Republicans are discussing China’s culpability in the coronavirus outbreak, said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Marlow said, “The media are just obsessed with a 24/7 debate about how culpable the president is [for the coronavirus outbreak], which strikes me as sort of sick. I do think that there is [a] country that is particularly responsible for all this, and that’s China. I know that we need to deal with China at a certain level for global business, but I find there’s shockingly little discussion of China’s role in all this.”

Scalise shared, “Amongst my colleagues, there’s a lot of discussion about China’s role in this, and I think we’ve seen some of the weaknesses in our supply chain in America. Many other countries are recognizing this, too. We’ve become so dependent on China for basic things including [personal protective equipment] or certain building blocks of some of the great drugs that we come up with and make in America.”

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Breitbart News has documented expert analyses regarding U.S. dependence on Chinese exports of medicines and medical products, including China’s mercantilist measures aimed at collapsing American manufacturing of medical and pharmaceutical goods.

China must be held accountability for negligence contributing to the coronavirus pandemic, said Scalise. He also called for restoration of American manufacturing and decoupling the U.S. and Chinese economies.

“We’ve got to pull that supply chain back, and ultimately we’ve got to hold China accountable for what they did,” Scalise stated. “Not only did they start this in Wuhan, they hid it from the world. They weren’t transparent. When our medical experts were reaching out to China, their medical experts wanted our help, because we’ve got such brilliant minds in medicine in America, and yet they shut us out, and that cost lives, it cost trillions of dollars to our economy and to other nations, as well.”

Scalise continued, “China’s got to be held accountable for that, and I think the president took very necessary steps up front.”

China expert Gordon Chang proposed U.S. seizure of China’s holdings of U.S. Treasury obligations as compensation for the one-party state’s negligence related to the coronavirus pandemic. Steven Mosher called on the U.S. to remove China’s sovereign immunity in response to its negligence related to the coronavirus outbreak.

“Mainstream media” and “far-left socialists” derided President Donald Trump’s decision to restrict travel from China in response to the coronavirus outbreak, recalled Scalise, including Joe Biden’s repeated characterization of the measure as “xenophobic.”

Scalise highlighted Breitbart News as a counterweight against widespread disinformation pushed by “mainstream media.”

“No matter what [Donald Trump] does, they’re going to wake up and criticize him,” said Scalise of many news media outlets. “Unfortunately, that’s the playbook of the mainstream media. It’s why so many of them have such dismal ratings.”

Scalise went on, “[Americans] get their information from other sources now, like yours, because they want to know what the facts are. They don’t want some news agency that just hates the president to try to undermine what [Donald Trump] does, even when he does something that works.”

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.