Exclusive — David McCormick: China Must Pay 'Reparations' for Deaths of 'Millions of Americans' by COVID-19, Fentanyl

David McCormick, a Republican candidate running for the U.S. Senate to represent Pennsylvania, said on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with special guest host Matt Boyle that China should pay “reparations” for damage done to Americans via COVID-19 and fentanyl abuse.

He said, “We need to hold China accountable for COVID, and we need to hold China accountable for fentanyl, which is killing people across Pennsylvania, coming across our open borders, and coming into our country, and it’s a huge problem nationally.”

China should not be be protected from sovereign immunity, given the Chinese Communist Party’s complicity in the novel coronavirus outbreak and the human toll wrought by drug abuse related to fentanyl produced in the one-party state, he added.

“China hasn’t been held accountable,” he remarked. “We need reparations on the Chinese for both of those things, or we need to eliminate sovereign immunity so the victims of COVID can can hold China accountable. We lost a million Americans and trillions of dollars of value, and that’s a way we go on the offense with China.”

McCormick called for a decoupling of the American and Chinese economies in “critical industries that are significant strategically” to lessen U.S. dependence on Chinese manufacturing for pharmaceutical products and semiconductors. He included artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing as two other realms requiring government-industry partnerships for the purpose of competing with China.

“We absolutely need to have a whole-of-nation strategy [towards China],” he determined. “I  think there are four things we need to do.  The first thing is absolutely decouple in critical industries that are significant strategically. … Our pharmaceutical supply chain is dependent on China, but also semiconductors. Semiconductors are at the core of everything, and 90 percent of the world’s semiconductors are manufactured 90 miles from mainland China. A terrible set of strategic decisions led to that point.”

The U.S. should construct domestic microchip manufacturing plants — called “fabs” — as part of a strategy to economically decouple from China, he said.

He continued, “We have to bring those [industries] home. There are steps to do that. … We need to build fabs in the United States and around the world, and we need to double down on that effort. That’s critical [to] be not dependent on China or Taiwan for our semiconductors.”

McCormick said the U.S. must implement industrial policy to compete with China’s mercantilist framework.

He remarked, “There are other key industries as well — artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing — we need to bring those home, and that’s going to require the government to partner with industry to accelerate that, because in China’s case, they’re deeply invested in these industries and that’s why they’ve grown so quickly.”