Washington: US President Donald Trump said he has evidence that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, contradicting the country’s National Intelligence, which hours earlier had rejected claims of that the virus had an artificial origin.
The Director of National Intelligence on Thursday ruled out the possibility of an artificial origin of the virus in a laboratory in Wuhan.
“The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified,” it said in a statement.
The federal agency added that the intelligence community “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan”.
Hours after the statement, which was unusual for the agency, Trump claimed he had evidence which he refused to disclose that the virus actually originated inside a laboratory in Wuhan.
When asked by a reporter if he had concrete evidence “that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus”, Trump replied: “Yes, I have… I think that the World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves because they’re like the public relations agency for China.”
Asked to explain what evidence he had seen, Trump said: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
“Whether they (China) made a mistake, or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose?
“I don’t understand how traffic, how people weren’t allowed into the rest of China, but they were allowed into the rest of the world. That’s a bad, that’s a hard question for them to answer,” he added.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that senior US officials had begun exploring the possibility of imposing punitive measures or seeking economic compensation from China for its alleged mismanagement of the pandemic.
The options being considered include taking away its sovereign immunity so that both the government and victims can file lawsuits against the Asian country, and cancelling some of the debt obligations.
Trump, however, was inclined towards imposing fresh tariffs on China rather than stop paying its debt.
“We can do it with tariffs. We can do it other ways even beyond that without having to play that game,” said the President.
This latest development comes as the US currently accounts for the highest number of coronavirus cases, as well as deaths in the world.
As of Friday morning, the cases increased to 1,069,424, with 63,006 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University.