Donald Trump said Thursday he was considering punitive taxes against China after seeing evidence suggesting that the new coronavirus would come from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, recently singled out for its lack of transparency. "Yes," he replied to a White House reporter who asked, "Have you seen anything so far that makes you seriously believe that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the source "of the pandemic?
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Trump plans to introduce new customs taxes
"It was something that could have been contained in the original place and I think it could have been contained very easily," he said. The President, who did not specify what the evidence was, added that he could therefore impose punitive "customs taxes" on China.
Donald Trump was also asked about another possible retaliatory measure: that the United States does not repay its debt to China. "I can do it differently. I can do the same thing but differently by imposing customs taxes", as he already did during the trade dispute between him and Beijing, he replied.
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"We don't know if it comes from the market or even from another place"
American diplomatic chief Mike Pompeo said Thursday that he did not know "precisely" where the pandemic had started. "We don't know if it comes from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We don't know if it comes from the market or even from another place," he said in an interview with local radio. "We don't have those answers. This is why President Trump has made it clear that we need to have them," added the US secretary of state.
Donald Trump has often attacked China since the start of the epidemic, which has significantly weakened the U.S. economy. But the strength of growth and jobs was one of the main campaign arguments of the republican billionaire, candidate for re-election in November.
He regularly accuses China of lying about the human toll of the epidemic, while his country has more than 63,000 deaths officially linked to Covid-19. He also recently raised the possibility of asking Beijing to pay billions of dollars in compensation for the damage caused by the new coronavirus.