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Hold the CCP accountable for COVID-19
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) 
January 11, 2022
Washington Examiner
 
Two years ago, the world first encountered a dangerous new coronavirus as reports of an outbreak slowly leaked out of Wuhan, China…
 
But due to the secrecy and blatant obstructionism of the Chinese Communist Party, the virus’s origin remains a mystery. This is simply unacceptable. The world deserves to know the truth about COVID-19, and the U.S. government should punish those who are keeping the facts in the dark.
 
Though the virus originated in China, the CCP has been deliberately uncooperative since the very beginning. The regime was aware of a contagious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan by perhaps as early as mid-November of 2019. And yet, Beijing withheld this critical information from the world until Jan. 20, 2020…
 
Even the regime’s initial admission of an “outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause” on Dec. 31 came only because whistleblowers … had forced its hand by leaking a confidential memo.
 
And let’s not forget that the public notice on Dec. 31 did not admit that the new disease was caused by a highly contagious coronavirus, even though we know … that it had been sequenced multiple times by then…
 
That early obstruction continued. Last year, the CCP refused to give the World Health Organization access to critical raw data of the earliest known and suspected cases of COVID-19 and denied the WHO’s request to explore the lab leak hypothesis in Wuhan…
 
Denial and deception are common tactics of an authoritarian, genocidal regime. What is more alarming is that some U.S. government officials have also covered up facts about COVID-19’s origin.
 
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, misled the public about the possibility that the virus originated from scientific experimentation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…
 
Today, we know that the WIV had received grant money from multiple U.S. government agencies, primarily as a sub-grantee of the EcoHealth Alliance, and we know that Chinese researchers were performing risky experiments on coronaviruses, one of which could easily have leaked into the public.
…
Along with Republican colleagues, I have introduced the COVID Act in the Senate. This bill would place sanctions on Chinese authorities that continue to hide the truth and cut funding for research collaboration if Beijing does not allow a forensic investigation into the coronavirus’s source…
 
After two years of infections, lockdowns, and social isolation, the facts about this disease’s origin need to come to light. Beijing may continue to obstruct, but there should be painful consequences for doing so.

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