communist Party’s role in spreading the virus as COVID-19 cases again spike in places around the United States.

“I want everybody right here today, as the day before America’s Independence Day, to understand where this virus started — with the Chinese Communist Party that is making us stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs. They spawned the virus. They hid the virus. They sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationalists over here to seed and spread the virus,” Navarro said.

Velshi challenged Navarro’s assertion, asking him to explain his claim about the hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals.

“Here’s the point: While they were preventing any domestic travel from Wuhan to Beijing or Shanghai, locking down their transportation network, they freely sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals on aircraft to go around the world,” the White House adviser explained before the host interjected again.

There is evidence that China covered up the coronavirus’s spread, muzzled whistleblowers, intimidated doctors, misled the World Health Organization, and blocked outside health experts. In April, the U.S. intelligence community reportedly believed that the Chinese Communist Party downplayed the outbreak and that China continued to mislead the world. Just this week, the World Health Organization backtracked on its assertion that the Chinese government alerted the United Nations agency about the coronavirus outbreak.

China has denied orchestrating a cover-up, accusing other countries of politicizing the pandemic.

The U.S. leads the world in infections and related deaths. There have been more than 2.8 million cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., and more than 130,000 people who became infected have died. Nearly 11 million people have been diagnosed with the coronavirus globally since the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than a half-million people who were infected have died.

Navarro argued that whether or not China intentionally spread the coronavirus is irrelevant and said that “what was intentional” was Beijing moving to protect its citizens by shutting down travel within the country before it shut down international travel.

“Let me be really clear about this: I don’t think it matters whether they did — what they deliberately did, Ali, and this is beyond reproach in terms of a fact. They deliberately allowed Chinese nationalists to come to the United States, Italy, and everywhere in between — who were infected — while they were locking down their own transportation network. And I think it’s really important for Americans to understand that,” he added.

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