WASHINGTON: Former US President Donald Trump on Saturday (local time) called on America and all the nations to demand reparations from China due to the damage caused by COVID-19.
Speaking at the North Carolina Republican Convention, Trump said: "The time has come for America and the world to demand reparations and accountability from the Communist Party of China. We should all declare within one voice that China must pay. They must pay."
He also stressed that the US should immediately take steps to impose a 100 per cent tariff on all Chinese products, which can stop them from pulling their military and move a lot of companies back to the US. The former US President also said that he had a great relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping until the 'China virus'. He also said that China doesn't care much about current President Joe Biden.
"In addition, all nations should work together to present China for a bill of minimum USD 10 trillion to compensate for the damage they have caused and that is a very low number, the damage is far far greater. As a first step, all countries should collectively cancel any debt that they owe to China as a downpayment on reparations," he said at the convention.
"The nations of the world should no longer owe money to China. China has destroyed so many nations... China should owe money to the nations of the world... These nations have been destroyed," Trump added.
Trump also slammed the Biden administration for being 'timid' and 'corrupt', accusing it of shutting down investigation into the origins of COVID-19 earlier. "Joe Biden and his family took millions of dollars from the CCP. They bought him off, they fragrantly lied about it to American voters... the big tech and fake news media did not want to talk about it," he said.
Taking a dig at White House top medical adviser Anthony Fauci, he said: "Fauci said powerfully at the beginning ' no masks', you remember that? No masks, and then he went into masks and then he became a radical masker...but perhaps Fauci has never been more wrong than when he denied the virus and where it came from."
This comes amid a renewed focus on the origins of the virus. An explosive new study has found that Chinese scientists created the virus in a lab in Wuhan, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
Earlier this month, a report by Wall Street Journal had stated that three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care after they fell ill in November 2019, a month before Beijing reported the first patient with COVID-like symptoms.