NOTICIAS

Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined the Guy Benson Show on Fox News Radio to discuss the origins of COVID-19, President Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin, and infrastructure. See below for excerpts and listen to the full interview here. 
 
On leaders of the G7 summit calling for the World Health Organization (WHO) to lead another investigation into the origins of COVID-19: 
 
“I think [the leaders] have to say they want to do something about it. The whole world has been turned upside down. Some of those countries, the U.K., for example, just postponed their opening. So they’re still going through it, in a lot of those countries, in a major way.  Just count your blessings everyday that the Trump Administration put all that money on the street. We got three vaccines, we might certainly soon have a fourth. So we’ve been very blessed in this country in that regard. 
 
“But the problem [the G7 leaders] have is they don’t want to take on China individually or collectively. Now, they share the same concerns we do about China, but they’ve got all these other economic concerns that they’re worried about and they don’t want to get cut off from the Chinese market. 
 
“The World Health Organization is a membership organization, first and foremost. So they depend on their members to continue to pay their dues and allow them access — what they want is access, and they’re afraid the Chinese will cut them off on this and a bunch of other things. And then there are the people running it, some of whom I believe are compromised. And I don’t know this for a fact, but you never know if some of these people are being bribed, if some of these people are looking for a future business deal out of this whole deal.” 
 
On the COVID-19 lab leak theory: 
 
“The bottom line is, the chances of this being a lab accident are equal to the chances of this being an animal to human transmission. They have an equal probability of being true; we don’t know which one of the two it is. 
 
“I can say this, there are a lot of coincidences here. This thing happened to have broken out in the one city where the Chinese conduct experiments, where they take a virus in nature that is not infectious in humans and they mess with it, they alter it so that it becomes infectious in humans, which is what they call gain of function. The reason why you do that is because you want to then come up with a vaccine on how to cure it, how to treat it — but people can get infected doing this stuff. 
 
“We know for a fact that, for example, during SARS there were two researchers in Beijing separately that were infected in a lab accident and led to outbreaks, so it happens. And we know that this facility is one that U.S. diplomats had expressed concerns about its safety. So you start putting these pieces together. 
 
“They’ve never produced the animal, never showed us, ‘Here’s the animal.’ They did it in four months after SARS, nine month after MERS. They have yet to say, ‘We found the bat, or the dog, or whatever it is that spread this thing.’ And they have not done that.”
 
“It happened in Wuhan, there are no bat caves in Wuhan, it’s a major metropolis, in the city that has the lab that does these kinds of experiments, which we know is unsafe. There is a lot of circumstantial stuff…and there’s a chance the Chinese themselves don’t fully know. Because they’re in a system where if you mess up on one of those labs, you don’t go running and say to your supervisors, ‘Hey we had a mistake.’ You don’t get rewarded for honesty and reporting bad news in dictatorial regimes. That’s how Chernobyl spiraled out of control.”
 
On President Joe Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G7 summit: 
 
“As far as that meeting with Putin is concerned, I’ve always said, I’m not a Putin fan. I’ve been consistent since way back. [I have supported] sanctions, seeing him for what he is, seeing the nature of his government for what it is. But [Russia has] a massive nuclear arsenal and we do have to meet with the guy.”
 
On the possibility of an infrastructure deal: 
 
“Well, I want to go through the details of [the infrastructure package] and understand it. I don’t want to put a commitment out there and then back off it. But I want to do infrastructure, I do. I want us to build bridges and roads. Frankly, I want us to help mitigate against sea level rise; we have that issue, it’s going to be a problem for Florida. I want to deal with all these things. And I think you can get the votes for that. This is the closest we’ve ever been to being able to do that stuff. 
 
“The problem is not that; the problem is on top of all that they also want to do this thing where you give every family $300, whatever it is, per child, forever. Not a child tax credit where it comes out of their payroll taxes, just a $300 check that starts in July until December — they want to make that permanent. They want to add all these other things. And I get it. I’m not in favor of their proposal for [paid family leave], but I think that’s an issue we need to talk about in this country.”