'Come clean': US presses China on coronavirus after lab reports
WASHINGTON DC, USA - The United States stepped up its pressure on China over the coronavirus pandemic with President Donald Trump saying his administration was trying to determine where the deadly disease originated from.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also called on Beijing "to come clean" on what it knows. At a White House news conference on Wednesday, Trump was asked about reports of the virus escaping from a laboratory in Wuhan, where the coronavirus first appeared.
"We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation that happened," he said.
Asked if he had raised the subject in his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said: "I don't want to discuss what I talked to him about the laboratory, I just don't want to discuss, it's inappropriate right now."
At least 136,000 people around the world have now died from the disease, with almost 31,000 in the US alone. More than two million people have been diagnosed with the virus, while at least half a million have recovered.
Trump's top diplomat, Pompeo, meanwhile told Fox News Channel after Trump's news conference, "we know this virus originated in Wuhan, China," and noted that the Institute of Virology was only a handful of miles from the market, where people first came down with the disease.
"We really need the Chinese government to open up" and help explain "exactly how this virus spread", Pompeo added.
"The Chinese government needs to come clean," he said.
The state-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology dismissed reports the virus may have been artificially synthesised at one of its laboratories or escaped from its facility as far back as February.
China's foreign ministry noted on Thursday the World Health Organization has said there is no evidence coronavirus was made in a lab.
Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing that WHO officials "have said multiple times there is no evidence the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory".
Trump and Pompeo's comments follow an Associated Press news agency report, which blamed Chinese authorities for failing to immediately disclose information about the human-to-human transmission of the virus, also known as COVID-19, which allowed the virus to spread beyond Wuhan.
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