Trump appointee Peter Navarro on Saturday claimed that the Chinese government sent "hundreds of thousands" of its nationals to travel, thus "seeding and spreading" the coronavirus, implying that the Chinese Communist party "is making us stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs".
"I want everybody right here today, as the day before America’s Independence Day, to understand where this virus started — with the Chinese Communist Party that is making us stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs. They spawned the virus. They hid the virus. They sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals over here to seed and spread the virus," Navarro declared in an interview with MSNBC.
Pressured to provide an explanation for his claim of "hundreds of thousands Chinese nationals" he said were "sent over here", Navarro denounced China for letting its citizens travel the world despite having imposed lockdown domestically.
"While they were preventing any domestic travel from Wuhan to Beijing or Shanghai, locking down their transportation network, they freely sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals on aircraft to go around the world", he said.
After the host's several attempts to clarify whether Navarro sees the move as "deliberate", the White House official opined that his answer to the question does not matter.
"Let me be really clear about this: I don’t think it matters whether they did — what they deliberately did, Ali, and this is beyond reproach in terms of a fact. They deliberately allowed Chinese nationals to come to the United States, Italy, and everywhere in between — who were infected — while they were locking down their own transportation network. And I think it’s really important for Americans to understand that", Navarro asserted.
His accusations fall in line with the Trump administration's recent foriegn policy shift toward China, as White House officials have marshaled a story that Beijing is guilty of everything regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. China has been blamed of downplaying the seriousness of the disease, concealing related data and even running the World Health Organization (WHO).
Beijing, alongside WHO - quickly defunded by the US over the accusations - has refuted the accusations, and denounced the Trump administration for its attempts to politicize the deadly pandemic.
Currently, at least eleven million people around the world have been infected with COVID-19, with over 2 million cases registered in the US, as the country tops the globe in infections and deaths in the pandemic.