During an interview with Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo that aired on Sunday, White House economic adviser Peter Navarro laid out reasons as to why he saw China’s role in the coronavirus pandemic as a bad actor.

Navarro noted communist nation went from being a net exporter of personal protective equipment, as it is the largest producer in the world, to a net importer. According to Navarro, that suggested something went awry.

“My focus here at the White House is making sure that the people of America are safe from this virus and getting things like personal protective equipment, masks, ventilators and things like that,” Navarro said on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “But here is what I can tell you about China. If you think about what China did over the course of this thing, they did four things that led to the deaths of many people worldwide. I mean, first of all, the virus was spawned in China. Second of all, they hid the virus behind the shield of the World Health Organization. The third thing they did was basically hoard personal protective equipment, and now they are profiteering from it. And if you walk through that, you were one of the first in the media to raise the question of whether that P4 lab was involved. That’s an interesting issue.”

“What we know is that the ground zero for this virus was within a few miles of that lab,” he continued. “If you simply do an Occam’s razor approach that the simplest explanation is probably the most likely, I think it’s incumbent on China to prove that it wasn’t that lab. So that’s number one. But, more importantly, we know that for a critical six-week period of time, China used its influence at the World Health Organization to hide the virus from the world. This was a time where that virus could have been contained in Wuhan. Instead, five million Chinese people went out from Wuhan and propagated the virus around the world. That was a critical time. So that was that. And then here is what I think should be very disturbing to every American. During that period of time, that six-week interval when they were hiding this virus from the world, China went from a net exporter of personal protective equipment — they are the largest producer of that in the world — to a large net importer.”

“They basically went around and vacuumed up virtually all of the PPE around the world, including a lot from this country, which was, for humanitarian reasons, sharing our PPE with them,” Navarro added. “And what that did was leave people in New York, Milan, and everywhere in between defenseless when it came time to have that PPE. Now what’s happening today, which is equally alarming, is China is sitting on that horde of PPE, where it cornered the market, and it’s profiteering. I have cases coming across my desk where 50-cent masks made in China are being sold to hospitals here in America for as much as $8.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor