White House trade adviser Peter Navarro accused China yesterday of sending poor, or even fake, antibody testing to the Coruna virus to the United States, and accused it of "profiting" from the pandemic.
Navarro, who is highly critical of Beijing and appointed by President Donald Trump to deal with supply-line issues linked to the health crisis, said that further testing of HIV and antibodies is vital to the return of Americans who are now totally cut off from work.
"We can then find people with immunity who can be in the workplace in a safer environment," Navarro told Fox and Friends. "But we will not allow China, for example, to profit from these false and unrealistic tests, because this will cause very big problems."
"There are a lot of antibody testing devices coming from China and they are of poor quality and record wrong data and things like that," he said.
The United States relies heavily on China for basic equipment and drugs, and the two countries have accused each other during the current crisis of the Coronavirus.
Navarro accused China, where the Corona virus is believed to have appeared for the first time in Wuhan, of spreading the virus to the rest of the world after "it hid it for six weeks."
"They could have contained the virus in Wuhan ... they didn't do that. They sent it to the world with hundreds of thousands of Chinese who have flown to Milan, New York and elsewhere," Navarro said.
China has rejected US accusations, including those of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that it was secretive on the issue of the spread of the virus. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Twitter on Monday that Pompeo should "stop playing the political game. He prefers saving energy to saving lives."
It is noteworthy that the United States has become the country most affected by the virus, with more than 970,000 cases and 55,000 deaths.