Washington – This morning, Wyoming Congresswoman and House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) joined Reece Monaco on KFBC Radio in Cheyenne to discuss holding the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accountable for lies and disinformation efforts about the spread of coronavirus. Listen to the full interview here, and see an excerpt of the transcript below:

REECE MONACO: The President has come out and has said that he wants to cut off funding to the World Health Organization. In this time of a global pandemic, it’s not just here, it’s around the world, is that a good move for the United States to cut off the funding to the World Health Organization?

REP. LIZ CHENEY: I do think so. I think the President is doing the right thing. I think that the World Health Organization has a crucial role to play, but as long as the Director of the World Health Organization is somebody who is doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party, they’re costing lives not saving lives. What we watched happen over the last several months was the World Health Organization become a mouthpiece for the government of China and helped the government of China, frankly defended them when they were not providing the access that they should have provided, when they were lying about the transmission of the virus, when they were refusing access to international groups to Americans to help them get in there. They were refusing to give us the DNA sequencing of the virus. Having the World Health Organization defend those kinds of actions or deny that they were going on when we knew they were, really creates an untenable situation. I think the President is right to say, ‘Listen, we’re going to be holding back funding and doing an investigation.’ We want the WHO to play a constructive role, the world needs it to play a constructive role, but it can’t under the current circumstances.

MONACO: Now, in a newsletter that you penned you mentioned, you mentioned holding China accountable for the COVID-19 coverup. How would you hold them accountable for this?

REP. CHENEY: I think there are a number of things that we need to do and I think you’re going to see nations around the world uniting to do. I think one of them is to be clear to the Chinese that they cannot be part of the civilized community of nations, frankly, if they’re going to continue to allow the kind of practices that they have at the wet markets. They’ve reopened the wet market in Wuhan where they’ve got wild animals and completely disgusting practices where we know that the spread of viruses from animals to humans has occurred in the past. It may be that in this circumstance this virus escaped out of the biological testing lab they also have in Wuhan Province. Number one, that kind of activity, both to allow this virus to spread, to escape, to lie to the world about it, to disappear doctors who were putting their lives at risk to warn the world, that those kinds of things are just not behavior that the world is going to accept. I think that we also have to make sure we move our pharmaceutical supply chain, multiple ones of those out of China. We can’t be dependent on them for ingredients for things like our antibiotics for the production of our medications.

I think we need to make clear that we’re not going to allow Huawei and the 5G efforts that China has undertaken to try to dominate 5G and control the world’s data. We’re not going to allow those to continue. I’m hopeful that we’ll see the United Kingdom and other nations that have thought that it would be prudent to allow the Chinese to control their 5G networks will see – because of this crisis – the real danger that that would entail. I think it’s going to be important for us to make sure the Chinese understand, frankly, we believe in freedom, we believe in free speech, we believe in the rights of the individual, and we’re not going to allow them to dominate a global world order where those things are trampled on, where their view of the world prevails. That’s just not something we’re going to stand for.