China’s handling of the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic has raised questions about the communist nation’s priorities, where it seemingly put its own domestic politics ahead of the global public health. According to former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Bill Hagerty, a GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, that decisionmaking by the Chinese government was criminal.

During an interview that aired on Friday’s broadcast of “The Jeff Poor Show” on Huntsville, AL radio’s WVNN, Hagerty laid out China’s ambitions and noted it put public relations ahead of human lives.

“China was behind every tree and under every rock,” he said. “You think about their Belt and Road Initiative. You think about the things they are trying to accomplish there. They’re basically and use their economic might to make very strategic positioning all along critical trade routes. And they have built a military powerhouse out there while many previous administrations have watched. President Trump has taken a very different approach to this, and it was my great honor to serve as his representative in Japan as we began to build the bulkhead there and really watch an important strategy with the Japanese to push back and make the United States the partner of choice in that region.”

“But I’ve worked with China and seen how they operate for years. And I can tell you, what they’re trying to do right now with this Wuhan virus is the crime of the century in my view,” Hagerty continued. “I think it’s the greatest cover-up in human history. When they tried to act like it didn’t come there — they even said the United States, our military somehow put it there. It’s just unbelievable. We know the virus started there. We know it was their efforts to try to hide it, to not disclose it to the rest of the world. It cost Chinese lives. Now it has gotten out. It cost lives, and it has cost economic damage all around the world. The Chinese are playing what I believe is a public relations game, and what they should have been playing is working hard on public health.”

As a remedy to address some of the issues with which the United States has been confronted during the pandemic, Hagerty argued once the problem was under control that the manufacturing of items essential to the public’s health and safety should be taken of China.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor