Former President Donald Trump was widely criticized for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has escalated to hundreds of thousands of Americans dead in a span of a year since it broke out. Having taken to blame China for the emergence of the pandemic, Trump said that the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan.
Speaking on Dan Bongino’s radio show this week, the former president was pressed on a report regarding the suspected origins of the global pandemic by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece said that the virus first came from a lab in Wuhan that was accidentally leaked to the public. The piece cited a report from the US intelligence community, that has since reignited a debate of the disease’s origins.
Trump said that there was no need to use the term “potential” when it came to touching on the mysterious origins of the pandemic that has killed millions of people all over the world. The Trump administration and many Republicans have pushed the idea that the virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
“I think it came from the lab without the word ‘potential’… I have very little doubt – and I mean very, very little doubt that it came from a lab,” said the former president.
The US also published a report days before Trump left office in January, that revealed several researchers from the Wuhan lab were sick and hospitalized in the fall of 2019, before the first known case of the outbreak. The symptoms of those affected were in line with COVID-19 and seasonal illnesses. China has since denied allegations of a virus leak from the lab in Wuhan.
In an interview on Newsmax, Trump recalled that he would do the opposite of what top infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci would recommend. Trump and Dr. Fauci have often butted heads over information regarding the pandemic, which also led to GOP lawmakers criticizing the infectious diseases expert. Trump would also falsely claim that Dr. Fauci warned that a COVID-19 vaccine would take years to make or would not happen at all.
“Remember I closed our country to China way much earlier than Pelosi or anybody wanted it to happen,” said Trump, referring to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Including Dr. Fauci, who I always got along with pretty well but I usually did the opposite of what he wanted.”