Trump says China made ‘horrible mistake’ and covered up coronavirus outbreak

Donald Trump last night pinned the global coronavirus outbreak squarely upon China, which he accused of a state cover-up after making a ‘horrible mistake’. 

The president continued to point the finger at Beijing and fueled growing suggestions that COVID-19 spread from a Wuhan laboratory before snowballing into a worldwide pandemic.

His fiery remarks at Sunday’s Fox News virtual town hall meeting at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there was a ‘significant amount of evidence’ the disease had escaped. 

Trump also said there was enough evidence to prove President Xi Jinping’s regime misled the global community. 

‘Well, I don’t think there’s any question about it. We wanted to go in, they didn’t want us to go in. Things are coming out that are pretty compelling. I don’t think there’s any question,’ the president said Sunday.

‘Personally, I think they made a horrible mistake, and they didn’t want to admit it,’ he added.

His comments came as a Department of Homeland Security report shared on Sunday revealed US officials believe China ‘intentionally concealed the severity’ of the pandemic in early January and hoarded medical supplies.

The four-page report dated May 1 that was obtained by the Associated Press notes that China downplayed the virus publicly but increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies. 

The document accuses China of covering their tracks by ‘denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data.’

It lends weight to a leaked dossier drawn up by the Five Eyes intelligence alliance which describes how Beijing made whistleblowers ‘disappear’, destroyed early virus samples and scrubbed the internet of any mention of the disease in the early stages. 

In the wide-ranging interview last night:

• The president said he believed a coronavirus vaccine could be developed by the end of the year;
• He lashed out at Democrats who he said were motivated by politics and ‘don’t want to see a good result’;
• Trump conceded that 100,000 Americans could die from the disease, after initially touting 60,000 as the final toll;
• Trump claimed he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln by the press, as he sat in the shadow of the 16th president’s memorial;
• He lashed out at the World Health Organisation, branding its handling of the pandemic a ‘disaster’ and justified his decision to cut funding;
• Vice president Mike Pence admitted he should have worn a mask when he visited the Mayo clinic following a backlash for flouting the rules.

In Sunday’s virtual town hall, Trump said that China failed to admit their mistake in refusing to accept global aid. 

‘We wanted to go in, but they didn’t want us there. Even World Health wanted to go in – they were admitted but much later, not immediately. They made a mistake, they tried to cover it, like a fire…They couldn’t put out the fire,’ Trump said. 

He condemned the Communist nation for not alerting global leaders on the severity of the outbreak while continuing to allow flights to exit China.  

‘What they really treated the world badly on, they stopped people from going into China but they didn’t stop people from going into the USA and all the rest of the world.’ 

‘They knew they had a problem, I think they were embarrassed by the problem,’ Trump added.

When asked about President Xi, Trump said ‘I’m not going to say anything’ but ‘this should never have happened’.

He also lashed out at the World Health Organisation for siding with China and blindly regurgitating its ‘wrong’ information.

The president branded the UN agency’s handling of the emergency a ‘disaster’ and said the US had been ‘foolishly’ pouring funding into its coffers. 

Trump said that the federal government is putting together a ‘strong’ report on the origin of COVID-19 that has infected over a million in the US and killed over 68,000, adding it will be ‘very conclusive’.  

Last week Trump told reporters that he had seen proof that suggests the virus originated in the lab, but he did not go into detail.  

Earlier on Sunday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that ‘a significant amount of evidence’ suggested the virus came from the Wuhan lab.

‘I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan. These are not the first time that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab,’ Pompeo said on ABC’s This Week. 

The US intelligence community said it believes that COVID-19 was not ‘manmade or genetically modified’ but was investigating whether it was caused by ‘an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan’.

However, Chinese officials and scientists have denied that there is any connection between the outbreak and the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that studies infectious diseases including coronavirus. 

Experts believe the virus started spreading as early as February in the United States before it forced states to issue lockdown directives for millions of Americans beginning in mid-March. 

Last week, Trump claimed that he had seen evidence that coronavirus started in the Wuhan virology laboratory and warned he could impose tariffs of $1trillion on China in retribution for the pandemic. 

‘Yes I have. Yes I have,’ Trump said when asked if he had seen proof the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Technology. 

The Wuhan lab is located near a wet market that has been identified as the likely epicenter of the outbreak that took place late last year. 

However, the president would not divulge what the evidence was that confirmed his suspicions, when asked by a reporter.

‘I can’t tell you that. I am not allowed to tell you that,’ he responded.

The Five Eyes spy document, which was leaked to the Australian Telegraph on Saturday, also details how ‘risky’ bat-related virus studies were carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

The 15-page document brands Beijing’s secrecy over the pandemic an ‘assault on international transparency’ and points to cover-up tactics deployed by the regime. 

It cites several studies led by scientist Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Institute into deadly bat-derived coronaviruses, with at least one of the virus samples being a 96 per cent genetic match for Covid-19.

But as part of a mass ‘suppression and destruction of evidence’, the state ordered samples of the virus to be destroyed in laboratories while wet market was bleached to extinguish remnants of the disease. 

On Sunday Trump blamed US intelligence officials for failing to warn the country about the severity of the virus tweeting: ‘Intelligence has just reported to me that I was correct, and that they did NOT bring up the CoronaVirus subject matter until late into January, just prior to my banning China from the U.S. Also, they only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner…’