'The View' blames Trump for initial rejection of COVID-19 lab-leak theory: 'Unleashed this xenophobia'

 "The View" claimed Wednesday that former President Donald Trump is responsible for the lack of credibility given to the theory that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Reacting to FBI Director Chris Wray's admission about the origins of COVID-19, Whoopi Goldberg, who refused to say Trump's name, suggested the lab-leak theory wasn't allotted a proper examination in the early days of the pandemic because Trump "made it about Asian people."

"If you-know-who had not started it with that, had he not made it about that," Goldberg claimed, "it probably would have been listened to a lot differently."

Sunny Hostin agreed.

"Because Trump unleashed this xenophobia, he stopped allowing Chinese people to come to the country. He then started calling it the—" Hostin said.

"Don't even say it," Goldberg interjected.

"He kept on saying 'China, China' and doing this thing where I was even concerned, as someone who had lost family members, for [Hostin's husband] to even bring it up," Hostin continued. "That is really sad because when you can’t trust the transparency of your government, where are you?"

FBI Director Says Pandemic Likely Caused By Lab Leak | The Viewwww.youtube.com

In recent days, the U.S. government has begun admitting what many people already believed: COVID-19 did not originate from a wet market in Wuhan, but escaped, perhaps accidentally, from the Wuhan bio laboratory that conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal disclosed a classified intelligence report given to the White House and Congress in which the Energy Department said it believes with some confidence that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan lab.

Then on Tuesday, FBI Director Wray said the FBI's long-term assessment has been that COVID came from the lab.

"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," Wray said on Fox News.

"Here you're talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans. And that's precisely what that capability was designed for," Wray explained. "I should add that our work related to this continues, and there are not a whole lot of details I can share that aren't classified. I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here."