According to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), the United States needs to prevent all visiting students from China from studying science because they might “steal” the vaccine for COVID-19 when it’s developed.
Cotton was interviewed on the Fox show “Sunday Morning Futures,” and he wasted no time spinning wild conspiracy theories, including one that the Chinese government was “actively trying to steal” a coronavirus vaccine from the U.S, telling host Maria Bartiromo:
“The Chinese Communist Party has been stealing America’s intellectual property for decades and they’re not going to magically stop in the middle of a pandemic. In the middle of a pandemic, what’s the most valuable intellectual property in the world? It’s the research that our great laboratories and life science companies are doing on prophylactic drugs, therapeutic drugs and ultimately a vaccine.”
But the senator was just getting warmed up, next asserting that China might try to blackmail the world if they develop a vaccine for the virus:
“So, I have little doubt that the Chinese intelligence services are actively trying to steal America’s intellectual property as it relates to the virus they unleashed on the world. Because of course they want to be the country that claims credit for finding those drugs of finding a vaccine and then use it as leverage against the rest of the world.”
What Sen. Cotton is failing to take into consideration is that if indeed Chinese scientists are the first to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, they will have the option of giving it away or charging, say, $10,000 a dose to hostile nations. And bellicose rhetoric from U.S. senators isn’t exactly beneficial at a time when we should be working with — not against — other nations to develop a vaccine for this horrible disease.
A few minutes later, Cotton made his declaration of keeping Chinese students from studying science, remarking:
“It’s a scandal to me that we have trained so many of so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s brightest minds to go back to China, to compete for our jobs, to take our business and ultimately to steal our property,” the senator said.
“I think we need to take a very hard look at the visas we give Chinese nationals to come to the U.S. to study. Especially at the post-graduate level in advanced scientific and technological fields.”
Instead of letting students from China study science and medicine in the United States, Cotton railed, they need to read “Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers”:
“That’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”
And what voters in this country need to learn is that electing anti-intellectual cretins like Tom Cotton is detrimental to the health and well-being of every American.
Featured Image Via YouTube Screenshot
