Liz Cheney: China is responsible for the coronavirus pandemic

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Rep. Cheney: Clearly Chinese are responsible for COVID-19

Congresswoman Liz Cheney discusses why China is responsible unleashing coronavirus on the global community and how they have infiltrated WHO and NATO

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Rep. Liz Cheney said on Thursday that she forecast potential issues with China’s wet markets long before the coronavirus outbreak.

“There’s obviously previous experience with ...  the threat of a virus that [is] passed from animals to humans,” the Republican Wyoming lawmaker told “The Brian Kilmeade Show.”

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Cheney said that considering the human-animal interface in China’s wet markets, it was known that there could be a virus that “humans have not seen before.”

“We’ve known that the source for that kind of thing, the threat of that comes out of the wet markets in China. Whether this particular virus came out of the wet markets or came out of the lab there, I think that clearly, the Chinese are responsible.”

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While rumors have swirled that the coronavirus originated in bats and then infected another animal that passed it onto people at a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, scientists have not yet determined exactly how the new coronavirus infected people. But these kinds of markets are not known to operate in the most sanitary conditions.

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Cheney said that China knew that the wet markets were a problem.

“Even if you assume, as all evidence seems to point to, that this was not intentional, the Chinese have known for decades that the wet markets created this kind of threat.”

Cheney concluded that the coronavirus that China has “unleashed” and that the Chinese Communist Party refused to share information about could end up killing millions and bring the global economy to a standstill.

Meanwhile, more Republican lawmakers are joining the push for the World Health Organization to be defunded over its kid-gloves treatment of China in the initial days of the coronavirus response, as the White House openly considers taking the dramatic step.

The WHO has increasingly been the focus of questions about its response to the coronavirus pandemic, including information it tweeted in January that quoted “preliminary” findings from Chinese authorities that downplayed the seriousness of the virus that has since turned into a pandemic, shutting down daily life around the globe.

Fox News' Greg Norman contributed to this report.