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Donald Trump Says Joe Biden 'Is Bowing Down to China' by Not Investigating COVID Origins

Newsweek 12/29/2021 John Feng

© NICHOLAS KAMM/Scott Olson/AFP via Getty Images/Getty Images LEFT: President Joe Biden speaks with the National Governors Association about his administration’s COVID-19 response at the White House in Washington, D.C., on December 27, 2021. RIGHT: Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on October 9, 2021, in Des Moines, Iowa. In a newsletter to supporters on December 28, 2021, Trump accused Biden of "bowing down to China" by failing to find the virus's origins.

Donald Trump has accused President Joe Biden of "surrendering" to COVID-19 and joining China's "coverup" of the virus' origins by failing to put pressure on Beijing.

In a lengthy year-end newsletter to his supporters on Tuesday, the former president praised his administration's coronavirus response and concluded that he handled the pandemic "exceptionally well." "It's not even close," he wrote.

More than two years after SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the world is no closer to knowing the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, a disease that has now killed more than 819,000 Americans and claimed more than 5.4 million lives worldwide.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said it was "so obvious" that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. In August, however, the Intelligence Community (IC) found evidence of the so-called "lab leak" theory to be inconclusive, after Biden gave agencies 90 days to have another look.

In his newsletter, the former president accused Biden of "bowing down to China" and joining Beijing's coverup.

"The Biden administration has continually refused to hold China accountable for its role in the deadly spread of the coronavirus, opposing President Trump's demand that China pay trillions of dollars for the damage it has caused."

Trump homed in on the U.S.'s reported COVID-19 death toll, which remains the highest in the world and has more than doubled since Trump left office in January 2021.

"One year in, Joe Biden is a failed president who has surrendered to the virus and broken his number one promise to the American people: to end the pandemic once-and-for-all," Trump said. He suggested Biden "should be removed from office."

Biden's immediate challenge is to address a shortage of at-home rapid tests while continuing to vaccinate the nation—only 61.8 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated so far. Trump called the lack of access to tests a "national scandal."

On Monday, Biden said he would back state governors as they battle the Omicron variant—now the dominant strain in the U.S.—over the holiday period.

His administration has backed the WHO's next phase of origin tracing, which includes another look at the environment surrounding Wuhan as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. China has expressly rejected the proposal while also pushing its own conspiracy theory about COVID-19 being an American bioweapon.

Following the IC's inconclusive origins review in August, Biden criticized Beijing for withholding critical information "from the beginning" of the pandemic. Chinese officials "have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it," he said.