“Let’s see what happens with their investigation. But we’re doing investigations also,”  Trump said at a daily news conference of the White House Coronavirus Task Force on Saturday.

“If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, then there should be consequences,” he said.

As scrutiny of Trump’s response to the outbreak has intensified, congressional Republicans have sought to blame China for the coronavirus outbreak, which emerged from the country’s Hubei province in late 2019.

Some GOP lawmakers have suggested the virus was released from a lab during Chinese experiments, and have floated a bill that would allow Americans to sue China for damages.