Washington D.C. – Today, Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), Lead Republican of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, appeared live on Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) culpability in the spread of coronavirus and updates on key coronavirus related legislation. Key highlights are below.

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On small business relief: “I think the biggest provision in this bill is the small business relief. It allows them to stay open, keep employees on payroll and kind of keep things moving until we get through this crisis, give them cash flow given liquidity, so they don’t have to shut down. What we don’t want to see happen are small businesses shutting down. So we are trying to keep them afloat in the short term, so they are there in the long term.”

On the CCP’s continued coverup and deception: “They are price-gouging in Europe. They are not giving these test kits for free. It’s like starting a wildfire that is burning homes down and then showing up with buckets of water to put it out. They started this wildfire. It’s very clear to me. They started a disinformation campaign blaming United States military as though they are responsible for coronavirus. We all know the truth, this started in early December. The doctors who warned were detained for doing so and questioned, and had to retract statements. You know, this was about a month before the World Health Organization even knew about what was going on. A precious month. Meanwhile, there is a big festival going on in Wuhan, that had millions of people going in and leaving Wuhan on domestic and international flights, bringing the first cases into the United States, in January. This could have been contained, this could have been stopped.” 

On stopping CCP disinformation on social media: I sent a letter to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon for perpetuating propaganda on their platforms because this has to stop. Their journalists are an arm of Chinese Communist Party, ours are free and independent. They announced they want to expel U.S. journalists out of China because they don’t want them to cover the truth about what really happened. They are trying to cover this up, they are not going to get away with it.

On the WHO’s complicity: The WHO is complicit as well to some extent. When they gave positive remarks to China and said China was handling this really well and that it was not transmitted human to human, which it was. By that time, it was already going into international travel. The WHO also really criticized the President for the travel ban on China and Maria you and I know that saved thousands if not millions of lives in the United States.

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