Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” former National Security Adviser Susan Rice said it was “shameful” for members of President Donald Trump’s administration to race-bait by calling the coronavirus pandemic the “Wuhan virus,” in reference to where the outbreak started.
Mitchell asked, “Secretary Pompeo has seemingly backed down a little bit from what he has been referring to as the Wuhan virus. We’ve seen this after a call between President Trump and President Xi in China, but it did — the Wuhan virus meme that came from Pompeo did break up a G7 foreign ministers’ call last week where they couldn’t reach agreement on steps forward because of the insistence by the American secretary of state that this be blamed on China.”
Rice said, “Andrea, it’s shameful. I mean for the United States to be race-baiting and to be treating a virus —which never has a flag, can’t have a flag as being the providence of one country is designed to be decisive. It’s designed to stigmatize people of Asian descent, and it’s not the way the leadership of the United States, the secretary of state and the president of the United States ought to be behaving, in the best of times, but certainly not in a crisis. The reality is that viruses can arise in any corner of the globe and spread to any corner of the globe. In 2009, when we were dealing with the Swine flu pandemic, that arose in North America, in Mexico and then in the United States before it spread across the planet.”
“So it doesn’t serve us well,” she continued. “It doesn’t serve the objective of squelching the virus globally to brand it in nationalistic or xenophobic or racist terms. We all have to work together on this. We can stamp out this virus effectively, eventually in the United States. China may be able to do it on its side of the world, but if it’s not stamped out everywhere, it will come back, be resurgent and be our problem yet again. So the reality of this is we have a global problem.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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