Tuesday in an appearance on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) argued China was not upfront with regards to the COVID-19/coronavirus.

He blamed the Chinese Communist Party’s lack of transparency for the spread that has cost the lives and livelihoods of people around the globe.

“[T]he Chinese have never been honest,” Rubio said. “The Chinese Communist Party lies constantly about all sorts of things. You know, they have — in the — they have the — the camp — the work camp where they have all the Uighur Muslims, interned over a million people. You can see the images. It’s been well documented. And they keep saying those are vocational schools. As far as the death toll is concerned, it is — we don’t know what the number is. I actually think they don’t know what the number is. But I think it has — most certainly substantially higher than the number they have publicly disclosed, both on the infection rate and on the death rate.”

“It is my view, based on information I’ve seen from open sources and other places that there are hundreds if not thousands of deaths early in this crisis that they didn’t even report as — as COVID-19 deaths,” he continued. “They saw someone who died, and they did — they just sort of buried them like you normally would. It took them weeks to even publicly acknowledge that this was a disease that could be transmitted from person-to-person.”

“By the way, this is not a competition to see who can have more people die, who can have more people infected,” Rubio added. “But let there be no doubt, the failure of the Chinese Communist Party to be transparent and to open up to the world and disclose this early has cost the lives of people around the world, has cost the infections of people around the world and has caused this to spread faster and further than it needed to.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor