US Needs to Pull Its Supply Chain Out of China Over COVID-19 Pandemic: Top House Lawmaker

The P4 laboratory (L) on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on May 27, 2020. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Amid growing speculation that COVID-19 may have originated from a Chinese laboratory, one of the top House Republicans suggested that the United States should retaliate by removing the United States’ supply chain from the region.

When asked about what actions the Biden administration should take, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the ranking GOP member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States should simply pull out of China and the region.

“My response to this whole thing is supply chain,” McCaul told CNN on May 30. “We need to pull our supply chain out of the region, that being medical supply, rare-earth mineral supply. And a bill that’s going through Congress right now, bipartisan, that I’m working on, the CHIPS for America Act, advanced semiconductor chips, which are the brains in everything from your iPhone to the F-35.”

“If we can pull these chains out of China, it will hurt them economically,” he said. “And that would be very punitive in nature.”

McCaul’s comments follow reports suggesting that the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in Wuhan, China—the initial COVID-19 outbreak hub—died of a COVID-like illness in late 2019. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) questions witnesses during a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing in Washington, on Sept. 16, 2020. Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images

David Asher, who led an investigation and had served in the U.S. State Department, told the Daily Caller that an individual who worked at the Wuhan lab at the time provided information about the woman’s death. If her death was from COVID-19, it would be weeks before the CCP reported in mid-January that the virus was transmittable among humans.

The Chinese regime has been criticized for engaging in a coverup of the origins of the virus and blocking attempts to probe its origins. In the early part of 2020, several doctors and researchers who attempted to warn others about the virus were arrested by CCP officials.

Although a number of corporate news outlets and fact-checking websites claimed the CCP virus had nothing to do with a possible laboratory leak in China, Biden administration officials have, in recent weeks, shown a willingness to investigate its origins and suggested there’s a growing consensus among U.S. intelligence officials that the virus wasn’t transmitted from animals to humans. The Chinese regime, since the start of the pandemic, has said the virus was transmitted at a wet market from a yet-to-be-disclosed type of animal.

“As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” President Joe Biden said last week in a statement. “Here is their current position: ‘while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter—each with low or moderate confidence—the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.’”

Meanwhile, McCaul on May 30 said he believes it’s “more likely than not” that it “accidentally” emerged from a lab.

“This is the worst cover-up in human history that we have seen, resulting in 3.5 million deaths, creating economic devastation around the globe,” McCaul said of the CCP’s actions.