WASHINGTON — China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is akin to the Soviet Union’s response to Chernobyl, U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien said Sunday.

“The cover-up that they did of the virus is going to go down in history along with Chernobyl,” O’Brien told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine. “We’ll see an HBO special about 10 or 15 years from now.”

Asked about the implications of the pandemic for the newly-agreed-upon U.S.-China trade deal, O’Brien replied that “we’re in a very different world” than when negotiations first began.

“We want good relations with China and with the Chinese people, but unfortunately, we’re seeing just action after action by the Chinese Communist Party that makes it difficult,” O’Brien said. “With respect to the trade deal, we’ll see if they live up to it, but we’re dealing in a new world now with corona.”

“They unleashed a virus on the world that’s destroyed trillions of dollars in American economic wealth that we’re having to spend to keep our economy alive, to keep Americans afloat during this virus.”

Trump suggested earlier this month that he was considering abandoning the deal, signed earlier this year with great fanfare. His remarks came less than 12 hours after U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He — and released a joint statement saying they were optimistic China would keep up its end of the bargain.

The deal requires China to increase purchases of U.S. goods and services by $200 billion above 2017 levels over the next two years. That includes $76.7 billion more in U.S. exports this year and $123.3 billion more in 2021.

Doug Palmer contributed to this report.

Donald Trump “does have a point” about the need to change the World Health Organization, said German Health Minister Jens Spahn, but he urged the U.S. not to leave the body and to wait until after the coronavirus crisis to consider reforms.

Last week, the U.S. president threatened to end funding to the WHO and pull out of it altogether, unless it could demonstrate its independence from China.

Without mentioning China, Spahn told the Financial Times that the U.S. “does have a point — the WHO needs to reform its governance and accountability.”

“We need to figure out exactly where the money goes,” he added.

But Spahn said now was not the right time to undermine the global health body. “In the middle of a crisis, when you’re putting out fires, you can’t talk about reforming the fire brigade,” Spahn said. “First, we have to deal with the crisis, and only then talk about the WHO.”

U.S. contributions to the WHO are critical said Spahn, adding that he would be “very sorry” to see the country leave.

“Of course the U.S., Germany, Europe — we can do a lot on our own, but there are a lot of countries in the world that can’t,” the German politician said. “They need support and they should get it. If Ebola breaks out in another part of the world then we’ll no longer be able to control.”

LONDON — Boris Johnson has a choice: to keep his chief adviser or to maintain the credibility of the U.K. government’s lockdown rules.

That’s the message from a growing number of Tory MPs who are feeling the backlash from their constituents over the alleged multiple breaches of coronavirus lockdown rules by Dominic Cummings, the strategic guru who masterminded the Brexit campaign and Johnson’s path to a thumping election victory.

Two days after the Guardian and Mirror reported that Cummings had driven 250 miles from London to stay at a property next to his parents’ house in Durham while his wife had coronavirus symptoms, the story was still dominating front pages and the morning political shows on Sunday. These included new claims that Cummings had been spotted 30 miles from his parents’ house on Easter day and in Durham on April 19, allegedly on a separate trip up from London.

Tory backbenchers are highly attuned to constituent anger over any suggestion that there is one rule for those in power and another for everyone else. “Cummings must go before he does any more harm,” prominent Brexiteer MP Steve Baker told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday. “If he doesn’t resign, we’ll just keep burning through Boris’ political capital at a rate we can ill afford in the midst of this crisis.”

Downing Street and senior ministers have rallied to Cummings’ defense and the adviser himself insists that he acted “reasonably and legally” because he was acting in the interests of his four-year-old son. But former Tory Immigration Minister Caroline Nokes tweeted there could not be “wriggle room” for some people when it comes to lockdown restrictions, and that she had made her views clear to her whip.

According to a YouGov snap poll, 68 percent of respondents said they thought Cummings had broken the lockdown rules.

“My inbox is rammed with very angry constituents and I do not blame them. They have made difficult sacrifices over the course of the last 9 weeks,” she wrote.

Other Conservative MPs have publicly joined Baker’s call, including Simon Hoare, Roger Gale, Craig Whittaker, Peter Bone and Damian Collins, with the latter saying Cummings has a “track record of believing that the rules don’t apply to him and treating the scrutiny that should come to anyone in a position of authority with contempt.”

According to a YouGov snap poll, 68 percent of respondents said they thought Cummings had broken the lockdown rules, compared to 18 percent who said he had not. Fifty-two percent said they thought he should resign. Meanwhile, an online petition calling for Cummings to be sacked had collected more than 50,000 signatures on Sunday.

This is bad news for Johnson, who is due to face the House of Commons’ liaison committee made up of senior MPs on Wednesday and will certainly be quizzed on why he has stuck by his adviser despite the apparent breaches of the rules.

Fresh allegations ‘completely untrue’

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps toured the TV studios Sunday to deny the latest allegations from the Observer and Sunday Mirror newspapers, telling the BBC’s Andrew Marr that Cummings would not resign.

“You’re right, everyone’s been making huge sacrifices … the key thing is not to keep moving around but we’ve never told people specifically where they have to locate themselves,” he said, adding that “Mr. Cummings decided that the best way to provide that security was to be in a location where the sister and the niece could drop food off on the doorstep.”

He also said Cummings had not returned to Durham afterward for a second time. “When he came back to London, which was on 14th April, he has remained in London since and hasn’t been back to Durham, so there are lots of things being said here which are completely untrue,” he told Sky’s Ridge.

But he conceded he did not know whether Cummings had stopped during his 250-mile journey up to Durham — potentially infecting other people en route. And asked about the alleged witness sighting of Cummings in Barnard Castle on Easter Day, 30 miles from Durham, Shapps told Marr, “I don’t know about whether those reports are true or false.”

Shapps conceded that Cummings’ father had spoken to police — contrary to what the transport secretary had said at a press conference on Saturday. But he said it was the police who had been contacted by Cummings’ father, not the other way round.

Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said there should be an urgent investigation by the Cabinet Office and Johnson should take Sunday’s daily government press conference to provide answers. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party wrote last night to Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill, calling for an urgent inquiry.

Thomas-Symonds told Marr show that “the allegations we’ve seen are extraordinarily serious and they do need to be dealt with.” He urged Johnson to chair the daily press conference Sunday to answer questions directly.