As more agencies finally admit that Covid likely originated in a Wuhan, China laboratory, former President Donald Trump said its time for "China and the corrupt forces who facilitated this colossal suppression of facts" to be held accountable.
In a new 2024 campaign video, Trump said the "damage" China caused by allowing Covid to circulate worldwide exceeds "50 trillion dollars."
"Something has to be done, and it will be done," Trump said.
Earlier this month, Trump said, since he always believed the virus originated with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he was not surprised by the revelations from FBI Director Christopher Wray and the Department of Energy that the Chinese lab was most likely the source of Covid.
“It was a terrible mistake. It came from there and yeah, in some way, there should be something paid to the world,” Trump told reporters before speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Trump at the time estimated that the coronavirus leak cost the world $50 trillion.
“China doesn’t have that $50 trillion or anything close, but something should be done for the world by China because what they put the world through is a terrible thing,” he said.
Wray said federal investigators believe the pandemic likely started with a leak from the Wuhan lab.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News in an interview. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
Democrats and their allies in the media have long insisted the lab leak was a conspiracy theory.
In an op-ed for the Daily Mail on March 4, Trump said, if he is elected in 2024 he’ll push for China to pay damages to countries around the world for the spread of Covid-19.
"Now that the evidence of Chinese culpability is clear to all, we must hold China financially responsible for unleashing this plague upon the world," Trump wrote.
"Joe Biden will not do this. Biden is unbelievably weak on China — perhaps because his family has received millions of dollars from entities linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Yet the need for accountability remains. China's deceptions and lies in the critical early phrase of the outbreak are well documented."
China's "lies and deception killed any opportunity to stop this deadly global catastrophe at the start," Trump wrote. "Add to that the probability that the virus emerged from a Chinese government lab, and may even have been engineered by Chinese government scientists, and it is clear that the nations of the world are not just owed a massive apology; they are owed massive damages."
Trump went on to say that "nothing should be off the table — tariffs, taxes, and a global summit on reparations."
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