US President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened new tariffs against Beijing after claiming there is evidence linking the coronavirus to a lab in China’s ground-zero city of Wuhan, IgbereTV reports.
When he was asked if he had seen anything giving him a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of the outbreak, Trump replied, “Yes, I have.”
Trump told reporters at the White House that US agencies were investigating how the virus first emerged and what China had done to stop it spreading to the rest of the world.
“We’ll be able to get a very powerful definition of what happened,” he said, adding that a report would be made to him “in the not too distant future.”
“They could have stopped it,” he said, attacking China for not cancelling international flights out of the country in time.
But the US intelligence community said Thursday it had concluded that the novel coronavirus originated in China but was not man-made or engineered.
When reporters at the White House asked for details on what made him so confident about a link to the laboratory, Trump replied: “I cannot tell you that.”
When he was asked about reports that he could cancel US debt obligations to China, Trump said he could “do it differently” and act in “probably a little bit more of a forthright manner.”
“I could do the same thing but even for more money, just putting on tariffs,” he said.
