Fri 01 May 2020:
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — 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.
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.”
The Republican is increasingly making complaints over Beijing’s handling of the pandemic outbreak a major issue for his November re-election campaign.
He 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”.
But even as the issue remains under probe, Trump said he already has suspicions.
“They could have stopped it,” he said, attacking China for not cancelling international flights out of the country in time.
