Washington: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday said the Trump administration knows enough to be confident that the deadly coronavirus emerged from a laboratory in China’s Wuhan.
“I cannot say much about the intelligence we have collected with respect to this. But we know enough now to be confident of this,” he said in an interview to Fox News.
Pompeo said he has seen evidence that this likely came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Happy to see other evidence that disproves that. We should get to the bottom of it. That is why we have been asking for months now to give Westerners access to this information,” he added.
More than 70,000 Americans have died due to coronavirus and over 12 lakh tested positive for COVID-19.
“What has taken place here did not have to be. We know this virus came from Wuhan, China. We know that the Chinese knew about this at least by December and did not act fast enough, that the World Health Organization, at the behest of the Chinese, failed to declare this a pandemic in a timely fashion,” Pompeo alleged.
“These are the kind of things that caused this problem. And I must say, even today, as I sit here, as we do this interview, we still do not have the information we need. We still continue to implore the Chinese government to turn over the samples to allow Westerners in to look at these labs,” he said.
“We still need information not only to work on this particular crisis, but to do everything we can to take down the risk that something like this could happen again,” Pompeo said.
