House lawmakers are calling on China’s government to admit that the coronavirus originated there and retract its “baseless conspiracy theory” that the United States military started the spread of the virus in Wuhan.
Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) introduced the resolution, and The Hill reports that it has garnered support from roughly two dozen Republican lawmakers.
The resolution was drafted with the goal of “expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Government of the People’s Republic of China made multiple, serious mistakes in the early stages of the COVID–19 outbreak that heightened the severity and spread of the ongoing COVID–19 pandemic.”
It continues to detail several instances where China’s government reportedly suppressed information about the virus and denied that it could be spread between people.
Several reports detailed efforts officials took to tamp town information about the virus, including censuring or detaining health care workers who raised alarms about the disease.
Additionally, the government told the World Health Organization (WHO) that human-to-human transmission was not possible. On January 14, the WHO tweeted that information from Chinese officials showed that it was not possible to spread between humans.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
The resolution also cites a study from South Hampton University which found that had China acted three weeks sooner to curtail the spread of coronavirus, it would have reduced the spread of it by 95%.
Finally, the lawmakers call for China’s government to “publicly state that there’s no evidence that COVID–19 originated anywhere else but China.”
They also condemn the censorship of doctors and reporters in China in the early days of the outbreak of the virus.
Banks has previously called for China to suffer consequences for its “negligence,” which “led to the crisis in America today.”
The latest data from Johns Hopkins University finds that the U.S. has 50,206 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, with 606 reported deaths from the virus.