Attorney generals for 18 states ask Congress to investigate China's coronavirus response
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson speaks out against China's lack of transparency over the outbreak.
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South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said on “Fox & Friends First” on Tuesday that China's response to the coronavirus outbreak has been “disgusting.”
Wilson made the comment three days after 18 state attorneys general signed a letter asking bipartisan leaders in both the House and Senate to open hearings into China’s role in the spread of the coronavirus, accusing the nation of "layers of deceit" in a cover-up of the severity of the virus while it "wreaked havoc" in the U.S.
Wilson, who organized the letter, said on Tuesday that it asked members of Congress to “step up” and conduct hearings of oversight “so that we, the states, can get answers to the questions as to why our local economies and our populations have been decimated.”
As of Tuesday, the U.S. reported more than 1,354,000 coronavirus cases and more than 81,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
U.S. employers cut 20.5 million jobs in April, a record-shattering number that pushed unemployment to 14.7 percent, the highest level since the Great Depression, as the coronavirus pandemic triggered an unprecedented economic catastrophe.
LAWYERS IN CLASS-ACTION AGAINST CHINA CLAIM TO PRESENT TIMELINE EVIDENCE OF CORONAVIRUS COVER-UP
The actual origin of the virus continues to be under investigation, with officials probing whether the virus jumped to humans at a wet market or escaped from a nearby lab where it was being studied.
Fox News first reported last month that there is increasing confidence from U.S. officials that the virus likely escaped from the lab in Wuhan.
“We’ve all heard stories of the doctor, who was the whistleblower initially when the Wuhan virus was first announced, and that he was suppressed and then put away then all of a sudden came back out and ended up dying from the very virus he helped discover,” Wilson said, explaining why he thinks China’s response has been “disgusting.”
“Then we’ve seen reports of China buying tens of millions of dollars of PPE [personal protective equipment], leading up to the pandemic spreading across the ocean and attacking our country,” he continued.
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Wilson said the questions the attorneys general want to be answered include “What did China know? When did China know it? [And] what did China do to exacerbate this problem through the cover-up?”
Fox News’ Tyler Olson and Fox Business’ Megan Henney contributed to this report.
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