Democratic Senator Chris Murphy put the blame firmly on President Trump, not China or the WHO, for the coronavirus pandemic.
Murphy: Trump “Didn’t Take This Virus Seriously”
Speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN, Senator Murphy said that the reason that “we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did, it’s not because of anything the WHO [World Health Organization] did, it’s because of what this president did.” Murphy said that because President Trump “didn’t take this virus seriously,” and the administration was so “cavalier,” the situation was a whole lot worse than it could have been.
“We weren’t going to be able to keep every case out of the United States, but we didn’t have to have tens of thousands of people dying,” Murphy added.
Anderson asked Murphy about President Trump’s defunding of the WHO, noting that “it’s clear the WHO has said very positive things about China, and kind of downplayed their lack of transparency,” with Anderson highlighting that the official “Chinese death tolls right now just seem ludicrously low.”
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Murphy responded by claiming that “pulling money out of the WHO has nothing to do with keeping America safe,” and that President Trump is simply “trying to find scapegoats” for the crisis:
Let’s be clear, early on, in this crisis, there was no bigger cheerleader for China and their response to coronavirus than President Donald J. Trump. It was President Trump, who on 12 different occasions, praised President Xi’s efforts to control coronavirus, specifically praised China’s transparency, which we now know was a complete joke. And so, the president is engaging in sort of middle school grade deflection, trying to blame the WHO for something that he was responsible for. And the fact of the matter is, while the WHO is imperfect, in the early days of this virus, they invested in testing. They created, by the end of February, 1.4 million tests in collaboration with a German manufacturer. And so, had we been working with the WHO early on, we might be in a very different position here being able to test twice as many, three times as many people as we have.
Murphy: “Weaker As a Nation If We Pull Out”
The Senator concluded that America would be “weaker as a nation if we pull out of the WHO,” because there is “no way to stand up an effective, international anti-pandemic program without them.”
This is, of course, total nonsense. The United States is the biggest funder of the WHO, so Trump’s pull of funding is the greatest way to teach them a lesson for cozying up to China and refusing to criticize them. If this forces the WHO to stop their pro-CCP behaviour, then it will absolutely be keeping America safe, no matter what some Democrat Senator says.
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