President Donald Trump has warned there would be consequences if China is found to have deliberately released Coronavirus into the world. This warning is the latest salvo from the United States president in his rising criticism of China over the origin of COVID-19 and how China has handled the pandemic.
“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. “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then surely there should be consequences.”
Trump has always castigated China, saying the Asian giant was not transparent with the coronavirus situation. And as if to get back at China, he cut out the United States funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), saying WHO has been “China-centric” and biased in channeling resources that are not merited to China. In fact, Trump and his aides often refer to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus”.
Trump has made it clear on a number of occasions that his administration would investigate if China created the coronavirus in its Wuhan virology lab to demonstrate its capacity for bio-warfare. China has however consistently denied that COVID-19 was ever created in its Wuhan lab or that it escaped from the virus facility.
Just last week, China revised the total number of people who died of coronavirus in the country, revising the death toll by 50% on the premise that the authorities failed to properly count the dead. But the Trump administration said they would not buy the revised death toll, accusing China of a cover-up. As it stands, Johns Hopkins University put the number of coronavirus cases in the United States at over 720,000 and the death toll at about 37,000 – the largest statistics of any country in the world.
Source: reuters.com