The US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs will launch a large-scale investigation into the causes and spread of coronavirus, as well as the role of China and the World Health Organization (WHO) in the fight against the virus, committee chairman Senator Ron Johnson told the “Politico” edition.
According to him, the committee intends to find out why the US stocks were not “better prepared” for the epidemic, why pharmaceuticals and medical equipment are manufactured abroad, and will also study WHO’s response to coronavirus and how the virus was able to spread initially in China.
“How did it all begin? Was there an animal-to-human transmission? Or did it come from a laboratory in China? Perhaps this was the best intentions, attempts to come up with different drugs, treatment methods for coronavirus in general. We need to know what role WHO could play in an attempt to hide the case”, – the Senator said.
Johnson noted that he entrusted Senator Rick Scott to investigate the role of WHO, which, according to the US authorities, did not do enough to find out in China accurate information about coronavirus in the early stages of its spread.
Earlier, the US President Donald Trump again threatened that he could pull the United States out of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Trump criticized both organizations for the fact that, in his opinion, they harm US interests. In particular, according to Trump, the WTO facilitated China’s “unfair” trade actions against the United States, and WHO “was too focused on China”, although it receives the lion’s share of funding from the United States. In this regard, Trump promised to revise WHO funding.