US President Donald Trump on Saturday said China should face “consequences” if it was found to have been “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus outbreak.
“It could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and the whole world is suffering because of it,” Trump said at a briefing.
“If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake,” he said. “But if they were knowingly responsible... then sure there should be consequences.”
The US president offered no evidence to back his claim, but some sections of the media and his allies have recently contended that - with giving any proof - the virus escaped a virology laboratory in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak in China.
There have been news reports of the lab receiving funding from the US, and American diplomats expressing concerns about safety measures in place at the facility. There have also been reports that US intelligence agencies have launched an investigation into the lab.
China has reacted sharply to Trump’s charges. The director of the laboratory in Wuhan has rejected claims that it could be the source of the outbreak, calling it “impossible”.
In an interview with state media published on Saturday, Yuan Zhiming, the director of the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said that “there’s no way this virus came from us”. None of his staff had been infected, he told state-backed media outlet CGTN, adding that the “whole institute is carrying out research in different areas related to the coronavirus”.
{{/usCountry}}In an interview with state media published on Saturday, Yuan Zhiming, the director of the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said that “there’s no way this virus came from us”. None of his staff had been infected, he told state-backed media outlet CGTN, adding that the “whole institute is carrying out research in different areas related to the coronavirus”.
{{/usCountry}}The origin of the pandemic has been traced to a wet market in Wuhan, where the Covid-19 virus is believed to have been transmitted to humans.
Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, displayed a graph at a briefing attended by Trump that showed the death rates of various nations, and China was shown to be at the bottom with the lowest rate.
Birx said she included China in the chart to highlight how “unrealistic”its coronavirus numbers are. The US mortality rate is 11.24 per 100,000, which is much higher than China’s reported rate of 0.33.