Former President Donald Trump said in a recent interview with Sky News Australia that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and claimed it was released due to “gross incompetence.”
Trump said, “Some of the intelligence is classified and I can’t talk about it, but it most likely, and when I say most likely, like 95%, came from the Wuhan lab. I don’t know if they had bad thoughts or whether it was gross incompetence, but one way or the other it came out of Wuhan, it came from the Wuhan lab. I started hearing stories … that there were lots of body bags outside of the lab. I heard that a long time ago. And if they did in fact have body bags, that was one little indication wasn’t it?”
He added, “I think it was probably an accident, I don’t think it was on purpose. If it was, that’s essentially war.”
Trump also shared his own theory about how the pandemic may have started.
“A scientist walked out and had lunch outside in a park or something with the girlfriend, and he had it and she had it,” he said.
“I don’t know if it was patient zero or patient something else, but that’s one theory. I think that it was incompetence. I think that it escaped from the lab through incompetence.”
Trump went on to criticize the World Health Organization and its leader, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, claiming that “the WHO is owned and controlled by China. I dropped out of the World Health Organization. I thought it was ridiculous. They were late, they were wrong. They were like a mouthpiece for China.”
Sky News Australia also interviewed Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who said that Tedros was “deeply beholden” to the Chinese government.
“Dr. Tedros owed his leadership role at the WHO to deals that were cut with the Chinese Communist Party. Dr. Tedros couldn’t have been that next leader without the support of the Chinese Communist Party,” he said, adding that the WHO “weren’t willing to demand from the Chinese Communist Party that they be given access. They failed, they failed because of the absence of backbone and resolve and the world is deeply worse off for this. This was the tragedy, the central tragedy of the end of ’19 and the beginning of ’20. It became political, not scientific. It became driven by personal incentives and not the dataset.”
