Tennessee U.S. Senate Candidate Bill Hagerty said the Chinese Communist regime’s cover-up of the coronavirus is the “crime of the century,” in an interview with Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday.

“I think what the Chinese government has done, what the regime has done, indeed is the crime of the century,” Hagerty told host and Breitbart News Political Editor Matthew Boyle.

Hagerty said, “The evidence is stacking up [that] the virus indeed escaped from a lab there in Wuhan. They went for six days. They waited until over 3,000 people were infected with the virus, and even escaped the boundaries of their borders — it got to Thailand — before they decided to inform the world that there was a virus that was running rampant there.

“Even then, they were not straightforward,” he continued. “They destroyed samples, they silenced doctors, they shut down air traffic within their country before they shut down international traffic. The [World Health Organization] came over — you know, the W.H.O., corrupt from the very top — their leader Tedros came over and began to parrot talking points that the Chinese government gave them, that it didn’t transfer from human-to-human.

“All the while, the virus is growing and expanding, and went from what could have been a regional epidemic to a global pandemic. Again, thanks to what I call the crime of the century,” Hagerty said. “This is the cover-up that the Communist Chinese regime tried to perpetrate and the result of that has been massive damage to our economy, our global economy at risk, and certainly massive loss of life.

Hagerty has also dealt with the threat close up from China, as Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to Japan. He has been endorsed by Trump for the U.S. Senate race in Tennessee, and has been appointed as a member of the task force to reopen the American economy.

He pledged to make sure that not another American dollar is committed to China.

“We need to make the United States the most attractive place to invest. We need to get these companies back to America. We need avoid the type of strategic vulnerability that we see today. I want to see us bring our companies back,” he said.

“That’s going to a massive form of retribution as well, because China has thrived on the back of the type of manufacturing facilities that they put in, on the type of growth their economy has achieved through stealing intellectual property, by subsidizing industries, by doing many, many unfair things to grow their economy,” he said.

“We’re going to put an end to that,” he said.

He also said the U.S. military needed to work with Japan to push back against China’s militarization of some of the world’s busiest trading lanes.

“China has come out with very bogus territorial claims that we need to really stand up and resist at every turn,” he said. “But we cannot let them advance in the region that they’re in.

“We need to push back on them at every turn, whether it’s militarily or strategically, whether it’s economically [or] whether it’s just bringing our manufacturing back and getting out of an environment that doesn’t play by market-based rules.”

Those interested in Hagerty’s campaign can find more information at teamhagerty.com.

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