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United States President Donald Trump appears to weaken his own intelligence agencies by suggesting that he has seen evidence that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory.
Previously, the office of the US director of national intelligence. USA He said he was still investigating the origins of the virus.
But the office said it had determined that Covid-19 “was neither artificial nor genetically modified.”
China rejected the laboratory theory and criticized the United States’ response to Covid-19.
Since its appearance in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, the coronavirus is confirmed to have infected 3.2 million people and killed more than 230,000.
What did President Trump say?
At the White House on Thursday, a journalist asked Trump, “Have you seen anything at this time that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of this virus?”
“Yes, I have. Yes, I have,” said the president, unspecified. “And I think the World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves because they are like China’s public relations agency.”
When asked to clarify his comment, he said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you.”
He also told journalists: “If they [China] made a mistake, or if it started as a mistake and then made another, or did someone do something on purpose?
“I don’t understand how trafficking, how people were not allowed to enter the rest of China, but they were allowed to enter the rest of the world. That is a bad question, difficult to answer.”
The New York Times reported Thursday that senior White House officials have asked the United States intelligence community to investigate whether the virus comes from a Wuhan research laboratory.
Intelligence agencies are also tasked with determining whether China and the WHO withheld information about the virus early on, unidentified officials told NBC News on Wednesday.
What did the chief of intelligence say?
In a rare public statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees US spy agencies, said Thursday it agrees with the “broad scientific consensus” on Covid-19’s natural origins.
“The [intelligence community] “It will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan.”
It was the first clear-cut response by US intelligence that discredits conspiracy theories, from both the United States and China, that the virus is a biological weapon.
But the possibility that the coronavirus has inadvertently leaked from a research facility has yet to be disproved.
- Is there any evidence of the coronavirus lab launch idea?
- China and the United States trade coronavirus conspiracy theories
What is the bottom line?
Trump has recently been stepping up his war on words with China over the pandemic after what U.S. administration officials described as a truce with Beijing.
On Wednesday, he suggested that China wanted him to lose his reelection bid in November.
Trump previously accused Chinese officials of covering up the virus early on and said they could have stopped the spread of the disease.
He also criticized WHO and withdrew US funds for the world body.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused the Trump administration of trying to distract itself from its own problems in dealing with the crisis.
A ministry spokesperson has also repeatedly promoted the idea, without evidence, that Covid-19 could have originated in the United States.
According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration is looking for ways to financially punish China. According to reports, the discussions include allowing the United States government to sue China for damages or cancel debt obligations.
The propaganda war between the United States and China
This is the first final statement on the matter from the United States intelligence agencies. He rejects the most extreme conspiracy theories about the origins of the pandemic: that the Chinese developed and unleashed the coronavirus as a biological weapon.
But it doesn’t rule out the possibility that the virus was accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab studying infectious diseases.
The US Secretary of State. The US, Mike Pompeo, in particular, has spoken of that scenario, urging China to allow outside experts to enter the facility and raising questions about the safety of laboratories in other parts of the country. The Chinese government says such allegations are unfounded and fabricated out of thin air.
The claims and counterclaims about the origins of the virus are part of a propaganda war on China’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
But they also reflect the United States’ frustration with the Chinese over not sharing more data on how the pandemic developed.
