China: Biden ‘Wasted Too Much Time Politicizing the Pandemic’

China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday claimed America is currently “repeating the nightmare of the country’s failures in fighting the coronavirus” with the “Delta variant rampage” and castigated President Joe Biden for wasting “too much time politicizing the pandemic.”

“Epidemiologists and experts warned that the worst is yet to come and that the Biden administration has missed a number of opportunities to contain the virus spread by putting science above politics,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) paper fretted.

The editorial was mostly the latest variation of the Communist Party’s perpetual whine that the rest of the world should cooperate with China and welcome its supposedly peerless skill at fighting the Chinese coronavirus, instead of obsessing over which laboratory it might have escaped from. As the rest of the world has learned to its dismay, China’s techniques and vaccines do not seem to work very well anywhere else.

“Chinese experts attributed the latest wave to US missteps in facing up to viral mutations, reluctance to learn lessons from the epidemic control work in the past, and to make it even worse, the continuous politicization of the pandemic that has hindered global cooperation in fighting the virus,” the Global Times pronounced.

Sensitive to left-wing U.S. media trends as always, the Chinese paper paused to take a swipe at Texas and Florida for supposedly getting “overwhelmed by admission surges” and predicted, “the situation will continue to worsen in the near future, especially in the conservative US states with low vaccination rates.”

The Global Times then turned to slam Biden’s “politicization” of the pandemic, by which it meant the Biden administration investigating the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan:

From the day US President Joe Biden took office, he made controlling the COVID-19 pandemic one of his priorities. Amid the Delta variant rampage, he recently said that the US will “in all probability” see more guidelines and restrictions including new steps to get more people vaccinated. However, in the eyes of some Chinese experts, the Biden administration has wasted too much time politicizing the pandemic, which has hindered the global efforts in fighting the highly contagious disease.

In addition to the Biden administration’s slow response to the viral mutations, over the past half year, the Biden administration has formed a so-called alliance of democracies in fighting the COVID-19 epidemic, whose ulterior goal was to wrestle with China, Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Sunday. 

“Also, Biden’s plan to boost vaccine cooperation with the Quad countries as part of a political maneuver also made joint efforts to fight the epidemic more difficult,” he said. 

The Chinese Communist paper claimed the Biden administration’s refusal to stop investigating the origins of the coronavirus is putting “scientists around the world under tremendous pressure” and interfering with “global cooperation” to battle the pandemic.

“By taking experiences from other countries that are also combating the Delta variant, for example, in China where the acceleration of mass vaccination and rigorous prevention measures are still proving effective in fending off the virus, the US should have learnt from the lessons from the past rather than put more focus on politicizing the epidemic while continuing to slander China,” the Global Times hectored.

China on Friday reported its highest (admitted) number of coronavirus cases from the outbreak that began in July. The outbreak has now spread to at least 40 cities and 17 provinces. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Monday called it “the most serious outbreak since last year’s peak in Wuhan.”

“The surge in new cases has triggered mass testing, lockdowns and travel restrictions, and officials have been removed from positions and punished over Covid-19 failures. Beijing has also tightened travel restrictions for its citizens as part of efforts to contain the infection,” the SCMP reported.