Trump Calls for China to Pay Covid Sanctions in the Amount of ‘Ten Trillion Dollars’
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Former President Donald Trump is claiming vindication over the Covid-19 lab-leak theory, and calling for China to pay massive economic sanctions as a result.
In a statement released Thursday afternoon, Trump claimed that “everyone” is beginning to say he’s “right” about the theory. (President Joe Biden stated last week that the U.S. intelligence community “has not reached a definitive conclusion” on the origin of the virus. While the theory that the Covid pandemic has its origins in a lab leak has become more mainstream in recent weeks, it has not been proven.) Specifically, Trump pointed to the emails of Dr. Anthony Fauci, newly made public after a FOIA request, as proof of China’s complicity.
“The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore,” Trump said. “China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!”
The former president was likely referring to a Feb. 1, 2020 exchange with Hugh Auchincloss, Fauci’s top deputy at the NIAID. In one email, Fauci attached a paper from the journal Nature Medicine titled: “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.” Auchincloss’s response has been held up by conservatives to cast doubt on Fauci’s repeated sworn testimony that the U.S. did not fund so-called “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH,” Auchincloss wrote to Fauci. “Not sure what that means since [Top NIAID official Dr.] Emily [Erbelding] is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”
“OK,” Fauci replied. “Stay tuned.”
China’s entire 2020 GDP, according to the World Bank, is just north of $23 trillion. So Trump is calling for nearly half of that to be paid in sanctions.
