US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday (03.05.2020) that there is significant evidence that the new coronavirus pandemic originated in a lab in Wuhan, where the outbreak began in China.
“There’s huge evidence that that’s where it started,” he told ABC.
“China has a history of infecting the world and managing laboratories below standards. This is not the first time the world has been exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab,” he said.
However, despite being a major critic of China’s handling of the onset of the pandemic, Pompeo declined to say whether he believed the virus had been intentionally released.
“The Chinese Communist Party continues to block access to the Western world, the world’s best scientists, to decipher exactly what happened,” Pompeo stressed.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the Asian giant’s role in the pandemic, which has infected nearly 3.5 million people and killed more than 240,000 worldwide. According to Trump, Beijing hid important information about the outbreak, so he demanded that he be “responsible.”
“China behaved as authoritarian regimes do, tried to hide and confuse, and use the World Health Organization (WHO) as a tool to do the same,” said the head of American diplomacy.
