Politics

Trump says China unleashed Covid on world, Xi discourages politicizing virus

United Nations, Sep 22 (efe-epa).- United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged the United Nations to hold China to account for having “unleashed the plague” of Covid-19 on the world while China’s leader Xi Jinping warned against any attempts to politicize the pandemic.

The US Republican leader also repeated his claims that the World Health Organization, from which he has said the US would withdraw, was “virtually controlled by China.”

He made his remarks during a seven-minute, pre-recorded address to the 75th UN General Assembly in New York.

“We will distribute a vaccine, we will defeat the virus, we will end the pandemic, and we will enter a new era of unprecedented prosperity, cooperation and peace,” Trump said.

“As we pursue this bright future, we must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China.”

Trump said that at the beginning of the pandemic, which is thought to have emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, China halted domestic travel while “allowing flights to leave China and infect the world.”

Blaming China and the World Health Organization for their alleged mismanagement of Covid-19 — which Trump labeled the “China Virus” in his speech, despite previously being accused of racism for the same terminology — has become a recurring theme for the US president.

He said: “75 years after the end of World War Two and the founding of the United Nations, we are once again engaged in a great global struggle.

“In the United States, we launched the most aggressive mobilization since the Second World War.”

The US is currently the world’s worst-hit country by the pandemic, registering over 200,000 related deaths and 6.8 million confirmed infections.

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