Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Accuses China of a Cover-Up

President Trump stepped up criticism of China, part of an international backlash over the outbreak. President Trump accused the Chinese government of making a “horrible mistake” in its coronavirus response and of then orchestrating a cover-up that allowed the pathogen to spread around the world.

“My opinion is they made a mistake. They tried to cover it, they tried to put it out. It’s like a fire,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday night during a virtual town hall on Fox News. “You know, it’s really like trying to put out a fire. They couldn’t put out the fire.”

China did eventually suppress the disease with a harsh lockdown, but public health experts have criticized Beijing for withholding information and acting too late.

Mr. Trump, who has come under fierce criticism for his handling of the crisis, also issued the latest in a series of accusations from members of his administration laying blame on China for the creation and spread of the virus.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was even more explicit, saying on Sunday that the coronavirus originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the virus first appeared.

That conflicts with the judgment of most virologists and of U.S. intelligence agencies, which say that the virus was “not man-made or genetically modified.”

They're shilling hard for the Communist Party

They are deliberately trying to conflate the claim that Trump is making (and which is totally obvious by the way) that the virus escaped from the lab in Wuhan with the claim that the virus was created through genetic modification in the lab.

Normally I'd think they were doing this to make Trump look bad, but here they are employing the Clinton playbook to defend their paymasters in China. The Clinton playbook was that whenever someone accuses you of something, get Sidney Blumethal or Dick Morris to start a rumor that you did something ten times worse. Then conflate the two, then disprove the bigger fake allegation and say the whole thing was a lie, and by the way what does it matter anymore.

The lying liars at the New York Times are even ignoring their own reporting, which is linked in their own fake news article:

Speaking on the ABC program “This Week,” Mr. Pompeo, the former C.I.A. chief and one of the senior administration officials who is most hawkish on dealing with China, said that “there’s enormous evidence” that the coronavirus came from the lab, though he agreed with the intelligence assessment that there was no indication that the virus was man-made or genetically modified.

This is beyond fake news. This is deliberate head-fake news.

That conflicts with the judgment of most virologists and of U.S. intelligence agencies, which say that the virus was “not man-made or genetically modified.”

In order to escape from a lab, there is no requirement that it be "man-made or genetically modified." So the Times creates a fake narrative that Pompeo didn't say in order to refute an argument that was not made.

Regardless of whether it came from a lab or a meat market, China made no serious efforts to contain it, downplayed how serious it was - with assistance from the WHO - and allowed it spread throughout the world without self-restricting its own travel. This crisis either would not have occurred at all, or would have been considerably less severe had they been up front immediately and warned of the danger from the start.

Precisely. And usually they do it in such a sneaky way you get confused, or even if you keep it straight you think they might have been confused.

But here they have done it so deliberately and so clearly you can see that they are playing a shell game with the truth.

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