US President Donald Trump has appeared to undercut his own intelligence agencies by suggesting he has seen evidence coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory.<\/p>\n
Earlier the US national intelligence director’s office said it was still investigating how the virus began.<\/p>\n
But the office said it had determined Covid-19 “was not manmade or genetically modified”.<\/p>\n
China has rejected the lab theory and criticised the US response to Covid-19.<\/p>\n
Since emerging in China last year, the virus has killed 230,000 people worldwide including 63,000 in the US.<\/p>\n
Simple ways you can help during the pandemic<\/p>\n
Has US tested more than rest of world combined?<\/p>\n
The pandemic has seen at least 3.2 million people infected, a million of them Americans, since the virus spread from the city of Wuhan.<\/p>\n
What did Trump say?<\/p>\n
At the White House on Thursday, Mr Trump was asked by a reporter: “Have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus?”<\/p>\n
“Yes, I have. Yes, I have,” said the president, without specifying. “And I think the World Health Organization [WHO] should be ashamed of themselves because they’re like the public relations agency for China.”<\/p>\n
Asked later to clarify his comment, he said: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump has appeared to undercut his own intelligence agencies by suggesting he has seen evidence coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory. Earlier the US national intelligence director’s office said it was still investigating how the virus began. But the office said it had determined Covid-19 “was not manmade or genetically modified”. China has rejected the lab theory and criticised the US response to Covid-19. Since emerging in China last year, the virus has killed 230,000 people worldwide including 63,000 in the US. Simple ways you can help<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":20143,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20144,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20142\/revisions\/20144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}