[ad_1]
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs against Beijing on Thursday (April 30) after claiming there is evidence linking the coronavirus to a laboratory in Wuhan City, China’s ground zero.
When asked if he had seen anything that gave him a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak, Trump replied, “Yes, I have.”
Ad
The Republican increasingly raises complaints about handling the Beijing pandemic outbreak as a major topic for his re-election campaign in November.
READ: Trump says China “will do everything it can” to lose reelection race
He told reporters at the White House that US agencies were investigating how the virus first emerged and what China had done to prevent it from spreading to the rest of the world.
“We will be able to get a very powerful definition of what happened,” he said, adding that a report would be made “in the not too distant future.”
Ad
But even while the matter remains under investigation, Trump said he already has suspicions.
“They could have stopped him,” he said, attacking China for failing to cancel international flights outside the country in time.
READ: Trump blames China for COVID-19 spread, says United States investigates
Various theories are circulating about how the virus appeared in Wuhan, including that it emerged from a market that sells live animals or accidentally from the Wuhan Research Laboratory.
The U.S. intelligence community said Thursday that it had concluded that the new coronavirus originated in China but was neither created by man nor designed.
Pressed by White House reporters for details on what made him so confident of a link to the lab, Trump replied, “I can’t tell you that.”
Regardless of where the blame for the outbreak falls, Trump is stepping up a war of words with Beijing, again claiming on Thursday that “China does not want to see me re-elected.”
Attention now turns to what Trump will do in terms of threatened retaliation. The new tension comes just a few months after the United States and China resolved a trade war that had been stirring up world markets.
So far, Trump has been remarkably imprecise about the measures he is considering, but the tariffs, he said, are a possibility.
But when asked about reports that he could cancel America’s debt obligations to China, Trump said he could “do it differently” and act “probably more directly.”
“I could do the same thing, but even for more money, simply by imposing tariffs,” he said.
CHECK THIS: Our comprehensive coverage of the coronavirus outbreak and its developments
Download our app or subscribe to our Telegram channel for the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak: https://cna.asia/telegram
