Vivek Ramaswamy: China Must Pay for 'Unleashing Hell on the World' with Coronavirus Pandemic

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called for holding China accountable for its role in the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic during Tuesday night’s presidential primary debate, accusing the Communist Party of “unleash[ing] Hell on the world” and owing the planet a debt.

Ramaswamy made a series of promises in the form of assertions to genocidal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, including supporting the ouster of China from the World Trade Organization (WTO), a ban on Chinese government purchases of American land, and limited American business operations in China. He made the remarks in response to a question regarding how he would address shortcomings in the U.S. Navy, couched in concerns that America’s naval fleets have aged poorly and require updates to properly engage in operations in the South China Sea, including support for Taiwan.

Ramaswamy was one of five candidates participating in the Republican Presidential Primary debate in Miami, Florida, hosted by NBC News alongside the Republican Jewish Coalition. Notably absent from the debate is the longtime frontrunner in the Republican Party primary, former President Donald Trump, who was in office when the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic first erupted.

Asked for “specifics” on how Ramaswamy would approach renovating the U.S. Navy, he offered an extensive answer on his general policy on China and condemnations of fellow candidates Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He then directed a message to Xi.

“My message to Xi Jinping is this: you are done buying land in this country, you will not donate to universities in this country, U.S. businesses won’t expand into the Chinese market until you play by the same set of rules,” Ramaswamy asserted, “you’re kicked out of the WTO, and you actually have to have accountability for the COVID-19 pandemic financially, which unleashed hell on the world.”

“We have to hold them accountable,” he reiterated.

Ramaswamy did not detail how he would make China pay financially for its role in the pandemic, but he had run through his allotted time to answer the question. Debate moderators did not return to the topic of the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic for the rest of the broadcast.

China’s responsibility for the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, once a hotly debated topic, has not yet surfaced as a top issue in anticipation of the 2024 presidential election. The pandemic began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, spreading rapidly internally before cases of the disease began surfacing internationally. Chinese officials initially blamed “wet markets” — open-air locations where butchers sell wild animals, and often butcher them on-site, for consumption — for spreading the disease from animals to humans. In response to mounting concerns that the novel coronavirus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a top laboratory known to have been studying bat coronaviruses at the time of the onset of the initial outbreak, the Chinese Communist Party began claiming, without evidence, that the pandemic began at a U.S. Army facility in Maryland.

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) concluded in a 2021 report on the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus that a laboratory leak was not the origin of the pandemic but did not offer a concrete alternative. It suggested that the virus infected humans through an intermediary animal that became infected from the virus’s original host but presented no evidence of the Wuhan coronavirus infecting an animal found in the wild in Hubei province where Wuhan is located. The W.H.O. notably ignored a warning from the nation of Taiwan in late 2019 that an infectious disease was spreading in China and claimed in late January 2020 that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the highly contagious disease.

Former Chinese Centers for Disease Control (CDC) chief Gao Fu — the official who initially blamed illegal wildlife sales for the pandemic — has since conceded that a laboratory leak may have initially triggered the first cases of coronavirus that created the pandemic.

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