Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Friday once again criticized China for its handling of the coronavirus breakout and how it has not been upfront about how widespread it has become.

Cotton told Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham noted how the Chinese government was not updating the rest of the world on what its doctors and scientists were observing regarding coronavirus.

“I don’t disagree that China’s scientists and doctors can, in some cases, be world-class, and they can be professional,” he said. “However, they have sitting next to them at every level of government a minder from the Chinese Communist Party. And I do not have any confidence in those party apparatchiks allowing China’s scientists or their doctors to speak freely to anyone outside of China, especially officials in the United States government. That’s why we’ve seen the numbers of this coronavirus continue to spike in strange, unpredictable patterns. Those aren’t newly discovered cases. Those are newly disclosed cases because China is carefully managing the flow of information about this virus.”

The Arkansas lawmaker also batted down criticism that he was promoting conspiracy theories by suggesting there was a possibility coronavirus was not “naturally occurring.”

“We know that it didn’t start in the Wuhan food market,” Cotton said. “That was the original story of the Chinese Communist Party. So it’s only responsible to ask where it did start. I still think the most likely hypothesis is it was naturally occurring, but given the proximity of that laboratory to the food market, it is only reasonable that we ask the Chinese Communist Party to be open and transparent about the kind of research they were conducting there, and the safety protocols and practices they had in place. Until China provides the evidence, we cannot know for sure where this virus originated.”

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