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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy to discuss COVID-19 origins and the United States’ relationship with China. See below for highlights and watch the full interview on YouTube and Rumble.
On the origins of COVID-19:
“[The lab leak theory] was labeled disinformation, and a bunch of media outlets extensively went into it. But there’s a lot of common sense embedded into this. There’ve been other pandemics or other diseases that have spread out of China. MERS and SARS both happened in the last 15 years. [In] both of those cases, they said, ‘This is the animal that it came from.’ In this particular case, that has never happened.
“It also happens that this all began in a city where there are, not one, but two laboratories that conduct what they call gain of function research….
“There’s never going to be any smoking gun, because the Chinese government’s never going to release it. [But] you start putting [the pieces] together, and it explains why the FBI and the Department of Energy have reached that conclusion. I think others will begin to move in that direction.”
On the federal government’s confidence in its COVID-19 origins assessments:
“All of the intelligence agencies have low confidence in their assessments, including the ones that have assessed that [COVID-19] is naturally occurring…, because they just have very limited information. We are dealing with an autocratic, tyrannical dictatorship. This is not the most open society and most open government in the world…. That’s why they’re all going to have low to moderate confidence in their rulings.
“We’re 100 percent sure—that’s high confidence. We’re semi-sure, because we’ve got some good information—that’s moderate. We think this is what happened, but we wouldn’t bet our life on it—that’s low confidence.
“If you went through all the assessments, whether it’s the lab leak people or the ones who think it was naturally occurring, they’re all going to be in that low range. Because in the end, they’re all dealing with circumstantial evidence. But I do think when you combine that with common sense, you start to lean in the direction of a lab leak.”
On the United States’ relationship with China:
“The central issue here is the way we’ve run and made decisions in this country for 30 years. It really took off around 2001 when the decision was made to invite China into the World Trade Organization. The notion at that time was, ‘These guys are going to get rich, they’re going to start buying our stuff, and then they’ll become just like us. Capitalism is going to change China.’
“That did not work. They took our jobs, they took our factories. They gutted entire areas of this country. The only change is they’re richer. They’re more authoritarian than they used to be. And now? Now they are a near-peer rival unlike anything America has ever faced.
“A lot of that is a product of the decisions we’ve made here. The Chinese officials did what government officials always do. They tried to make their country great and to build it up. They did it at our expense by cheating [and breaking] the rules.
“The most important issue we face right now is…we’ve got to walk away from those assumptions. We’ve got to walk away from the way we deal with trade and commerce around the world. Every decision we make—who we trade with, who we interact with economically—has to benefit workers in American industry. Because if you’re not strong, none of this other stuff matters.
“And to the extent that we can’t make or buy something, it should come primarily from democratic allies and countries that we can count on, not places like China or Russia, who are autocracies that have hostile intentions towards the United States.
“To me, that’s the most important thing—we need an attitude adjustment. This is not about everybody wanting to one up each other on who’s tougher on China. It’s about being smart and comprehensive and coherent about the challenge we face, a lot of which we’ve created through our own policies.”