Issa: TikTok on US phones 'like having 80 million Chinese spy balloons flying over

 Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., lambasted the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok as an espionage tool of China, equating it to the Chinese spy balloon that the U.S. shot down earlier this month after crossing from Alaska to South Carolina. 

"Having TikTok on our phones is like having 80 million Chinese spy balloons flying over America," tweeted Issa, who's previously called for a nationwide ban on TikTok to "protect America from Chinese surveillance."

Critics argue TikTok is a surveillance tool. U.S. officials have expressed concern about the prospect of the video platform's extensive data harvesting being accessible by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which Issa described as a malign force requiring a different approach from Washington.

"The essential work of redirecting our relationship with an increasingly adversarial China is made even more difficult by the extensive influence, surveillance, and even espionage that the CCP has successfully deployed in this country," Issa told Fox News Digital. "Our universities, tech sector, industrial base, and even media must now accept the long view and clear reality that China is a hostile entity and it is in our national interest to reset our relationship."

Issa on Wednesday joined fellow Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in voting along party lines to advance the Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries Act, a bill that would grant the Biden administration new authorities to ban TikTok and crack down on other China-related economic activity.

"Currently the courts have questioned the administration's authority to sanction TikTok. My bill empowers the administration to ban TikTok or any software applications that threaten U.S. national security," Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chair of the committee, said earlier this week. "It is time to act."

McCaul expressed frustration with Democrats on the committee, all of whom voted against the bill, noting senior Biden administration officials have declared TikTok a national security threat.

"If we deem it's dangerous enough to be taken off our phones in Congress, why [would] the Democrats would want to allow this to take place on our children's phones," McCaul said Thursday on Fox News Channel. "Because that's primarily who uses TikTok are children. And what we're saying is it's ok for a foreign adversary to snoop in with a spy balloon, if you will, on every phone that your child has to both steal and surveil and then censor your child's behavior."

Last year, President Biden signed a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that included a measure banning TikTok from federal government devices, including the phones of lawmakers. The White House said Monday that government agencies have 30 days to delete TikTok from federal devices and systems.

McCaul's bill would extend U.S. restrictions on TikTok. However, Democrats appear united in opposing the measure, expressing concerns about the legislation being "unvetted" and rushed.

"The Republican instinct to ban things it fears, from books to speech, appears uninhibited," Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said after the bill was approved to move forward. "Before we take the unprecedented step of banning an app used by over 100 million Americans, harming our national security and infringing on their freedom of expression and speech, Congress must first adequately consult with the administration and other stakeholders."

Meeks added that the bill is "dangerously overbroad" and could unintentionally harm businesses in the U.S. and allied countries due to broad restrictions on data transfers to China.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the bill a "slippery slope" and "serious violation of our First Amendment rights" that could lead to further efforts leaving "U.S. residents without some of their favorite international books, movies, and artwork."

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told FOX Business Network on Wednesday that he has apprehensions about a bill giving the president power to ban TikTok and called for Congress to do the job itself.

"I do think we would be wise just to target tick tock and to outright ban it," said Hawley. "Another proposal, let's give the president the authority to ban it — I worry about that. I mean, let's just ban it. Let's do it by legislation. Let's target TikTok. Let's make it simple, make it clean, make it easy, and let's get it done."

Hawley, who described TikTok as "just a backdoor spy vehicle for the Communist Party of China," introduced legislation along with Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., in January that would ban the app from being downloaded on any U.S. device as well as any commercial activity with the app's Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Republicans aren't the only ones open to a TikTok ban. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for example, said recently that a nationwide U.S. ban on TikTok "should be looked at," pointing to concerns over TikTok being owned by ByteDance.

Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., last month introduced a bill that would ban social media platforms like TikTok if they are owned, wholly or in part, by "adversarial foreign regimes."

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the new Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, has also called for a nationwide TikTok ban.

"My hope is that we can either ban or force a sale of TikTok," he told CNBC on Wednesday. "I have a bipartisan, bicameral bill that would allow for that … I think Matt Pottinger last night identified the central concern. It’s not just that TikTok, ByteDance, and by extension the CCP can use the app to exfiltrate your data or track your location. It's that with control of the algorithm, they control what information Americans get. They could use that to then influence our elections and our sense of national identity."

Gallagher was referring to former Trump White House deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, who at a hearing of Gallagher's committee on Tuesday night warned China will have "the ability to manipulate our social discourse" and control what information Americans can and can't see if TikTok and other Chinese platforms aren't banned in the U.S.

TikTok and the U.S. government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States have been negotiating for more than two years on data security requirements. In a statement, TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter called for the Biden administration to finalize a proposed national security deal designed to address U.S. concerns while expressing disappointment with McCaul's proposed bill.

"A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide," said Oberwetter. "We're disappointed to see this rushed piece of legislation move forward, despite its considerable negative impact on the free speech rights of millions of Americans who use and love TikTok."

Biden has wavered on whether Washington should ban TikTok.

"I'm not sure. I know I don't have it on my phone," Biden said last month, responding to a reporter's question about the app.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Wednesday that the federal government is working on a solution for TikTok but wouldn't say whether it would be banned.

Jean-Pierre confirmed that the president is concerned about TikTok being a threat to national security but said the ball was in Congress's court to act.

Beyond the federal level, dozens of states are imposing bans on TikTok as a way of combating Chinese influence. Republican-led states have particularly taken the lead, but some blue states have imposed similar bans.

However, some Democratic governors, including Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer and California's Gavin Newsom, continue to use TikTok despite the widespread bans.

In November, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that he's "extremely concerned" about TikTok's operations in the U.S.  

"We do have national security concerns at least from the FBI's end about TikTok," Wray told members of the House Homeland Security Committee in a hearing about worldwide threats.

"They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users," he explained. "Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so choose. Or to control software on millions of devices, which gives it opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices."

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has called TikTok "a sophisticated surveillance tool" that "poses an unacceptable national security risk," while the U.S. military has banned personnel from using it. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has demanded a complete U.S. ban on the short-form video app.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/top-republican-tiktok-us-phones-80-million-chinese-spy-balloons-flying-america

Veru fails to get emergency authorization for Covid therapy

 Veru Inc. (NASDAQ: VERU), a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing novel medicines for COVID-19 and other viral ARDS-related diseases and for oncology, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declined to grant at this time the Company’s request for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for sabizabulin, Veru’s novel microtubule disruptor, to treat hospitalized adult patients with moderate to severe COVID-19 who are at high risk for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS).

In communicating its decision, the FDA stated that despite the FDA declining to issue an EUA for sabizabulin at this time, the FDA remains committed to working with the Company for the development of sabizabulin.

Separately, the FDA also provided comments on a proposed confirmatory Phase 3 study protocol submitted by the Company for hospitalized moderate to severe COVID-19 patients at risk for ARDS and death that could support a new EUA authorization and/or NDA approval. FDA stated that in the potential confirmatory Phase 3 clinical study design: “strong consideration should be given to appropriate time frames for interim analyses so that – should a strong efficacy signal again be observed – the trial could be stopped in an efficient time frame.” Veru expects to communicate the details of the design and timing of this potential Phase 3 confirmatory study soon. It should be noted that in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) fact sheet published on February 9, 2023, HHS and FDA made clear that FDA’s ability to continue authorizing new COVID-19 therapeutics for emergency use is not impacted by the ending of the declaration of the U.S. public health emergency on May 11, 2023.

https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/veru-provides-fda-update-on-request-for-emergency-use-authorization-for-sabizabulin-for-hospitalized-covid-19-patients-at-high-risk-for-ards-/

Intellia: FDA OKs Investigational New Drug (IND) Application for Angioedema Therapy

 Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTLA), a leading clinical-stage genome editing company focused on developing potentially curative therapies leveraging CRISPR-based technologies, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared the company’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application for NTLA-2002 for the treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE), enabling the company to include the United States in the global Phase 2 portion of its ongoing Phase 1/2 study. NTLA-2002 is an in vivo genome editing candidate designed to inactivate the target gene, kallikrein B1 (KLKB1), to permanently reduce plasma kallikrein protein activity and thus prevent HAE attacks after a single-dose treatment.

https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/intellia-therapeutics-announces-fda-clearance-of-investigational/

Natera Announces Commercial Payor Coverage for Signatera

 Natera, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTRA), a global leader in cell-free DNA testing, today announced the Company’s first commercial coverage policies for its molecular residual disease test, Signatera, including its first pan-cancer coverage policy for adjuvant, recurrence monitoring, and treatment monitoring.

Effective March 1, 2023, Blue Shield of California now provides commercial coverage of Signatera for plan members diagnosed with any solid tumors. Specifically, the policy describes tumor-informed ctDNA testing with Signatera as medically necessary for patients with stage I-IV cancer to provide information for (1) adjuvant or targeted therapy; and/or (2) monitoring for relapse or progression, including but not limited to the use of immunotherapy.

In addition, effective January 1, 2023, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is providing coverage of serial testing with Signatera for plan members diagnosed with colorectal and muscle invasive bladder cancer and for pan-cancer immunotherapy monitoring.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/natera-announces-commercial-payor-coverage-120000589.html

Protect Incentives for Medical Breakthroughs

 “There is no better time to have lung cancer.” That’s the pep talk my oncologist gave me not long after I received my diagnosis. It might sound ridiculous, but my story proves it and demonstrates the value of the incentives in place that encourage the development of new, more effective medical treatments.

While receiving that news was absolutely devastating, I now know it was only the beginning of a new chapter. Five years later, I’m alive and well thanks to breakthroughs in targeted therapies to treat my cancer. My diagnosis represented an inflection point, not only in my life, but in the research and development process to bring new treatments to patients with non-small cell lung cancer. Like many others, my story is also a stark reminder that our elected leaders must preserve the incentives that encourage the discovery of lifechanging and lifesaving medicines for cancer and other hard-to-treat conditions, most importantly strong patent protections.

I was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with an ALK+ (anaplastic lymphoma kinase) amplification that occurs in only about 5% of all lung cancer cases. By the time it was found, I was Stage IV – inoperable, uncurable, but fortunately not untreatable. At the time, I was in the prime of my life. I was experiencing success at work, enjoying every minute of raising my three daughters, and even training for the longest swim race of my life across Long Island Sound near my home just outside of New York City. By every measure, I was the picture of perfect health.

But, things took a turn. First, I thought it was just turning 50 and a few extra pounds that was slowing me down—then maybe asthma or an allergy. Treatment for those conditions did not work, nor did it for pneumonia. Following more tests and exams, I began to worry more and more. Finally I received the news: cancer. The diagnosis was heartbreaking and shocking. I had no risk factors for the condition and no hereditary history that would have hinted at my risk for lung cancer. 

Then came those encouraging words from my oncologist. I didn’t know what to make of them at first – I certainly wasn’t feeling lucky at that moment.  But the more I learned about my diagnosis, the more I believed them. Advances in treatment for my disease had been approved by the Food & Drug Administration just weeks before. It was almost poetic.

Had my diagnosis come 10 or maybe even five years earlier, the targeted therapies that are specifically designed to keep ALK+ NSCLC at bay wouldn’t have existed. It took years of scientific discovery, millions of dollars of investment, and a dedication to research from companies to create the therapy that worked for me and many others with this rare form of lung cancer. Without that work and investment, I almost certainly wouldn’t be here to relay my story.

Life sciences companies have to take incredible risks to conduct research in rare disease categories. The research is daunting for numerous reasons. Innovators are working with a very small population size, limited data, and a harder uphill battle to succeed in bringing new therapies to market for patients. Without proper intellectual property (IP) protections and their associated incentives, drug companies might choose only to pursue treatments for bigger categories of patients or to stop innovating all together.  This would be devastating to millions of people like me facing rarely diagnosed cancers, auto-immune diseases, neurological disorders, or metabolic conditions, to name a few.

But last summer, the World Trade Organization (WTO) waived international IP protections for COVID-19 vaccines, threatening the very incentives that enabled the U.S. to bring tests, vaccines, and treatments to market for a deadly virus with record speed. More recently, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced support for delaying a deadline to decide whether to extend a similar waiver to COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics instead of opposing weakened IP protections. A slippery slope of IP waivers is bad policy for patients like me and a real threat to the ecosystem that has brought hope to millions with challenging conditions and is hard at work trying to find answers for patients who still have none.

Without innovation that was made possible by patent protections, I wouldn’t have had these five years to see my daughters through high school and college graduations, to deepen connections with family and friends, and to advocate on behalf of other patients. My hope today is that our policymakers recognize the value of supporting and encouraging innovation so that others who receive a heartbreaking diagnosis have the same opportunities I did.

Bruce Dunbar is a lung cancer patient and research advocate from New Rochelle, NY, and a Member of the Board of Directors for the Lung Cancer Research Foundation (LCRF).  

https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2023/02/28/protect_incentives_for_medical_breakthroughs__111470.html

Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About Ageism?

 

In the long run, we are all dead--John Maynard Keynes

Patti Temple Rocks is still angry about the Covid pandemic — just, in a very particular way.

“I can’t believe that there was a period when there seemed to be this big collective sigh of relief, like, ‘Oh, it’s really just affecting older people who are ready to die anyway,’” she recalls. “The pandemic was terrible in many ways, but one downside was how it amplified the notion of old people as fragile and weak. That’s true in some cases, but not most. And nobody was looking forward then and thinking ‘Uh oh, we might run out of workers without them.’”

Rocks is a business consultant, campaigner and author of the recently-published I’m Still Not Done, a sometimes-personal analysis of what she, among others, suggests is set to become the civil rights battleground of the next few decades. While we’ve held important conversations on sexism and racism, ageism has remained overlooked. That’s somewhat odd, considering it’s the one form of discrimination that is likely to affect all of us. (Not that that should be a qualifying reason for justice.)

“Covid saw preemptive lay-offs disproportionately affecting older workers,” Rocks says. “Then we saw ‘The Great Resignation,’” she notes, with people older than 50 taking early retirement. Now, employers are scrambling to figure out how to coax them back into a workplace that has too often seemed stacked against them. “It’s strange: talk to people in HR about whether they’re addressing ageism in the workplace, and often the reaction suggests that they haven’t even recognized that they need to,” Rocks adds. 

After all, demographics are undergoing seismic shifts: longer, healthier lifespans mean there are more older people not ready to quit work or who need the money to live out that longer life. “But the workplace just hasn’t worked out what to do with that older cohort,” Rocks says. “Why don’t we give the same support to people at the end of their careers as we do those starting out?”

The workplace is only the tip of ageism’s spear. It’s where it can be felt most pointedly, and where, while ageism is hard to prove, legal action is more likely to follow. The likes of Google, IBM and other industry giants have learned this the hard way. A survey by the American Association of Retired People found that a large majority of people older than 45 say they’ve either been personally affected by age discrimination or know someone who’s faced it at work. A more recent study suggests that the chance of someone older than 50 being laid off and then finding new employment at the same rate of pay is virtually nil. 

But as Peter Kaldes — CEO of the American Society on Aging — notes, that’s hardly surprising, given how deeply ageism runs in a culture in which the default position is to to hide rather than celebrate our older age. “We’re faced with having to turn the clock back on 200 years of the kind of ingrained mindset that has us still telling people they ‘look good for their age,’ whatever that can possibly mean,” he says.

If racism and sexism are taboo, it remains socially acceptable to denigrate a huge swathe of the populace simply for having successfully avoided dying. If you’re old and a woman, expect some extra vitriol, as Madonna recently discovered upon announcing her greatest hits tour.  

It’s not just advertising, which has privileged portrayals of youth since the late 1960s, when the gerontologist Robert Butler coined the term “ageism.” Kaldes says that the idea that “older people are less relevant” has infected the wider media, in the imagery and language it uses in relation to older people (which is something the ASA recently advised the Shutterstock photo agency about). It’s also seeped into business, healthcare, academia and politics.

Corrosive anti-age standpoints are often heard in discussions on identity (the old shouldn’t ‘act young’ and certainly never sexually), on succession (older people need to move aside to make way for the allegedly more capable young) and on consumption (they shouldn’t use up rare resources, or voice their opinion on a future in which they would have a lesser part). 

Kaldes argues that while there are more community-minded cultures around the world — notably Asian and Mediterranean — in which old age is revered as a fount of wisdom and experience, industrial nations (and the United States especially) have been built on the spirit of individuality. We tend to value the individual as more or less useful based on their age. As Mark Zuckerberg noted in 2007: “Young people are just smarter.”

But this point of view is looking increasingly stupid, Kaldes argues, if only for economic reasons. Those older than 60 now account for some 70% of global consumer spending. They represent the fastest growing market for all sorts of products and services, from smartphones to dating apps to riskier financial investments. And there are only going to be more older people, both outside of work and in it; one in four U.S. workers will be older than 55 by the end of the decade, and one fifth of the world population will be older than 50 by mid-century. The world, in short, is getting older. 

“Business is going to run out of people to sell to [if it maintains its stereotyping towards older people],” he stresses. And he’s not talking about selling more anti-aging products to ‘fix’ signs of those passing years.

“It’s as though there’s been this toggle switch thrown from seeing old people as some kind of disease to run away from, to ‘oh my god, they have all the money!’” laughs David Stewart, advertising photographer turned founder of We Are Ageist, an agency specializing in advising brands on how to speak to older demographics. “The fact is that not re-thinking our attitudes to age is going to be economically untenable. And because older people have all the knowledge and may be at the height of their intellectual powers, ignoring them will increasingly come to be seen as dumb too.”

“It’s also way more complicated than addressing sexism or racism because what age means, and our self-perception through age is constantly in flux from person to person and generation to generation,” Stewart adds. “You know, the most ageist people actually tend to be older people — they’ve internalized 50 years of negative messaging about themselves.”

But most people don’t notice just how insidious ageism can be. “All those outrageous comments by those in the public eye during Covid, asking whether a cull of older people would be such a bad thing — just switch out ‘older’ for, say, a skin color or religion and we’d recoil in horror,” says Ken Bluestone, the head of policy at the UK-based Age International. The organization campaigns for older people across 33 countries, and its studies suggest that half of us have ageist views. “Ageism has become an attitudinal problem, yet it’s so strange that we feel it’s okay to say such things about what is a universal experience.”

Age International argues (as does the World Health Organization’s 2021 Global Report on Ageism ) for a stringent legal framework, in which ageist thinking is challenged on a more day-to-day basis. This could build awareness and drive change, following a similar blueprints for how we changed attitudes and defined duties around disabilities in many countries. 

“To draw that parallel, it’s not disability that defines someone,” Bluestone says. “It’s how society responds to that disability in a way that allows that disabled person to thrive. The same principle holds for aging. It’s not chronological age that defines an individual, but how we treat that person. And it needs to be clear that we do all have the rights not to be treated differently because we’re of a certain age.”

“The tragedy of old age is not the fact that each of us must grow old and die, but that the process of doing so has been made unnecessarily and, at times, excruciatingly painful, humiliating, debilitating and isolating through insensitivity, ignorance and poverty,” Robert Butler wrote back in 1975. Are we in a better place almost half a century later? Certainly there’s resistance — a generational blurring in dress, hobbies, cultural preferences, political views and so on. But it’s hard to be convinced that we’ve moved forward much. 

As Kaldes puts it, look around the world, and some governments may be setting up departments to ponder age-created policy. But all too often this is sidelined as a welfare matter or as a means of driving only legal solutions, rather than (as he suggests is necessary) looking at the situation holistically. He’d like to see popular culture play a more dynamic part in confronting ageism as, he says, it has so successfully driven a change in attitude towards homosexuality. But Kaldes adds that we’re going to have to get to a place where “boomers, and those younger, simply don’t stand for this anymore”.

Might the pandemic even prove to be some kind of tipping point? Ashton Applewhite, ageism campaigner and author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, reckons it exposed an issue that had previously been pushed into some dark corner and ignored. “Clearly this isn’t some niche issue, either,” she says. “Nobody is talking about ageism as something that’s stupid or marginal anymore…raise the idea and nobody is opposed to tackling ageism. It’s more that they just haven’t thought to actually think about it. 

“I don’t think we should be aiming for a society in which older age is applauded — you don’t get applause just for having breathed more,” Applewhite chuckles. “But I do think we should aim for a society that’s age-neutral. Age is real: being young is different to being old. Age is part of our identity. But we give it far more value than it deserves. It’s just a data point. And the older the person is, the less it says about them because the less homogenous we become.”

Yet, Rocks suggests, it will need something of a push to build momentum. Yes, through her work as an advisor on age-related matters, she finds that, very slowly, ageism awareness is making an impact. Yet where, she asks, is a more vociferous, full-blooded uprising? “We’re yet to reach the level of indignation at which people are more motivated, at which there’s a kind of Me Too movement for ageism, which would see a load of people ‘cancelled,’” she laughs. “It’s still hard to see that people are getting angry about this — there are still no marches against ageism. But they will come.”

https://www.insidehook.com/article/health-and-fitness/ageism-examples

Cotton sounds alarm on dangerous ‘conspiracy of silence' over COVID origins

 Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., is finally vindicated for his 2020 contention that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China – a claim that had been dismissed as a "fringe theory" by several major news outlets.

Sen. Cotton joined "Mornings with Maria" Thursday, to discuss the severe mishandling of the investigation into the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the White House is "bending over backwards" to avoid a consensus. 

"Maria, I appreciate you joining me and exploring the most likely explanation for this virus, which is the Wuhan labs. The only conspiracy back in the early part of 2020 was a conspiracy of silence among liberals and the media in the federal bureaucracy and Democrats in Congress to try to suppress the common sense, evidence-based conclusion that so many Arkansans had reached - that the Chinese Communists were responsible because of their negligent practices in this lab for unleashing this pandemic on the world. That's the only conspiracy theory that was circulating around," the Arkansas Senator argued.

WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 27: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has continuously urged the Biden administration to investigate the mysterious origin of COVID-19. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis-Pool/Getty Images) (Photo by Tasos Katopodis-Pool/Getty Images / Getty Images)

"Unfortunately, you still see, in some degree, that conspiracy of silence. You see White House officials this week bending over backwards to say they don't have a consensus, there's no firm conclusions to apologize for, or even defend Chinese communists," Sen. Cotton continued. 

Sen. Cotton further argued that the Biden administration has continuously projected weakness when dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, specifically referring to his handling of China's surveillance missions.

"They did the same thing when China sent a spy balloon to America, speculating that it could have gotten blown off course from Guam to Alaska. That's a heck of a wind, Maria. That's what's dangerous, is that the Biden administration and liberals in the media still have this mindset that somehow if we appease Chinese communists, if we mollify them, if we kowtow to them, then they won't take provocative actions towards America. That's the exact opposite of what we should be doing," he explained.

Host Maria Bartiromo bolstered the Arkansas Senator's declaration, expressing her concern that the Biden administration's progressive development of the U.S.'s relationship with China is "downright dangerous," and asking the senator why he believes the president is "so soft on China."

"It's part of a pattern of Joe Biden's career. He's always excused Chinese communist aggression and wrongdoing. I mean, as recently as the 2020 campaign, he was saying that China is not a competitor of the United States, and he even goes out of his way, still, to say that he doesn't want a Cold War. Well, I don't either, and most Arkansans don't. But if China is waging a Cold War against us, as they have been for decades, our only choice is to win or to lose. And unfortunately, this administration has a losing policy," he said, Thursday.

In response, Bartiromo issued a heavy question to Sen. Cotton, asking "What can you, as an elected official, do about it?"

U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and China's President Xi Jinping (L) meet on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on November 14, 2022. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

"Unfortunately, this administration has a losing policy. Right now, what we should be doing is taking actions that are long overdue to make it clear to China that there are consequences for unleashing this pandemic on the world. There are consequences for invading our airspace," Sen. Tom Cotton concluded. 

"Things like banning TikTok, banning Chinese nationals from buying farmland in America, having reciprocal treatment for their diplomats and spies in America that they impose on Americans in China. Most Arkansans think that's a very simple proposition, is that whatever China does to us, we should do to them. Simple reciprocity."

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/sen-tom-cotton-sounds-alarm-dangerous-conspiracy-silence-covid-origins