Pompeo says evidence ties COVID-19 to China lab

Trade tensions between the US and America are on the rise over the origin of the pandemic. Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman breaks down the latest developments.

Video Transcript

- We have been listening to some rhetoric from the President regarding China over the coronavirus and its origins. He's now talking about that perhaps we'll see some increased tariffs on that nation. Rick Newman has been tracking this for us.

So, it seems as though the intelligence is not conclusive about the origins of the coronavirus.

RICK NEWMAN: It sounded like it was conclusive not too long ago. The intelligence community supposedly found no evidence that this virus came from a lab in Wuhan. There is a virology lab there, a well-known one.

But now the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said he's seen evidence that it has, so this is part of what is obviously a political strategy for the Trump administration. So they seem to have made a deliberate choice to try to vilify China to deflect criticism from President Trump's own very slow reaction to this problem.

So this is catching on. This is one of those things that's just kind of becoming a common narrative among Trump supporters, that the Chinese are responsible for this virus and that we need to punish them somehow. That's very oversimplified, and it's not exactly clear how we could punish China without punishing ourselves.

Trump is tariff man, of course, so he loves the idea of using tariffs. But tariffs are a tax on us first. It's a tax on stuff we buy that may, down the road, get reimbursed by the Chinese when they import stuff to us. So that does not look like a great solution, taxing ourselves, not a great idea

- Rick, does the number of deaths that the administration expects, which is going to increase drastically, play to the advantage of the attack on China or against President Trump?

RICK NEWMAN: I guess it depends who you're talking to, Adam I think, I mean, it's reasonable to think that what voters want here in the United States is, OK, we understand there could be a problem with these live-animal markets in China which we thought was the original source of this. But how about we just address the problem here first?

I mean, Trump is going back to the origin of this virus. At the same time, he's getting very low marks for his actual handling of the crisis. And Trump, still, he's-- he seems like he's just going to take a hands-off approach to this all the way through the home stretch, into November. He's kind of detaching himself from whatever the Phase 4 stimulus might be. He wants to start traveling again. That's what he's going to do this week with a trip to Arizona.

So Trump is kind of casting around for a storyline that will work and displace the storyline that he was very slow to respond here. I don't know whether voters are going to buy it.