Trump points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology

FPI / May 5, 2020

President Donald Trump on May 3 suggested that his administration will soon release “conclusive” evidence that the coronavirus originally leaked out of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I don’t think there is any question about it,” Trump responded during a Fox News town hall when asked a question on whether China’s action allowed the pandemic to spread across the globe.

Trump told host Bret Baier that the administration “will be giving a very strong report on what we think happened, and I think it will be very conclusive.”

The president's comments were made the same day that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo maintained the administration has compiled an extensive report on the origins of the coronavirus.

“We have said from the beginning, this virus originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outset. But I think the whole world can see now,” Pompeo said on ABC Sunday morning. “Remember, China has a history of infecting the world and they have a history of running sub-standard laboratories.”

“These aren’t the first times that we have had the world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab,” Pompeo said.

Trump said that he does not view the virus as a malicious action by China.

“Personally I think they made a horrible mistake,” he told town hall co-host Martha MacCallum. “They didn’t want to admit it. We wanted to go in but they didn’t want us there. World Health wanted to go in.”

“They tried to cover it, they tried to put it out,” Trump continued. “It’s like trying to put out a fire. They couldn’t put out the fire.”

Pompeo said in the ABC interview:

“I’ve seen what the intelligence community has said. I have no reason to believe that they got it wrong….

“The Chinese Communist Party had the opportunity to prevent all of the calamity that’s befallen the world..this is an enormous crisis created by the fact that the Chinese Communist Party reverted to form, reverted to the kinds of disinformation, the kinds of concealment that authoritarian regimes do.

“Had those scientists been operating in America, they would have put this out, there would have been an exchange of ideas, and we would have quickly identified the types of things that we needed to do in response. Instead, China behaved like authoritarian regimes do, attempted to conceal and hide and confuse and employed the World Health Organization as a tool to do the same.

“These are the kinds of things that have now presented this enormous crisis and enormous loss of life and tremendous economic cost all across the globe….

“I think the whole world is united, understanding that China brought this virus to the world.”

Free Press International