With each increasing day, Democrats sound more and more like desperate probationary members of the Chinese Communist Party. When Trump calls out Chinese propaganda (that the U.S. military created the coronavirus) by referring to the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” lefty journalists and Democrats are all to quick to echo the CCP and accuse him of RACISM. When Trump defunded the World Health Organization (WHO) to force it to clean up its act and stop kowtowing to China, Democrats in the House Appropriations Committee went nuclear, comparing this defunding to the Ukraine matter leading to Trump’s impeachment.
Yet sometimes the groveling is truly jaw-dropping. For instance, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said China had absolutely nothing to do with the coronavirus crisis in America. Instead, he placed all the blame on Trump.
“We knew it was a matter of time before it arrived here and it was just shocking how cavalier the administration was,” Murphy said, repeating the false claim that Trump had called the deadly pathogen a “hoax.”
“The reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did,” the senator added. “It’s not because of anything that the WHO did. It’s because of what this president did. He didn’t take this virus seriously.”
"The reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did.
Is not because of anything that the W.H.O. did.
It's because of what this president did."
— @ChrisMurphyCT says the scale of the US outbreak is @realDonaldTrump's fault. pic.twitter.com/i1YRQzAYgQ
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 15, 2020
To be fair, Trump did give conflicting statements about the virus — partially because medical professionals also gave conflicting statements about it. Numerous media outlets — on the left as well as on the right — not only referred to the virus as “the Chinese coronavirus” or the “Wuhan coronavirus” but also downplayed the danger of the virus, saying the common flu is worse.
Experts had been confused about the coronavirus not just because it is new but because the Chinese government repeatedly lied about it, hid news about the pandemic until it was too late, and then seemingly helped the spread of the virus.
Indeed, the British think tank the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) claimed that countries should sue China for breaking international law and demand trillions in damages.
“From the outset, the CCP tried to censor attempts by Chinese citizens to identify and publicise the truth concerning the origins, nature and dangers of the virus. Not all of these censorship efforts succeeded, and a considerable body of independent, corroborative data came to light,” the HJS report explains. “Though all information in the Chinese official media is subject to CCP control and prima facie cannot be trusted, carefully comparing demonstrably factual non-official data with suitably caveated information from official channels makes it possible to construct a coherent, fact-based picture of what actually happened, and hence to allocate responsibility.”
According to unpublished, unconfirmed Chinese government reports seen by the South China Morning Post, the first recorded case of the coronavirus dates to November 17, 2019, weeks before The Lancet‘s claim that the first recorded case came on December 1. By December 8, the SCMP documents recorded between 1 and 5 new cases. By December 27, the SCMP documents showed 181 confirmed cases, and a friend of coronavirus whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang recalled that his medical department first reported the new outbreak to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control on the 27th.
On December 30, Dr. Li sent a message to his friends about the outbreak, and the police responded by investigating his friends. The authorities forced Dr. Li to pledge not to spread “disruptive rumors.” Meanwhile, by that date, the SCMP documents recorded 266 cases. Li would go on to die of COVID-19 after contracting it from his patients. On December 31, China finally reported the outbreak to the WHO, while claiming there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
On January 1, 2020 a Hubei official ordered coronavirus tests halted and samples of the virus destroyed. On January 14, the WHO reported some human-to-human transmission, but quickly retracted the claim, citing Chinese sources. Wuhan was not put under lockdown until January 22-23. On January 26, Wuhan’s mayor admitted that 5 million people had already left the city.
On January 7, the CCP’s journal Qiushi began publishing timelines of President Xi Jinping’s efforts against the outbreak. A transcript of a speech Xi gave on February 3 referred to a statement he had made on January 7 at a meeting of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, when he had “issued requirements for the prevention and control of the new Coronavirus.”
Xi Jinping could have acted to shut down Wuhan as early as January 7, two weeks before the city was shut down. A University of Southampton study found that if strict quarantine measures had been introduced three weeks earlier, the coronavirus’s spread would have been reduced by 95 percent.
As the coronavirus spread across the globe, China’s Communist Party put out a video encouraging Italians to hug Chinese people to prove they weren’t racist — while China was lying about the true danger of the virus. Chinese companies also sent faulty medical gear and coronavirus antibody tests to European countries. Meanwhile, Xi attempts to blame the U.S. for the virus.
Americans have been rightly alarmed to discover just how much the U.S. medical supply chain relies on China — a totalitarian communist country known for its One Child Policy, its brutal oppression of the Muslim Uyghur population, and its stringent crackdown on unofficial religions, including many forms of Christianity. To be clear, people of Chinese descent are not the problem, and Chinese Americans have contributed a great deal to the U.S., but the Chinese Communist Party is a menacing threat to its own people and the world.
Make no mistake, the coronavirus is China’s Chernobyl, and it is flabbergasting that Democrats would cover for China at this time of crisis. For Murphy to say the U.S.’s battle with the pandemic “has nothing to do with China” is frankly beyond the pale.
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Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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