Can U.S. politicians really save lives by ‘attacking China’?

It’s shocking that some politicians and media in the U.S. still focus their attention on shifting the blame rather than saving lives, even as the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues to spread rapidly in the country.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying posts the “anti-China playbook” by U.S. Republicans on Twitter as soon as it was exposed. (Photo/Screenshot of Hua Chunying’s Twitter webpage)

U.S. Republicans have even prepared a detailed “teaching book” on how to shift the blame for its problems in handling the COVID-19 onto China.

“Don't defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban -- attack China,” stated the “teaching book”, a recent memo sent out by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to GOP campaigns.

The 57-page document, exposed by U.S. media, simply advises GOP candidates to pivot to China when asked if the spread of the novel coronavirus is Trump’s fault.

This simple and crude excuse is complete proof that certain politicians in the U.S. don’t care about science and evidence, and are only attempting to manipulate public opinion by confusing right and wrong.

In fact, U.S. politicians including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senator Tom Cotton have been playing the blame game long before the memo was leaked.

These politicians are obsessed with politicizing the origin of the novel coronavirus, and unleashing their imaginations on the so-called safety issues of Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, the Chinese city that was hardest hit during the pandemic.

While claiming that the novel coronavirus that caused the current pandemic may have leaked from the WIV, none of the U.S. politicians who made this serious allegation against China has provided any scientific basis for it.

When the public started to question the U.S. government’s handling of the pandemic, these politicians shamelessly attempted to fool them by saying China and the World Health Organization delayed the U.S.’s response to the crisis.

However, a lie will always be exposed to the public by the truth.

South Korea and the U.S. reported their first cases of COVID-19 infection on the same day, but experienced entirely different trajectories for the disease.

For days, global health experts, including Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of famous medical journal The Lancet, reviewed in detail the timeline of how the pandemic developed, pointing out that the U.S. had received the information about the disease from the WHO immediately after the outbreak.

With over 1 million cases of COVID-19 infection and nearly 80,000 deaths, the U.S. is the country that has been most affected by the pandemic in the world.

Some officials have called the pandemic situation in the U.S. its “Pearl Harbor moment” and “9/11 moment”.

More information about the U.S. government’s gross negligence in handling the early stages of the pandemic is coming to light and the public is getting a better understanding of the facts about the transmission of the disease in the U.S. It would be self-deceiving for certain U.S. politicians to dream of winning people’s support by shifting the blame onto others.

This historic crisis is creating more doubts and leading to reflection on U.S. society, where various parties want to know why the country was so ill-prepared for the crisis and has had to act passively in responding to the pandemic, when it had more than two months to get ready.

The U.S. pandemic response has been “fragmented, chaotic, and plagued by contradictory messaging from political leaders,” pointed out an article published in U.S.-based Science magazine.

Currently, joint efforts and international cooperation are the most effective “vaccine” against the novel coronavirus, and is the only one countries can rely on to fight the pandemic.

The virus knows no boundaries. No one is truly safe unless everyone is safe. In the face of this global crisis, any effort made by anyone to fight the virus in any corner of the world is part of the war between mankind and the pandemic.

Self-deceiving acts such as shifting the blame onto others will never be an effective way to fight the virus, but are a despicable attempt to plague the world with a political virus.

The U.S. must figure out a way to end the political virus in its politicians before they can hope for a victory over COVID-19.