Chris Wallace: 'I’m just not sure how you hold China accountable' for COVID-19 outbreak
"Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace said on "America's Newsroom" on Friday that he is "not sure how you hold China accountable" for the COVID-19 outbreak.
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"Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace said on "America's Newsroom" on Friday that he is "not sure how you hold China accountable" for the COVID-19 outbreak.
Wallace made the comment reacting to the Fox News report, citing multiple sources, that there is increasing confidence that the new coronavirus outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of China's attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States.
The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus – a naturally occurring strain that was being studied there – was bat-to-human and that "patient zero" worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.
Host Ed Henry asked Wallace on Friday how he would answer the “tough question” of “how you hold China accountable,” which he said doesn’t seem easy especially given “the president is in the middle of trade deals.”
“I think the trade deals, and as important as they are, probably take a backseat at this point,” Wallace said. “I’m just not sure how you hold China accountable.”
Wallace went on to note that it seems there’s “no question,” based on Fox News anchor Bret Baier’s reporting related to the information from sources, “that this was a naturally occurring virus in a lab and that it wasn’t a bioweapon, but that they didn’t have the security and it escaped from the lab.”
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“Somebody was in the lab, caught it, took it out and then spread it in the city, 10 million people, of Wuhan where the Chinese government seems most responsible as they were far from transparent, they covered it up, they covered up the doctors who were reporting it and that allowed the virus to spread more,” Wallace said.
U.S. Embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab and passed on information about scientists conducting risky research on coronavirus from bats, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
On Thursday, China’s foreign ministry pushed back on the suspicion that the virus escaped from the facility, citing statements from the World Health Organization that there is no evidence the coronavirus came from a laboratory.
China "100 percent" suppressed and changed data, sources tell Fox News. Samples were destroyed, contaminated areas scrubbed, some early reports erased, and academic articles stifled.
There were doctors and journalists who were "disappeared" after warning of the spread of the virus and its contagious nature and human-to-human transmission. China moved quickly to shut down travel domestically from Wuhan to the rest of China, but did not stop international flights from Wuhan.
Additionally, the sources tell Fox News the World Health Organization (WHO) was complicit from the beginning in helping China cover its tracks.
“How you respond to that? How you hold them accountable? I’m not sure,” Wallace said.
He went on to say that the U.S. won’t “go to war with them over it.”
“I suppose you can impose some economic sanctions, but I’m not sure that sanctions at this point, when the entire global economy is in a free fall, to get into some kind of a trade war makes the most sense,” he said. “So I’m not sure how you can do it in the short-term, but it certainly does point out the problems with the Chinese government.
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“You’re dealing with a totalitarian dictatorship and obviously, they decided at that point saving face, controlling information, was more important than being transparent and sharing it with the world,” Wallace continued.
Fox News’ Bret Baier and Gregg Re contributed to this report.
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