US Congressman Brian Mast on Tuesday introduced a bill that would allow the United States and other countries to withhold payments owed to China in order to cover the costs incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th February, 2023) US Congressman Brian Mast on Tuesday introduced a bill that would allow the United States and other countries to withhold payments owed to China in order to cover the costs incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The United States and other countries should permanently withhold payments on debts owed to the People's Republic of China in amounts equal to the public costs incurred by such countries relating to COVID-19," the text of the bill said.
China is responsible for the global pandemic and should be held accountable for its handling, the bill said.
The global outbreak of the coronavirus disease is a direct result of China's long and appalling record of human rights abuses, including suppression of the freedom of expression, and its aggressive domestic and global propaganda campaign, the bill said.
On Sunday, US media reported that the US Department of Energy, which runs a network of national bioresearch laboratories, has joined the FBI in claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from a test tube in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The 2021 US intelligence report concluded that the virus first circulated in Wuhan no later than November 2019. The scientific and political community in the United States has been arguing since then about whether it escaped from a lab or emerged naturally and jumped from an infected animal to a human.
China has repeatedly lashed back against suggestions that its biological research program could have been the origin of the outbreak, which has claimed millions of lives globally since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020.
