U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “cannot present evidence” that the new coronavirus came out of a Chinese lab “because he doesn’t have them,” Beijing said Wednesday.
Pompeo said On Sunday that there was “a huge amount of evidence” that the virus responsible for the COVID-19 epidemic originated in a virology laboratory in Wuhan, the city in central China where the disease was first detected late last year.
“Mr. Pompeo spokes at a number of times but cannot present evidence,” the spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, told the press.
“And why? Because there is none,” he believed, and said that the question of the origin of the epidemic should be left to scientific experts “and not to politicians who lie based on their domestic policy needs.”
Washington has increased its pressure on Beijing in recent weeks, accusing the communist regime of having been slow to react to the onset of the epidemic and after letting the Wuhan Institute of Virology virus out.
“There is immense evidence that he got out of there,” the US secretary of state told ABC.
“It’s not the first time” that China puts “the world in danger” because of “non-compliant laboratories,” he insisted, though he did not say whether he thought the new coronavirus was intentionally created.
Chinese public television on Monday called Pompeo’s statements “crazy.”
President Donald Trump last week threatened to apply new tariffs on Chinese products as a sanction for the spread of coronavirus and its consequences for the U.S. economy.
