U.S. trade adviser links coronavirus to China government
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A food delivery worker wearing a protective face mask to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus rides on a street in Beijing, today. According to state media reports, nearly one hundred thousand delivery workers have to accept the nucleic acid testing, a countermeasure to prevent the spread of the virus in the capital city.
WASHINGTON >> White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is calling the coronavirus a “product of the Chinese Communist Party” and suggesting without evidence it may have been intentionally created by the Chinese government.
Navarro said on today’s CNN’s “State of the Union” that it remains unclear how the virus started and “until we get some information about what happened in those labs or what happened in that wet market, we know that the virus was spawned in China.”
President Donald Trump and his allies have been repeating the unsubstantiated theory linking the outbreak’s origin to a possible accident at a Chinese virology laboratory. U.S. officials describe the evidence as purely circumstantial.
The leading theory is that infection among humans began at an animal market in Wuhan.
Navarro says it’s “open question” whether the virus was purposefully created. He says in his view, the Chinese government is “guilty until proven innocent.”
