It should be no surprise that China would lie about the origins of COVID-19, considering in the first weeks of the epidemic its government "suppressed and punished" people who were telling the truth, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday.
"Like all dictatorships, it lies all the time," Gingrich said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "They were faced with the entire planet blaming them for having first cause the epidemic and then second, making it much much worse because, for the first six weeks, they actually suppressed and punished the people who were telling the truth."
And as a result, he added, "this whole pandemic is dramatically worse because of China."
A Chinese government official this week claimed that the U.S. Army brought the disease to China, and Beijing also is pushing an alternate explanation, claiming virus was brought to the country in 2019 by U.S. athletes participating in the Military World Games that were held in Wuhan.
"(China), in a sort of typical dictatorship manner are going to try to tell a big enough lie that just the process of fighting the lie gives it some life," Gingrich said.
Gingrich added that the Chinese also should not be trusted about Huawei's involvement with 5G advancements.
"We have been sitting around, failing to act for over a year-and-a-half now, and every day we fail to act, Huawei gains ground around the world," he said. "It's a vehicle of misinformation, and a vehicle of spying for China, and anybody who thinks that they are not going to use it that way has no concept of how China works."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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