Commentary: Washington's politicization of COVID-19 at expense of million lives

NEW YORK, May 16 (Xinhua) -- For the past two and a half years, Washington's political elites, as well as those in the mainstream media, have painted a misleading and erroneous picture of the fights against the COVID pandemic both at home and abroad.

Based on those illusions, Washington believes it has the moral high ground to level baseless accusations against other countries' anti-COVID approaches, even as COVID deaths in the United States have crossed one horrific milestone after another.

Several days before it marked 1 million COVID-19 deaths in the country, the White House issued a statement that defined the current stage as "a moment of renewal -- of lives saved, new jobs created, and new hope for rebuilding America."

It was not the first time Washington portrayed a rosy picture of COVID-19 that contrasted with the brutal reality. When hundreds of Americans were still dying from COVID-19 every day in the middle of last year, and a more virulent strain of the virus, Delta, was spreading swiftly at home and abroad, Washington raced to urge Americans to celebrate the Fourth of July and their "independence" from the infection.

In an article that chronicled what happened over the following four weeks amid the U.S. government's scramble to curb the Delta surge, The Washington Post reported that the surge of Delta cases that overran the country forced the U.S. administration to reckon with their overconfidence, and Washington "took weeks to enact a plan in an attempt to catch up."

On March 1, in his first State of the Union address since taking office, U.S. President Joe Biden claimed that "thanks to the progress we've made in the past year, COVID-19 no longer need control our lives."

In fact, the deadly pathogen killed over 1,900 Americans and infected over 46,000 during the same day Biden delivered the speech. And the so-called "progress made last year" amounted to 34.6 million infections and nearly half a million deaths, with COVID-19 ranking as one of the top three leading underlying causes of death in the country.

While Washington is scrambling to project the nonchalance that the country is back to normal, it is more about political expediency and optics than anything else.

Meanwhile, Washington's political and media elites have gone to considerable pains to present a distorted picture about other countries' fights against COVID-19.

By demonizing other countries' efforts to deploy all available resources to save lives as so-called "restricting individual freedoms and trampling on human rights," U.S. politicians and their media allies have exposed their amnesia, arrogance, irresponsibility, self-contradiction, and even malicious intentions.

Those naysayers are purposefully ignoring what happened in countries that were unable to curb the spread of the virus: collapsed medical systems, short supply of food and massive loss of lives.

So far, global COVID-19 death toll has reached 6.26 million, according to the Johns Hopkins University's dashboard. In a stern warning about the bleak prospect of global fights against COVID-19 in early May, the World Health Organization said that some governments had undercounted the COVID-19 death toll by millions.

Given that the virus has never ceased mutating and new variants are likely to be more transmissible, it is too early for any country to declare victory in the pandemic.

Some people have advocated "herd immunity" as a way out. Yet, numerous examples of recurring illnesses and breakthroughs among the vaccinated have been reported. The outlook is especially dismal in light of recent evidence that the virus's latest variants can easily evade immunity.

Scientists have been quick to develop vaccinations to combat the virus, but none of them can provide complete protection, and no perfect cure is currently available. Traditional tactics of wearing face masks, social distancing, and quarantining infected people remain the most effective way to preserve lives and reduce the pandemic's impact.

Many individuals, including professionals, believe COVID-19 will become a "big flu," and that humans will be able to live with it. However, reality has shown that this could be just wishful thinking.

According to a new study by the University of California, Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people treated for COVID-19 developed Post Acute Sequelae of COVID-19, most commonly known as "Long COVID." Other studies have also found that the virus could damage the brain and other organs of the patients. Patients who have been fighting viral symptoms for months and are still suffering are not uncommon.

Many aspects of the virus remain unknown. Scientists are still studying how the virus spreads, why symptoms vary so greatly, why antibodies vanish in a matter of months, whether more lethal new versions will develop, and so on. These unknown characteristics of the virus suggest that returning to normal life is still a distant prospect.

Even health officials within the Biden administration have publicly acknowledged that the United States might have 100 million COVID-19 infections this winter, with a potentially large wave of deaths and hospitalizations.

Instead of politicizing global COVID-19 fights, Washington should set aside its insidious political agenda and focus on saving lives.