During a wide-ranging interview with the Alabama-based Trussville Tribune on Thursday, Alabama Senate Republican nominee Katie Britt raised the issue of holding communist China accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic that is still lingering globally.
Britt defeated Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) earlier in the week to secure the Republican nomination.
In her first media appearance since her Tuesday victory, Britt addressed the China threat and said several issues related to China still needed to be resolved.
“[C]hina is, in fact, our greatest threat,” she said. “And one thing I worry about with regards to Russia and Ukraine is an emboldened Russia is an emboldened China is an emboldened Iran. China has not minced their words. They want to take Taiwan, and I think it’s by 2027, so we have that. But if you look at the pandemic, you know, obviously, they need to be held accountable. They are the origin of the virus. You look at how that played out.”
“You look at the fact that our leaders, instead of doing what they should have done after and during the pandemic — which I believe is take a step back and say, it’s not an if but when something like this happens again — how can we secure our supply chain, and to your point, China makes over 90% of our antibiotics,” Britt continued. “They make our medical supplies. They make in Taiwan all our chips. It can’t continue. We’ve got to create an environment where we can on-shore those jobs back to America, secure up our supply chain. You look at them buying up our farmland.”
“We’ve got to put a stop to that,” she added. “You look at the fact that they continue to steal our intellectual property and defense capabilities. It’s almost taunting us with what they’re doing there overseas with our defense capabilities.”
Britt criticized the Biden administration for its overtures to remove Trump-era tariffs placed on China. She said raising them could not be left off the table. However, she claimed to remove them was a “big mistake on Biden’s part.”
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