Pompeo pushes new claim of China covering up origin
Washington, US - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged on Friday there were COVIDlike illnesses among staff at a Chinese virology institute in autumn 2019, casting further blame on Beijing as health experts arrived in the country to probe the pandemic’s origins.
The top US diplomat in a statement urged the World Health Organization team that landed on Thursday in Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first detected, to ‘press the government of China’ on the ‘new information’.
“The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the (Wuhan Institute of Virology) became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” Pompeo said.
He said this contradicted reports that none of the staff at the institute had contracted COVID-19 or related viruses.
“Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one,” Pompeo said.
COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019 and has since billowed out across the world killing more than two million people so far, infecting tens of millions and eviscerating the global economy.
The outgoing administration of Donald Trump has consistently blamed China for COVID19, which has killed 390,000 people in the United States, with the President routinely calling it the ‘China virus’.