Prez rips China ‘incompetence’ for killer COVID
President Trump on Wednesday blamed China’s “incompetence” for allowing the novel coronavirus to spread around the world and kill more than 320,000 people.
“Some wacko in China just released a statement blaming everybody other than China for the Virus which has now killed hundreds of thousands of people,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
“Please explain to this dope that it was the ‘incompetence of China’, and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing!”
The president didn’t name the source of the finger-pointing statement from China. But China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Trump of trying to make the World Health Organization a scapegoat over his “incompetent response” to the pandemic.
“The US tries to use China as an issue to shift responsibility and bargain on its international obligations to the WHO,” Zhao said in response to a letter from Trump to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“It is futile. Currently, COVID-19 is still spreading in the US and many other places,” Zhao said, adding that Trump and other US politicians should stop the blame game and work with the international community.
Trump, during a White House Cabinet meeting on Monday, said he considers it a “badge of honor” that the US has more coronavirus cases than any country in the world and chalked it up to all of the testing his administration has done.
“Really, it’s a badge of honor. It’s a great tribute to the testing and all of the work that a lot of professionals have done,” he said. “So if we were treating a million people instead of 14 million people, we would have far fewer cases.”
The US has more than 1.5 million coronavirus cases and the death toll is now more than 93,000.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week praised Taiwan’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“We have a shared vision for the region — one that includes rule of law, transparency, prosperity, and security for all,” Pompeo said in a statement released Tuesday.
“The recent Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for the international community to see why Taiwan’s pandemic-response model is worthy of emulation.”
Pompeo a day earlier had condemned the exclusion of Taiwan from WHO’s annual meeting, saying it proved US allegations that the UN body was under the Chinese Communist Party’s thumb.
The WHO member states at the annual meeting delayed discussion on whether to grant observer status to Taiwan, which Beijing considers a province awaiting reunification and seeks to exclude from all international organizations.
Pompeo said WHO’s Tedros “had every legal power and precedent” to include Taiwan in the meeting.
“Yet he instead chose not to invite Taiwan under pressure from the People’s Republic of China,” Pompeo said in a statement.
Trump has been highly critical of Beijing’s response to the pandemic, blaming China for using its influence with WHO to downplay the severity of the virus and for failing to accurately report the number of cases in the country after the initial outbreak in December.
Trump threatened to permanently halt US funding for WHO unless the United Nations agency commits to “major substantive improvements within the next 30 days.”
If not, “I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization,” Trump wrote to Tedros on Monday.