Since the outbreak began, China has been accused of multiple cover-ups and deliberately lying about its coronavirus infection and death rates. Beijing has tried to rebrand itself on the international stage as a leader in tackling the virus but the drumbeat of complaints has been getting louder in recent days and the faulty kits, delivered to the likes of Britain, Spain and the Netherlands, is only exacerbating the problem.

In a blog post on Monday, John Bell, the coordinator of coronavirus testing for Public Health England, said that none of England’s 17 million antibody kits — including the ones bought from China — have performed well.

“We see many false negatives and we also see false positives,” he wrote. “…This is not a good result for test suppliers or for us.”

He added that the antibody tests bought had only able to identify immunity accurately in people who had been severely ill. The antibody tests will be crucial in helping essential workers get back to work.

Ideally, the finger-prick tests would be able to confirm who had already built up immunity to COVID-19 and perhaps let them leave lockdown and return to work.

John Newton, Britain’s new testing chief, told the Times of London that the antibody tests from China were not good enough because they were only able to identify immunity accurately on people who had been severely ill.

“The test developed in China was validated against patients who were severely ill with a very large viral load, generating a large amount of antibodies . . . whereas we want to use the test in the context of a wider range of levels of infection including people who are quite mildly infected. So for our purposes, we need a test that performs better than some of these other tests.”

In response to the news that all of the kits fell short of expectations, the Prime Minister’s Office announced it would push to get a refund.

“If the tests don’t work then the orders that we placed will be canceled and wherever possible we will recover the costs,” the PMO said.

Britain is the latest place that has had issues with equipment and kits bought from Beijing.

Last week, the Netherlands joined Spain, Turkey, Georgia and the Czech Republic in their concerns over masks and test kits. The claims of faulty test kits and other devices came as the number of COVID-19 cases continued to surge in the United States and Europe.

Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering they weren’t working properly. The Netherlands also rejected China-made coronavirus testing kits and protective gear, calling them substandard and questioning the quality of supplies Beijing is selling — at marked-up prices — to the world.

“China creates the poison and sells the solution to it,” foreign affairs expert Gordon Chang told Fox News.

The Trump administration has blasted China’s authoritarian leadership for trying to conceal what it knew about COVID-19 during its earlier days when the virus it is believed could have been contained.

“This is the first time a Chinese ship has hit and sunk boats in our commune this year,” said Nguyen Van Hai, a local official from the Quang Ngai province, a few hundred kilometres from the Paracel Islands.

Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea as its territory and has built artificial islands with military-capable facilities over reefs and outcrops in the area, which are also claimed in part by Vietnam.

Hai said China’s ships hit and sank the fishing boat on Thursday morning before “capturing and detaining the crew” on a nearby island.

Two Vietnamese fishing boats attempted to rescue the eight fishermen, but they were also detained with their ships on the island, state media said, quoting local sources.

China released the eight fishermen and the two Vietnamese rescue boats on Thursday evening.

Local authorities are waiting for them to dock back in Vietnam on Sunday to hear a full report on the case before sending their complaints to higher authorities, Hai said.

In recent years, Vietnam has accused Chinese vessels of attacking Vietnamese fishing boats, with a few incidents corroborated by dramatic videos posted online.

The Paracel Islands are claimed by Vietnam but were occupied by China in the aftermath of a 1974 invasion that killed dozens of Vietnamese.

Beijing says it’s slowly beginning to emerge from the crisis that originated on its soil, while putting its propaganda machine to work to craft a favorable narrative. Weeks after announcing the outbreak, some governments — particularly the United States — are accusing China of purposely failing to inform the public, thereby exacerbating the crisis.

A Chinese doctor who has since died of the virus tried sounding alarms during its early stages. Li Wenliang — who worked in a Wuhan hospital and has since been hailed as a hero — was detained with eight other doctors for posting information about patients with respiratory problems on WeChat, a Chinese messaging platform.

Authorities claimed the doctors were spreading “unverified information” as reason for their detention. Other doctors were reprimanded and told to stop posting online about the virus. Li was released after signing a document admitting he committed “illegal acts.”

He eventually contracted the virus and died in February.

“If society had at the time believed those ‘rumors,’ and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today,” the Supreme People’s Court said of Li’s detention. “Rumors end when there is openness.”

SARS

Accusations of covering up unfavorable news to protect its image are nothing new to the Chinese Communist Party, which has a penchant for secrecy that has hampered containment efforts in the past.

When the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic broke out in the country in late 2002, the Chinese government was accused of failing to take action for several months. The virus was believed to have originated from wet markets of the Guangdong province before spreading to major cities.

It took the government four or five months to disclose the outbreak, which claimed the lives of more than 770 people in 30 countries.

Tainted milk

Chinese authorities reportedly ordered Sanlu Group Co, the maker of infant formula that was embroiled in a string of recalls after its tainted milk powder was linked to kidney stones in infants and at least four deaths, to cover up the scandal for fear of igniting social unrest.

Parents who tried warning of the poisoned milk were thwarted by an unresponsive bureaucracy, according to the New York Times, and journalists who heard about the sick children were blocked from covering the story during the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

A massive outcry stemmed from how the public remained uninformed for months as parents gave their children tainted formula. Many of the corporations involved were blamed, but so were government officials who were criticized for the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to maintain control rather than fix a broken regulatory system.

In all, more than 300,000 babies became sick. Sanlu’s chairwoman was given a life sentence for doing nothing to stop the sale and production of the milk after learning it was dangerous. Several other executives were also jailed and a dairy farmer and milk supplier were executed.

Tiananmen Square massacre

China’s need to control information also extends to well-known events. In 1989, 1 million pro-democracy protesters gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to force the government to move away from decades of one-party rule.

Weeks later, Chinese troops entered the square and opened fire on the unarmed protesters. Hundreds, if not thousands, are believed to have died, but no official death toll was ever made public.

China has since censored the incident through draconian Internet restrictions and the elimination of any reference to the massacre.

Great famine

China’s Great Famine claimed tens of millions of lives as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward transitioned the country into a communist society amid rapid industrialization in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Britain.

From 1958-61, Mao pushed harsh harvest quotas with primitive Soviet farming techniques.

Combined with the persecution of farmers who failed to produce enough food, the country descended into a dark period where hunger impacted millions. Discussions of some Mao-era policies that revive national traumas have been banned in China in an effort to whitewash its history.

To talk about the famine at the time was deemed counterrevolutionary and subject to punishment from the state, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Yang Jisheng, a journalist who wrote a 1,200-page account of the famine, was banned from leaving China in 2016 to travel to the U.S. to accept a Harvard University prize for his work.

His 2008 book, “Tombstone,” is also banned in China.

China and Russia continue to use the global coronavirus crisis to spread false reports and other online disinformation, according to the latest update published Wednesday from the European External Action Service’s team dedicated to highlighting such digital tactics.

The group, called East Stratcom and whose mandate includes debunking fake news originating from Russia, said there had been more than 150 cases of pro-Kremlin disinformation linked to the global health crisis since late January. That includes claims that the European Union was on the verge of collapse because of national governments’ fumbled responses to COVID-19.

Across social media, these narratives, often promoted by Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik, have also highlighted how the Kremlin has been better prepared than its Western counterparts, and how some EU governments welcomed aid provided by both Moscow and Beijing.

So far, these messages have yet to break through to a wider audience, mostly staying within Russian- and Chinese-friendly audiences online, particularly in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece.

But as the global crisis grows at pace, such efforts — both from state-backed groups and domestic EU actors — are linking the coronavirus pandemic with existing misinformation themes, including the targeting of migrants, minority groups and the long-term credibility of the EU, according to the authors of the update.

“In the EU and elsewhere, coordinated disinformation messaging seeks to frame vulnerable minorities as the cause of the pandemic and to fuel distrust in the ability of democratic institutions to deliver effective responses,” the officials wrote in their analysis. “Some state and state-backed actors seek to exploit the public health crisis to advance geopolitical interests, often by directly challenging the credibility of the European Union and its partners.”

Both Russia and China have rejected accusations that they have spread false reports and disinformation online.

In response to the public health crisis, EU officials and executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter have tried to clamp down on the worst offenders, with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, urging both tech companies and the public to do more to stop the spread of disinformation online.

Confronted with demands for action, social media giants have beefed up their response to the crisis, including promoting official advice, removing harmful material and using artificial intelligence tools to track false reports. Still, many policymakers remain unsatisfied, and misinformation remains rife on these digital platforms.

“Those spreading disinformation harm you,” von der Leyen said in an online video statement on Tuesday. “Disinformation can cost lives.”

In recent weeks, China and Russian had attempted to undermine Europe’s response to the crisis, according to the analysis. That included promoting messages, both within the 27-country bloc, as well as the Western Balkans, North America and elsewhere, that the EU was not tackling the pandemic, that it was betraying its core values in the region’s response and that Moscow and Beijing were the only ones providing a robust strategy to combat COVID-19.

Yet despite these state-backed initiatives, most online falsehoods about the coronavirus still originate from average EU citizens looking for advice, guidance and support from others on social media, according to several independent disinformation experts who were not connected to the EU’s latest analysis.

Canadian physician Dr. Bruce Aylward, an aide to WHO director-general Dr.Tedros Adhanom, sat down for a video interview with RTHK about the coronavirus outbreak where he was asked whether the organization would “consider Taiwan’s membership.”

For several seconds, Aylward sat in silence.

“Hello?” the reporter asked.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear your question Yvonne,” Aylward responded.

“Okay, let me repeat the question,” she said.

“No, that’s okay. Let’s move to another one then,” the WHO official told her.

The reporter doubled down, saying she was “curious” to talk about Taiwan as well as the ongoing pandemic, but Aylward quickly hangs up.

After calling him again, the reporter asked about what his thoughts were to Taiwan’s response to the outbreak.

“Well, we’ve already talked about China,” Aylward answered. “And you know, when you look across all the different areas of China, they’ve actually all done quite a good job.”

Critics slammed Aylward and WHO for what they suggested was the global organization kowtowing to China.

“Aylward’s behavior reminds us that either we remove #China’s pernicious influence in multilateral institutions like the #WorldHealthOrganization or the world’s free states defund them and start over,” author Gordon Chang reacted.

It is an embarrassing scene, journalist Ezra Cheung said. “Ironically, despite being so close to China, Taiwan manages to keep the #coronavirus infection and fatality rate low.”

“This is really stunning. Beijing’s power over the speech of a Canadian WHO official,” Axios reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian tweeted.

“When exactly did the WHO become a front for Chinese propaganda?” Grabien media company founder/editor Tom Elliott asked.

WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lijian Zhao, a Chinese politician serving as deputy director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department, is heading a propaganda campaign to shift the blame for the worldwide coronavirus onto the United States, Italy and other countries.

He made headlines last week after taking comments from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of context, claiming the U.S. Army purposefully brought the coronavirus to China.

The State Department has vehemently denied that claim, and the World Health Organization’s investigative report on the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in February, found the novel disease originated in meat markets the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China in November.

Zhao’s latest effort to spread misinformation was highlighted Wednesday after a woman identified only by her first name, Beatrice, told the Daily Beast she wrote a three-tweet series about her “shower thoughts” earlier this month.

She is not a doctor, nurse, or epidemiologist – and said she wrote as a young mother from Albuquerque simply wondering aloud whether coronavirus had arrived in the U.S. earlier than initially detected.

“This isn’t a conspiracy tweet but I really think COVID-19 has been here in America for awhile. Do you guys remember how sick everyone was during the holidays/early January? And how everyone was saying they had the “flu” and the flu shot “didn’t work”?” the woman, whose Twitter name is “the lizard king” @mamaxbea, wrote on March 14, in the first of three tweets.

That message went viral a week later. Zhao retweeted and quoted Beatrice on March 22, sending her Twitter following skyrocketing.

Beatrice’s other two tweets in the series said:

“Most people did have flu-like symptoms combined with respiratory infections. Also I remember a lot of healthcare workers (both here and on Facebook) posting about how awful RSV was this year and how there were lots more respiratory cases than in years past.”

“Idk. I’m not an expert. I’ve just been thinking about it since a lot of people tested negative for the flu and there wasn’t a test for COVID-19 yet. Obviously it’s serious either way and please stay home/wash your hands/stop panic buying the toilet paper/etc.”

Last week, President Trump received pushback for repeatedly saying at press conferences that it was a “Chinese virus” that caused the pandemic, which prompted the Chinese state-run media to dub the worldwide outbreak the “Trump plague.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo summoned the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Communist Party, Yang Jiechi, for a conference call last week to rebuke Zhao and several other Chinese diplomats taking his lead for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus’s origin on Twitter.

Sharing a video from a congressional hearing with the CDC, Zhao wrote: “CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”

In response to his message, Pentagon press secretary Alyssa Farah condemned the Chinese Communist Party for using American media to spread conspiracy theories.

“As a global crisis, COVID-19 should be an area of cooperation between nations. Instead, the Communist Party of China has chosen to promulgate false & absurd conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 blaming U.S. service members. #ChinaPropaganda,” she said.

Chinese state-run media also reportedly has taken comments made by Italian doctor Giuseppe Remuzzi out of context. Remuzzi spoke to both NPR and Italian broadcaster La7 Attualità about the outbreak of the coronavirus in the northern Lombardy region in Italy, which is now the worst-affected country in the world. His quotes were then translated and posted to Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, to place the blame on Italy for the outbreak.

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and Banks led the drive to round up co-sponsors for the resolution Monday which so far has seen Reps. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., Austin Scott, R-Ga., Trent Kelly, R-Miss., Brian Babin, R-Texas, Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., Greg Steube, R-Fla., Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., Mike Rogers, R-Ala., Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., and Jason Smith, R-Mo., sign on.

This resolution comes as tensions between the U.S. and China are running high over the Chinese government’s high-powered propaganda campaign seeking to paint itself as the global coronavirus savior while several U.S. officials and politicians, including President Trump, have taken to calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” in reference to its origins in Wuhan, a city in China.

The resolution argues that the Chinese government “made multiple, serious mistakes in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak that heightened the severity and spread of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which include the Chinese government’s intentional spread of misinformation to downplay the risks fo the virus, a refusal to cooperate with international health authorities, internal censorship of doctors and journalists and malicious disregard for the health of ethnic minorities.”

Specifically, the resolution suggests that China was aware of a novel coronavirus strain in mid-December, with multiple doctors raising the alarm among the Chinese medical community before the new year. But, the resolution says, Chinese authorities muzzled those doctors, including on Jan. 3 forcing one to “sign a letter confessing that he had made ‘false comments’ that ‘severely disturbed the social order.'”

The largely Republican group of representatives also condemns China for its treatment of the Uyghur Muslims, a religious minority from which U.S. government officials believe China has rounded up between 800,000 and 2 million people, placing them in reeducation camps that function largely as forced labor camps.

They condemn “the detention of over 1,000,000 [Uyghur] Muslims and other ethnic minorities in ‘re-education camps’, whose crowded and unsanitary conditions makes the camps hotspots for viral disease and leave prisoners at an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.”

Finally, the resolution lays out the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign to paper over its responsibility for the rapid spread of the coronavirus, specifically mentioning its lack of cooperation with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a foreign ministry spokesman who “claimed that COVID-19 originated in the United States and that the United States army brought the virus to Wuhan to wage biological warfare” on China; and China’s move to expel journalists with the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times.

The move to expel journalists caught the attention of the highest levels of the U.S. government last week, with the National Security Council responding with harsh words and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is not a co-sponsor of the Banks resolution, rebuking the Chinese government.

“This brazen assault on the free press by the Chinese Communist Party is appalling,” Schiff tweeted March 17. “That it occurred in the midst of a public health crisis, when the flow of unbiased information to the public is critical, is also dangerous. China’s attempts to silence the truth must not stand.”

Banks himself has also weighed in on the expulsion of the American journalists.

“The Chinese Communist Party are masters at disinformation,” he tweeted last week. “They’ve lied about coronavirus before. They kicked out American news outlets this week because they know we don’t help push their propaganda. News outlets should be wary of ‘facts’ they’re pushing.”

It also mentions a study from the University of Southampton which claims “if China had taken action 3 weeks earlier, the spread of coronavirus would be reduced by 95 percent globally.”

The resolution demands that China backtrack on its decision to kick out the American journalists, free the Uyghur Muslims in its camps, and asks for a retraction from the World Health Organization, which has been accused of carrying China’s water over its coronavirus response, over comments made by its leaders praising China for “leadership” and “transparency.”

It is unclear when or if the resolution will receive a vote on the House floor.

This time it’s from a prominent Chinese official who is using articles written by the American media to fuel Beijing’s propaganda machine as the tit-for-tat between the two superpowers escalated Monday over COVID-19’s origin and which country’s lack of action is responsible for turning the novel coronavirus into a global pandemic.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted, “US CDC admitted some #COVID19 patients were misdiagnosed as flu during the 2019 flu season. 34 million infected & 20,000 died. If #COVID19 began last September, & US has been lack of test ability, how many people would have been infected? US should find out when patient zero appeared.”

Zhao also retweeted a March 21 USA Today article that claims race and global health experts believe that describing COVID-19 as a “Chinese” virus exacerbates xenophobia and that President’s Trump’s repeated use of it, despite pressure from China to stop, only makes the situation worse as the bodies pile up worldwide.

Zhao tweeted or in some cases retweeted stories from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS News that have all reported on America’s response to the global crisis and Trump’s insistence that it’s China’s fault.

The war of words between the two governments has turned particularly dirty in recent days as China tries to reposition itself as a global leader and the U.S. struggles to find an effective way to muzzle the monster virus.

Trump, as well as other government officials in the U.S. State Department, have openly taunted China. They argue Beijing blocked news of the coronavirus for months, silencing doctors and critics whose early alarms could have saved thousands of lives.

The U.S. has also slammed the communist-run nation for trying to manipulate the narrative and grab the global spotlight as the only nation that is prepared to provide humanitarian relief to the other hard-hit COVID-19 countries.

First, there is an effort to magnify the scale and scope of China’s mitigation efforts. Hitherto, China had used its economic might and political heft to ensure that the World Health Organization (WHO) kept Taiwan out of the membership of the world body. After the virus outbreak, Beijing has also been able to prevent any WHO criticism of China’s actions. A joint WHO-China report on the coronavirus disease was practically hagiographic in tone, talking about how China had “rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history” and that the measures China has adopted are “the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans.”

As impressive as all this sounds, it is the case that as with the SARS epidemic of 2002-2004 that originated in China, the global spread of Covid-19 is directly attributable to the fact it was not contained within China in the early stages. Chinese political exigencies initially dictated a cover-up of the outbreak of the disease was the best way forward. China’s ‘report card’ is therefore, ‘mixed’ at best and it is probably too early even to say yet that China has completely stopped the spread of the virus.

Second, even if it might not be schadenfreude, China has in recent weeks highlighted the struggles of other countries in dealing with their own outbreak and attempted to pay back in kind for the criticism it copped in the early days of the epidemic.

For instance, it quoted the WHO Director-General’s March 14 comment that more coronavirus cases were being reported each day outside of China than the latter had reported at the epidemic’s peak, and that Europe had become the new global epicentre of the disease. Chinese media has highlighted the US’ “overconfidence and lack of knowledge on the virus” that stopped it from preventing the virus from spreading. Part of this exercise reflects also in the highlighting of cases of Covid-19 now entering China from overseas.

Third, there is an increasing effort to advertise China’s contribution to helping other countries fight Covid-19. China has sent medical aid and offered training to several countries from Iraq to Italy, and Iran to the Philippines. It has also highlighted without fail the gratitude each of these has apparently expressed to China for such aid.

Meanwhile, Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s philanthropic foundation as well as the company’s own foundation have planned donations of medical equipment to every country in Africa. Ma had earlier also announced a donation of 500,000 coronavirus testing kits and 1 million masks to the US.

Fourth, is a desire to underline the robustness and legitimacy of the Chinese political system. The earlier WHO-China report, for instance, highlighted the “sincerity and dedication” of not just the medical personnel and scientists but also of Chinese “Governors and Mayors”, thus indirectly absolving the CCP leadership of its mistakes. Criticism of the US, while often warranted, has also involved references to the Chinese central government’s “decisive measures” as well as advice to the US — one of the first modern federal states — on “strengthen[ing]… coordination” between the US federal and state governments.

References in the report to the “community grid management system in China” and its role in fighting the 2019-nCov while accurate, also elide over the fact that it is the same system that also aids and abets draconian surveillance and control measures over minority ethnic populations in Tibet and Xinjiang.

The pandemic is also seen as offering an opportunity for China to push CCP General Secretary and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rhetoric of a “community of common destiny” — part of the narrative of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — as a way of framing China’s help to the outside world. Calling Xi, “commander-in-chief of China’s war against COVID-19” now that the epidemic is apparently within control inside China is also about reinforcing not just his leadership supremacy at home but offering him as a model for other leaders and peoples around the world.

Finally, there is now an active Chinese effort to deflect blame and spread misinformation. The most prominent part of this campaign has been the effort to somehow pin the blame for the origins of the virus on the US. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, formerly Deputy Chief of Mission in Islamabad, has unashamedly pushed the narrative that the novel coronavirus was introduced into China by the US military and has incoherently — but successfully, going by the number of retweets — linked proceedings in the US Congress to his conspiracy theory. China has even gone after Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America’s most prominent writers and the 2010 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, saying that his claim of the novel coronavirus “coming from China” was “inaccurate”.

The sophistication and spread of the Chinese propaganda campaign shows how seriously its rulers take their country’s image abroad and the importance of this image to maintaining their hold on power at home.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party have been accused of silencing doctors and critics in the early stages of the coronavirus, costing thousands of lives.

Now that they have seemingly turned the corner in tackling the virus at home, the communist-run nation has now positioned itself as the country ahead of the coronavirus curve, and has routinely made unsubstantiated claims that the U.S. is behind the crisis.

In turn, President Trump has routinely referred to coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”.

Despite no longer seeing eye to eye with President Trump, Bolton, a notorious hawk, took China to task Saturday morning for their role in the spread of the virus.

“China silenced coronavirus whistleblowers, expelled journalists, destroyed samples, refused CDC help, and concealed counts of deaths and infections. It’s fact there was a massive coverup. China is responsible. The world must act to hold them accountable,” the former U.N. ambassador tweeted.

China has been mounting a very public — and largely successful — humanitarian campaign to come across as a strong world leader.

China’s private and public sectors are working in lockstep to fast-track aid to countries that are in desperate need of it. Earlier this week, Xi pledged to send more medical experts to Italy, a country on track to surpass China in the number of coronavirus-related deaths when the numbers are tallied at the end of Thursday.

However, President Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric against China, blasting its government for its claim that the U.S. military planted the virus in Wuhan.

Critics have condemned the president’s rhetoric as “racist” and “xenophobic” while defenders insist it reflects the origin of the virus and how the Chinese government is responsible for mishandling the outbreak.