Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton believes China is “actively” trying to steal a coronavirus vaccine from the US and could be using foreign students to do so. As such, he has urged the government to limit what they can study.
“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,” Cotton told Fox News’ ‘Sunday Morning Futures’.
“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,” he added.
The senator went on to say China “unleashed” Covid-19 — the virus is believed to have originated in the city of Wuhan — and they want to claim “credit” for a vaccine and “use it as leverage against the rest of the world.”
Cotton then ramped up his anti-China rhetoric by suggesting limitations should be placed on what students with visas from the country can learn while they are studying in the US.
“If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare & the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing” — Sen. Tom Cotton proposes restricting Chinese students from studying science & tech at US universities pic.twitter.com/Sn6f6MMwtW
“I think we need to take a very hard look at the visas we give Chinese nationals to come to the US to study,” he said. “Especially at the post-graduate level in advanced scientific and technological fields.”
To prevent these students from “stealing,” Cotton says they should be allowed to study non-technical fields like “Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers.”
“That’s what they need to learn from America,” he said. “They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”
As various countries race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, more and more pundits have begun weighing in on the importance of who makes the vaccine and can take credit for it. While Cotton is concerned by China, others have already begun whining about “white male privilege.”
An Oxford University women’s studies professor wrote up an op-ed for the Huffington Post this week in which she expressed fear over the developers of the vaccine being “white, male and Oxford-educated.”
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