Trump just halted this virus research funding to China, blaming pandemic on lab leak

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

46% : WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump signed an executive order to halt federal funding for a type of biomedical research in China and Iran, aiming to prevent development of another pandemic like COVID-19.
44% : But determining the cause of COVID-19, which killed an estimated 7 million of people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and ground the worldwide economy to a halt, has been fraught politically because of tensions between the U.S. and China.
35% : " "That's how it leaked out, in my opinion, and I've never changed that opinion," Trump said.
30% : After signing the order, Trump recounted his theory on the origins of COVID-19, saying he believed from "day one" that it was caused from a lab leak in China.
28% : "It can leak out innocently, stupidly and incompetently, and half destroy the world," Trump told reporters at the White House.
27% : Mao Ning, spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, told reporters in January that experts from the World Health Organization found it was "extremely unlikely" the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
18% : Trump and some federal agencies have long theorized that the pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which the Chinese deny.
14% : Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who was on hand as Trump signed the order, pointed to a leak from the Wuhan lab as a likely source for the pandemic.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.