Moscow, April 14 (Sputnik) The US will hold those ‘responsible’ accountable for the global COVID-19 pandemic that has already caused the deaths of more than 119,000 people worldwide, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview with the German newspaper Bild.
“There’ll be a time to make sure that we all understand what happened and that those who are responsible are held accountable for that. I’m very confident that that process will take place … There’ll be a time for recriminations,” Pompeo said, according to a transcript of the interview published on the State Department website on Monday evening.
Pompeo stated that Washington was committed to locating the source of the disease, and called on Chinese scientists to participate in the process.
“We’ve seen these stories about Chinese wet markets, we’ve seen stories about precisely where this virus originated, and it’s important that the whole world gets this. We want the globe’s best scientists, including Chinese scientists, to be participants in making sure that we evaluate where this began, where it originated, how it was moved around the globe,” the secretary of state said.
As of Monday evening, Johns Hopkins University has registered at least 580,000 cases of COVID-19 in the United States, resulting in more than 23,000 deaths.