White House Trade Adviser Says Chinese Communist Party Took Down US Economy in 60 Days

White House Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro speaks during a briefing on the CCP virus pandemic in the press briefing room of the White House in Washington on March 27, 2020. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro this week claimed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruined the United States’ economy in just 60 days due to its handling of the CCP virus outbreak.

Speaking to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Navarro explained how the CCP engaged in a cover-up of the virus outbreak and allowed it to spread by continuing to let people from China travel to other parts of the world.

“We know that patient zero in China was about mid-November. It was in Wuhan. We know that ground zero had the P4 weapons lab, where the virus likely came from,” Navarro said.

“For the next two months, we know that China hid the virus from the world behind the shield of the World Health Organization. And as they did that, they sent gleaming passenger jets from China, not into the rest of China from Wuhan, but to places like New York and Milan, seeding the world with what would become a pandemic,” the economist and author explained.

Navarro said that customs data showed that the CCP also “vacuumed up virtually all of the world’s personal protective equipment, including over 2 billion masks,” and that China is “sitting on that stockpile of what we call PPE,” and “selling it at profiteering prices to some,” while also putting pressure on some countries to “deny the virus came from China or to talk about Taiwan or to do other things.”

“So that’s it in a nutshell. And what that means for us here is, this morning, Americans won’t go to church because of the China virus,” Navarro continued. “Sons and daughters of America won’t be taking their mothers to brunch. Tomorrow, 33 million Americans won’t be going to work, and millions of children in America will be home climbing the walls, instead of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic.”

People who lost their jobs wait in line to file for unemployment at an Arkansas Workforce Center in Fayetteville, Ark., on April 6, 2020. Nick Oxford/Reuters

The White House trade adviser concluded: “President Trump built the most powerful and beautiful economy in the world in three years. The Chinese Communist Party took it down in 60 days.”

As The Epoch Times has previously reported, CCP officials knew in November or early December that COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus, had appeared in Wuhan but chose not to share this vital information with the rest of the world. Chinese officials instead arrested those who tried to warn of the danger, including doctors and medical experts, and employed the regime’s rigorous censorship to prevent media coverage and to delete any mentions of the virus from social media.

As a consequence of the CCP’s actions, the virus has created a global pandemic that has killed more than 280,000 people and devastated economies around the world, including the United States.

President Donald Trump on May 3 promised a new “very strong” report which would reveal what really happened in China to cause the global pandemic, adding that the CCP was “embarrassed” by outbreak and had attempted to cover it up while “treating the rest of the world badly” by allowing people to fly out of Wuhan to other parts of the world, prompting the virus to spread.

Trump also said he believes the United States economy, which has begun partially reopening in recent weeks, is set to have an “incredible year” and is “going to go into a transition in the third quarter and see things happening that look good.”