China can’t be ‘scapegoated’ if it’s really guilty
Marc A. Thiessen says if Trump is personally to blame for our lack of preparedness for the pandemic, so are Obama and Biden.
The blame-Donald Trump-for-everything crowd is accusing Republicans of pointing the finger at China for the coronavirus pandemic to divert attention away from the Trump administration’s response. Rubbish.
Case in point: The front-page headline in Sunday’s New York Times read: “G.O.P. Aiming To Make China The Scapegoat.” Scapegoat? Sorry, it was the Chinese Communist regime, not the Trump administration, that unleashed this virus on the United States and the world through its lies and deception. Americans of all political stripes understand this and are more than willing to put the blame where it belongs. The Harris Poll finds 77 percent say the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the virus, including 90 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats.
By lying to the world and obstructing an earlier global response to the virus, the Chinese Communist Party started this global forest fire. Just as it would be ridiculous to say someone is trying to scapegoat a fire-starter to divert attention from the failures of the firefighters, it is ridiculous to say that President Donald Trump is trying to scapegoat China to divert attention from his administration’s response.
The fact is, no one — including our nation’s top public health experts — knew we were facing a once-in-a-generation pathogen. On Jan. 21, Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview,
“This is not a major threat for the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.” Our government’s smartest medical minds expected this outbreak to be like the SARS, avian flu, swine flu, MERS, Zika and Ebola outbreaks that came before it — a serious public health emergency, to be sure, but one we could handle.
It wasn’t just public health experts who got it wrong. The day after Trump imposed travel restrictions on China, former Vice President Joe Biden accused the president of “hysteria, xenophobia, and fearmongering” — which suggests he would have been even slower to act. On Feb. 24, Nancy Pelosi held a rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown where she said that while “it is sad that what’s happening in South Korea, what’s happening in China,” here in the United States “we feel safe and sound.” And some of the very journalists now trying to pin the blame on Trump were themselves dismissing the threat the virus posed.
Why was everyone so slow to see the coming danger? Because at a time when China’s government should have been alerting us to prepare for an unprecedented contagion, Chinese officials were spreading disinformation that kept the United States and the world in the dark. The only countries that successfully contained the virus were those, like Taiwan, who have experience with Beijing’s disinformation, saw through its lies and took early action.
Despite all this, Trump heeded the advice of our public health experts every step of the way. When Fauci and Deborah Birx recommended that he implement population mitigation measures, he did so — shutting down a booming U.S. economy to protect public health. And the fact is, the decisions that slowed the U.S. response the most were not made by Trump. It was bureaucrats from the Food and Drug Administration who refused to allow private and academic labs to develop coronavirus tests, costing us six crucial weeks in ramping up testing and forcing our country to adopt population-based mitigation. It was scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whose sloppy laboratory practices contaminated the only approved test kits, rendering them ineffective.
And if we are assigning blame to politicians, then recall it was the Obama administration that failed to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile of masks, gowns and respirators after the 2009 swine flu epidemic, and that failed for eight years to implement the George W. Bush administration’s initiative to stockpile 40,000 ventilators for a pandemic. If Trump is personally to blame for our lack of preparedness, so are Obama and Biden.
Ultimately, responsibility for the costs of this pandemic rests with a Chinese regime that intentionally lied about the virus and proactively impeded the U.S. response — refusing to share samples, disappearing doctors who sounded the alarm, and shutting down a Chinese lab that dared to share the genome sequence of the virus. Today, some in the media are arguing that any effort to blame China is a plot to deflect criticism from Trump. They’re wrong. In fact, what is really shameful is that many in the media are so eager to blame Trump that they are willing to deflect criticism from China.