Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) introduced a bill Thursday aimed at holding the Chinese communist regime accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reportedly claimed the lives of over 1.1 million Americans.

If passed in the Republican-controlled House, the "China Lied, People Died" Act (H.R.566) would "prohibit the availability of Federal funds for programs, projects, or activities in the People's Republic of China until amounts made available for COVID-19 relief in the United States have been reimbursed, and for other purposes."

"My first order of business this Congress is holding China accountable," Nehls told Fox News Digital. "The Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is singlehandedly responsible for the loss of a million lives in the United States and causing one of the worst economic disasters in the history of our country."

Nehls added, "With a Republican majority, we will work to force the CCP to pay back the $4.6 trillion in Congressionally appropriated funds, as well as the $16 trillion of American taxpayer dollars that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic."

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) has co-sponsored the bill.

Nehls introduced a House resolution on Jan. 9 in the same spirit as H.R.566, which has been referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The proposed resolution states:

• "the coverup of COVID-19 by the ... Chinese Communist Party has caused significant economic harm around the world and has cost the United States economy $16,000,000,000,000";
• "the global median gross domestic product dropped by 3.9 percent from 2019 to 2020, making it the worst downturn since the Great Depression";
• "the Chinese Communist Party’s calculated coverup, including reporting inaccurate numbers of infections and deaths, enabled COVID–19 to go global";
• "the COVID–19 pandemic increased extreme poverty between 88,000,000 and 93,000,000 in 2020"; and
• "over 1,000,000 Americans have died as a result of COVID–19."

For these and other reasons, the Texas congressman believes China should be held financially responsible.

The guilty party

Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report in December noting that it was "plausible" that Chinese military researchers possessed the COVID-19 virus "as part of bioweapons research" prior to its release into the world as a consequence of a safety incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

An October Senate report indicated that natural origins claims now appear untenable and that the "COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident."

Beyond its possible culpability over the potential manufacture and release of the virus (i.e., at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab), Chinese authorities also delayed warning the world about the emergence of the deadly disease, going to great lengths to silence doctors like the late Lie Wenliang, who had tried to raise the alarm.

Communist officials waited until Dec. 31 to alert the World Health Organization, then claimed, "The disease is preventable and controllable."

A Five Eyes intelligence dossier accused the CCP in May 2020 of engaging in an "assault on international transparency" to the "endangerment of other countries," reported the New York Post.

The intelligence dossier indicated that the genocidal Chinese regime had scrambled to bury evidence of the virus and its origins, "destroying" lab samples, censoring evidence of spread, and denying sample requests from other countries.

British conservative politician Bob Seely said in response, "At the end of this when the dust settles it is also clear that there has to be a re-evaluation by the West of its relationship with China."

The Department of Homeland Security intelligence service indicated in early 2020 that the CCP simultaneously covered up the outbreak while hoarding critical medical supplies and cutting other countries off of items believed necessary to tackle the virus, reported NBC News.

"We assess the Chinese Government intentionally concealed the severity of COVID-19 from the International community in early January while it stockpiled medical supplies by both increasing imports and decreasing exports," said the May 1 DHS report.

Extra to possibly birthing the virus, covering it up, and taking advantage of other nations it left in the dark, the CCP also locked down domestic travel internally while knowingly allowing infected Chinese citizens to travel internationally.

The New York Times reported that while Chinese officials began locking down Hubei province, home to Wuhan, they nevertheless continued to permit international travel ahead of the Lunar New Year, when hundreds of millions of people were expected to travel back to their hometowns.

175,000 people left Wuhan on Jan. 1 alone.

Seven million people left Wuhan in January before travel was restricted, thousands of whom the Times indicated were infected. Thousands successfully made it to cities around the world. 900 reportedly made it to New York; 2,200 to Sydney, Australia; and tens of thousands more to various other cities.

Flights out of Wuhan weren't cancelled until late January 2020.

The Weekend Australian reported that a 2015 document written by Chinese, communist, military scientists and senior public health officials described SARS coronaviruses as ushering in a "new era of genetic weapons."

The document notes that such viruses can be "artificially manipulated into an emerging human ­disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed in a way never seen before."

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