China should be held accountable for its conduct leading up to and following the global coronavirus outbreak, said Gordon Chang, Daily Beast columnist and author of The Great U.S.-China Tech War, offering his remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host John Hayward.
Mansour asked about possible consequences for China following the worldwide impact of the Chinese government’s mendacity and negligence.
“People are furious,” said Mansour, “and if this shutdown [across] the country lasts long, and if the projections are as bad as some of the epidemiologists suggest they will be, we’re going to come out the other end of this extremely angry. We cannot go back to status quo with China. it seems to me that there’s going to be a reckoning, some sort of an international trial.”
Mansour added, “‘We are going to have a lot of people sick and tragically dead because of this, and as you said, China’s handling of it — their gross malfeasance — is unacceptable.”
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Chang replied, “My mind is just does not able to comprehend this. I am actually surprised by the inhumanity of what they’ve been doing, and it just incomprehensible. When you look at the modeling of virologists, we could have something like 95 million Americans infected, maybe more, and the death toll from that could very well be in the hundreds of thousands.”
The coronavirus outbreak increases the urgency to economically decouple from China, maintained Chang.
“We probably will follow something close to a trajectory of the countries in Europe, which means we will have perhaps millions or tens of millions of Americans infected, hundreds of thousands of us will not survive this,” Chang stated. “So we have got to understand that however this came out of China — deliberate or accidental — we have got to cut our links with China. We have got to impose costs on China. We’ve got to defend the American Republic because this is an existential crisis for us.”
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) political corruption has been further revealed during the viral pandemic, observed Chang.
“Dr. Tedros, as the director general of the World Health Organization, has actually hindered the world’s response to the coronavirus,” Chang remarked. “So he delayed, at a critical moment, the declaration of a health emergency. He also delayed the declaration of the pandemic. Now both of these things eventually got done, but much later, and as the World Health Organization delayed, people got sick and people died. So this is an example of China actually pressuring the head of the WHO and senior WHO officials into doing things which really resulted in tragedy.”
The U.S. should defund the WHO in the absence of executive reform, Chang recommended.
“We’ve got to remember that Dr. Tedros himself is a die-hard committed socialist,” noted Chang. “During one of his early trips to Beijing during the coronavirus epidemic, he was talking about China’s response and [how] it showed the superiority of the socialist system, thereby him making comments to the detriment of democracies.”
Chang added, “I think that we need to either get rid of all the top leadership of WHO, and it’s a lot of people there who need to leave, or we defund the organization. But this organization certainly has been hindering the world’s response to this epidemic.”
Hayward noted the WHO’s initial opposition to the implementation of travel bans regarding China as a disease-controlling measure.
Chang noted the unified opposition to President Donald Trump’s use of travel bans from many Democrats, U.S. news media outlets, and the Chinese government.
“The one thing that President Trump did on January 31 was to impose the travel restrictions and the quarantine. and President Trump took enormous heat from, not only from Beijing, but from domestic critics, but that was the one thing that bought the United States some time,” Chang stated. “If we didn’t have that, we would be in even worse shape than we are today, because that gave the CDC and others the opportunity to mount a defense.”
Using travel bans “was the most important decision that the federal government made,” concluded Chang, “and President Trump made it early and he made the right call.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
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