Punishment campaign? What communist China is doing to their own people
Melissa Francis and Brian Kilmeade react the Chinese government targeting its own citizens who report new coronavirus cases, speak about the illness or try to mourn the dead
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Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro responded Tuesday to reports that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has launched a campaign to silence coronavirus survivors and families who have lost loved ones during the pandemic as part of its effort to control the narrative surrounding the virus and its true origins.
"China continues to silence all of its critics which is really not shocking in the slightest," "The Ben Shapiro Show" host said.
CHINA SILENCING CORONAVIRUS SURVIVORS WITH HUSH MONEY
"Wow, what a shock," he added. "You mean that China is a horrible totalitarian country and that they lied about the coronavirus throughout?"
Fox News reported Wednesday that officials in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus outbreak, are paying families roughly $420 for each relative lost to the pandemic in an attempt to buy their silence. In addition, authorities are offering discounts for cremation and burial services, as Fox News has previously reported.
Faced with increasing international criticism and growing demands for compensation from China over its initial handling of the virus, the CCP has worked to keep mourners quiet. Families whose relatives died have demanded answers from the government about what went wrong in Wuhan.
Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there was "enormous evidence" that the outbreak stemmed from an accidental release from a lab, but the World Health Organization (WHO) said that intelligence officials have yet to reach that conclusion.
"Natural origins is not in conflict with the idea that this could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab."
"The evidence suggests that this came from a bat that is not native to this particular region," Shapiro explained, "and so the suggestion has been that there's a lab there that does study coronaviruses and they brought a bat in from like 600,000 miles away and the poor treatment of waste allowed this to escape -- not that they crafted the virus to kill people, but that it accidentally escaped the lab."
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"Now," Shapiro continued, "the World Health Organization is claiming that the U.S. government provided no evidence to back up allegations that the virus originated in the lab ... well, I'm sorry but I feel like we have better evidence to suggest that this went through a lab in Wuhan ... than you had to suggest there was no human to human transmission," he fired back.
"The fact that the WHO just continues to sort of repeat Chinese propaganda lines is pretty incredible."
Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said at a press conference when asked about the virus’ origins that he is "assured" that the virus is“natural in origin."
“We have listened again and again to numerous scientists who have looked at the sequence and looked at the virus and we are assured that this virus is natural in origin,” he said.
WHO SAID IT IS 'ASSURED' CORONAVIRUS IS NATURAL IN ORIGIN
"Natural origins is not in conflict with the idea that this could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab," explained Shapiro. "The virus could be of natural origin and also, they didn't do their waste disposal properly."
"The conflation by the media of the accusation, 'This came from a lab' with 'It was created and militarized by the Chinese military'...those are not the same accusations at all," he added.
"They're going to have to explain how this bat ended up infecting half the globe, when it was there presumably because of the laboratory."
Fox News' Danielle Wallace and Gillian Turner contributed to this report.
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