Trump calls for China, WHO to be ‘held to account’ for Covid lab leak

According to the 2024 Republican presidential candidate, "The world has finally woken to the truth about the Wuhan virus. Now it's time to hold China to account."

"The cover-up of COVID-19's origins is one of the greatest scandals in the history of the world," he began. "Millions of people all over the planet have died from the China Virus."

Trump added, "The cost of the outbreak and the lying about its origins is incalculable, some say in excess of $50 trillion."

He continued, saying that now is the time "to hold China—and the corrupt forces who have facilitated this colossal suppression of facts—accountable for the damage they have inflicted upon all of humanity."

According to a recent Wall Street Journal review of a classified intelligence report, the U.S. Department of Energy "has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak" in Wuhan, China.

Days later, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray confirmed in an interview with Fox News that his agency believed the Chinese lab leak hypothesis was the most probable explanation for the origins of Covid-19.

"The facts are now plain for all to see," Trump wrote of the reports ahead of his scheduled speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday, before recalling the critics who came after him for promoting the theory before its mainstream acceptance.

"When I first suggested in early 2020 that the virus may have come from a lab, it was called 'racist,' a 'conspiracy theory,' and a claim for which 'there is no evidence,'" he said.

"The entire globalist establishment—from the World Health Organization, to the media, to Anthony Fauci and the public health authorities, to the corrupt Silicon Valley tech giants, to Joe Biden—worked relentlessly to silence, censor, and shut down any suggestion that the so-called 'lab leak theory' could be true."

As revealed in the "Twitter Files" released by Twitter owner Elon Musk, the social media platform censored information about Covid vaccines under direction from US intelligence agencies and pressure from Pfizer.

"Scientists who called for transparency and investigation were attacked," Trump said. One of the censored experts was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who promoted natural herd immunity over the use of vaccines and lockdown mandates to fight the virus.

"Facebook and Twitter labeled posts related to the theory as 'disinformation,'" Trump continued. "The media mercilessly ridiculed the idea."

The former president went on to go after Biden, who he said "shut down the investigation my administration had launched into the true origins of the China Virus."

"We all know the real reason for these censorship campaigns. The 'lab leak' did not serve their political agendas. So they did the Chinese Communist Party's dirty work, and effectively imposed China's propaganda on the Western world," he continued, before calling for a "reckoning," arguing that the "sinister censorship regimes in the United States and throughout the West must be dismantled and destroyed."

Putting emphasis on the need for free speech, Trump went after the WHO, which "must also be held to account."

According to Trump, the global organization "effectively did China's bidding" by endorsing the "natural origin" theory, and failing to "conduct a thorough inquiry into the possibility that the virus came from a lab."

They "covered up for China at every turn," he wrote, recalling how the WHO strongly advised against his travel ban on China early on in the pandemic, which the GOP candidate said "saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S."

"For this reason, as President, after my detailed requests for specific reforms were ignored, I terminated America's relationship with the World Health Organization," he said, complaining about the $450 million that the US paid WHO per year compared to China only paying $40 million despite having a much larger population.

"They wanted me to come back in very badly," Trump said. "They offered me to come back in for what China pays. I said, 'Some day I might take it, but you have to be admonished.'"

"Not only did Joe Biden re-enter the WHO without getting any meaningful reforms, but he did so at full price, restoring the hundreds of millions of dollars American taxpayers send each year to an organization that badly misled the world in the service of Communist China," he continued, adding that the current presidents' attempt to negotiate to sign a treaty with WHO would give them "sweeping powers any time foreign bureaucrats decide to declare a pandemic."

As reported by Fox News, the WHO's governing body, the World Health Assembly, in December 2021 agreed to negotiate an "international agreement aimed at coordinating pandemic responses after COVID found its way into every country and disrupted the global economy."

The WHO is reportedly hopeful to finalize the treaty with world leaders by May 2024.

Trump went on to argue that "In the event of a real emergency, the treaty would have us ship up to 20 percent of our medical supplies and medications to the WHO for distribution to other countries," calling it an "outrageous globalist scheme" that would "put America and other signatories on the path to surrendering our sovereignty to the whims of foreign public health bureaucrats—the same people who got COVID-19 completely and totally wrong."