On Tuesday the president of the United States urged China to be transparent about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic which originated in Wuhan, China in 2019. Without timelines or details, President Trump said the US will release a report containing the origin of the virus. “We will be reporting very definitively over a period of time”, the president said to reporters. Since the outbreak of the virus in December last year more than a quarter of a million people have died arising from the virus. The US intelligence agencies had been sent in to figure it out if the virus was manmade or modified in a lab. On Sunday, the secretary of state Mike Pompeo said that there was a significant amount of evidence that the virus might have originated in a Chinese laboratory.
Initially, President Trump has praised China over its response to the Covid-19 pandemic but over the recent weeks, the two countries have been on edge with each other. In his speech, Mr Trump said “we want them to be transparent. We want to find out what happened so it never happens again”. President Trump has faced pressure from lawmakers to act against China. The president has also faced a lot of criticism for the way he has handled the crisis arising from the coronavirus pandemic and has accused the Chinese government of being incompetent in handling the virus. According to Senator Ted Cruz, he said “once we recover from the coronavirus pandemic, we must reevaluate our relationship with China. The Chinese government hid the coronavirus outbreak from the world, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of jobs. China must be held accountable”. The World Health Organization has called Mike Pompeo’s statement “speculative” especially after he had a different saying from that of President Trump.
