‘Was right about Wuhan lab’: Trump demands China pay $10 trillion

Former US President Donald Trump on Thursday said that he was right about the “China Virus coming from Wuhan lab”. He also asked for a penalty to be imposed on China for the deaths and damages caused by the “lab leak”.

“Now everyone, even the so-called ‘enemy’, are beginning to say that President Trump was right about the China Virus coming from Wuhan Lab,” Trump said. He, therefore, called for imposing fine on China for the death and destruction they have caused due to this “lab leak”.

Trump also took aim at Dr Anthony Fauci, who was head of the Covid-19 task force, and had often clashed with the former President on handling of the pandemic. Dr Fauci had initially been sceptical of the claims of Trump that Covid-19 had leaked from a Chinese lab. “The correspondence between Dr (Anthony) Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay $10 trillion to America, and the world, for the death and destruction they have caused,” Trump said.

The former President was referring to emails of Dr Fauci released by the US government in which he was told early in the pandemic the virus had “unusual features”. Republicans pointed to the emails to allege Dr Fauci knew of the work at Wuhan Institute of Virology early on.

After Dr Fauci’s private emails were revealed to the press the debate over the coronavirus coming from a Wuhan Lab has sparked once again.

Over 3,000 pages of emails were obtained by the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News and CNN through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, date from January to June 2020. The emails revealed about early days of the Covid-19 outbreak in the US. Dr Fauci and his colleagues took notice, in the early days, of the theory that Covid-19 may have leaked from a laboratory in China’s Wuhan.

On the “lab leak” email, Dr Fauci told CNN he still finds it unlikely that a Wuhan laboratory released the virus. “I don’t remember what’s in that redacted (email), but the idea I think is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people,” he said. “I think that’s a bit far out.”

But in recent days, amid criticism of an inconclusive international probe into the virus’ origins and new reports of Covid-related illness in the region weeks before it was officially identified, the theory is once again sparking debate.