Chinese state media has launched an aggressive war of words against Mike Pompeo who has been branded "evil" for spreading "groundless accusations" about the origins of coronavirus.
The US Secretary of State has repeatedly claimed that the virus behind today's global pandemic did not pass from animals to human in a wet market, as experts have said.
Instead, he insists it accidentally leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China has spent the intervening months trying to cover it up with a false story. "I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan," he told ABC News on Sunday.