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BEIJING / WASHINGTON: With Covid-19 (coronavirus) cases and deaths every day, the United States government has stepped up attempts to fan the flames of rhetoric against China to divert attention from its direct responsibility for the crisis.
The number of Covid-19 deaths in the country reached 66,369 as of Saturday night, with total infections at 1,132,539, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE).
Rather than doing everything possible to save as many Americans as possible, the administration of President Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress are working hard to frame Beijing as the original culprit and use China as a scapegoat for their own steps. false.
“Don’t defend Trump, apart from the travel ban on China: attack on China,” has advised a detailed memo sent by the Republican National Senate Committee to Republican campaigns, urging Republican candidates to address the Covid-19 pandemic. aggressively attacking China.
The 57-page strategy paper, recently obtained by Politico, includes advice on everything from linking Democratic candidates to the Chinese government to dealing with accusations of racism.
The April 17 memo focuses on three main lines of assault: China caused the virus “by covering it up,” Democrats are “soft on China,” and Republicans “will push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic. ” “Politician summed up.
Quoting current and former US officials. The New York Times reported on April 30 that senior Trump administration officials pressured intelligence agencies to search for evidence to support a theory that a laboratory in Wuhan was the source of the outbreak when the president stepped up a public campaign. to blame China for the pandemic.
But many scientists argue that the evidence leans firmly toward natural transmission, an interaction as yet unknown in late fall that allowed the virus to jump from a bat or other animal to a human.
“There is no scientific backing” for the two claims recently made by some American politicians and media that Covid-19 could have been created by humans and escaped from a laboratory, a Buzzfeed report said, citing interviews with several scientists on 22 of April.
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, told BuzzFeed that he was not even comfortable calling the idea that the lab was the origin of a theory outbreak. “A theory is based on results,” he said. “I think it is driven by politics, frankly.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, principal investigator at the Center for Global Development, said there is currently no evidence that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory, either as a deliberate creation or an accidental release.
World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman Fadela Chaib said at a press conference on April 21 that “all available evidence suggests that the virus is of animal origin and is not handled or built in a laboratory or somewhere else”.
The United States intelligence community “agrees with the broad scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was neither man-made nor genetically modified,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a statement on 30 of April.
Jeffrey Sachs, a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said in a recent op-ed that the White House “will continue to target the WHO and China and any other targets to distract attention.”
“However, the record is clear: China had the epidemic under control while the United States did not. China implemented a strict national closure while the United States did not. China deployed its top technologists and companies to do the job. In fact, Trump repeatedly praised China during February, only turning China on when the situation became difficult in the United States, “Sachs wrote. – Xinhua / Asian News Network
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