China should pay for coronavirus: Peter Navarro
White House trade adviser believes bipartisan effort is needed to hold China accountable
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro suggests China's role in the coronavirus crisis needs to be discussed in a bipartisan way to figure out how to hold the country accountable.
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White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told FOX Business' "WSJ at Large" China should pay the United States for its role in spreading the deadly coronavirus.
“I think there needs to be a national discussion ... it has to be bipartisan ... about compensatory damages by a country that inflicted this pandemic on the world,” he said.
Navarro argued the financial toll the outbreak had on the U.S. has been staggering.
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“You’d start with the close to $10 trillion we’ve already got to put out there for fiscal and monetary policy,” he explained. “You’d look at all the damages directly to our economy. You’d look at the ... American lives lost and value those appropriately, although there’s no value you can put on a life that’s really accurate. And that’s trillions of dollars.”
FOX Business' Gerry Baker asked Navarro how America could get China to agree to that kind of massive compensation.
“That’s above my pay grade, and you’re asking me important questions,” he said. “I’m simply saying that this crisis, and China’s role in virtually manufacturing this whole crisis, we need to have a national discussion.”
FOX Business’ Stuart Varney argues the U.S. is considering the various ways to ‘punish’ China.
Navarro also made the explosive charge that there’s no doubt China knew early on how dangerous the virus was and intentionally allowed it to be exported.
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“That's a matter of fact. It should be undisputed,” he insisted. “The only question in dispute now is, did it come from the P4 lab and was that virus genetically engineered to be a weaponized virus? Now, on the weaponized virus issue, that's obviously a volatile discussion to have. But what I can tell you is, the reason this virus became so dangerous is because it leads to asymptomatic spread, meaning that people without symptoms can actually spread the virus. That's highly unusual.”
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Looking forward, Navarro believes one of the key lessons America should learn from this crisis is U.S. companies need to stop making products overseas and bring the work back here.
President Trump says he wants to bring manufacturing back to America.
“One of the big solutions here is to bring our supply chains and production home through things like buy American, through things like deregulation, which will make it easier for us to locate manufacturing here,” he noted.
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